Monday, April 07, 2003
An interesting look at globalization in music and a fierce defense of local culture. ... culture deserves analytical coverage.
The reportage of culture in this country has been confined to entertainment - music shows and albums, theatre and beauty parades. The print media is more guilty of this lapse than the electronic. ...
Culture can be defined in many ways. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines culture as "customs and beliefs, art, way of life and social organisation of a particular country or group."
The Concise Oxford Dictionary says it is "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively."
Famous Kenyan historian and political scientist Ali Mazrui has a more sophisticated definition: "Culture is a system of inter-related values active enough to influence and condition perception, judgment, communication and behaviour in a given society," he says.
According to him when culture endures and is innovated through the generations, it becomes a civilisation.
Veteran journalist and Zamcom deputy director Edem Djokotoe, a dyed-in-the-wool ethnicist, agrees with Professor Mazrui.
In Mr Djokotoe's own understanding Mazrui's description suggests that for culture to live it must respond and adapt to the stimulus of change.
"It is on the basis of this characteristic that you can talk in broad terms about Western civilisation which consists of liberal democratic, individualistic, plurarist, constitutional, technologically-oriented and capitalist values shared by all the nation-states which were once part of Christendom (Papal Rome)," Mr Djokotoe says.
He lists some of the countries sharing these values as Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Over the years the US has become the custodian of this culture, which it has successfully exported to many other parts of the world.
It is in this light that the current spat between the US on the one hand, and Germany and France on the other, over the US-led war on Iraq should not be expected to culminate into a total fall-out.
The cultural ties between these sibling nations are too strong to be severed by mere differences of opinion on a crumbling regime presided upon by a single-track minded despot.
As Mr Djokotoe observes, "the citizens of those countries might speak different languages, but the fact that they have a common denominator of shared cultural experiences mitigates against differences among them."
What a unifying force, then, culture can be. It has so much grip on people that it controls and directs every aspect of their daily lives.
Culture is driven by the environment, which generates the stimuli triggering certain behaviour and beliefs of a particular society. The degree of willingness by the people to respond to their environment determines the preservation or extinction of their culture. ...
Culture, therefore, gives people an identity and is expressed in many ways, but mostly through the arts - songs, paintings, drama, folklore and sculpture. ...
Beautiful oil paintings and caricatures adorn the walls of bars, night clubs and restaurants depicting the core activities of the local people - fishing and hunting - and the dangers and beliefs they attach to them.
All this testifies to the way the environment shapes people's culture and gives them an identity.
It is safe, therefore, to assert that culture is a manifestation of what people are, what they think, what they believe in, who they think they are, what they wear, what they eat, how they spend their spare time and how they relate to one another as they respond to their environment.
When people start living and behaving in a way that is divorced from their own environment, to imitate the lives of other people from a different environment, then they lose their culture and, therefore, their identity.
"If culture does not endure, its manifestation disappears and that culture dies. Culture should be fed for it to survive," Mr Djokotoe told a group of journalists in Lusaka recently.
Each generation should be able to inherit culture, innovate it and pass it on to the next if it has to prolong its span.
People are identified mainly by their culture - indigenous language, rhythms, food, dress and beliefs.
Therefore, once you lose your culture and start imitating other people in far places, you become vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation and oppression.
Colonisation in Africa thrived mainly because the colonisers knew how to apply this principle. They attacked the culture of the natives first. Using the Bible, money, education, food and intimidation, they convinced the Africans that their culture was primitive and inferior to theirs.
They should discard their culture and adopt that of their masters.
"Colonisation has two phases," Mr Djokotoe explains. "Firstly, the foreigner colonises you physically by taking away your land in which you live, then he colonises you psychologically by controlling your behaviour and manipulating your way of thinking."
This is also what happened in Zambia. Although Zambians have liberated their land they are still to purge themselves of the poisonous thinking planted in their minds by the colonisers that anything African, particularly Zambian, is primitive.
Culture thrives on music and other arts. When you, therefore, throw away your own music to imitate the music of other people thousands of kilometres away you voluntarily colonise yourself culturally. The problem is that you will not be respected by other people because you will have no identity.
If you despise your own culture and adopt that of foreigners what do you expect them to think of you?
This explains the current obsession by young Zambian musicians with the morally rotten and rhythmically empty Western R& B and ragamaffin, which is basically the music of convicted thieves, paedophiles (child defilers), rapists, drug addicts and satanists where it comes from.
The tragic result has been that the copycat, mediocre R & B and raga produced in Zambia by the young singers, mimers and rappers cannot sell across its borders. It has pitifully failed to penetrate the international market.
No wonder Professor Mapopa Mtonga, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Zambia says, "Globalisation has created a situation in which we have become consumers. We don't produce music that can provide us with therapy, but are relying on foreign music which has relevance only where it comes from."
Our youngsters are even trying to imitate Kwaito music which the South Africans themselves have lamentably failed to sell in Europe and America because of its lack of originality.
How do we expect to preserve our culture if the young people who are expected to inherit and innovate it are obsessed with imitating foreign music, which only depicts other people's cultures? ...
When will the musicians in this country play their role as custodians of our culture and agents of its preservation? And when will our journalists look beyond entertainment and give culture the serious analytical coverage it deserves?
¶ 4/07/2003 08:56:00 PM
The reportage of culture in this country has been confined to entertainment - music shows and albums, theatre and beauty parades. The print media is more guilty of this lapse than the electronic. ...
Culture can be defined in many ways. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines culture as "customs and beliefs, art, way of life and social organisation of a particular country or group."
The Concise Oxford Dictionary says it is "the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively."
Famous Kenyan historian and political scientist Ali Mazrui has a more sophisticated definition: "Culture is a system of inter-related values active enough to influence and condition perception, judgment, communication and behaviour in a given society," he says.
According to him when culture endures and is innovated through the generations, it becomes a civilisation.
Veteran journalist and Zamcom deputy director Edem Djokotoe, a dyed-in-the-wool ethnicist, agrees with Professor Mazrui.
In Mr Djokotoe's own understanding Mazrui's description suggests that for culture to live it must respond and adapt to the stimulus of change.
"It is on the basis of this characteristic that you can talk in broad terms about Western civilisation which consists of liberal democratic, individualistic, plurarist, constitutional, technologically-oriented and capitalist values shared by all the nation-states which were once part of Christendom (Papal Rome)," Mr Djokotoe says.
He lists some of the countries sharing these values as Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. Over the years the US has become the custodian of this culture, which it has successfully exported to many other parts of the world.
It is in this light that the current spat between the US on the one hand, and Germany and France on the other, over the US-led war on Iraq should not be expected to culminate into a total fall-out.
The cultural ties between these sibling nations are too strong to be severed by mere differences of opinion on a crumbling regime presided upon by a single-track minded despot.
As Mr Djokotoe observes, "the citizens of those countries might speak different languages, but the fact that they have a common denominator of shared cultural experiences mitigates against differences among them."
What a unifying force, then, culture can be. It has so much grip on people that it controls and directs every aspect of their daily lives.
Culture is driven by the environment, which generates the stimuli triggering certain behaviour and beliefs of a particular society. The degree of willingness by the people to respond to their environment determines the preservation or extinction of their culture. ...
Culture, therefore, gives people an identity and is expressed in many ways, but mostly through the arts - songs, paintings, drama, folklore and sculpture. ...
Beautiful oil paintings and caricatures adorn the walls of bars, night clubs and restaurants depicting the core activities of the local people - fishing and hunting - and the dangers and beliefs they attach to them.
All this testifies to the way the environment shapes people's culture and gives them an identity.
It is safe, therefore, to assert that culture is a manifestation of what people are, what they think, what they believe in, who they think they are, what they wear, what they eat, how they spend their spare time and how they relate to one another as they respond to their environment.
When people start living and behaving in a way that is divorced from their own environment, to imitate the lives of other people from a different environment, then they lose their culture and, therefore, their identity.
"If culture does not endure, its manifestation disappears and that culture dies. Culture should be fed for it to survive," Mr Djokotoe told a group of journalists in Lusaka recently.
Each generation should be able to inherit culture, innovate it and pass it on to the next if it has to prolong its span.
People are identified mainly by their culture - indigenous language, rhythms, food, dress and beliefs.
Therefore, once you lose your culture and start imitating other people in far places, you become vulnerable to exploitation, manipulation and oppression.
Colonisation in Africa thrived mainly because the colonisers knew how to apply this principle. They attacked the culture of the natives first. Using the Bible, money, education, food and intimidation, they convinced the Africans that their culture was primitive and inferior to theirs.
They should discard their culture and adopt that of their masters.
"Colonisation has two phases," Mr Djokotoe explains. "Firstly, the foreigner colonises you physically by taking away your land in which you live, then he colonises you psychologically by controlling your behaviour and manipulating your way of thinking."
This is also what happened in Zambia. Although Zambians have liberated their land they are still to purge themselves of the poisonous thinking planted in their minds by the colonisers that anything African, particularly Zambian, is primitive.
Culture thrives on music and other arts. When you, therefore, throw away your own music to imitate the music of other people thousands of kilometres away you voluntarily colonise yourself culturally. The problem is that you will not be respected by other people because you will have no identity.
If you despise your own culture and adopt that of foreigners what do you expect them to think of you?
This explains the current obsession by young Zambian musicians with the morally rotten and rhythmically empty Western R& B and ragamaffin, which is basically the music of convicted thieves, paedophiles (child defilers), rapists, drug addicts and satanists where it comes from.
The tragic result has been that the copycat, mediocre R & B and raga produced in Zambia by the young singers, mimers and rappers cannot sell across its borders. It has pitifully failed to penetrate the international market.
No wonder Professor Mapopa Mtonga, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Zambia says, "Globalisation has created a situation in which we have become consumers. We don't produce music that can provide us with therapy, but are relying on foreign music which has relevance only where it comes from."
Our youngsters are even trying to imitate Kwaito music which the South Africans themselves have lamentably failed to sell in Europe and America because of its lack of originality.
How do we expect to preserve our culture if the young people who are expected to inherit and innovate it are obsessed with imitating foreign music, which only depicts other people's cultures? ...
When will the musicians in this country play their role as custodians of our culture and agents of its preservation? And when will our journalists look beyond entertainment and give culture the serious analytical coverage it deserves?
¶ 4/07/2003 08:56:00 PM
