GOREE INSTITUTE

Project Summary and Background

"Imagine Africa" - concept and, of course, aspiration – is a phrase that the Gorée Institute decided to make the blue line running through all our deliberations and activities. What do we intend to convey by such a line that may sound like a form of escape?

First, obviously, that we need to see Africa as it is - in all its brutality, excesses, riches, horror, humiliation, poverty, despair, squalor, posturing and display, beauty and creativeness. And this is a function of the imagination because we must make leaps in order to accommodate, in useful fashion, the complexity of the continent and from there draw sustenance for continued creativity. Often there is a wilful misreading of the reality we live in - for racist or paternalistic purposes to justify the fact that Africa is in effect left to wallow in non-development, or else to see it as an exotic and slightly dangerous object of folkloristic pity mixed with excitement; or again, the misreading may be self-serving because we Africans wish to continue portraying ourselves as victims of history.

So, to start with, we believe it is possible and very necessary to see the continent as clearly and therefore as imaginatively as we can.
Let us go deeper: Who does Africa in reality belong to? What is the status and the protection of the hundreds of thousands of people moving across the continent from war zone to refugee camp, from poverty to peril, or even - as only too many do by any imaginable means - out of Africa altogether?

Another reason, for us, to "Imagine Africa." is to understand the terrible morbidity of young people in some of our cities - Monrovia, Freetown - dressing up as gaudy and tattered child brides with wigs and rouged faces to go out and kill indiscriminately? How and since when did the AK47 become the instrument of initiation into adulthood?

ow do we explain the maiming, the senseless mayhem, the raping of infants, the greed and the graft, the cynicism of our rulers, the absence of accountable governance buried under special pleading, the decay of our public ethics, the profound corrosion of individual and collective self-esteem because of our supposed victimhood?

We here at the Gorée Institute recognize the absolute importance of that which perhaps cannot be quantified - memory and imagination; and have always believed that concepts and practices of democracy, development and culture overlap to thus profoundly define one another. That is why we identified ourselves from the outset as a Centre for promoting Democracy, Development and Culture in Africa. The aesthetics of interacting with the environment, of experiences morphing through art into objects and processes of beauty, constitute the ground for ethical consciousness.

Breyten Breytenbach, March, 2007 (edited)

Our work

“Imagine Africa ” is a project that groups individuals with experience in the fields of politics, the economy, academia, religion, civil society activism together with cultural creativity. By incorporating some of Africa's pre-eminent public thinkers and artists, it initiates rigorous research on matters of public concern, thus linking art and culture with politics.

The Institute uses different means to share the different expressions of thought and ideas. An annual activity hosted on the island is Taalifkat Tudunya ("Writers in the World") a Workshop in Creative Writing. This brings together twenty aspiring writers / graduate students over ten days who will be brought into contact with the 'real world' of other cultures and other academic and artistic disciplines, in creative ways, but still within the framework of their studies and, as far as possible, slotting in with existing university writing programs. The Workshop are led by pre-eminent American poets and writers, complemented by African academics and/or creative practitioners.

We are also developing opportunities for artist residencies that will combine expressions on the security and political situation on the continent with wider outreach and interaction with student and the Institutes broader civil society partners.

Additionally plans are underway for the production of an annual publication ‘Imagine Africa’, that will bring together critical essays and literary expressions that interrogate and reflect different aspects of Africa’s reality, present past and future.