By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
Last year Ghana’s Food and Agriculture Minister, Major Courage Quarshigah (rtd), told African scientists during the 10th African Association for Biological Nitrogen Fixation (AABNF) conference in Accra to research into African culture and beliefs for the continent’s development process. Before Quarshigah’s advise there are signs of growing export of African cultural products. The casts of Yaa Asantewaa, Warrior Queen, took a bow alongside authors such as Wole Soyinka and artists like Mossi Konde, Femi Kuti, Baba Maal, Dade Krama and Youssou N’Dour at the forefront of multi-million dollar surge in African cultural exports. As Africa increasingly gets integrated into the global cultural system more royalty money is now coming into Africa for African music, hair plaiting, sculpture, traditional medicine, painters, dance, plays, story-telling, and many more sold abroad than is leaving the continent in royalty fees to foreign performances in Africa.
By bringing seasoned scientists together at the AABNF conference to brainstorm and share with the public current scientific achievements, future development and the role of Biological Nitrogen Fixation research in improving food production in a sustainable manner, Africa’s vast untapped cultural products, including its food, is being challenged to enter the global cultural arena and smooth it out with countries such as China which cultural export bring it billions of dollars. Like Chinese traditional medicine such as gingseng, it is becoming increasing common to see African traditional medicine abroad. Quarshigah’s instructions came at a time when international scientists and new research are fast discovering that many African cultural values, for long ignored by colonialism and African “Big Men,” are better in Africa’s development process than the long-running glamour to use foreign, unfit ones.
The key issue here is respect and sensitivity of African cultural values in the global business arena. This comes in the tail of increasing awareness of alternate traditional medicine alongside Western medicine internationally. In Canada’s British Columbia and other provinces, for instance, Chinese acupuncture and other traditional medicine have been officially accepted in the health system. It is therefore not surprising that Nancy Karanja, chairperson of the 16-year-old AABNF, has asked corporate bodies and international NGOs to help African culture enter the global economy by funding AABNF activities to enable them to help African smallholder farming communities enter the global economy. The challenge is how African scientists/researchers can open up Africa’s huge secrecy and cultures, for long closed by colonialism and Africa’s elites attitude, for the continent’s progress in order to solve its numerous problems such as poverty and food security.
Increasingly, African values, for long misunderstood and wrongly branded "primitive" by Europeans, are now being touted as one of the best to save the world from many of the madness of science. African farming, medicine, spirituality, food, child rearing, communalism, polygamy, and many more are being touted by many a non-African scientist as good--a break from the past. African baby-sitters are said to be one of the best in the world because of the way Africans rear their children. Ron Eglash, a computer scientist and ethnomathematician at Ohio State University, in his groundbreaking book, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (Rutgers University Press, 1999), tells how African indigenous designs are embedded in modern computer thought: designs that in their more elaborate, infinite form, are called fractals, and are waiting to be researched and exploited for economic gains like many African cultural values.
Ethiopia’s new confidence to develop and export its traditional textile designs, like Ghana’s Kente cloth, demonstrates the signs that Africa’s economic indigenous values are getting the attention of the world, as fashion experts turn to traditional Ethiopia fabric for new textiles and inspiration for their latest creations. Gadol Ton and Elias Meshesha, United States designer and an Ethiopian businessman respectively, have just launched a collection of clothes made in Ethiopia from locally manufactured materials. Ton is convinced that this is the start of a new and important development for Ethiopia’s traditional industry, which he describes as one of the best in the world. With better technology better fibres like silk could be developed and more diversified line created. Ton is convinced that Ethiopia’s traditional fabric could be a multi-million-dollar industry for the country. Like the rest of Africa’s traditional economic values, much of Ethiopia’s traditional garment industry has not really been discovered in international sense. Since colonial times to now Africa have been swamped with massive textile imports and Africans have not been too proud of their own traditional textile designs and products. But that's about to change. “We want to get this negative thinking off the people's minds, especially government officials, and get them to support domestic industry,” Meshesha said, as he revealed his ambitious plans to show off the collection in other countries and prove that Ethiopian traditional textile industry can be competitive internationally.
Nowhere are more attempts being made to research African cultural product for export than in culturally rich Nigeria. At Adeniran Ogunsanya College of Education, Lagos plans have been concluded to produce and export a branded powered Olitorius Species, popularly called Ewedu in Yoruba. The college’s provost, Dr. Adewale Noah, in saying the product was part of the college's contribution to the economic development of Nigeria, revealed that the college had experimented the product for five uninterrupted years and that it had proved through various testes that it would be a good product. Said Dr. Noah, "What we are doing is that, we are preparing Olitorius Species, what we call Ewedu in Yoruba, for export. We have experimented this for the last five years and we have tested it under different conditions and have proved that no matter the condition the product is going to survive.”
The product, according to the Lagos-based This Day, is said to be at the branding stage and will hit the local and the international market early this year. "For now, we are still thinking of the most appropriate branding as we want the product to get to the market in foolproof state. Packaging makes a lot of impact in the market, that is the stage we want to conquer and patent the product so that no one could easily fake it," Noah added. Nigerian cultural products, for instance, are now everywhere in West Africa and South African’s everywhere in southern and central Africa. While, generally, there is no statistics on the exact amount of money Africans are spending on both foreign and African cultural products, observers believe African cultural products are not only surging at home but increasingly making a breakthrough internationally. Most of the money, cultural experts told West Africa, are being generated in the United States, with Great Britain, South America, and western Europe following. American journalist Eugene Linden reports how American companies are beginning to see economic value in African and other indigenous knowledge with scientists attempting to commercialize the pharmaceutical uses of plants. One key aspects of the project is the improvement of an antiviral agent for respiratory diseases and herpes infections that is used by traditional healers. As the beauty of African culture makes waves globally, there are suggestions that it can be a marketable commodity if handled with respect and sensitivity, helping to keep indigenous knowledge alive.
One notable African cultural export, aside from the internationally famous Ghana’s Kete cloth, is women’s hair braiding. Despite its simplicity, the tightly braided woman's hairstyle, the coils seem to spread out from the neck, split into subsidiary branches, and erupt into repetitive patterns gives hint of computer skills. Eglash argues that the designs are a form of African mathematics that may force researchers and historians to rethink their assumptions about traditional African mathematics and development. Other examples demonstrated the use of sophisticated mathematical ideas in everyday objects. Artisans in the arid region of the Sahel produce windscreens using a scaling design that gives them the maximum effect--keeping out the wind-driven dust--for the minimum amount of effort and material. This can be developed further for business.
The need to open up Africa’s traditional products for business is aided by the African Renaissance process which is to be brought about not only by African governments alone but also by African scientists and researchers. But the researchers and scientists who are to help unlock Africa’s mysteries and culture for development will need African leaders to facilitate the creation of an environment in which the goal of Africa's rebirth will take place. Such efforts can be complimented by civil society. This will be a conscious decision by the Africans to take pride in their identity for international business. It will be when the African abandons the idea that for him to be developed he must be judged on the value systems of those of European descent, whether they be in Africa or elsewhere.
"It is only those countries that embark on research to discover new facts or information about their effects on human life in particular, that are said to have developed…Rather through research they have changed the form of things already in the existence and improved upon their old ways of doing things," Quarshigah said, challenging African researchers to make the African comfortable materially by tinkling with African cultural values in order to create the new. Quarshigah said it is untoward that very little of such global developments could be credited to Africans because instead of researching into "our Africans culture and improve on it, Africans pride themselves with using the products of development of other cultures." Colonialism and Africa’s education system created such confusion.
But the issue of using Africa’s huge untapped values for development does not only rest with researchers but recording them since Africa’s history is oral and some are vanishing. In the Central African Republic, for instance, Bernard N’donazi, a health technician, whose father converted into Catholicism and acting in deference to a Catholic priest who wrongly regarded African traditions as pagan, ordered the destruction of the male house, where boys acquired the learning of their elders—with that, a cultural and medicinal tradition that extended back into ancient times went up in flames. Today N’donazi, having released the damage done to some aspects of his Souma tribe’s traditional value, is directing his energy toward revalidating the healing wisdom of Central African Republic tribes. Quarshigah threw light on N’donazi’s struggle when he quoted the huge loans and grants African countries received to fight HIV/AIDS and wondered how much of this money would be set aside to research into claims by numerous African herbalists that they have found cure for HIV/AIDS. Throughout the continent many African herbalists have been proclaiming their findings of cure for HIV/AIDS but all have not been encouraged.
Despite the leap in cultural exports, Africa is still importing significantly more cultural products than it sells abroad. Yet, cultural development experts told West Africa that culture is one of Africa’s fastest-growing export sectors. This is informed by the increasing number of over 200 million Africans in the Diaspora, especially in the United States, the Caribbean and South America where there are large number of people of African descent who constitute market for African cultural products. While most of this African cultural exports are being operated through individuals and organizations, African governments have not looked at this seriously as cash cow, unlike most countries in the Western world and Southeast Asia which give top priority to cultural exports. In Canada, for instance, culture is now one of twelve priority export sectors and high on the agenda of Ottawa in its export business trips abroad usually led by Prime Minister Jean Chretien.
