There was heated debate across the African continent late last year, when African intellectuals rose up in arms after the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy said - quoting, perhaps without knowing it, the German philosopher Hegel, who made the same statement in 1830 - that Africans did not have a history and therefore had never really been able to launch themselves into the future. What made it worse for the intellectuals was that Sarkozy had chosen to express such sentiments right inside the Continent of Africa! He was giving a speech at the University of Dakar – after which, ironically, he eventually got a standing ovation.

Perhaps the French president's position is not totally out of place. The African, in some cases, does not seem to know from whence he has come. Unfortunately, the African, is constantly trying hard to become like his teacher, like his master, and trying even harder to shed his identity, anything that labels him as African. And after years of practice of this manner of erosion and brainwashing, the result has been me, you - the status quo of the African today. We have become a people caught between a past we no longer can call our own and a present that is neither ours nor one that we fully comprehend.

A collective forgetfulness, a kind amnesia of who or what or why or how the African is

But deeper than what is seen - from African women using corrossive creams to lighten their skins, wearing caucasian inspired wigs to replace their kinky hair; faked foreign accents and acquired culinary habits to replace the indigenous, just to mention the obvious… is a grimmer status quo. Beneath the veneer of gestures and mannerisms, and with far reaching implications, lies the death of a culture and an identity. It is actually the death of a people - to take it to its logical conclusion - which has already started, with a collective forgetfulness, a kind amnesia of who or what or why or how the African is.

To start by examining where we stand, art and culture, being the mirror of a society or to a larger extent a civilisation, has been scrapped off Kenya's public schools as an examinable subject. And fairly enough, students who have so much else to do, do not make time for a subject that is neither compulsory nor examinable.

We are resigning this continent to the inevitable destination of the death of innovation

“Art is life, and life is art” as artist Justus Kyalo said, and creativity in art gives birth to creativity in reasoning to solve mathematical problems, in innovation in science and technology and so on. Art, being the realm of imagination and projection, allows us to go beyond the frame of everyday life issues and invent the future. In denying children this opportunity to express themselves and to release energy on an alternative platform, we are resigning this continent to the inevitable destination of the death of innovation – Africa will be stuck!


You or I - would be fast to throw stones at the government and policy makers who could have refused to just stand by and do nothing about improving or even maintaining arts, crafts and cultural studies in Kenya's schooling systems. But a famous quote says that democracy is a process that ensures that no people are governed better than they deserve. Isn't the status quo a culmination of the contribution of the many parts that make up our society – you and I being the basic components of that society?

We think through words

Are we doing all we can to teach our children our ‘native' language? And yes, speaking of language, it was Kenya's renowned writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, adding to Hegel who stated that “we think through words”, who said that language was a medium of “our memories, the link between space and time, the basis of our dreams”. Yet too many among us, especially the children and youth, not being able to speak in the ‘native' mother tongue have taken this as a sign of liberation, an advancement perhaps from a nativity, an un-enlightenness that clings to us. Hence, to use Wa Thiong'o's analogy, the link to our memories being broken by a language that is ours but that we have forgotten, are we not lost in space and time? Aren't we a people without a basis for our dreams, if we do have dreams we can call our own?

In his speech, ‘Imagine Africa', Breyten Breytenbach, said: “For Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, using and promoting the mother tongue is not simply a reaction against the supposedly economic pragmatism of globalisation; it is more about

resurrecting the African soul from centuries of slavery and colonialism that left it spiritually empty, economically disenfranchised and politically marginalized. Ngugi believes that when you erase a people's language you obliterate their memory. And people without memories are radar-less, blanks, unconnected to their own histories and culture, clones, mimics, surrogates, mere functionaries who have placed their knowledge-of-self-and-other in a “psychic tomb” in the mistaken belief that if they master their coloniser's language they will own it and henceforth, be allowed to sit as equals at the dinner table to use it as fork, however clumsily. It is not easy to eat crumbs with a foreign fork. Such a people, because of their alienation, will become dangerous to themselves and to others. Like hooligan parrots”.

We cannot deny the globality of our contemporary world, as long as we maintain our “locality”

But what about the artists? What role have they played in advancing and passing on the mantle to those that will come after them? Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire or Amilcar Cabral, and even Frantz Fanon, to name a few, were

poets, artists who were not only active in participating in their space of art but were able to influence the way the African story is told to this day. Are today's African artists influencing the course of Africa's history?

While this is not a situation limited to Kenya only but a collective African tragedy, perhaps a good question to ponder here would be whether it is practically possible to maintain a cultural identity - any cultural identity, African or otherwise - in societies that are fast changing to adapt fast food and instant-take-aways as local cuisine. Living in what has been described as a global village, is taking on and embracing one's culture living in isolation and denial of what the world has across the board changed to become?

The writer Homi Baba's notion of “glocality” offers one way of dealing with this. By this forged word, what Baba meant was simple: we cannot deny the globality of our contemporary world, as long as we maintain our “locality”. To quote the late Césaire, “universality can be nothing but the sum of all the particularities”. It is up to us to redefine those particularities without which we, as people, would disappear from the surface of human consciousness.

If that be the case, we need to regain consciousness, embrace a re-awakening, a renaissance, a remembering, a fullness of time of radical changes in the African's process or system of thinking; A cultural re-awakening, an arousal from our stupor and amnesia…