Conservation Issues, Management Initiatives and Challenges for Implementing Khami World Heritage Site Management Plans in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Before and after it was nominated on the World Heritage List in 1986, Khami had been affected by various conservation problems, which threatened its outstanding universal value. These conservation issues ranged from collapse of stone walls to lack of resources to immobilise the factors that had continued to overwhelm the site. Although several conservation exercises were made to protect the site, these were carried out without appropriate site management planning. The effect of lack of proper planning for Khami was the recurrence of conservation problems at one of Zimbabwe’s impressive dry stone wall cultural sites. In 1999, a 5-year site management plan was introduced and a number of objectives and strategies were outlined to deal with the management issues that were affecting the site. The Khami management plan was only reviewed in 2013, 13 years after it had expired. This chapter reviews the extent to which the Khami site management plans were implemented since the development of the first plan almost two decades ago. The appraisal indicates that to a certain extent due to inexperience of implementing site management plans, few objectives of the plan were able to be attained.