As the only brown woman practicing in heritage resource management its difficult to explain my lived experience in words. Much of what I've experienced happens in the metaphysical, in the spiritual, in the "other". The various places, environments, people and cultural groups I've had the opportunity to engage have led me to start something on my own that I believe will make an impact, in the lives of the women I come across in the public engagement processes of grave relocations.
African woman have long endured oppression within their family structures and have been subjected to abuse, and are not acknowledged as the sacred keepers and store houses of our cultural and heritage identity and brown women. A bold young woman dared us to be vocal, to "take up space" and have a big voice in the world. Therein led me to begin this, a place where woman will have a voice in the approach to the management and conservation of their heritage their families, descendants, their children, their history... their legacy.
It is us. I present to you "Nkgo~the vessel" a blog..a platform for my people, women.. to begin to communicate the lived experiences of their ancestors. Those that we meet in the metaphysical, those that we interface and interact with in the process or relocating their graves. The spiritual repatriation of the metaphysical is constantly being challenged and the approaches to grave management do not allow for this process to be tailored specific to those that it impacts the most.
Women are often times sidelined and only consulted with when the identity or the necessary information about the deceased is required... but they often times don't present the relationships they had with the deceased, their lives, their history. This is where the emotiveness that causes many family disputes that hold up development projects for months begins, often times where conversations around 'wake fees' and 'compensation' or 'restitution fees' are negotiated there begins the battles for 'ownership' of graves...of human remains...of people.
I hope this blog will be a 'space' of peace, sharing, knowledge, empathy, respect and healing. The ethnographic record of southern African women, their lived experiences, their lives, their history, their knowledge, their children, their families and all the people that they affect and are affected by their exhumation and their reinterment elsewhere needs to curated in a way that allows for us to still interact with the dead. Their memories live within us, we will collect and store and share their stories through this vessel.
Please check out our blog, facebook page, instagram and linkedIn page for more details on the exciting ethno-archaeology undertaken at REACH!
Comments