© Numero Unoma
Last month I was in Yaoundé for the CIC 2022, the International conference of CERDOTOLA, which is the Centre for the Documentation and Preservation of African Languages and Cultures. It is the brainchild of a friend and colleague of mine, the brilliant and gracious Professor Charles Binam Bikoï, who invited me to speak on the 2022 theme, ‘New African Thought’.
Once again I found myself spending several days with little fresh air or natural light, mostly confined in grand auditoriums, and in the company of some of Africa’s most brilliant minds, as well as many highly intelligent and accomplished people from other parts of the world, all active academically and practically in the Afrocentric space and sphere.
I am always blown away by the sheer force of personality, intellect and skill at these gatherings, and some of those in Cameroon were people from other African cities I know well, like Addis Ababa, Harare and Abidjan to mention but a few. We met again here in Yaounde, to talk about the same things we keep talking about, only from a slightly different angle this time. Well, I guess you could say a much different angle in some ways.
I also found myself sitting through the papers presented by African American academics, whose mosaic of information is on the one hand very comprehensive, but on the other hand often extremely subjective, and sometimes also somewhat outdated, to a point incomplete, in fact sometimes even downright inappropriate. On the other hand, I learned of my own ignorance, and gained a host of information about the African American journey from my new brother, Siphiwe Baleka, whose thoughts, experiences, talk and walk you can read about at balanta.org
I have managed in the past to fall out with Sandra Izadora because I found her to be patronising toward Africans, but most annoying of all, is the fact that the basis for her patronising us is astronomical ignorance that is born of the African American tendency, often to employ as a tool of oppression the same flavour of superiority with which they are oppressed by their fellow Americans of a different hue. Sandra was knocking young Africans for ‘giving up traditional wear in exchange for American blue jeans, T-shirts and baseball caps’
The premise for her pseudo-intellectual authority is the fact that she bedded Fela. Ok, I’m being just a little bit economical with the truth here, as well as a tad shady. The story goes that she introduced Fela to the black civil rights movement and their philosophies. Be that as it may, this does not preclude an absence of intellect, education or philosophical understanding on the part of Fela. We all know of his pedigree, even though many in the Caribbean have not so much as heard his name. Who? They ask quizzically, when he is mentioned, but I have recently heard Burna Boy being put down for asking too high a price or arriving late. I tire.
I told Sandra that she spoke as one who had merely seen certain photographs or footage, but clearly did not spend significant time among Africans young and old, in their own habitat and environment, or she would not have made such misplaced observations. I even pointed out to her the policy in government offices in Abuja to wear trad on Fridays, to which she responded passionately that we should not have to set a day to wear it. Her social media followers, like little piranhas each came forward to take a bite out of me, each bite more ignorant than the last. Instead of learning, they chose to wallow in their own ignorance, and even went as far as to attack a person on the basis of that ignorance just because (or is that despite the fact that) said person was in possession of superior information. I tire o!
Why am I telling you all this? Well because the conference in Yaounde coincided quite conveniently and appropriately with UNESCO’s World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. So we can all legitimately get together and wax lyrical about how our audiovisual heritage has been compromised, eroded, allowed to decay, appropriated and misappropriated. And then when we’re done, we can all go home again until the next conference…or congress…or summit, or symposium, or seminar.
Our academics have become entertainers. They know how to spin an engaging yarn. They know how to present facts and figures and anecdotes, and organise information with the wit to make their audiences laugh or clap several times throughout one lecture. But then what next?
Their egos have been fed, their estacode has been paid, and they can go back home and feel important. Who is going to do the actual implementation of all their bright ideas, I ask.
What exactly is Audiovisual Heritage anyway? The UNESCO website says that “audiovisual archives tell us stories about people’s lives and cultures from all over the world. They represent a priceless heritage which is an affirmation of our collective memory and a valuable source of knowledge since they reflect the cultural. Social and linguistic diversity of our communities”
What immediately came to my mind was does Nollywood qualify to be classed as audiovisual heritage, because if it does, then I fear for our youth. Okay let me keep it balanced. I have nothing against Nollywood per se, but the fact is that most of it does not add value, and too much of it is actually brain damage. What are the values it imbibes in storylines and their outcomes. What are the aspirations that it puts into the impressionable minds of our mostly youthful population of consumers of the art? What does Nollywood REALLY tell of our history, our dress and our traditions?
Following the African premiere of Wakanda Forever in Lagos a couple weeks back, which also coincided with Art X Lagos btw, one questions what standards we are accepting as Africans when Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira, whose native Bantu tongues are so close to the Xhosa they cringe-worthily Americanise in the film, that they simply have no excuse for the travesty of their ‘accents’ in the movie. Btw in this instance, I quote my friends and family from several southern African countries, who watched the movie and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the embarrassing lack of pride in one’s culture that we Africans adopt when they ‘assimilate” into American society. Maybe that’s what informed Sandra Izadore, perhaps I should apologise?
For my part, I take comfort in hearing my language, Igbo, on the film’s soundtrack, which I have gorged on since attending AFRIFF, I’m sure my neighbours are begging God to make me play something else, ANYTHING else lol!. But my gaze on Africa gives me the ‘anya mmiri’ (tearful eyes) of CKay’s R&B-Afrobeat fusion thingamajig track.
So, if Africa is a perspective, then whose gaze counts as an acceptable, even an appropriate perspective? This is where both the pros and the cons of our diversity come into play. From ethnicity, dialect, dresscode, food, physicality, spirituality, ‘historicality’, ‘Afro-futuristicality’,
home-grown-ness, japa-ism, diasporality, both historical and contemporary, and then the nuances of multiraciality among us Africans, how do we even begin to standardise the African perspective or gaze?
The free-form fluidity of the ‘anything goes’ end of the spectrum is as risk-ridden as the rigidity and brittleness of the absolutist conservative end of it. How do we negotiate, indeed navigate movement between these two poles, even in the multi-dimensionality of space-time and hyparxis.
And given that culture and language are not static, might one argue that the only real perspective is the meaning one’s individual perspective has for oneself, and the relativity of that to the perspectives of all others, individually and collectively? No, I’m not smoking weed. I promise. I’m just pondering the imponderable. Why? Well, because.
Because the answers to these questions must be agreed upon by those to whom they actually matter most directly. Yup, that’s us Africans. Us Black folks, actually. And because once we understand and master the gaze, then we can raise the volume on projecting the voice.
I tend to be quite practical in life. I think that we should see Africa as the dot in the middle of the circle. You know, the one the pin of the compass makes when you draw the circle. But since life is not two-dimensional, we must take the dot to be the pivot of all 360 possible axes, which gives us a spherical 3-dimensional potential for 360×360 ergo 129,600 POVs. [Caveat: I am no mathematician, and if I have got this wrong, I should hope a mathematician will come forward and correct me.]
To come back to the conference in Yaoundé though, in which 5 aspects of ‘New African Thought’ were compiled as an agenda for the overhaul of the present African way of thinking, which is based originally in our own philosophies and cultures, but adulterated, diluted, warped and eroded by years of trauma and oppression, both physical and mental, as well as economic, diplomatic and spiritual.
1. Re-conceptualise and surpass “development”
2. Reinvent the social bond, politics and institutions.
3. Re-found education and research.
4. Strategically rethink Africa’s relationship to power, time and the environment.
5. Re-conceptualise and surpass “development”
Using these, let us proactively contemplate which perspectives on Africa serve us, and which ones undermine our cohesion and progress toward consolidating our identity, voice and destiny with full agency.
Next week I’ll let you read the paper I presented in Yaoundé. Wakanda Forever!