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Heritage, marginality and hybridity in the gold fields of southeastern Senegal

January 22, 2016 @ 6:00 AM - 8:30 PM

| Free

Over the past millennia, South East Senegal has gained the reputation of an important gold mining region. Today it still lives by that reputation as it continues to attract global investments.

The region of has a fascinating past through medieval times, slavery, colonialism and the recent effects of gold mining on national and regional population mobility, and on the preservation of cultural and natural resources. The effects imposed by culture and sociopolitical organisations on small-scale decentralized communities have been vast.

This evidence which will be presented at the lecture may have immense consequences for both modern industrial gold mining and culture heritage management projects in the region. It will be  suggested that it was not the quest for gold, but instead the quest for freedom, that initially made these marginal lands attractive to both Tenda and Malinke/Fualni groups despite its warp landscapes.

Speaker: Dr Ibrahima Thiaw

Dr Ibrahima Thiaw is the director of the archaeology laboratory of IFAN, a research institute based at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar. He has also directed the Musée d’Art Africain of Dakar for seven years. Over the past fifteen years, he ran several research programs on sites associated to Atlantic slavery and European colonisation including the UNESCO World Heritage site of Goree Island (Senegal), to collect comparative data on patterns of enslavement and impacts on local communities. He has also conducted several heritage management projects in Senegal, Guinée, Guinée Bissau, Sierra Leone, Congo and elsewhere. His recent publications focus primarily on the Atlantic impact and on culture heritage management.

Dr Thiaw holds a Ph. D. in Anthropology from Rice University (Houston, Texas, USA) and Masters degrees in both in Prehistory and History from from Paris X (Nanterre-France) and the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal) respectively.

Chair; Prof Kevin Macdonald

This lecture will be followed by a reception from 630pm-730pm which all attendees are welcome to attend 

This lecture is part of the African Voices Programme – More details