As I was going through my mail i read postings
on the United States of Afrika and i thought I will share this article I read
whiles in Johanesburg, SA.
This is an extract from a speech
Wole Soyinka, Play wright, presented at the TB Davie Memorial Lecture at the
University of Cape. Published in the Mail & Guardian, September 3-9th
1999,Johanesburg, South Africa.
Just as Kosovo, or Rwanda, Algeria, or indeed
Angola, there are horroros in today's arenas of conflict that defy the
accommodativeness of the Muse traditional or contemporary.
Sierra Leone has into turned the land of
terminal censorship, abrupt and unregulated, where the voices of memory are
bbrutally censored, mindliessly, terminally, not even under aproject of
religious doctrinaire cleansing as in Algeria, ethnic cleansing as in Kosovo or
Rwanda, or Ideological cleansing a in unbelievable Cambodia and other aberrant
projects for the conditioning of the mind.
We may be tempted to take consolation from the
fact that traditional cleansing rituals have been exhumed to assist in the
project of reintegrating child soldiers-that is , junvenile killers, torturers
and even rapists-into the community, but theis is several steps yet away from
the artistic conversion of such rites.
And the strident, benumbing afflictions of the
dialogue of arms-Rwanda, Congo, Angola and so forth-often serve to obscure the
more insidious, and ultimately more enduring incapacitation of the arts and
their producers in other parts of the continent. THe general response is:
at least, in these other arenas of polotical turmoil, the artists have a
voice of some kind, however muted. They are not actually subjected to that level
of directionless devastation that does not even distinguish between radical and
progressive, between priest or peasant, trader or journalist-at least,
until they are cynically hanged by the state like the Ogoni writer, Ken
Saro-Wiwa.
From Uganda of Idi Amin and Milton Obote to
presetn -day Sierra Leaone, from Siad Barre's Somalia and Mariam Mengistus's
Ethiopia to Liberia, the dismal story has been wearisomely repeated. It is time,
i think, that we began to stare into the codl face of statistics. Time surely,
that we began to consider, for instance, how much each day of warring costs us
in Sierra Leone, Sudan or Angola, and then compare this to the entire budget of
African nations, not merely for their cultural, but for their routine
educational and professional training programmes. The most recent assessment of
Nigeria is that the nation expends a million dollars a day for its operations in
Sierra Leaone.
With Ethiopia and Eritrea-erstwhile partners,
indeed brothers in a liberation struggel-breathing life into the arms industries
of both the Western and the dismembered Eastern Blocs, not forgetting making
multimillionaires of ever obliging arms traffickers who pray or just this kind
of belligerant idiocies of Third World Leaders, I believe that some structured
attention is due to the expropriation of cultural life, specifically, by the
unchecked rapacity of arms. this should constitute, surely, it s own specific
study, within the various arean of stock taking that accompanies the usual
observances of a millennial approach.
The land of Syl Cheney-Coker, peot, who declares
himself content to be "the breakfast of the peasants", "aa the
hands that help the fishermen bring in their catch", " a hand on
plough that tilss in their fields", is silenced. This land also of the
playwirght Yulisus Amadu Maddy, of the urbane critic Eldered Jones, of skilled
silver and gold smiths, of the sublime sculpures fo the Nimba peoples and
timeless lyrics of their griots(a traditional musician/peot or minstreal), has
been turned into a featureless landscape of rubble, of a traumatised populace
and roaming canines among unburied cadavers.
How does a sculptors begin to carve with only
stumps for arms? How does a vilage griot ply his trade with only the root
fo the tongues still lodged at the gateway of memory? The rest has been
cut out- often the hand that wields the knife is the hand of the future, the
unbiquitous child soldier-and the air is bereft even of the solace of its
lament.
A lament can be purifying, consling, for a
lament still affirms the retention of soul, even of faith, yes, it is a cry of
loss, an affirmation of humanity, a reaching out to a world that is stil human
or to forces that shape humanity. A lament does not emerge from atrocities, for
an atrocity is the very silencing of the human vocie. It deadens the soul and
clogs up the passages of hope, opening up in their place only sterile
accusations, the resolve of vengeance, or elase a total surrender to the triumph
of banality. We can no longer speak of wars on the continent, only of arenas of
competitive atocities.
Where a yet unmatured generation becomes
conditioned to indiscrimate slaughter and systematic ehumanisation, where
abdomination become a way of life, even violence becomes-it sounds impossible
but it is true-even violence does become degraded. No peotry can emerge from
such horrors, only records, the keeping of ledger sheets, a balance that must
some time be rendered. In vain therefore we shall await the heart-rending but
uplifting lament of a Costa Andrade:
The Mother of
Angola
have fallen with theirs
sons
No, what the peot will find weighing on his tongue,
unutterably heavy but true, are the lines:"The mothers of Africa/Are
violated by their sons."
i do not hear, in this travesty of the creative process, the
anunciation of a renaissance, nor read the first flickers of its regenerating
fires on our ever-receding horizons.
The Struggle Continues!!!!!
Ndey Jobarteh