This beautifully-produced volume is the outcome of a symposium held in May 2013 at Dumbarton Oaks, the home of Harvard University's program in Garden and Landscape Studies. Director John Beardsley convened the symposium and edited the book. Previous publications in this extensive series are dominated by titles such as The Italian Garden, The French Formal Garden, Garden History Issues: Approaches and Methods, and Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture. More recent titles indicate a welcome broadening of scope, Designing Wildlife Habitats and Technology and the Garden and, the latest, the book under review, Cultural Landscape Heritage in Sub-Saharan Africa. Even this brief overview suggests how innovative is the Garden and Landscape Studies program and the fresh themes that are currently emerging from it. A volume on Africa, even if it excludes the northern parts of the continent, is much to be welcomed, extending the range of landscape studies and allowing fascinating intellectual narratives to emerge and to be explored.
The book is divided into four themed parts: introductory (two chapters); ‘Monument and Environment’ (five chapters); ‘Pathway and Grove’ (four chapters); and, ‘Rethinking Landscape’ (three chapters). There is a rich bibliography, together with copious notes for each chapter and photographs, maps, and diagrams appear on almost every page. Most of the authors are scholars of Africa employed in academic institutions in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Given their disciplines – architecture, ethnography, geography, anthropology, art history, and landscape studies – the authors come at their topics from a variety of perspectives. Geographically, the contributions are wide-ranging case studies: Mali, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, West and East Africa (Nigeria, the Swahili coast), and South Africa. Perhaps indicative of the small pool of appropriate authors and the unevenness of research on this unusual topic, there are large gaps in the coverage (francophone and lusophone countries in particular, as well as Zambia, Botswana, and Namibia). Moreover, some regions are particularly well served with more than one chapter, including Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The front cover of the book, perhaps somewhat surprisingly and incongruously for a continent replete with the beautiful indigenous culturally-constructed heritage spaces that are discussed and illustrated in the volume, is a rather touristy photograph of present-day urban Cape Town, arguably the least ‘African’ city in sub-Saharan Africa.
This book does not aim to be comprehensive, nor to impose constructs that are deeply embedded in language – such as ‘landscape’, ‘culture’, or ‘heritage’ – on to African spaces. As Beardsley makes clear in his introduction, rather, the aims are to begin ‘an initial foray into a field long ignored in landscape studies … [and] … to invite discourse about one of the longest occupied and least studied landscapes on earth’ (2). Certainly the first objective has been accomplished, and it is to be hoped that the second, too, is, in time, successful.
The assemblage of case studies is a large one and not all can be covered here. Predictably, Great Zimbabwe has a chapter (by Innocent Pikirayi), but so has the meaning of waterscapes to ancient and modern Zimbabwe society (by Joost Fontein). Less well known are the elements of humanized spaces in Madagascar, fascinatingly unravelled by Randall Bird, and details of the reconstruction of Djenné by Charlotte Joy. Sandy Prita Meier's contribution on the intriguing coral stone pillar tombs of the Swahili coast – if often derelict and neglected today – is truly pioneering, as is the analysis of elite ‘gardens’ in West Africa by Neil Norman. There are two chapters on South Africa; one covers the contested cultural landscapes now within formal protected areas (by Maano Ramitsundela), while the other is on Cape Town with the meanings of Table Mountain at its core (by Jeremy Foster).
The political element of space and place is made clear in many chapters – an aspect of landscape that is truly international. The main message of this book, however, lies first, in Jeremy Foster's argument that these humanized African landscapes, like countless thousands on our planet, are hybridized spaces, despite claims of ‘authenticity’ or accusations of ‘appropriation’ that so often appear. Perhaps it is that the African colonial past is relatively recent that such arguments do not arise in discussions around the palimpsests that are, for example, the German town of Trier, the landscapes of Iberian Galicia, or parts of Latin America. Second, the historiographical overview provided by Grey Gundaker (‘Design on the World’) is a tour de force on landscape architecture and garden and landscape studies. This chapter alone should be required reading for anyone interested in these topics and many ventures into these intellectual challenges can begin with the sound knowledge provided by Cultural Landscape Heritage.
