Reviews
BOOK REVIEW
Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa
S
ub-Saharan Africa
is one of the longest
occupied and least
studied landscapes
on earth. While
scholarship has been
attentive to images of
nature made by the
region’s explorers
and settlers and
to landscapes of the colonial era –
public parks and game reserves,
botanical gardens and urban plans
– surprisingly little attention has
been paid to spaces created by and
for Africans themselves, from the
precolonial era to the present.
This book is a contribution to a small
but growing effort to address this
oversight. Its essays present a range
of landscapes: pathways and cairns
used by nomadic people to navigate
through and mark significant places;
anthropogenic or managed forests
consecrated to ritual purposes of
various kinds; tombs or palaces with
significant landscape orientations
and components; even monumental
ceremonial and urban spaces, as at
Great Zimbabwe or Djenne.
AUTHOR: John Beardsley
PAPERBACK: 452 pages
PUBLISHER: Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection (March 14, 2016)
ISBN: 978-0884024101
They explore what we know of
precolonial and later indigenous
designed landscapes, how these
landscapes were understood in the
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colonial era, and how they are being
recuperated today for nation building,
identity formation, and cultural
affirmation. Contributors engage with the most critical issues in preservation today, from the
conflicts between cultural heritage and biodiversity protection, to the competition between
local and international heritage agendas.
africandesignmagazine.com
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