Opening
remarks for The ArtTerial Conference on
Vitalizing African Cultural Assets
Gorée Island, 5-7 March 2007
Dear friends and colleagues,
I present my remarks under
the heading of "Imagine Africa"
because some time ago we here at the Gorée
Institute decided to make this phrase
- or concept and, of course, aspiration
- the blue line running through all our
deliberations and activities. You will
see the commitment on most of our documents.
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.
In the process we realized
that we must ask questions. Such as: What,
if anything, are the characteristics we
share and collectively call 'African'
from Cairo to the Cape, from Dakar to
Mogadishu? Are we talking history? Culture?
Economics? Race? Or just this sad space
between potential and shattered dreams?
Is the vaunted 'sameness' or 'difference'
perhaps only in the eye of the outside
beholder? We live in a bedlam or a beggar's
paradise of supposedly autonomous nation-states.
Are they viable or even useful? What do
they correspond to? Is there any state
on the continent, South Africa included,
that can look after the legitimate expectations
and needs of its citizens?
Let us go deeper: What is
the contents - the rights and responsibilities
- of citizenship for us? What is our definition
of 'common purpose', 'common good' or
even 'public good'? How much value do
we put on the individual human life? 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?
Now, when it would seem
that there is a general 'retraditionalization'
of people - how do we read the phenomenon
in terms of 'globalisation' (which is
world consumerist capitalism) and 'modernity'?
What values did independence and liberation
bring? What happened to those values?
Have we been living in borrowed clothes?
Is there a peculiarly African way of articulating
and administering power, let alone sharing
it? Do we have effective checks against
the abuses of privilege? What is the weight
or the influence or even the sustainability
and mandate of our civil society structures?
What have we changed for the better since
the 50 years of Ghanaian independence?
More precisely, what is the impact of
our creators and observers, those whose
very purpose of being is transformation,
our community of artists?
In other words - what has
African imagination contributed to our
understanding of what we are doing to
one another and to the world?
These questions are rough
and broad and I know that many answers
exist and can even be demonstrated. But
how honest are we in our answers?
A second dimension of our
need to "Imagine Africa" is
simply the recognition of the relationship
between the imaginary and the real. I
take it as common cause that part of the
human condition, maybe the essential flame,
is the process of imagining ourselves
to be. We are who and what we are only
in becoming. We survive, we live because
we try to conceive of the nature and the
purpose of being. Our consciousness is
constant invention or the recognition
of what we may be, bounded by the possible.
Maybe this is not so unique
to the human condition. After all, do
birds not imagine their territory and
perhaps also the nature of their being
through flight and song? Animals come
to an experience of themselves by movement
leaving traces as markers of memory. It
could be that life is awareness because
it knowingly strives for imagining existence
and thus questioning the sense and finality
of the process. Leaving traces of ourselves,
as in creative productivity, could then
be seen as part of the definition of consciousness
for us as well. We know that in order
to progress we must stretch for something
just out of reach - if only for a life
that will be more compassionate and decent
than the cruelty, paranoia, greed, narrow
corporatism or narcissism we mostly indulge
in and find such ample justification for.
And so we dream. There's
the personal dream to come to terms with
the inevitability of being finite; there's
the communal one of justice and freedom
upon which we hope to secure the survival
of the group. And then there is the dimension
of moral imagination.
This brings me to the third
reason, for us, to "Imagine Africa."
How do we 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?
How 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?
Is it because our societies
are stalked by death - endemic poverty
and the plague of Aids? Or can it be because
we never delivered on the dreams of liberation
and emancipation?
I would postulate that we
of this generation suffer from a massive
failure of moral imagination. Instead
of responsible freedom we substituted
self-enrichment and entitlement linked
to cowardice, bad faith, the corruption
of dependence, and that glorification
of impotence or of posturing expressed
as political correctness, where our languages
were gutted of texture and colour and
we posited our shrill interventions on
the mumbo-jumbo of 'healing' and 'closure',
changing the terms we use for looking
at the objectionable in the hope of thus
repressing horrible realities. In some
instances we even went through the sinister
farce - or are still indulging in it -
where 'confessing' to torture and repression
is intended to lead to an absolution supposed
to bring about 'reconciliation'. This
must be a prime example of practising
the hypocrisy of religious motivations
as snake oil for social leprosy in order
not to lose the essential: the power and
the privileges of the rich and those whom
they co-opt. Anything, any show, any stuffed
bird - but the firm commitment to proceed
from our shared humanity to identify what
is unacceptable and bring about justice!
What 'horizon of expectations'
are we proposing to the young? How do
we interpret the flight of at least 35,000
young people this last year, in pirogues
and cayucos - with probably another 10,000
perishing in the sea or in the desert
along the way - for a Europe where, at
best, they will be shadow people? This
country just now saw the electoral victory
of the candidate of populism and corruption
and manipulation - which, concurrently,
meant the rejection of that political
caste identified with secular modernity.
To the south of here, we have a president
pretending to cure Aids by the laying
on of his healing hands - but only on
Thursdays and just ten patients per month.
And these ruling elites, the plunderers,
the only act in town, are found all over
Africa.
I want to quote to you from
a recent newsletter by Tajudin Abdul-Raheem
- one of the last Pan Africanists, also
the Deputy Director Africa for the UN
millennium campaign; in this letter he
took a look at the present crop of African
governors for life and of death and with
the insight of long experience he came
to the following assessment (I'll condense
his words):
One: They come as liberators
but the longer they stay in power the
more they become oppressors, intolerant
of dissension or even discussions within
their own political and military formations…
Two: The vanguard of the masses slowly
become the vanguard of the ruling party
or clique and soon degenerates into the
vanguard of the leader… Three: They
usually come with big dreams and enormous
commitment to the masses, but the paraphernalia
of power, the glitz, the pomp and pageantry
and all the trappings take over…
Add to that the institutionalised culture
of sycophancy: jungle fatigues soon give
way to the best of Saville Row suits,
Gucci shoes, Rolex watches etc. The 'comrade'
has now 'arrived' and will be in no hurry
to vacate the State House which he ridiculed
not so long ago… Four: A ruling group
that had been held together for many years
by shared ideology and perspectives are
more and more built around the personality
of the leader, his family, in-laws, freelance
opportunists and other cronies… Five:
The interests of the party, the government
and the people become indistinguishable
from the whims and the caprices of the
Leader… To oppose him is to oppose
the people. Six: The progressive changes
they have brought about in the country
become 'gifts' from a benevolent leader
to his hapless citizens… Seven: Most
of them were revolutionaries who began
their political careers and rebel lives
as firebrand anti-imperialists but soon
became converts to the free market and
are now new best friends with the imperialist
countries, especially the USA and other
Western powers… Eight: These former
revolutionaries who espoused Pan Africanism
now resign themselves to 'better managing'
the neo-colonial state and are soon engrossed
in competition rather than cooperation
with their former comrades… Liberators
become looters and occupiers… Nine
and Ten: The twin evils of these leaders
becoming both victims of their militaristic
means of getting and retaining power,
and wallowing in external validation by
the same Western powers who not that long
ago praised our erstwhile dictators as
'moderate'.
With no coherent, shared political project;
with little job opportunity in the offing;
with families falling apart; with Western
consumerist appetites forced down their
throats; with estrangement and obscurantism
haunting them like sombre fires - what
kind of "Imagine Africa" can
we hold up to the young?
You may now ask, what does
my litany of despair have to do with the
aims of this conference?
We at the Institute believe
it is possible to imagine Africa differently,
and certainly culture is one way to go
about it. But our struggle for light and
ultimately our success will be at the
cost of brutal honesty, of questioning
all the holy cows and taboos, and of remaining
engaged to stay the course.
It is clear from the thorough
way in which the conference was prepared
that we will visit and describe the cultural
situation as it is, and identify the causes
for the absence of viable and sustainable
cultural spaces and practices. Maybe we
will be able to make a useful distinction
between the so-called 'culture' of entitlement
by which cultural manifestations are hijacked
by the new hegemonists of the party-state
in their attempt to rewrite history -
often funded by the private sector hoping
to secure their stranglehold on the economy
- supposedly for the benefit of the majority
but in fact to camouflage the absence
of real transformation, as opposed to
those actions and expressions of creativity
that must always challenge and undermine
the power and the pretensions of orthodoxy.
Creativeness, in our case, if it were
to be not only the celebration of lies
but truly enriched by our environment
and the lives of ordinary people, will
of necessity give offence to the powerful.
The new horizon we propose
must be shaped by questioning all assumptions
of legitimacy and 'historical truth',
or the glib justifications of nation-building
and purported majority rule; it cannot
afford to succumb to the dictates of the
lowest common denominator. In art, ethical
clarity (which is not the same as certainty)
is the prerequisite for keeping our tools
sharp and effective. It is also our specific
expression of solidarity with all those
who are oppressed. As cultural practitioners
we just cannot afford to assume, for instance,
that market ideology is a moral imperative.
All of the above implies, I think, an
ongoing awareness of the nature of awareness
and accountability.
I know we are here to promote
better practices in assuring a sustainable
cultural environment, and how these practices
and systems may contribute to viable economies.
But I also hope that this conference will
underline the extent to which cultural
creativity participates in the shaping
of personal identity, and thus of responsibility
and dignity. I hope we can recognize how
vital it is to understand and promote
the progressive dialectic between, at
one end, the riches of diversity and their
expressions and, at the other, the over-arching
and shared goals of national and historic
entities. At this interface of reciprocal
and mutual shaping the culture of transformation
appears. And Africa is rich first of all
because of its diversity.
Take the issue of national
languages as contribution to this dialectic.
A writer like Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o
has made it clear to us that language
is more than just a means of communication;
it is the essence of our being, the very
core of our soul as African people and
(I quote) "the medium of our memories,
the link between space and time, the basis
of our dreams." One's mother language,
any language, is the living repository
of the experiences of the people from
many origins and stations who gave tongue
to it over the ages. It is the tool we
have for transforming our understanding
of the world we live in, by shaping its
expressions. For Ngugi using and promoting
the mother tongue is not simply a reaction
against the supposedly economic pragmatism
of globalisation; it is more about resurrecting
the African soul from centuries of slavery
and colonialism that left it spiritually
empty, economically disenfranchised and
politically marginalized. Ngugi believes
that when you erase a people's language
you obliterate their memory. And people
without memories are rudderless, unconnected
to their own histories and culture, mimics
who have placed their knowledge-of-self-and-other
in a "psychic tomb" in the mistaken
belief that if they master their coloniser's
language they will own it and be allowed
to sit as equals at the dinner table to
use it as fork, however clumsily. It is
not easy to eat crumbs with a foreign
fork. Such a people, because of their
alienation, will become dangerous to themselves
and to others. Like hooligan parrots.
The continuity and constant
evolution of one's language is also the
connection through which one can understand
and assume responsibility for one's actions.
Borrowing the feathers of the master in
order to look like him is a ploy to move
away from one's own responsibility for
history, perhaps from the banality of
evil as Hannah Arendt understood it. When
you lose the transforming tool of your
own language, which resonates from far
deeper than mere parrot learning, you
lose the capacity for accessing the true
dimension of events and thus the ability
to comprehend the banality of evil. You
deprive yourself of the means of fully
understanding and assuming the moral circumstances
from which such evil arose. That is when,
Arendt argues, we start to generalise
and think of criminals as monsters. There
can be no collective responsibility, she
says; if that were the case we would deny
all true and verifiable accountability
and thereby evacuate the problem. Ultimately
it is not just a cop-out; one can see
how such an approach helps to constitute
the environment in which a genocide may
occur. Indeed, we cannot deal with crime
if we elevate it as some collective monstrosity.
I therefore hope that this
conference, besides promoting the practical
environment of development, will also
recognize the absolute importance of that
which perhaps cannot be quantified - memory
and imagination.
We here at the Gorée
Institute have always believed that concepts
and practices of democracy (or democratisation,
because it is a conduct and not necessarily
a state), 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.
Beauty - however we conceive of it (but
we always recognize it) - is a way toward
accessing ethical values. Conscience flows
from consciousness; the other way round
would constitute moral dogma.
Let me conclude with something
less harsh and arduous.
Islands are places of wind
- of passage, exchange, becoming other.
In fact, islands are enactments of permanent
moving. Here, where there is the creolisation
of awareness-being which some pompously
call 'culture', one is changed. (Maybe
the I-land irrevocably splits one-ness;
the parrot has only the wind to imitate!)
Remember that 'purity' is the opposite
of integrity. Islands, like this one,
are also places where one may, paradoxically,
be cured from an intoxication with power.
I have three wishes. One:
That we may find productive ways of working
toward establishing a rosary of such islands
all around and over the continent as havens
of fearless confrontation and creativity
where strong winds may blow, as outcrops
of a Middle World that will not be defined/defiled
by patriotism and pomp and the corrupting
addiction to power. That we can then,
from these offshore spaces of 'democracy'
work toward better harmonising our means
through the building of partnerships.
Maybe we can call these ships!
Two: That each one of you
may wish to imagine a flag to be raised
to the memory of wind and the force of
imagination. A flag is the shaping of
wind, both its veiling and the unveiling.
Three: That this meeting
may be deeply disturbing in its questioning
of all assumptions and platitudes of 'truth',
and thereby happy and satisfying.
And - if I may be greedy
and add a fourth wish - that we may from
now on avoid the frustrating 'way-forward'
cemeteries where too many problems are
laid to rest under the cold earth of good
intentions and nice-parrot resolutions.
Breyten Breytenbach
Gorée Island
5 March, 2007
..........................................................................................................
Imagine
Africa Agora
Many African societies are
moving through rapid cycles of transformation
and growth - only too often interrupted
by violent regime change, wars, botched
and contested elections, or crises set
off by substantial movements of people,
famine, pandemics and other disasters.
Although much progress has
been made in an attempt to regionally
integrate and the harmonize certain processes;
the forward rush of change, often under
pressure of a hostile global environment,
has left little room or time for reflection
and research, and even less time for questioning
or re-evaluating the basic assumptions
upon which new strategies can be deployed.
In addition, there is no public forum
for the private sector to effectively
interact with other components of society
on matters of development and ethics within
a global context of both competitive and
integrating markets, which is experiencing
a technological revolution, and increasing
cultural or religious confrontations.
- Who does Africa in realy 'belong'
to?
- Wy is Africa now in a worse and
weaker position
than it was ten years ago
- Is greater regional integration
the answer?
- What possible 'dream' can be held
up to the younger Generation |
How can we clarify and deepen
these debates in such a way that the best
minds are engaged while influential sectors
of society become involved and credible
consensus concern is developed?
The Gorée Institute
proposes in a third pillar of action the
establishment of the “Imagine
Africa Agora” a forum that will
group individuals with experience in the
fields of politics, the economy, academia,
religion, civil society activism and cultural
creativity. By incorporating some of Africa's
pre-eminent public thinkers, it would
operate as a think tank - both through
sustained internal debates that will lead
to the results of these discussions being
published or otherwise made accessible,
and by initiating or soliciting rigorous
research on matters of public concern.
The Forum will also promote intellectual
interaction among thinkers and activists
throughout the continent, and promote
the development of joint projects.
To highlight the activities
of the Forum, there will be a yearly event
in "La Principauté",
a residence on Gorée Island, that
formerly belonged to the Aga Khan, during
which a prominent African or international
personality will deliver the annual lecture.
Expected Project Result:
| - The influential sectors of African
society become more engaged in creating
a consensus on dilemmas to the continent’s
social, economic and political development.
|
Programme
Manager:
Tashina M. Giraud
Gorée Institute
B.P 05, Gorée, Sénégal
Tel: +221 849 48 49
Cell: +221 461 80 99
tashina.giraud@goreeinstitute.org
