heritage, legacy and leadership: ideas and interventions The Cultural Leadership Programme and the Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage were delighted to present Heritage, Legacy and Leadership: Ideas and Interventions on 22 February 2008. This international symposium was conceived as a cutting-edge intervention to stimulate analysis and debate that would enrich leadership development within the heritage sector. The event brought together an eclectic and stunning mix of senior managers, practitioners, academics, policy makers, advisers and experts. This gathering of influential stakeholders produced a rich synergy as they explored the thinking, experiences and practices needed to develop bold, creative and progressive heritage leadership. By placing the challenges facing the sector within an international context, the symposium provided a rare trans-national forum. The exchange between renowned speakers and the heritage sector at large produced a stimulating dialogue, marking priorities and igniting possibilities for a dynamic and diverse twenty-first century heritage leadership. The Heritage, Legacy and Leadership symposium featured a range of engaging and sometimes provocative presentations, some of which are represented in this report. The key message emerging from the symposium was that cultural leadership is a collective responsibility and that we as individuals must strive to create, support and contribute to the leadership paradigm we envision. ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for’ was the phrase that resonated most powerfully throughout the proceedings. Doudou Diène’s thought-provoking keynote address is featured, along with a selection of the inspirational and at times challenging presentations that have been revised for this publication. Three complementary papers provide a commentary on the symposium’s value and legacy for the sector. Taken as whole this report bears witness to the aspirations and issues facing the leadership of the cultural sector in the UK and further afield. We invite you to fully engage in the symposium through this report, adding your voice and visions to the call for transformative cultural leadership. Dame Jocelyn Barrow Chair, Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage Dr Hilary S Carty Director, Cultural Leadership Programme A key and energising message from the thought-provoking symposium, Heritage, Legacy and Leadership: Ideas and Interventions, was that change demands action. Successive speakers from the podium and the floor movingly and graphically described the vivid and inspiring opportunities that lie within our grasp. Many expressed frustration that progress has been hesitant and patchy. I agree with them. We need to be even more determined to take up the cause and work together towards improvement, excellence and engagement with all people. In a time of economic uncertainty, people and communities can derive strength, purpose and reassurance from experiences involving culture, the arts, learning and the celebration of heritage and identity. But in a modern age we simply must apply these ideas to all people – people of all backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, genders, orientations and means. Creativity and imagination can help us to see ways to remove barriers to understanding; to deploy the widest possible array of media; to see that the legacy of heritage can be understood and appreciated through a stimulating blend of music, performance, art, dance, display, study and reflection. Collections, references, information and materials belong to us all. These resources can be presented, interpreted and applied for everyone but more emphasis is needed on the approaches to making it so. The built environment is part of the story. Buildings can speak but they have to be arranged in ways that convey a welcome. Open spaces are vital too, and we need to use them dynamically as part of the expression of a truly embracing and broad-based narrative. Stresses and strains in our cities, towns and villages will not be healed by politicians or by ‘someone else’. The only people who can help fix the issues, bridge the gaps, improve lives, make things happen and realise the potential of the rich diversity in our midst, are those who read this foreword. You and me. Enjoy the report. Read it well. Then let’s act together for the sake of all people. Roy Clare, CBE Chief Executive, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council 03 contents 1 I Prologue Nima Poovaya-Smith 06 2 I Heritage and identity Doudou Diène – keynote address 10 Samuel Jones – response 20 3 I Leadership, national identity and inclusion Roshi Naidoo 24 Lonnie G Bunch III 29 4 I Leadership and change in the twenty-first century James Early 34 Patricia Glinton-Meicholas 41 5 I Transforming heritage leadership: challenges and goals Temi Odumosu 46 6 I Circles of interaction, dialogue and exchange Janice Cheddie 60 7 I Appendix: symposium programme 66 Acknowledgements 69 05 1 prologue Nima Poovaya-Smith Nima Poovaya-Smith is founding director of Alchemy, a cultural enterprise company with a particular interest in the confluences of different cultures. Alchemy is undertaking a number of major cultural programmes in partnership with cultural, academic and public sectors. She currently serves on the Council of the University of Leeds and is a Trustee of the Beecroft Bequest. She set up the Transcultural Gallery at Cartwright Hall and previously held senior positions at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, and Yorkshire Arts. 06 Three defining events have taken place transatlantic slave trade resulted in a wealth of between the staging of the Heritage, Legacy buildings, monuments and prison forts from and Leadership symposium in February 2008 Africa to the Western hemisphere. The recorded and the writing of this prologue. Barack histories of these structures, however, almost Obama, in the most thrilling presidential race invariably make no mention of the enslaved in recent history, was elected as leader of Africans who built them. arguably the most powerful nation on earth. Diène cannot fail to impress as he addresses the Lewis Hamilton greatly added to the gaiety conference without notes, speaking with here in Britain by becoming the youngest ever enviable lucidity in English, effectively his third Grand Prix world champion. And the language. He provides compelling examples of inimitable Ken Livingstone was replaced as what I label ‘victor heritage’, where the Mayor of London by the equally distinctive and dominant communities are the memorialists or flamboyant Boris Johnson. gatekeepers of heritage and the dominated Looking back on the symposium it surfaces as a communities are characterised by invisibility and series of surprisingly vivid snapshots. The soaring silence. I shiver in the bright winter sunshine. architecture of City Hall matches the imposing There is something chilling about vast swathes of conference title, rich in abstract nouns: Heritage, heritage being deliberately suppressed or Legacy and Leadership. There is something both unrecorded, a kind of cultural genocide. Even uplifting and surreal about sitting in a light-filled though it was the cultural resistance to slavery, as atrium in the heart of London, listening to Diène reminds us, that ultimately destroyed the speakers from all around the world. Local slave system. However, as Samuel Jones from governments, I remind myself, have often been Demos points out in his response to Diène, even agents for transformational change, particularly a large country like China, with its growing in Victorian and Edwardian times, and were not economic clout, is not able to impose cultural bashful about asserting their prosperity and leadership easily. Millions of Chinese read success through some rather spectacular civic contemporary Chinese literature yet those architecture. outside of China would be hard-pressed to name a single Chinese-language, best-selling writer. In fact, the keynote speaker, Doudou Diène, the Languages such as English therefore continue United Nations Special Rapporteur on their dominant hold on heritage, legacy and contemporary forms of racism, racial leadership through the supremacy purchased by discrimination, xenophobia and related their colonial histories. intolerance, alludes to architecture and its ability to retrace or deny hidden heritage. The 07 The symposium’s joint presenters include the In almost all the presentations, including those relatively new but increasingly influential from our transatlantic and European colleagues, Cultural Leadership Programme, deftly led by there is a sense of tapping into an increasingly Hilary Carty, working in close tandem with the powerful twenty-first century zeitgeist. There is a Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian noticeable emphasis on the creation of a new Heritage. It is well supported by a wide range of paradigm for diversity and minority heritage cultural agencies. As is my style with events such discourses are firmly shifted from their ‘other’ as this, I listen attentively but in a state of mild status. Academic and writer Roshi Naidoo points reverie as presentations and discussions ping out the connection between the failure to create pong slightly mystifyingly but always more diverse cultural leadership in this country interestingly from global issues such as racism and the way we conceive so-called minority and xenophobia to the importance of histories and the nature of their incorporation diversifying governing bodies of British