Cultural heritage: a basic human need - Sada Mire at TEDxEuston

I'm an archaeologist I originally come from Somalia in the civil war in 1991 my family fled and we ended up in Sweden of all places and there something happened that was at the time seemed insignificant and I was in secondary school studying many topics and haven't actually done my primary school in Mogadishu in an orphanage college which absolutely had no comparison with the resources we had in Sweden's the other end of the scale there was this thing where we had a big huge history book and I wanted to know about African history and this was a world history book but there was only one page on Africa and there was actually just a one paragraph and this paragraph mentioned the transatlantic slave trade and that's important but surely there was more to African history than the transatlantic slave trade so I went to my local library and I found a book by basil Davidson Africa the story of a continent and in this I learned about the Ashanti the nooks sculptures the knee iguaçu Jenna Gino Timbuktu Aksum Great Zimbabwe ancient Egypt I could go on and on and on and but there was one sentence in that book that came to change my life it said in order to write African history we need to do archaeological research at the time having just come from Somalia I didn't know what our key ology was but I made a mental note of the word and six years later I enrolled for an archaeological course on a whimp and I'm probably one of the few people who didn't know who Indiana Jones was what when I enrolled for this course and I wanted to focus on Africa so I came to London at School of Oriental and African Studies and UCL and another seemingly insignificant thing happened my mother called me up and said I had inherited an object and it was this one I used to see this object with my grandmother all her life and my mother said to me it's yours now and I said what is it I knew what the name of it's called wagger and I said what is it and she said it protects the keeper from evil spirits and I thought oh good and then she said well it's actually made from a sacred tree and it's used for fertility rituals now that I didn't know anything about my culture was Islamic and that's it I didn't know anything about our traditional culture where we had sacred trees and fertility rituals so I started thinking about doing an essay on this I interviewed people and I found out that they were actually sites in Somalia and Somaliland associated with fertility so I started thinking about going back to Somalia that's me doing archeology in Scandinavia I was actually one I was so excited geologist person was talking to schools about the Vikings and this blond blue-eyed - looking at me African telling us about the Viking Age so um this is no burger I'm glad y'all can see it now and the idea came up that I wanted to investigate more about this and there were sites associated with fertility so I went to so decided to go back but this decision was a hard decision because I left as an IDP and a refugee and these landscapes where places I've associated with unpleasant experiences so it wasn't an easy decision but I decided to go back and when I went back I discovered that actually this region was a cultural crossroad in prehistory it's strategically located on the Red Sea and Indian Ocean and a lot of civilizations has passed through and not only did they pass through but they interacted with the locals and there was trade coming in from Persia ancient Egypt India China and many other civilization and hinterland Africa and the archaeological materials that we've discovered basically it's evidence of this we saw earlier a video showing scripts ancient scripts and one of findings we've made little gravestones showing Sabean writing and human-rights writing and the afro-asiatic family a language family has its birthplace here and we see there is so much history that was completely totally unknown to me and to many people but I wanted to focus on and follow the work that I've inherited from my grandmother and the fertility rituals that have heard so much about it led me to a site called overhalla this is in the oral history a site where we have it's been a pilgrimage site for a very long time and when you go there it's seemingly it's just a shrine you think at first but I found that it was actually a ruin town with city walls if probably not very clear from the image but the massive city walls still there and there are pottery from Greek and Roman China and it's it's a center but the significance of this place is before Islam it was a major press lamech site where rituals took place and being educated in the West and Mike received the perspective then being focused on monuments and objects I was exposed to a different perspective on heritage that I got locally which was more about the landscape and the fact that trees could be an archaeological site because they were sacred trees there were important trees mountains and a whole existence was woven around the landscape the Chiefs would be coronated using the sacred mountain they've been washed on the sacred spring and the trees the the leaves from the sacred trees would be they would be showered with those leaves because they would be giving fertility to to their people so it's a way of consecrating the people and also using ancestral shrines to for rain making even an animal crop fertility and it was a whole new thing for me I really didn't know anything about this and within Islam it's not something that people have talked about or it's just things that in a very seemingly insignificant way the way I've inherited the worker exists and women usually keep these traditions and anthropologists usually who've come to our country focused there usually male white and they've all focused into nomadism poetry and male culture but this link in the dealings with the human the birth and death all of these rituals that are perennial and continued was something that seemed in sin unreachable to them somehow because they were not associated with a major object or with a major monument and this site became after Islam it became a major Center for Islamic religion and it was in appropriated by the earliest Islamic kingdoms in the region and here we found Chinese pottery from Ming Dynasty which is 15th century and even earlier 13th century poetry and it shows the wealth of this region however our people do not link archaeology to their heritage because I met people who said all these sites they belong to the people who were big-boned and they they are not even Somalis it's Kurumi hora which means ancient people that don't look like us that are not us and hence a lot of people were looting archaeological sites because they had detached themselves from the dis linked with the heritage also the colonial times the narrative did not help because a lot of the sites that were discovered were attributed to other people over the round ruined site ruined towns all over the country people just said oh it's Arabs who have a outpost in the coast and people felt that the archaeology wasn't really something that was linked to their past they it was something that was introduced or other people have come with and people start looting after the wall warlords used it to fund their war they commissioned illicit digging and I was interested in understanding this phenomenon and nobody reported it of Somali heritage being looted so I went the Somali woman and took with me a catalogue of objects with images of objects and that this has happened we've lost so many artifacts what do you think and that's when I realized actually people are indifferent to archaeology because we have an indigenous way of managing cultural heritage in our society regardless of monuments on artifacts and this is what I call the knowledge approach people we're able to look at the same document and tell me how to make the objects what they are made from who makes them so it's not that they're they have no knowledge of their history they do but it's just that we preserve it in an intangible way it's an oral culture people value the knowledge rather than the possession of an object so I thought why are women in the Diaspora value in this sort of keeping this knowledge alive when surely household products that you don't need to use in Europe you just go to Argos you buy yourself a mat or all wrong but they were keeping this heritage and it's because we come from the nomadic landscapes here what's important is not how how many objects you keep but in fact what you can make from scratch when you need it we carry very little with us everything you own is on that camel and also everything is organic so that house can burn in one hour and you're in that landscape so what do you do you need to know exactly which tree to go to to get the roots for your heart you need to know exactly which tree to go to in order to hit a wound medicinal knowledge so our heritage was something that's kept in our head and basically passed on to our children and the women in the Diaspora that I interviewed we're talking about then those memories and those experiences and that's what they treasured not the lost museum objects that they hadn't seen or known about that are diluted for them they did not lose anything as long as they had this knowledge and they can pass it on that was their heritage so it was a very interesting context where you have also these desperate people who are looting the archaeology but then at the same time they have this complex locally appropriate theoretical framework to cultural heritage management so as an archaeologist I was very fascinated by this and I enjoyed to learning it but I also wanted it to be part of the mainstream archaeology so that these ideas are brought into to enrich archaeology and empower geology the same way that I could empower the community by bringing in my knowledge so we did many training courses and recently I set up this organization horn heritage and we have we're doing various projects to work with the community directly community are very very proud of these sites initially they didn't know what they were but I used to use sites from Scandinavia from I used to have an album to explain to them how similar sites are managed elsewhere I even had an album with Stonehenge explaining how you know what would people benefit from heritage so people increasingly could see that even the financial potential of it and we're actually able to manage sites like class girls so it's in there are communities who are living of it and what I wanted to introduce was for them to be able to use technology and at the moment Somaliland we have the young generation who are very used to IT so we incorporated them into the organization and we liaised with a very good organization who has worked in all over the world digitalized in world heritage sites it was a challenge at first to find funding but the Swiss government funded this project so we were able to take people to the site and train them here is also people from the Ministry of Tourism getting training in 3d digitalization and this is the second time this technology is being used for sites in Africa and we are very happy that's actually some Island where usually you wouldn't associate such development with I'm going to show you some of the results in Somaliland you have very speedy internet we realized this because we could do the digitization actually I got injured on my way to this project so I was on there but I was in Kenya and we were able to send the material off to CyArk headquarters in Oakland California and then within next day we were able to receive the processed material so this is last gael a 5,000 year old site with rock art and this is I call it the Sistine Chapel of Somaliland and here's why we've got a fly through image I started this talk by an anecdote saying something about my secondary school and the fact that I like lacked history classes in Africa and my one of my goals have been to use everything I've said so far and everything that we've discovered to feed that into the into the curriculum and this is exactly what we are doing now we have held many workshops with the Ministry of Education and various schools into the heads of secondary schools in Somaliland and I'm hoping this the next generation of Somalis will not face the problem I faced and will be able to just open their history book and learn their heritage thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 214,452

Keywords: ted x, sada mire, tedx talk, ted, ted talks, tedx talks, tedx, ted talk, TEDx, tedxeuston, horn heritage organaization

Id: V4UQYem6Dvc

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2014