Memories, creative industries and national transformation II

Now, there is a second leg of the conceptual anticipations of this topic—that of creativity. To create is to make something new. It is, in fact, a handiwork of God, the pristine Creator. What the rest of us do (who create) is to imitate the original creation, which is why Plato, the classical Greek Philosopher, […]

Now, there is a second leg of the conceptual anticipations of this topic—that of creativity. To create is to make something new. It is, in fact, a handiwork of God, the pristine Creator. What the rest of us do (who create) is to imitate the original creation, which is why Plato, the classical Greek Philosopher, vowed to ban all poets (and I suppose all creators of works of imagination) from his Republic. But it also involves other faculties—the free deployment of the imagination—capacity to dream, to envision and to mould fresh thoughts upon which fictions and other creative enterprises emerge, and on the basis of which available inspiration from the Muses (the god of creative inspiration) devolve. Note also the connection between the Muses and the Museum.
Unfortunately, our nation suffers from a disease called memorial amnesia—a rabid forgetfulness of the essence, value, potential and import of managing our cultural resources and industry for growing a vibrant and robust economy largely because of the mono-product nature of our economy.  This is spite of the covetable, recorded fact that ‘without black African art, modernism, as its various forms in European and American art, literature, music and dance in the first three decades of the 20th century could possibly’ not have existed (Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 1996). This assertion comes from various statements by prominent Europeans, from Charles de Galle of France to Pablo Picasso. Gates Jr. recorded de Galle’s frequent wondering to the effect that ‘without Black Africa from which he mounted the resistance to the Nazi regime of Germany, modern France would ever exist.’ The painter, Picasso, more affirmatively but unwittingly, credits Africa for his artistic Muse: ‘I have felt my strongest artistic emotions when suddenly confronted with the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists of Africa. These works of a religious, passionate, and rigorously logical art are the most powerful and most beautiful things the human imagination has ever produced.’(Pablo Picasso, African Art, Never Heard of it). This led Louis Gates Jr. to surmise that ‘European modernity manifested itself as a mirrored reflection of the mask of blackness.’
Is it, therefore, not a matter for immeasurable pain that Africa, the priceless inspirer of world culture, suffers such memorial cultural amnesia? John Picton, in his piquant contribution to the book Africa: The Art of a Continent states the ‘conditions for a history of African art’ and attributes the rudimentary nature accounts of the history of art in sub-Saharan Africa to the ‘extraordinary lack of data, especially when compared with what we know of European art’ and yet it is through the ‘work of art itself’ that information ‘about a given site or population’ can be best obtained. ‘The reasons for this lack are not hard to discover; the scant archaeological coverage of the continent, compounded by theft and illegal excavation, and the absence of written records compounded by inadequate assessment and incomplete collection of oral tradition.’
Moreover, most of the ‘classic works of sub-Saharan African art, unless they are the products of excavation, date from the late 19th and early 20th centuries…a fact with implications for the assessment of the visual arts that we do not yet know how to contend with (Picton, 1996) This graphically explains the memorial amnesia of our cultural resources, in spite of its re-creative potential for socio-economic transformation industry in Africa.