By Wangui wa Goro (2006-11-16)
Wangui wa Goro writes that to talk of the African Renaissance when Africans
go without food and die unnecessarily of curable diseases, when children
have no access to clean water and basic education, compels us to ask
ourselves who is this renaissance intended for. “That unless we can meet the
fundamental needs of the majority of African people, words like Renaissance
(rebirth) in the face of death for many sound like a mockery.”
It is easy to forget that culture is ever evolving and we are what we are
today. Some may want to hark back to a specific historical model of culture
in the eighteenth or nineteenth century or some other period which appeals
to their desires. Some may have profound knowledge of their desired
historical culture, while others may just be armed with nostalgia which they
acquired through a variety of ways. Neither is invalid, nor undesirable.
Recently, in an imaginary African country, some people in their mid forties
and fifties have taken to occasionally donning an animal skin to show their
‘elder’ status. Some are probably four wheel driving drunkards, rapists,
thieves or murderers living in secluded areas of the city in gated
properties with little or no connection with their rural communities.
Others are steeped in religious or cultural sentimentality acquired
dubiously for social mobility, acceptability or political or economic
expediency. This is then promoted as “our way of life”, as if culture cannot
be contested, as if the values of tradition and modernity cannot be put to
the test to scrutinise who they serve; for what purpose and to which ends.
Most worryingly, is the fixing of tradition as something staid that will
never change and which condemns the majority into servitude or slavery. For
me, culture should answer the question whether it can promote and deliver
democracy, equality and social justice for the majority. A pro-people
culture would bode well for peace, justice and democracy in Africa; a
culture that would enable a re-engagement with the self that has been
lacking - a re-engagement with our neighbours and the world in ways that are
powerful and which would yield tremendous wealth, enjoyment, creativity,
learning and exchange.
Amnesia and denial
Instead, on the whole, we have been living with our heads in the sand like
the ostrich. But the ostrich compensates for this behaviour in that it can
run, and run very fast when it needs to. What has struck me as absurd is a
wilful forgetfulness of what has happened to Africa in the recent and not so
recent past such as the colonial era and its aftermath. We have forgotten
our heroes and role models.
In Kenya for instance, years after independence, the question of freedom
fighters sits uneasily with the nation as does its colonial and post
colonial history. Practices which women and men have fought against such as
female genital mutilation, and entrenched views about women’s roles in
society, are yet again up for contestation. Coming from a former settler
colony and having visited several countries such as South Africa and
Zimbabwe, I am struck by how patriarchal and colonial our cultures still
remain, from our means of production, our means of consumption and our
participation in the production.
All of these are directed as they are at somebody else rather than
ourselves.In another example in Kenya people have been forced to wear used
underwear from second hand stocks in Europe! What happened to the thriving
textile industry? It has been decimated by cheap second hand used imports
and Kenyans are wrongly forced to wear used underwear.
What happens in the name of culture?
In most African countries and in the Diaspora, owing to the lack of
attention paid to this significant field of African culture much is done
quietly on the cultural scene through the efforts and sacrifice that
individuals and small groups make. This is true of most art forms which are
produced in private and painstaking ways, with little public support.
Occasionally, interested private or foreign investors such as the British
Council, the French Cultural Centre or the Goethe Institute (who see their
linkages with Africa and promotion of African culture as integral to
promoting their own cultures) enable us to catch a glimpse of what is
possible! The gesture is not reciprocated! Imagine, African cultural
institutes sponsored by African governments in every key capital of the
world!
Here, in London, where you would expect to find thriving cultural
institutions displaying the long links between Africa and the UK, you will
be hard pressed if you can point to one. The only institution which is
supposed to broadly represent Africans which has existed for a while, is one
you will want to run a mile from. It is currently shamefully closed and
dilapidated after several years of struggling to survive. Although it has
played an important role in democratic struggles for Africans on the
continent and in the Diaspora, its governance remains shrouded in mystery
and secrecy and many people have gradually been put off from going there as
they do not wish their culture to be promoted in this impoverished way. It
sits there, right in the heart of the thriving Covent Garden, 200 yards from
the UK’s prestigious multimillion Opera House. This sorry state of affairs
is a travesty, to both British and African Heritage. It is a general measure
of how we see ourselves at home and abroad and how we want to promote
ourselves. It is also a measure of how we are seen by others, alienated.
Changing this perception may be the way to that much-vaunted renaissance.
Elsewhere for instance in fashion, Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria continue to
impress with a sense of dress all their own, and what is even more
refreshing is that it is not for tourist appeal. Yet what is worrying for
even these thriving economies, heritages and creativity, is their reliance
on Brick Lane or Switzerland for lace and for designs (sold as African) but
produced in India or somewhere further away, thus creating jobs for others
elsewhere.
This is all well and good for south-south or any other collaboration.
However, the question of how the relationships are defined, the moral,
social, cultural and economic cost for Africa and the loss of the
possibilities to replenish creativity is one we must be concerned about. As
they say, practice makes perfect and we have been forever perfecting
everybody else’s things which are then directed at us for consumption
whether we like it or not. There is a subtle and not so subtle disparaging
of anything home grown that does not pander to somebody else’s appeal or
taste.
What is Kenyan? Is it the donning of animal skins and harking back to some
golden era in the 19th Century before the Europeans came? And whom is this
supposed to appeal to?
What is popularised and cheap is the man-eat-man culture of the bourgeoisie,
both Western and African which is often crude and vulgar as it is dependent
on making a mockery of the dignity of majority of the people and allowing
them to forget that what is theirs is being siphoned off slowly and sold
back to them repackaged (cheaply) at ten times the price. The mass media,
often Hollywood oriented, continues to dominate the nations’ outlooks on
themselves and it is rarely kind about who Africans are, or what our
aspirations are.
African Cultural Production and alienation
But what is the real lived experience of cultural production in Africa? I
work as a translator and challenge anyone reading this article, to name me
ten African literary translators and the titles of their books. You will be
hard pressed. This phenomenon is replicated across all cultural production,
with perhaps the exception of music by the greats - Baaba Maal, Angelique
Kidjo, Hugh Masekela, Fela Kuti, Miriam Makeba and others. Ask any African
which 10 books by an African writer they have read outside academia, or who
our ten leading painters, sculptors or film makers are and you will be faced
with blank faces. I learnt this the hard way, through being a member of the
jury of Africa’s 100 best books. The majority of the books that came through
the list were foreign-published and in European languages. They were written
mainly for academic purposes and for adult consumption.
Port Louis and the ideals of the Cultural Charter for Africa
Such moments make you realise that, as Africans, just how alienated from
ourselves we are. This alienation makes one wonder what happened to the
OAU’s Charter on Culture and the mandates, aspirations and ideals that
brought independence to Africa.
The OAU had made a brave attempt in 1976 in St Louis in Mauritius to define
a vision for an African Cultural Policy. The ideals then articulated still
remain relevant today and it is pleasing that this debate is set to continue
in Addis Ababa, and better still that we might live to implement it. For
culture must belong to people and their governments, as government
departments will not themselves produce culture, but facilitate it.
My hope is for the debate on national and regional policies to be a
continuous one and the lessons that have been learned from festivals,
exhibitions, competitions, creativity and interactions across the continent
and the globe to be shared more widely. Wonderful initiatives and models
exist but only linking them and the wider populace will make a difference.
Engaging in the debate of what democratic culture is and what it can become
and its links to schooling, arts, sport, entertainment, heritage, leisure
and general socio-economic and political production in every arena, is
crucial. It should engage the practitioners and policy makers but most of
all, it should engage the consumers.
Arts, culture and heritage are seen as a luxury, as a world apart from the
real. They are not seen as the pulse which can feed blood into the arteries
of justice, peace, democracy and development. Talent and achievement can be
nourished and nurtured through state support for arts, heritage and culture
in meaningful ways. Young and old people should be allowed to discover their
heritage, and here, I recall the work of a wonderful scholar George Senega
Zake who spent most of his lifetime trying to retrieve the dying musical art
forms of East Africa as well as educate new generations to appreciate their
heritage through music. Like him, we should become not only curators and
archaeologists, but take up our responsibility to make the past a thriving
part of the present and the future.
It seems that the task of excavating must go hand in hand with the task of
creating new and vibrant cultural industries which are pro people:
sustainable and economically viable. Projects which engage the majority and
contribute to national development and democracy, hold up a mirror to
society, allowing us to see a true picture of ourselves. Instead, we have
exiled, jailed, tortured and killed our artists by smashing the mirror into
thousands of fragments because we do not like what we see. The freedom to
culture is an important arm of the freedom of expression. It is a
fundamental human right.
Elsewhere, culture is what makes the humanity pulsate. One of the things
about Britain is the amount of thriving traditional and global cultures
represented there. They do not threaten what the nation thinks of its own
heritage. I am thinking here of the museums on slavery and colonialism in
Liverpool and Bristol which tell unflinchingly (although sparsely) about
those chapters of British history! Such institutions have come out of
people’s struggles for these spaces, and so their story is told, and in that
way, the story of Britain is holistically present. In similar ways, Africans
must continue to strive for their ways of life, past and present, to not to
be deleted off the page.
Vision
I do not ask for much as we look forward to the outcomes of the AU
conference on culture in Addis Ababa. I hope that the conference yields
deliverable outcomes that will engage the minds of the young and the old
through modern and traditional means, through technology, through
information, communication and through travel. We have a right to ask for as
much as we wish, but equally, we must be willing to play our part in
bringing it into fruition.
A first step in acknowledging our heritage is through its most important
medium, our languages, whether, visual, oral, physical or musical. The AU
has taken the bold step of adopting Kiswahili as the all African lingua
franca.
But language, whether the mother tongue or nation tongue or neighbour
tongue, must be a democratic tongue that allows people to express their
aspirations and imaginings without demeaning others. What is important, is
that these languages enable us to confidently excavate the past as well as
yield new possibilities for today and tomorrow. For what then are we wearing
borrowed clothing?
Culture is about dignity and self worth. It is about knowledge and
confidence in knowing the good, the bad and the ugly. In Africa, as
elsewhere, culture emerges through our understanding of this soil, its fauna
and flora, through its numerous waters and skies, through unfurling the
secrets that it harbours through our ancestors, and through us and our
dreams for the future.
Culture is universally compelling in its call to a moral duty which can
engage every human being. It is a fundamental human right and a very
fulfilling one. Hear the songs, watch those films, go to those bookshops and
readings. Go to those museums, produce those crafts, participate in the
production of art, consume it or produce it. Marvel at how rich our
heritages are. Marvel at the artefacts that were looted and are stashed in
vaults across the world. Feel the desire to demand their retrieval, or share
in the secrets which only a dying few can decipher. Engage them with trips
to this heritage sites of looting, physically or through technology. Touch
these totems. Let the totems or replicas be restored and returned. There is
so much that we can do and that must be done.
Our attitudes towards education are as important as the paramount questions
of justice and equality. In our own case, the question of restorative
justice is one which we must pay close attention to so that the ghosts of
those genocides, holocausts, dictatorships and theft do not visit us again.
What upholds our dignity and our humanity today has to be central. It cannot
be a case of “this is how our ancestors did it so we must do it in the same
way” if this means violating women’s rights, children’s rights, the rights
of one ethnicity or the privileging of one section of society over another.
It should uplift us all into valuing each other for what we are and for what
we can become.
African Renaissance
Measuring the African Renaissance is a perilous task. When people go without
food and die unnecessarily of curable diseases; when children have no access
to clean water and basic education, then we have cause to ask ourselves who
and what this renaissance is intended for. Unless we can meet the
fundamental needs of the majority of African people, words like Renaissance
(rebirth) in the face of death for many, sound like a mockery.
Yet without being cynical, there are many promising initiatives such as the
journal Kwani, the Paa ya Paa gallery in Kenya, Xarra, the only black
bookshop in South Africa, the various Africa wide, book, cultural, music,
film and theatre festivals and many other events that are good examples of
initiatives trying to place a different kind of culture on the map.
For me, these institutions/events represent different ways to culture, and
even then, I ask Kwani and Xarra: where are those African language
narratives? What medium is best to disseminate these? Nollywood may hold an
answer but even so, where are those technicians and publishers, like the
Henry Chakavas, the Aseneth Odagas, the Aminatta Sow Falls, the Ayebia
Clarkes and Kassahun Checoles who are brave to risk a different kind of
economy by publishing Africa? Where are those film makers who are willing to
bring the oral traditions on to our screens without apology while making
films that feed contemporary culture and document our heritage? Where are
those musicians and painters and sculptors? Where are the beautiful ones?
The reception and funding of their work, and how governments, citizens and
policy makers engage with them, will tell you even more about who we are.
The continuity of African Centred initiatives promise a re-awakening breed,
a different breed trying to nurture out of the postcolonial vacuum, the kind
of vision that Port Louis began as initiatives such as FESPACO and FESTAC.
This vacuum was interrupted by the abyss of repressive regimes and apartheid
on the continent. And although it is always easy to blame somebody else,
those years were a product of global culture which was vehemently
anti-African. Our governments aided and abetted the denigration of African
humanity. The perilous work and courage of cultural activists was key to
restoring some sense of normality to Africa today. So our task is to support
these initiatives as a part of democratic norms.
Pan-African global heritage
The contribution and role that the traditional and new diasporic communities
have played in contributing to continuity in the face of that vacuum cannot
be underestimated in the economic and cultural value they have continued to
offer. That is why we must embrace our multicultural global heritage instead
of being myopic and ethnocentred. We must enjoy wider global Pan African
heritage. In this way, everyone stands to gain, through sharing of skills,
through trade, through promoting excellence, through dialogue, through
linking the various trajectories of culture in their new locations whether
on the continent or beyond.
But further, we must see our African culture as part of a thriving global
heritage. Living internationally as I do, I have been privileged to dip into
the numerous cultures of Africa, Asia, North or South America, Europe,
Australia, the Atlantic, the Pacific and from the African Ocean and their
collaborations. I readily eat my fufu, aloco, ‘chapoo’, couscous, tchiabu
jdian, mukimo, attieke and rice and peas as if I have done so all my life.
Appreciating other cultures makes you appreciate what belongs to you and
also allows you to enjoy the wealth and beauty of the human heritage of
which we are a part. Global democratic culture should be encouraged as a
wealth, as it gives new perspectives on others and on the self, but it
should be done on terms which edify, not denigrate.
Our legislators must create a platform for our heritage for which they can
be remembered. Our governments must contribute to it, embrace it and run
with it. Most importantly, the everyday practitioners and artists have a
moral obligation to safeguard, nurture and defend our cultural heritage for
peace, justice and development as they have always done. For without them,
there can be no culture to speak of.
• UK based Kenyan, Wangui wa Goro is a public intellectual, academic,
writer, translator, and cultural promoter. She is currently the director of
Amber Cultural Productions as well as the president of the African literary
translators and subtitlers association (ALTRAS) and (TRACLA) Translations
Caucus of the African Literature Association (ALA) [log in to unmask]
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