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Summary

This paper will outline the evolution of the World Heritage Centre criteria for listing world heritage and some of the institutional and political considerations that informed it establishment over the last 50 years or more. It will argue that while it provides some space for African heritage, and of the global majority of state parties to put forward more sites that should be considered as modern heritage, there are serious shortcomings in what appears as mainly a Eurocentric approach to world heritage. Drawing from the Nara Document of 1994, the 2003 Intangible Heritage Convention, and the Cape Town Document of 2022, as well as other alternative understandings of international and indigenous global heritage aesthetics and possible re-interpretation of current criteria or their extension, the paper makes the argument that this will enhance African and of those of the global majority’s listing of heritage away from the dominance of Eurocentric and ethnocentric criteria. The paper outlines, using three case studies from Africa, among other examples, what kind of politics of mutuality and inclusion at the local, national, and international levels need to take place within African countries and UNESCO for this possibility of modern heritage inclusion to occur.

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