In 2014, the Okavango Delta in northwest Botswana was listed as the 1,000th UNESCO World Heritage Site. The inland delta has an important wetland, making it a unique natural landscape for spectacular flora, fauna, and diverse wildlife, attracting high-end overseas tourists. However, there is a disconnect between tourists visiting such natural heritage sites and local communities’ expression of their heritage through the same landscape.
Local communities do not have access to their traditional lands due to conservation policies and models to protect high-end tourism infrastructure and wildlife. These policies fail to acknowledge the indigenous knowledge and cultural practices owned by traditional communities to protect and preserve the environment.
Commonwealth Alumnus Dr Susan Keitumetse is a Research Scholar in Cultural Heritage, Sustainability, and Tourism, at the Okavango Research Institute, University of Botswana. She is also the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Chairholder – African Heritage Studies and Sustainable Development in Botswana.
In her multifaceted role, Dr Keitumetse promotes African cultural heritage by highlighting the traditional roles and identities of indigenous communities towards sustainable conservation of both cultural and natural heritage sites, such as the Okavango Delta world heritage site.
Connecting tourists with local communities
For centuries, the Okavango delta has been the ancestral homeland to indigenous people. Since colonial times, indigenous communities have been dislocated from their traditional lands through a colonial approach of setting up national parks and game reserves, leading to a loss of traditional knowledge on conservation to protect wildlife and the environment, which they had previously managed for centuries. Dr Keitumetse states that this traditional knowledge has been replaced by mostly colonial models of conservation which designate sites as ‘natural’ and most often leave out the ‘cultural’, diminishing the social history of these lands and role of Indigenous People in sustainable conservation.
As a cultural heritage researcher, Dr Keitumetse is engaged with Indigenous and local People and communities and gathers important information about their history and relationship with their ancestral homeland. Through interviews and community engagements, she found that although Indigenous and local People were dislocated from their ancestral homelands, now natural heritage sites, they still held memories about their traditional land and cultural practices carried out since generations. However, in speaking with Indigenous People, she realised that these memories and lived experiences were sadly fading as the younger generation had no access to their traditional lands for knowledge transfer.
In response to this, whilst serving as a board member for the Botswana Tourism Organisation (BTO) and the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) committee to review Botswana’s tourism policy, Dr Keitumetse shared Indigenous Peoples’ identities and traditional practices of cultural heritage to influence tourism policy to include cultural aspects to diversify the high-end tourism package. This has reinforced the significance of community knowledge on cultural heritage as a subject for social, economic, and environmental development.
“Tourism industry in Botswana is huge but it only focuses on nature tourism and not the cultural aspect. Cultural heritage includes settlement histories, folklore and folklife associated with landscapes, cosmic knowledges associated with the landscapes, traditional dance, crafts, and art. Most of my work in Botswana has been to show how cultural heritage can diversify not only tourism but also conservation approaches.”
Impact of Scholarship on a niche career in cultural heritage management
Dr Keitumetse’s career and passion in advocating for African cultural heritage happened by chance. In her early years, due to teenage pregnancy, she was dropped out of high school in 1993, as per the Botswana government’s Ministry of Education policy of the time (this has since been changed).
In 1994, she proceeded to complete her schooling by taking the Cambridge Overseas School Certificate exam as a private candidate. This limited the choice of subjects she could study at the University of Botswana when she rejoined to continue with her education. Unable to select her preferred subjects like science, she chose to study Humanities with a specialisation in environmental science and archaeology during her graduation. Following which, she completed her Post Graduate Diploma in Education (Geography and History) at the University of Botswana.
After winning the prize for the overall best student in Archaeology in her BA Humanities degree, and with her newfound interest in environmental archaeology, Dr Keitumetse received a Commonwealth Scholarship to complete an MPhil in Social Anthropology and Archaeology in 2002 at the University of Cambridge. Following which, she later completed a PhD in Archaeological Heritage Management, Tourism and Sustainable Development in African world heritage sites under the Cambridge Livingstone Trust. During her undergraduate studies in environmental science, and later Commonwealth Scholarship she was introduced to the concept of sustainable development, and she linked its application to cultural heritage management during her PhD studies.
Dr Keitumetse’s researched the UN Sustainable Development Goals and its application to the World Heritage Convention in particular, but not in exception. She recalls that most previous studies were largely biased towards natural resource management, dismissing the significance of culture in sustainable conservation of communities’ heritage and the environment.
Applying her doctoral research and interest in working with grassroot communities, she developed the Community-Based Cultural Heritage Resources Management (COBACHREM) model, which is still a work in progress. This is a new approach to equip scholars and practitioners to understand the interconnection between cultural heritage, environment, and various stakeholders, and to create awareness of cultural resources already existing in environmental conservation and management.
At the time, her research was a niche topic, making her a pioneer in impacting change within international policy in linking cultural heritage resources management and the sustainable development model.
“The Commonwealth Scholarship gave me five years of life changing experience and opportunity. I know in my depth of hearts that if it wasn’t for the Scholarship, I wouldn’t probably be where I am today.”
Working with UNESCO to promote national heritage
Following her doctoral studies, Dr Keitumetse won a Rockefeller funded research fellowship and worked at the Smithsonian Institute’s Centre for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, CFCH (Smithsonian CFCH) ), as a research fellow on the subject of “theorising cultural heritage” a centre for education and cultural research, in Washington DC, USA. Here, she met with colleagues affiliated with UNESCO and was encouraged further to pursue her an interest in cultural heritage theory and practice.
Returning to Botswana, Dr Keitumetse joined the University of Botswana’s Okavango Research Institute as a researcher and academician. In this role, she realised there was a need to promote cultural aspects of natural heritage sites through partnerships and collaboration with international institutions such as UNESCO.
Between 2007 and 2008, Dr Keitumetse as part of a team, facilitated the ratification of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Botswana (UNESCO 2003 ICH convention) . She worked with the Botswana National Commission for UNESCO and the government’s department of Culture to kickstart the process of ratification, which was approved in 2010. The Convention has helped to recognise the cultural aspect of places otherwise termed as natural heritage sites such as national parks, ensuring diverse representation of stakeholders to enhance its potential towards sustainable conservation and development. Botswana has since listed 3 elements on the UNESCO list.
“I am an international expert in world heritage, and this has placed my country expertise in the books of institutions such as UNESCO that I work with.”
Establishing the UNESCO Chair at the University of Botswana
Dr Keitumetse believes that cultural identities start fading in the education system. In Africa, curriculums mainly follow colonial education formats and there is a disconnect between the curriculum and local and indigenous knowledge owned by the bearers of African cultural heritage.
To address this challenge, in 2020, Dr Keitumetse led a process to facilitate the establishment of a UNESCO Chair at the University of Botswana. Given her expertise in national and international heritage management and sustainable development, she was appointed as the UNESCO Chairholder by the University Vice Chancellor, Prof David Norris.
As UNESCO Chair, her responsibilities include identifying how universities can exchange African cultural knowledge with local communities. She believes that through education, youth can learn about African indigenous knowledge, leading to innovative ideas and unique opportunities within any discipline.
For the university, attaining the UNESCO Chair has meant developing new programmes for students and diversifying its work beyond academia through research and impactful stakeholder engagement. The university has benefitted by gaining first recognition and grant fundings for both the university and local communities for cultural heritage projects.
“The University of Botswana as my employer has been the main beneficiary of my work. It has benefitted by rankings and brought a change in mindset towards the relevance of cultural heritage. For instance, Scholar GPS has recently recognised me as one of the top ranked expert in the field of heritage.”
Planning ahead
With the high-end tourism industry on the rise, Dr Keitumetse plans to continue raising awareness amongst local communities to develop skills in how they can package their cultural heritage for tourism, hence their own development.
She aims to establish an NGO or centre for cultural heritage and sustainable development to provide youth the skills and platform to carry forward cultural heritage research, activism and life-long learning activities. She hopes that this platform will create employment opportunities and serve as a think-tank on cultural heritage issues in both Botswana and Africa.
She is proud that her work and research has promoted Botswana’s cultural heritage at the international level.
“The path I have gone through during the Commonwealth Scholarship has shown me that one does not need to engage in initiatives that are popular in order to make impact. I have learnt that it is the non-attended areas where we always need to pay attention to build interest, momentum and make impact. This is how I see with my work on world heritage and sustainable development, a sub-field that was not popular when I took it up as PhD research in 2005, but currently it is growing to be the most considered conservation approach in world heritage sites.”
Dr Susan Keitumetse is a 2001 Commonwealth Scholar from Botswana. She completed a MPhil in Social Anthropology and Archaeology at University of Cambridge.
