Decolonising World Heritage Management in Africa: The Transformative Role of the African World Heritage Fund

This chapter interrogates the enduring colonial architectures that continue to shape World Heritage theory and practice in Africa, focusing on authenticity and heritage management. It argues that decolonisation efforts within the World Heritage Convention have too often remained performative and technocratic, adopting reformist language while reproducing hierarchies of expertise, value attribution, and decision-making that sustain epistemic exclusion. The chapter critiques how authenticity, when defined through expert-led bureaucratic procedures, can function as a vehicle for re-inscribing Eurocentric norms and marginalising African heritage ontologies. Drawing on postcolonial critique, it calls for an epistemic reorientation that centres African understandings of authenticity as spiritual, relational, and community-rooted, expressed through lived practice and continuity of meaning beyond the material fabric. Such a shift requires restoring agency, justice, and epistemic sovereignty in governance systems. Using diverse case studies, the chapter highlights the African World Heritage Fund (AWHF) as a catalytic actor advancing decolonial praxis by increasing the capacity and influence of African actors to shape agendas and decisions within the World Heritage Convention and legitimising heritage management systems that recognise communities as primary custodians.