Cultural Landscapes and Ecological Citizenship in Postcolonial Africa

Abstract

Landscapes do not only have material value as tourist attractions to a nation; in postcolonial Africa they also have to perform a symbolic function of constructing national cultural identities. Cultural landscapes lie at the core of nation building through the ‘memorialization’ and ‘heritagization’ of the nation. They constitute ecological texts of a mythologized past that narrates the fundamental myths of the nation based on the selective remembering by those in power. Using Zimbabwe and South African case studies, this chapter is a brief discussion of how the postcolonial state in Southern Africa is re-contesting colonial cartographies of power by re-imagining postcolonial nationhood through the new cultural landscapes that are informed by the liberation and decolonization ethics. While postcolonial ecological citizenship has been a site of ideological contestations between the (ex) colonized and (ex) colonizers, new cartographies of spatial-cum-cultural decolonization aim to construct new postcolonial memories so that the nation-state is not perpetually trapped in the geography of colonial trauma.