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Zanzibar Community Heritage

Youth perspectives, women-led community work and a growing archive of everyday Stone Town memory.

2017–2023Continuing legacy

Community project story

Heritage beyond landmarks.

Between June and August 2017, CIE associate Claire Louise Okatch worked with (Re)Claim Women’s Space in Heritage in Stone Town. Together they established a Youth Heritage Network that brought thirty young people into a series of five workshops about heritage stakeholders, public narratives and the role of youth.

Participants widened the idea of heritage beyond official monuments to include food, ceremonies, community myths and everyday knowledge. Working in pairs, they conducted fieldwork at places they selected and presented their findings to (Re)Claim and its partners.

Young people were not invited only to learn about heritage, but to decide what heritage could mean.

Two moments, one trajectory

From youth fieldwork
to a community archive

The later digital work continued the same principle: communities should retain a voice in how their place is recorded and represented.

2017Youth network

Thirty young voices

Five workshops explored who defines heritage, whose stories appear in public and how youth can become active stakeholders.

FieldworkEveryday heritage

Places they selected

Participants researched heritage sites in pairs, guided by their own expanded definitions of food, ritual, story, place and memory.

2023Community archive

Digital continuity

CIE returned to work with a local volunteer group on collecting oral histories, photographs and video as tourism and climate pressures intensified.

Stone Town workshop · 2023

Tools for stories at risk

A week of practical exchange connected community concerns to a locally managed digital platform.

01

Collect

Identify disappearing community stories and record the people, places and practices connected to them.

02

Archive

Develop practical methods for organising oral histories, photographs and video for continuing use.

03

Publish

Build a digital platform that can present local material without surrendering the community’s role in its interpretation.

04

Advocate

Bring concerns about built and cultural heritage to local government and religious leaders.

Sources and continuationReport 2015–2017 ↗Report 2022–2023 ↗Open Co-Lab map ↗

Let everyday heritage remain in community hands.

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