Brother Cherno Bah,

Many many thanks for bringing to our notice this wonderful and
thought-provoking piece.

sidibeh


2006/11/26, Cherno Marjo Bah <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> 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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