Culture at the rendezvous wth modernity: the relevance of policy

Culture and the creative domain must surely be among the most delicate areas of human endeavour as far as government intervention is concerned. Is it possible for national  policy making and regulation regimes to enhance the opportunities for a flourishing cultural and creative domain or would culture and creativity simply wither under the weight these regimes. This paper seeks to examine the elements that may be said to stimulate and nurture culture and creativity in the post colonial Africa with a critical focus on the policy environment. The discussion will mainly be informed by the experience of Ghana.
Dr. Esi Sutherland-Addy

Culture et éducation dans la construction de l'Afrique de demain

Culture et éducation dans la construction de l’Afrique de demain Les organisations internationales comme l’UNESCO ne cessent d’insister sur la prise en compte de la culture dans tout processus de développement. L’éducation est aussi  un pilier important du développement. Culture et éducation constituent ainsi des piliers essentiels pour la construction de l’Afrique de demain, comme le pense  des organisations panafricaines comme l’Union Africaine.
Or construire signifie d’abord avoir le souci de l’Afrique, en prendre grand soin, défendre sa place sur l’échiquier international. La construction de l’Afrique n’est pas seulement la tâche des politiques et des décideurs. Les acteurs de la société civile, les écrivains,  les artistes et les entrepreneurs culturels ont aussi un rôle à jouer. Il s’agit d’avoir une vision pour l’Afrique. Cette vision pensée mais  aussi imaginée et créée dans le domaine des activités et expressions culturelles doit être soutenue par une volonté politique concrétisée par la mise en place de politiques culturelles pertinentes. Ces politiques  doivent prendre en compte la diversité culturelle dans un pays donné mais aussi tenir compte du contexte mondial dans lequel l’Afrique doit trouver sa place.
Cette communication entend s’interroger sur les défis à relever aussi bien dans le domaine de l’éducation que dans celui de la culture mais aussi montrer le lien entre éducation et culture et montrer en quel sens une vision optimiste pour l’Afrique peut être envisagée.
Prof. Tanella Boni

“The writer’s scapel against our ‘hysterical paralysis’: a strategic structural reconstruction of our cultural umbilican chord”

Africa is once again at the threshold of the crossroads looking in every direction but within herself for clarity and vision of her purpose, her future. Her children are fighting wars, battling hunger and or general stagnation in development. Africans have come to value more and more cultural behaviors, which are foreign to their African ones.  We have for too long permitted Western ideals and beliefs to shape our worldview and give little or no credit or regard to our Africa cultures which. It is therefore of no surprise that the continent continues to suffer from the hands of dictators who have no sense of culture or pride.

The fact that Africa has been afflicted with ‘spiritual and psychological’ amnesia accounts for the problems she faces today. The continent has lost sight of the fact that it is from within that we draw inspiration, strength, vision and vigor to chart a positive progressive course. It is from our culture that we will find the long lasting solutions we so seek and so desperately need. The task is laid at the feet of all who have some influence in the society specifically national leaders, policy makers and thinkers, pastors, educationists, story tellers, movie makers and the writer!
Dr. Klorkor Okai

How Africa may pull the world out of its actual deadlock?

After describing the past  eras of Africa ‘ s glorious history and explaineing the different factors of the actual backwardness of the continent, Ambassador Silcarneyni GUEYE points his accusingly fingers to the people who caused it : the African elite who have betrayed their ancestors.

He brings into light what Africa has to offer to the whole world now in distress. By showing the whole world a new way of life in all fields of activities, including the political and economic ones, Africa may naturally play a leading role towards a new era no longer ruled by the dictatorship of the intellect. An era where humankind will be happy because naturally and inevitably living according to the Divine Will .
Ambassador Silcarneyni Gueye

The Challenges of Cultural Renewal and Transformation

The Chinese are now eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and selling computers in America; Indians own the means to produce both the cheapest car and the most expensive car in the world and are making steel in Europe.  Certainly, the two cases are great economic-industrial success stories and at the same time, examples of cultural transformation. The two continent-nations have transformed themselves, first having been through long periods of ‘consolidation’. Africa too has been going through the processes of consolidation and must now aim to take the next step towards self-renewal, which is, transform itself.

However, transformation is something that goes beyond physical reality, therefore the two examples are not just great success stories. They are first, ‘fantasies come true’ and belong to the domain of culture. The two cultures have finally discovered how to make themselves compatible and adapting to change. Every culture is led by its fantasies. I think finding ways to enhance our fantasies toward cultural renewal and consequent transformation, is the challenge facing all of us whose wish is to create the African future. My paper will try to explore the challenge and the possibilities.

Long before the mobile phone was invented with all the facilities that are available with it today, we had in Ghanaian and many other African stories (especially of witchcraft) ‘tele-view mirrors’ in which things happening far away could be seen. Fantasy. Culture. Oral Literature. It was all of these things, but well ahead of what is now very real.
Meshack Asare

Life after the African Writers Series: The need for a renaissance in the Publishing of African Literature by African Publishers

Without a doubt, the Heinemann African Writers Series did put a number of African Writers on the world map. Even with the discontinuation of the series, the trend still continues. With only a few exceptions, most African writers making a name writing quality literature are still being published by western publishers.
My essay, from a publisher’s point of view, will examine why African Publishers are not publishing bestselling African literature? The barriers to this achievement, as well as the urgent need for African Publishers to begin to Publish African Literature
How do we begin to do this and what can we expect in our desire to do this?
Elliot Agyare

A Generation of Afro-German Cultural Production:  Re-Defining African Diaspora

Germans of African/Diasporan parentage began coming to consciousness as part of a larger Black Diaspora in the mid-1980s.  Naming themselves “Afro-Germans” was the act of claiming themselves as a distinct, but integral, component of German society that had African as well as German heritage.  Inspired and mentored by fellow Diasporan Audre Lorde, an Afro-Caribbean-American poet, the relatively small coterie of Black Germans who took on the name of “Afro-Germans” in the 1980s would become the vanguard of an evolution that has resulted in Germany’s slow re-visioning of itself, now, as a more diverse population than half-a-century ago.

 By now, a generation of intellectual and cultural producers has emerged, re/presenting the voices and thinking of Afro-Germans as individual—and collective—women and men, affirming themselves as daughters and sons of Africa, but who are also native-born Germans.  This generation of sculptors, painters, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, poets, as well as scholars, journalists and autobiographers, has been articulating the Afro-German experience since the mid-1980s.  . 

Debrutalising The Mind

Meet Me Half-way

Said to be one of the two or three most complex words in the English language, ‘culture’ is notoriously difficult to define. What exactly is culture? Noun, adjective or verb? Who produces culture, for whose consumption and in whose image? Perhaps nowhere is the contemporary confusion over culture more acute than in relation to Africa. Described for centuries in the European imagination as the least cultured and civilised of all the continents, Africa’s relationship to culture is a complex and fraught one,
not least because ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ within Africa are routinely inter-changeable. This short paperseeks to examine the roots of what we call culture, extracting it from the more static processes of tradition, an entirely different concept altogether. The paper will attempt to show how our (African) reliance on tradition, not culture, as the mechanism through which modernity is encountered is fatally hampering our efforts to envisage a new future for ourselves. Tradition and modernity are often seen as polar extremes, engaged in a one-way, one-directional race towards the future. This paper argues that culture, properly understood and executed, is the medium that will get us there. Meet Me Halfway. It’s not a plea.
Lesley Naa Norle Lokko

A Human Face: Biko’s Conceptions of African Culture and Humanism

At the age of  thirty, Stephen Bantu Biko died in police custody on  September 12, 1977. Given the brutality of his death, writing about him is always profoundly distressing for me. This is so in the light of the fact that although the circumstances of his murder and the identities of his killers and others complicit in this crime have been public knowledge since the late 1970s, to date, no one has been brought to justice. The recent deaths of the two security policeman who assaulted him have, it seems, foreclosed all prospects of ever attaining any justice in this matter.

This essay, however, is not directed toward the history of Biko’s brutal death at the hands of the agents of the apartheid state. It is concerned with his concept of African culture and the humanist legacy inscribed  in his writings. In I Write What I Like Biko (1979: 98) concludes what is considered by many as his most eloquent and moving exposition on the nature of his political and cultural philosophy known as Black Consciousness with the following three sentences: 

We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. Let us march for the with courage and  determination drawing strength form our common plight and our brotherhood.

In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest possible gift- a more human face. The essay locates his  ideas  on the  role of culture in the struggle for national liberation in the tradition of  Fanon and Cabral and others.  It provides a detailed reading and outline of the relationship he establishes between his concept of  African culture and humanism. The impact of his philosophy on South African  literature and the arts are examined in relation to his vision of humanising the world along with the challenges currently facing cultural practitioners in post-colonial African societies in the age of globalisation.
Andries Walter Oliphant

Thinking aloud a cultural rennaissance: The Nigerian example

The paper attempts to trace the  history of independent Nigeria and how the issue of culture has been handled by successive regimes as a matter of public policy.It examines the various highs the nation has attained in the area of culture and how that has been factored into developmental aspects of the nation.It also highlighted the decline of culture after Festac 77  hosted by Nigeria leading to  the present resurgence at the emergence of the subsisting democractic era which began in 1999.The paper submits that it is not yet a rennaissance unless some conscious and programmed tangibility is brought to bear on cultural matters in its day to day interactions with the quest for societal upliftment and development.
Mr. Denja Abdullahi

Manufacturing the new African Future: The Factor of Culture

When UNESCO named the last decade as the decade of culture it stated four objectives to be achieved. They are as follows:

1. Recognizing how important the cultural factor in the development and progress of nations.
2. Confirming the cultural identity of every nation and society for a tree that has no roots can not stay alive.
3. Enhancing and expanding on partnership in culture.
4. Enhancing cooperation and exchange in fields of culture I think these aims still apply today a decade away from the decade of culture, and due to explosion of the age of information and media and the expansion of digital culture, the importance of the cultural factor increased in recent years and has become stronger and more vital in reshaping and remoulding our modern world and modern age. It has become more vital as a tool in social change and as a way of achieving development and progress and playing a stronger role on the map of world affairs and international relations.

The given  circumstances of our modern day and age are different from the past eras, the use of computers and internet has become a way of measuring what degree of progress a certain society has reached the chips and computer and internet are considered cultural tools and part of this cultural factor which is taking priority over political and military and economic factors in reshaping our world today.
Dr. Ahmed Fagih

Afropessimism and Afrofuturism: Diasporic Postmodernity In Extremis?

In this paper, I explore the terms Afropessimism and Afrofuturism as two limit conceptions and movements of African diasporic art, culture and critical thought. In my exploration of these terms, I identify their most defining positions as well as their leading exponents, linking this exploration to similar currents in the African continent itself. At the end of my reflections, I suggest that these terms belong to the order of ideas and experiences that are known in critical theory as limit cases, these being responses to crises and conjunctures that play dangerously with things that are presumed to be either unthinkable or inexpressible or unrepresentable.
Biodun Jeyifo