Cultural Policy for Arts Education

How to impact Art Education on the continent

With this programme, the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster aims to make a lasting impact on Arts Education in Africa by creating a vibrant forum for exchange between Africa’s cultural scholars and practitioners and by producing research that is specifically targeted at Africa-based practitioners and policy makers.

D. M.: The idea to decolonize art education seems to me to be overly ambitious, especially in Uganda where one of the local languages, Luganda, was used as a tool of colonialism. Don’t you think this is a futile agenda?

E. W. W.: I agree that it is ambitious to attempt to decolonize artistic education. But the scale of the challenge does not mean that it is not worth the attempt. Far from it: colonial power relations, and, in particular, the subordinate mentality that it, as a system, sought to instil in Africans, continues to impact decisively on relations of power, and on concepts of knowledge and value in ways that are perilously and generationally debilitating for far too many people on this continent.

A clear example of this is the extent to which European languages (admittedly for a complex range of reasons) continue to be widely used as what I once heard the Ghanaian academic Ato Quayson call the ‘languages of power’ in post-independence Africa. Indigenous African languages are regularly marginalized in law, in government, in journalism and in the education system within the very regions in which they originate. They are too rarely taken seriously by those with power as tools for serious discussion and debate. So-called “intelligent” people converse in the languages of former colonizers.

The use of European languages might make the work and ideas of Africans more readily accessible to some foreigners, but it also limits the participation in discussion and decision-making of people who have not had access to formal European-style education. And ideas of such people should never automatically be dismissed as ignorant or irrelevant. People who don’t speak European languages, people who have had no formal European-style education also produce and preserve important and useful knowledges. Often indigenous knowledges. The dominance of European languages within African discourses can therefore restrict the access to and circulation of rich and valuable ideas, imaginaries, philosophies and world views.

So it’s a slow and difficult task. Part of what the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe describes as ‘the difficult work of freedom’ in postcolonial Africa is, as I see it, to de-centre western cultures, western languages and western epistemologies, and to clear a space in which their indigenous counterparts can be reconstituted as centres of gravity.

However, just because a particular indigenous culture or language group was implicated in colonial rule does not necessarily mean that that language or culture can play no role in emancipation. Some Baganda may have been complicit in British colonialism, but many others fought vehemently against it. Dr Kizito Maria Kasule, the founder of the Nagenda International Academy of Art & Design (NIAAD), which hosted the first meeting of the Another Roadmap School – Africa Cluster, for example, is a Muganda from Masaka. The British sentenced his father to 5 years’ hard labour in the 1940s for his role in anti-colonial struggles in the Uganda Protectorate, an experience from which the father never fully recovered.

D. M.: A project like this obviously encounters many challenges. What are some of those challenges you have already faced?

D. M.: The conversation among many art elites on the continent today is about Pan African ideology in the arts. This can be seen with many workshops and exhibitions staged on the continent like the Art at Work Workshop, Artwork project, Dakar Biennale, the forthcoming Bamako Encounters and Kampala Art Biennale. Is this project part of the debate?

E. W. W.: It largely depends on what you mean by ‘Pan-African ideology’. I personally understand and attempt to practice Pan-Africanism (more or less following Kwame Nkrumah), as an ideological and activist commitment to the solidarity of people of African origin both on the continent and in the diaspora, and to the idea that the unity of people of African origin is essential for Africa’s long-term economic, social, political and cultural progress.

I simply don’t know enough about the initiatives that you reference to be able to speak with any confidence about their Pan-African ‘credentials’. But it’s worth pointing out that just because an event brings Africans together does not necessarily make it Pan-African – strictly speaking. At the same time, and in this day and age, any such initiative nevertheless possesses that radical, emancipatory potential: one of the most serious colonial continuities to afflict post-independence Africa is that so many factors – often external factors – conspire to continue to make it difficult for Africans to meet, to exchange and to join forces. One simple example is that it took longer and cost more money for Ayo Adewunmi to fly from Nigeria to Uganda to attend the first meeting of the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster in July on behalf of the Lagos Working Group than it would have taken him to fly to Europe. To me that is plain wrong.