Reversing the Historyctomy

Reversing the 'Historyctomy'- taking control of our stories, by undoing the 'sterilisation' that foreign values and cultures have brought about.

- Delivered at the Highway Africa 2002 Conference, during a session on local content. The 2002 HA conference was timed to tie in with the World Summit on Sustainable Development

This session is called “Writing Our Own Stories – News About Africa by Africans.” However, I am going to speak more about content in general than about news and information. And I want to leave you with more questions than answers.
What you will take away from here will be a handful of questions that hopefully will set in motion a process that will see the generation of more of our own stories.

African content/ local content/ OUR content, is not merely about content that is simply different from foreign content. Content is about identity. Promoting content is about realising that we own it and that we have a responsibility to share it. But generating an appetite for our own stories is more about understanding the reasons behind cultural fashion than trying to make our stories fashionable.

I like metaphors and I like to use them to convey my thoughts. I am go to launch into an extended metaphor about food – so I hope you are hungry for what I have to say.

It would be fair to assume that most of us here are from out of town, which would mean that you are staying in a hotel. That being so, you will be able to identify with what I am about to say. I’ve just been to two different countries (Kenya and Mozambique) before arriving here, attending similar civil society forums for different constituencies.

In both those countries, delegates from my region – that would be Southern Africa – at lunch asked for maize porridge – a staple in our region, just like cassava is in West Africa and the various forms of thin baked breads are in North and East Africa. In each case, the maize porridge was available, but not openly displayed among the rest of the sumptuous buffet on offer.

Why? It is inferior food? Does it taste bad? Or is it simply because it is assumed that it is a staple from a developing region and therefore not deserving equal standing with foods commonly consumed elsewhere in ‘developed’ countries? The truth is that, regardless of the fact that most hotels are not owned by Africans, African staff appears to be embarrassed about serving African food. When hotels offer a ‘local’ dish or two, the staff will go out of their way to make sure that you understand what you have ordered – as if it were something that would make you go bald or become impotent or something! This happened to me in Lusaka, Zambia last year, when staff pointed out that what I had ordered – river fish – was actually meant for ‘the locals’.

Earlier this year, deciding the menu for the gala dinner of the 31th Ordinary Session of the African Commission, care was taken to ensure that organisers would not come up with an African menu – delegates insisted it had to be a ‘Western’ menu.

You have all been welcomed to Johannesburg, this great city, and – if you are staying for the Summit – you probably have been given some kind of a guide as to where to go, listing all the best restaurants. In Johannesburg, you will find restaurants from all corners of the world in their hundreds. Yet, this being Africa, you will count on your fingers the number of African restaurants offering an African cuisine.

Perhaps not everybody would be adventurous enough to try some of Africa’s more exoteric dishes. But what people might find ‘strange’ in African cuisine, they will call ‘exotic’ if is part of a cuisine that has managed to market itself successfully – such as Chinese, Japanese or Thai. In Southern Africa, we eat mopani worms. It is a leaf-eating worm, and it is understood when outsiders prefer not to sample it. But then, it is quite acceptable to eat raw fish or animal genitalia if these feature on an Eastern menu. Not to mention prawns, which are actually bottom-feeding scavengers!

So, what are we saying with all this talk of hotel and restaurant food? Possibly – just possibly – that a large proportion of us are embarrassed about our own culture. And guess what, if we feel uncertain about our culture, how can we feel strong about our identity?

And if we don’t identify with our culture, how can we identify with the products of that culture – such as ‘our own stories’.

Do we have a chicken and egg situation, with production and consumption of our own stories? Do we need the demand before we can produce – or should we produce to expose it and in that way create the demand? Or are we producing the content, but failing to distribute it?

Don’t you feel that something is wrong, when local talent has to be financially aided to survive, while local artists using Western cultural genres become commercial successes? And to add insult to injury, musical success stories are owned by foreign companies: for a South African radio station to play a South African artist in most cases it has to pay royalties to Sony Music.

Why? The answer is simple: people want the foreign stuff. Why? Because they are used to it, they understand it and they have developed not only a taste, but also an appetite for it. Why? Because we have been conditioned through exposure to it.

Where does the problem lie? Is it the fault of parents, failing to pass on and instil some kind of pride in African roots? Or is the youth just not interested?

Cultural identity strengthens self-worth and therefore a sense of pride in one’s own heritage. At a time when Sustainable Development has become a song in our ears, we can go as far as saying that a strong cultural identification would go a long way towards defending Africa’s economic interests by forging a sense of ownership over African assets that would otherwise be supplanted by foreign alternatives.

We are doing a poor job of marketing ourselves.

Enough has been said about role models and their importance in shaping society by attributing to them certain characteristics deemed desirable and therefore to me emulated.

Where are our role models? We seem to have reached the point where anybody inside the Big Brother house – whether he or she is kicked out in one week or goes on to claim the title – is an automatic hero to be feted and paid to perform as master of ceremonies at all kinds of occasions. When last did an individual developing community theatre or traditional dances become a celebrity? When last did a nurse with 30 years service in an under-resourced hospital receive her due recognition as role model? What is the message we are sending out?

Are we going to allow Big Brother to become ‘our story’? Or are we going to strive for a story about a grassroots theatre producer and the nurse?

To ensure that our children grow up with an appetite for our stories, they must be nurtured on a diet of what is ours and not what is foreign. Just like Tiger Woods can transform golf from a white elite pastime to a sport for the ‘brothers’, while the Williams sisters do the same for tennis, so should we be able to do the same for African literature and film by marketing our African authors and filmmakers.

At a time when we are talking about sustainable development and NEPAD, we are doing little to counter an entertainment industry that promotes a lifestyle not unlike the wasteful ways espoused by American pulp fiction. Conversely, what are we doing to promote authors such as Kenule Sara-wiwe, Wole Soyinka, Ama Aita Aidoo and Nuruddin Farah?

Why is it so cool to look like American rap artists, foreign football stars etc, while our own backyard is rich in cultural diversity and heroes of the African struggle for liberation? Are we so insecure in cultural identity that we will adopt anything but our own to model ourselves after? Why does our youth need to be told that it is fine to look African?

We are doing a poor job or marketing ourselves.

Why do we need a foreign modelling agency to promote Sudan’s Alek Wek before our youth accepts that you don’t need to go to the extremes of Michael Jackson to feel good about looks?

How do we expect our youth to identify with African content, while they are trying to look like somebody else? Why do we allow our airwaves and paperbacks to bombard us with images of the rich lifestyle of American soap opera stars and rap singers? What message are we sending out?

I didn’t sleep much last night and kept on flipping through the channels on the TV. SABC 1 played hours on end of American music. Why not our music?

Let’s go back to Alek Wek. Why can we not market our own beauties?

A few years ago a Miss Botswana went on to win the Miss World/ Universe title. Did someone use her to market Africa? To promote a range of perfumes? To promote the Kalahari Desert with its rich tourism potential?

In our region – like in many parts of Africa – brides are still paid for in cattle (or the equivalent value in cash). But that’s to please the parents and relatives. For themselves, the young girls want the gold and diamond ring. Why does this Western custom appear to have more value? Understandably, you cannot wear a cow on your finger, but Africa has a long tradition of not only jewellery, but a rich gold industry.

So why do we go for the engagement ring? Could it be that De Beers and Anglo American are doing a better job of marketing? “A diamond is a girl’s best friend” is probably one of the world’s better known phrases alongside slogans by Coca-Cola and other corporate giants.

The in-flight magazines of our airlines write more about foreign countries than about our own. Do the airlines of other cuntries write about us?

We are probably all familiar with the various versions of mancala games. It is an African game, normally played on a wooden board, but also on the ground – it has rows of cups and pebbles or large seeds are used as markers. Can you go into Toys-R-Us or Reggies’ and buy a mancala set? Yet our toy stores are full of Japanese and American toys.

A question of marketing?

Why has mancala not been developed and popularised as a computer game? It is certainly more useful than spending your lunch hour playing solitaire.

I speak a number of languages and often it becomes a topic of conversation. I often meet people – Africans – who tell me they would like to learn another language. They have no specific purpose for it, other than being able to speak another language. And yet, instead of opting for an African language – perhaps one of the main languages of West Africa – Hausa, Yoruba, Fulani, Wolof – or one of the Nguni languages of Southern Africa such as isiZulu or isiXhosa or kiSwahili or even Arabic, which is one of the African Union’s working languages, they go for French or Spanish – even Italian. Why?

Why must our newspapers cover inane examples of life, from all corners of the world – take South Africa’s own Sunday Times for example, using the web site Ananova.com to fill up its ‘human interest’ space, instead of procuring entertaining snippets of incidents happening right here? Is it because we have failed to identify the kind of stories that have become the staple of our audiences and readership? Could this be the reason why so many of the books on African fables and myths are actually written and illustrated by foreigners? Did we fail to recognise that these stories were worth propagating? Could it be that our youth has changed to a foreign diet to avoid malnutrition because of the lack of own stories?

Or have we simply failed in making own stories readily available and – equally important – suitable for today’s palate?

There is good reason why we have a responsibility to promote and defend our stories. It is not only about taking control of our heritage, but of our economic assets. Maybe if we consume more of our own content, we can have recording houses strong enough to keep our artist from going to Sony Music, to whom we pay royalties each time we hear our artists on our radio stations. Maybe if we consume more of our content, we will not have foreign pharmaceutical companies registering centuries-old knowledge of the San people of the Kalahari as its own intellectual property. Maybe if we consume more of our own, we will not get the short end of the stick when Bretton Wood instruments are applied to us.