Humanity’s Global Heritage

The appearance of the notion of ‘Humanity’s Global Heritage’ results from the realisation of the necessity for international solidarity after the two World Wars, especially the last one.
Some landmarks attest to this correlation:
1954: adoption of the Convention for the protection of cultural goods in case of armed conflict (Convention de La Haye);
1972: adoption of the Convention for the protection of global and natural heritage;
1994: extension of the Convention to immaterial heritage.
The construction of Humanity’s global heritage marks a new and positive attitude towards the past. Firstly however, it is necessary to note that this heritage remains to be built and that neither the elements nor the aggregates of material evidences identified under the label of heritage yet make up a universally known entity, shared by all the civilisations and cultures which compose Humanity today. It is a testament to the will to build solidarity for the future by regenerating the past.
The extension of the notion to immaterial heritage is a step that marks acknowledgement of the legacy and practices of religions and civilisations outside the Western world. This means that, our age, having learnt from crises of civilisation, and engaging itself in building Humanity’s heritage, attempts to a noteworthy move towards a Humanity which will not have had some of its components and values amputated.

More particularly, concerning the process for the emancipation of African heritage, it is noted that the movement which has brought it to the position it finds itself in today in international relations is the result of a variety of factors. Despite the brutalities of colonisation and assimilation ideologies, the African peoples have faced their environment with the practices, traditions, languages, religions and beliefs that have been for a long time presented in certain ethnographical literature as forms of retrograde conservatism. This was the first level of resistance to the colonial order and other ideological influences, such as those of Arabisation. The constant fight of intellectuals, of cultured women and men in Africa, Europe, and at the heart of the diaspora, in America and in the Caribbean, alongside fights of the same nature led by Arabic and Berberian intellectuals from the continent and elsewhere, constituted significant, or even decisive movements towards political emancipation by reclaiming their culture and the right to difference and freedom. It is necessary to pay tribute to these pioneers and Africanists of the Western world who, by creating literary revues, publishing houses, collections, and producing literature that protests and makes claims, have made the necessity and the value of our cultural roots known.

If myths, spirituality, rites, natural sites and historic ensembles are now seen in a new light and recognised as an expression of the cultural diversity of Humanity, we owe this to the pioneers and the populations who have never cut their roots and continually showed that what appeared to the eyes of the Western world as retrograde conservation was for them a necessary conservatism. The 1994 Convention bears witness to this historical complexity. By enriching the global heritage through integrating its immaterial component, it associates the banal with the monumental, the oral with the written, the profane with the sacred, tradition with modernity and Western values with those of other civilisations.
These emancipation practices, though their very complexity, allow a vital link between conflict and diversity to come to light in their movement. The binomials enumerated above already bear the marks of conflicts of identity or interest, all things which contribute to the logic that if Humanity must be invented and built, then it will only be possible to build it with mutual recognition and equality faced with difference. It is not only a matter of showing through this bias that the banal, spiritual, oral, sacred and traditional are in conflict for existence and survival with the monumental, material, written, profane and modern. The West does not incarnate the general ethos of this second group of terms, whilst the other civilisations, in particular Africa, represent a model for the first. Things are not that simple. We can verify this with the following statement: The recognition of immaterial heritage coincides with a certain unease in civilisation: technological, industrial and capitalist’ – that of the logic of return, the megalopolis, the destruction of nature and threats to the systems of solidarity. Identity conflicts are not just found in relationships between civilisations or cultures, but on the contrary, they are found at the heart of Western society, in forms not immediately perceptible.
Faced with new contradictions to come, it is necessary more than ever to create counter-tendencies able to prevent danger. This is why states, multilateral cooperative organisations, and civil society must invent and set to work practices of resistance for the respect of the emancipation of identities, open to the diversity and the pluralism of heritage.