Twice Bitten: The Fate of Africa's Culture Producers

Extract

Let us anchor ourselves, for a start, to some acceptable terrain of cultural definitions. I shall use an example from our not too distant encounters. Few will disagree with me today, if I propose that we reject the concept of culture as realized in that manifestation known as Festac 77 [Festac: Black and African Festival of the Arts, Lagos, Nigeria, February 1977]. For, in the main, our people were offered a narrowed-down, reductionist aspect of culture in a gargantuan orgy of ill-organized spectacles. That negative reference is meant to limit the field, to eliminate decisively what often imposes itself on public consciousness as Culture with a capital C, or as something pronounced into being by a Ministry of Culture. What Nigeria exhibited was Culture as a sum, not even of parts, but of spectacular parts. Now, “spectacle” need not be superficial. Revelry can attain profound Dionysiac proportions, involve an inner ennoblement, almost cathartic—but it requires a consciously organizing hand, with an integrated motif around which even disparate acts of revelry are drawn. In those extravagant fields of “Festacian” revelry, however, such complex, enriching offerings were relegated to token, or symbolic, expositions, starved of funds and given scant coverage even in the media, and were finally relegated to the archives of that supracultural monstrosity known as the National Theatre. The theater of which nation, by the way? Of Nigeria? Or of Bulgaria, from where the concrete carbuncle was lifted, then grafted onto Lagos marshlands? What, in that general's cap or Christmas cake of a structure, constitutes even a fragment of Nigerian or African architectural intellect, modern or traditional? But more on that building in another place.