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.
Human Sciences Research Council (Tue,) studied this question.
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