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Organized by the Government of Kenya with financial support from the Government of Japan, the event brought together some 150 participants, including ambassadors, Ministers of Culture and heritage experts attending the 48th session of the World Heritage Committee. The publication grew out of the International Conference on Cultural Heritage in Africa, held in Nairobi in May 2025, with financial support from the Governments of Japan, Kenya and France.
What does authenticity mean in Africa?
For decades, African scholars and heritage professionals have questioned approaches to heritage authenticity that place primary emphasis on preserving original physical materials within the World Heritage system. In many African contexts, they argue, what makes heritage authentic may lie just as much in the traditions, knowledge, spiritual meanings and relationships that communities continue to maintain. African scholarship has consistently described authenticity as relational and sustained through community practice, while stressing the close relationships between nature and culture, and between tangible and intangible heritage.
During the event, Professor George Abungu, Chairperson of the Scientific Committee of the 2025 Nairobi Conference, noted that the newly launched volume aims to broaden how those principles are understood so that the African perspective of heritage can be more fully recognized within the World Heritage system.
Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Gender, Culture and Children Services, H.E. Hanna Wendot Cheptumo, described authenticity as “a living concept”, shaped by cultural context, community knowledge and lived experience. This means looking beyond what survives physically and asking what a heritage place means to the people who inherit, use and care for it.
From Nara to Nairobi
Ambassador Takehiro Kano, Permanent Delegate of Japan to UNESCO, placed this African reflection within the longer evolution of international heritage thinking. He recalled that the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity brought Asian approaches to heritage conservation into international heritage thinking, broadening the understanding of authenticity beyond the preservation of original physical fabric to recognize intangible dimensions —ideas that subsequently influenced the World Heritage Operational Guidelines. Ambassador Peter Ngure, Permanent Delegate of Kenya to UNESCO, described the Nairobi process as a continuation of this journey, bringing African perspectives into the evolving global understanding of authenticity. Heritage, he noted, is not only about monuments and historic fabric, but also about “living traditions, communities, knowledge systems, and the values that people attach to places.”
What happens when heritage changes?
Masanori Nagaoka, Regional Advisor for Culture at UNESCO’s Regional Office for Eastern Africa, gave some examples, pointing to the former royal palaces of Nyanza in Rwanda. Successive kings built new palaces, while earlier structures made from perishable materials eventually disappeared. Yet the places retained their cultural and spiritual meaning through memory, ritual and community engagement.
He went on to explain that similar ideas can be seen in the earthen architecture of Tiébélé in Burkina Faso and Djenné in Mali, where the rhythm of the rainy and dry seasons shapes how heritage is maintained. Because mud-brick structures are vulnerable to heavy rain, some are deliberately dismantled before the rainy season and rebuilt during the dry season. Rooted in local cosmology, this cycle of dismantling and rebirth is not seen as a loss of authenticity but as a way of sustaining it—keeping ancestral knowledge, traditional skills and community practices alive from one generation to the next.
Heritage is local before it is universal
Professor Pascall Taruvinga of Rhodes University brought the discussion back to a fundamental question: who defines heritage? Heritage is first local before it becomes universal, he argued. Communities should therefore be regarded not merely as stakeholders to be consulted, but as custodians and decision-makers.
This approach places elders, spiritual leaders, traditional custodians and other bearers of living knowledge closer to the centre of decisions about what heritage means and how its authenticity should be understood.
READ MORE: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/when-heritage-lives-towards-evolving-understanding-heritage-authenticity?hub=701
