The walls of the Yeredon Center for Malian Arts are painted with colorful murals depicting precolonial Bamana heroes admired for their leadership and fearlessness. These images, alongside the performance and plastic arts produced at the center, are meant to inspire foreign tourists as well as local artists, scholars, and neighborhood residents to appreciate the resilience of Mande cultural heritage. The center’s mission of “cultural preservation,” “education, exchange and social engagement,” and “assistance to local artists” articulates its vision of engendering among young Malians a sense of “self-knowing” (yeredon) and pride by demonstrating how Malian cultural heritage thrives and how it can generate social and economic capital (Kivenko 2016). Presenting ethnically diverse repertoires established by national and regional dance ensembles in the years since Malian independence in 1960, the center’s performance program stands in striking contrast with the painted representations of precolonial Bamana heroes and village scenes: on the one hand, the center offers through its performance repertoire a narrative of a nationally unified yet ethnically diverse Malian heritage, while on the other hand it offers visual depictions of social memory allied to the Bamana ethnic roots of the center’s founder and of a predominant segment of neighborhood residents.

In her book Cultural Heritage in Mali in the Neoliberal Era (University of Illinois 2016), Rosa De Jorio distinguishes between heritage as “a hegemonic, highly institutionalized project of [historical] commemoration that is productive of collective identities” (De Cesari 2010:625 in De Jorio 2016:2) versus social memory as a history that is forged by citizenry “in the course of people’s interactions within their social groups… and is key to the development of a shared identity” (11). In the course of several political transformations—from independence in 1960, through coup d’états, accompanied by a political-economic transition from socialism to democracy—competing narratives of heritage and social memory have emerged in Mali. These narratives offer, according to De Jorio, important insights into “the 2012 impasse of the Malian democratic experiment and… [to] critical aspects of modern power in postcolonial Mali” (2). The book draws its analysis of Malian monuments, museums, UNESCO-protected architecture, and Islamic sites of study and worship from the “unresolved relationship between heritage and memory,” identifying their disjuncture as a productive way to “expose instances in which state-promoted heritage projects may not work and are indeed actively resisted by local actors who refuse to identify with the forms of commemoration (and their management) promoted by the state” (14).

Rosa De Jorio’s extensive anthropological field research in Mali has enabled her to consider an equally wide range of heritage sites. The book’s five chapters move from hero’s monuments overlooking Bamako, out to a woman’s museum in a Bamako suburb, north to a colonial monument on the banks of the Niger river in Segou, further north to consider the political and aesthetic intersections of Islamic and secular mud-brick architecture in Djenne, and finally, to the presence of Sufi sites in present-day Islamist Timbuktu. By situating her research in this range of built environments, De Jorio effectively highlights how discord between institutional (national and transnational) heritage projects and Malian citizens’ memories variously play out on the ground. Focusing on the unresolved disjuncture between heritage and memory is tremendously useful in destabilizing institutionally-dominated narratives of Malian history, further nuancing important discussions of governmentality as a national and a transnational form of power “articulated outside the ‘container’ of the state” (7). For these reasons, this text offers individual chapters that can be meaningfully taught in both undergraduate and graduate level courses about neoliberalism in Africa, the intersections of politics and built environments, debates over cultural heritage and memory, and about narratives of and counter-narratives to power.

In spite of De Jorio’s efforts to consider how social memory rubs up against heritage, however, her evidence draws most heavily on the institutional narratives that she intends to destabilize. In her chapter on the heritagization of national heroes in the early years of Mali’s multi-party democracy, for instance, De Jorio offers two conflicting narratives about Mali’s socialist past and how best to commemorate it. Although the narratives represent diverging views on heritage and history, they both emerge from organized institutions: officials of the standing government and members of its opposition party. We do not hear testimonies of the individuals for whom the political leaders of a newly independent Mali represent political and economic strife and violence rather than liberation and self-determination. Finally, an important if more evasive site of heritage production in Mali is performance. National dance and music ensembles were founded as post-colonial nation-building tools in which government-sanctioned visions of history were staged as ways of informing the people about their cultural heritage. Counter-narratives—social memory—can be found in vernacular performances and ceremonies. How might these kinds of performances offer social memory that amplifies the kinds of contestations to which De Jorio makes reference, but only partially elucidates?