Significance in African Heritage

Heritage professionals are at all times called upon to make significant judgments about heritage places/objects. There is a supposition therefore that heritage places or objects have intrinsic values that need to be discovered and assigned. This paper, using various examples from Africa, however, argues that values are not intrinsic to heritage but are a construct of heritage professionals/community, and therefore, a heritage place/object can have various values depending on who is making the judgment. It therefore follows that if values vary according to who is assigning them, then the significant/insignificant of a heritage place and object will also vary from one person/community to another. The paper concludes by arguing that significant/insignificant judgments are hegemonic constructions between contending forces, and therefore, it is difficult to have a universally accepted significant or insignificant judgment