The historic town of Grand-Bassam as an example of transmodern heritage

Abstract

Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2012, the Historic Town of Grand-Bassam includes Quartier France, established in the 19th century as the first colonial capital of present-day Ivory Coast, and N'zima village inhabited by the N'zima kotoko (kctckc) people. Even a brief analysis of these two sections of Grand-Bassam juxtaposed with each other - their planning and development in the 19th and 20th centuries, structural and functional organisation as well as architectural variety - reveals the fundamentals of the Western modern/colonial project at play. Seen in this light, the Historic Town of Grand-Bassam reflects the core-periphery dynamic that, created by the coloniser, shaped relations between the Europeans and the local populations in this territory in colonial times. This paper, however, proposes a different lens to interpret the UNESCO World Heritage property, namely a decolonial framework of transmodernity, which allows to affirm the social, economic, political and cultural alterity of the African communities of Grand-Bassam and to appreciate the spatial organisation, built heritage and aesthetics of Quartier France and N'zima village as two distinct realities that coincide.