Ibrahima Thiaw – författare

From March 2009 Statistical Research Inc. (USA), Nexus Heritage (UK) and the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (Dakar, Senegal) jointly undertook an integrated programme of cultural heritage research and investigation in the Sabodala area of Senegal. This was part of an environmental and social impact assessment in compliance with Senegalese law and international best practice. The principal investigators were Jeff Altschul (SRI) Gerry Wait (Nexus) and Ibrahima Thiaw (IFAN). This report is the outcome of those investigations and makes a significant contribution to the archaeology and ethnography of eastern Senegal. Combining ethnographic and archaeological data yields a picture of a period of intense social change that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and extended well into the mid-twentieth century. This involved the overturning of previous norms by social groups of mixed ethnicity, who proceeded to create new social work-arounds for previous ethnic prohibitions. It also probably involved the final end to slavery, but possibly only within living memory. It seems likely that some sites—archaeological as well as traditional sacred properties—provide tangible links between the current villages and a highly contested and emotionally charged past. To paraphrase the American novelist, William Faulkner, the past in Sabodala is never dead; in fact, it’s not even past.

In 2011 and 2012, Dr Gerry Wait (then Nexus Heritage) and Dr Ibrahima Thiaw (Institute Fundamental d’Afrique Noire: IFAN, Dakar) undertook an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) project in Kouilou Department in the southwest region of the Republic of the Congo. The initiative had been commissioned by SRK Consulting UK for Elemental Minerals Ltd relating to a proposed potash mine. These landscapes were little known in terms of the sites and monuments from the distant and more recent past. That the area was important in the understanding of migrations along the African coast had been demonstrated in a pioneering set of excavations by Denbow (2012 and 2014). This base line study was undertaken to identify and evaluate cultural resources which might need further investigation. The second part of the study reports on ethnographic surveys undertaken in the same defined area, treating intangible cultural heritage as equally as important parts of the Congo’s cultural heritage and identity. The baseline studies were systematic in that they employed standard best-practice survey techniques but structured on a landscape level. By building upon Denbow’s extensive surveys and small-scale investigations from 30 years earlier the studies have enabled a richer and more nuanced understanding of the Atlantic Coast of Congo during the past millennium.