Center for Critical Conservation

One of our recent conversations within the Natureculture Lab and Critical Conservation was with Dr. Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, an archaeologist, heritage scholar and lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Bindura Universty of Science Education in  Zimbabwe whose work examines the intersections of archaeology, heritage, conservation, and decolonisation.

Having worked for more than a decade as a curator at the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site, Sagiya brings heritage practice into close dialogue with academic inquiry. His current research focuses particularly on the colonial foundations of conservation frameworks and their enduring legacies, including the institutional separation of natural and cultural heritage (Sagiya 2019; Sagiya and Pwiti 2023; Sagiya  and Shenjere-Nyabez 2026a; Sagiya 2026b).

Our conversation, which continued from the Natureculture Lab held in Bern in February 2025 (NC Lab, 2025), explored what it might mean to move beyond this inherited nature/culture divide: how Indigenous cosmologies challenge established conservation categories, how colonial epistemologies continue to shape heritage institutions, and how conservation might be reimagined through more relational understandings of landscapes, knowledge, and custodianship. The dialogue also led us to consider the ways in which cultural heritage governance is negotiated within national parks,conservancies and safaris, forest protected areas as well as the tensions that emerge between human communities, their heritage, and wildlife. 

When Heritage Destroys Heritage

The conversation centred on one of the fundamental dilemmas of both Natureculture Lab and Critical Conservation: what happens when one form of heritage destroys another? The discussion began with examples from Zimbabwean national parks, where large elephant populations increasingly damage archaeological sites and sacred landscapes. This raises difficult questions: Which heritage should be prioritised? Who decides? And according to which value system?Sagiya pursued a similar conservation dilemma through the case of red milkwood trees at the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site. The trees, which have themselves acquired heritage value, pose an increasing threat to the dry-stone walls of the Great Enclosure (Sagiya 2026b). Through this conflict between historic trees and ancient stone structures, Sagiya invites us to rethink notions of change, disturbance, and intervention in the conservation of archaeological heritage—and, more fundamentally, to ask what conservation means when caring for one valued entity may require harming another.

Munyaradzi argued that these conflicts are never only management problems but symptoms of a much deeper colonial inheritance. The concept of the national park, imported from Europe and North America during the colonial period, institutionalised a distinction between “nature” and “culture” that had not previously existed in many African cosmologies. The creation of protected areas often displaced local communities while simultaneously separating wildlife conservation from cultural and spiritual relationships to the landscape.

Drawing on his doctoral research, which involved ethnographic fieldwork with communities displaced by the creation of protected areas (Sagiya 2022), he described how local people frequently experience conservation authorities as prioritising wildlife over living cultural relationships with land. Their understanding of heritage includes not only archaeological remains but also everyday practices, sacred places, oral traditions, ancestral connections, and relationships with animals, rivers, forests, and mountains.

The Colonial Invention of Nature and Culture

A recurring theme throughout the discussion was the persistence of institutional divisions inherited from colonial governance. In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, responsibility for heritage is split between separate agencies responsible for natural and cultural heritage. Legal frameworks continue to reproduce this distinction despite the fact that, in practice, it is often impossible to separate the two.

Munyaradzi repeatedly emphasised that, within many Indigenous cosmologies, such distinctions simply do not exist. Animals are not understood merely as biological species but as ancestors or kin; rivers and mountains are simultaneously ecological entities and places of spiritual significance. Sacred sites derive their meaning not solely from material remains but from continuing relationships, rituals, and oral traditions that connect communities with ancestral spirits. Separating tangible from intangible heritage, he suggested, is comparable to separating the body from the soul.

This perspective directly challenges dominant heritage frameworks, including UNESCO-inspired categories that distinguish between natural, cultural, tangible, and intangible heritage.

Cosmologies Without Separation

One of the most illuminating parts of the discussion concerned Indigenous cosmologies according to which nature is culture. Animals are not merely wildlife. Lions may be ancestors. Mountains are not geological formations. They are living presences. Forests are not simply ecosystems. They are places of memory, ritual, obligation, and care. Sacred landscapes cannot be reduced to archaeological remains because their significance derives equally from oral traditions, ceremonies, relationships, and continuing custodianship.

As Munyaradzi observed, both analytical categories exist largely because conservation inherited them from Western epistemologies rather than because they reflect lived experience. This perspective challenges not only heritage management but also the conceptual architecture of conservation itself. What is being conserved here, actually? And how does heritage challenge the separation between nature and culture? 

Great Zimbabwe and the Politics of Knowledge

Drawing on his years as curator of Great Zimbabwe, Munyaradzi reflected on how archaeology itself became implicated in colonial narratives. Early European scholars struggled to accept that the monumental dry-stone architecture could have been constructed by African societies and instead attributed the site to various imagined “lost civilisations.” Such interpretations were never simply mistakes; they were political narratives that legitimised colonial rule by denying African histories of technological achievement and state formation.

Equally significant, however, is the survival of traditional dry-stone masonry knowledge itself. Conservation cannot be understood solely as preserving walls and monuments. It must also sustain the knowledge, practices, and intergenerational transmission through which such structures continue to exist.

Heritage as Inheritance

Perhaps the most conceptually productive moment of our conversation concerned language. Dr. Sagiya explained that the Shona concept nhaka is often translated as “heritage,” yet the translation remains incomplete. Nhaka refers to inheritance in a much broader sense. One may inherit land, responsibilities, ritual authority, family obligations, or custodianship. Heritage therefore describes relationships rather than objects 

This observation resonates strongly with one of the central ambitions of Critical Conservation: shifting conservation away from safeguarding isolated objects towards sustaining practices and forms of care. Language itself therefore becomes a methodological question. What forms of conservation become imaginable once we begin thinking through Indigenous concepts rather than translating everything into the vocabulary inherited from European heritage discourse?

Towards an Archaeology of Listening

Among the most interesting ideas that remained with me after our discussion was “an archaeology of listening” (Sagiya 2022). Unlike archaeology centred on excavation or documentation, an archaeology of listening begins by attending carefully to communities, landscapes, oral histories, and more-than-human relationships. It asks researchers not only to observe places but to recognise the multiple voices through which places acquire meaning.

For Critical Conservation, this is more than a powerful metaphor. It suggests a possible methodology divorced form authority, extraction and classification—one grounded in attentiveness, dialogue and relational understanding of the worlds we are implicated in.

Reflections

Our conversation sharpened several questions that sit at the heart of Critical Conservation and Natureculture Lab. Can conservation continue to rely upon categories inherited from colonial governance? What becomes visible once we abandon the assumption that nature and culture constitute separate domains? How might conservation move beyond preserving objects towards sustaining relationships? What would conservation look like if it began with Indigenous philosophies of inheritance rather than Western definitions of heritage?

These questions point beyond techno-scientific advances in conservation practice. They invite a more fundamental reconsideration of conservation itself—not simply as the management of heritage, but as an ongoing negotiation of relationships between people, places, materials, histories, and more-than-human worlds.

The conversation with Dr. Sagiya demonstrates that decolonising conservation requires more than expanding participation within existing institutions. It requires questioning the conceptual architecture upon which those institutions continue to rest.

References

Hobbis, G., Babakir, R., Douny, L., Ketterer, S., Lucas, M.L., Pearson, K., Sagiya, M.E and Kern, C.L. 2026. Demonstrably sustainable technics: Endangered material knowledge and paradoxical resilience. Journal of Material Culture, 1–34. DOI: 10.1177/13591835261421432

NC Lab (2025) online vide]. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4kyl5lExC0 (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

Sagiya, M.E and Pwiti, G. 2023. Conservation and management of archaeological heritage in the Hwange National Park, north-western Zimbabwe, in P. Shenjere-Nyabezi, G. Pwiti and D. Gronenborn (eds). The Past in The Present: The archaeology of northwestern Zimbabwe and the Nambya state (pp. 222-241). Harare: Weaver Press.  

Sagiya, M.E and Shenjere‐Nyabez, P. (2026a) ‘Some pasts are more important than others: Remembering and conserving built heritage places among descendants of the precolonial Nambya state in northwestern Zimbabwe’, Built Heritage, 10, article 36. doi:10.1186/s43238-026-00273-9.

Sagiya, M.E. (2022) ‘Documenting skills and practices of dry-stone masonry at Great Zimbabwe: Towards capturing a fading material knowledge’, Studies in the African Past, 16, pp. 30–77. doi:10.56279/sapj.v16.2.

Sagiya, M.E. (2026b) ‘Trees versus stone walls: A conservation dilemma at Great Zimbabwe’, International Journal of Heritage Studies. doi:10.1080/13527258.2026.2654898.

Sagiya, M.E. 2019. Heritage on the periphery: administration of archaeological heritage in Hwange district, Zimbabwe. Journal of African Cultural Heritage Studies, Special Issue, 2(1): 1-24.  

Sagiya, M.E. 2022. An investigation into archaeological heritage governance with special reference to Hwange district, northwestern Zimbabwe. PhD thesis, University of Zimbabwe. 

Sagiya, M.E. and Dervieux, Z. (2019) ‘Contested landscapes, multiple identities and the politics of belonging in Hwange district, northwestern Zimbabwe’, paper presented at the International Conference ‘Race, Identity and Globalization in the SADC region’, Gaborone, Botswana, February 2019. Available at: HAL (hal-04010519).