OCTOBER 12-15, 2003
God, horses, camels and the trouble with
Interpreters.
Ken Wiwa
I want to first thank INCD for asking me to make this contribution to the
conference but I want to especially thank the combination of Gary, Nina, Nina
and Alexis who have babysat me and many of you to Opatija – I can only imagine
the effort it takes to put together a conference like this and although it is
polite and customary to thank the organisers I must say that I fully appreciate
all the work you have done and as is often the way with many things in life you
might not appreciate what you have achieved until you sit down to reflect on
the experience.
Which is the unenviable task I have been asked to
do now - that is to reflect, summarise, comment on what I have seen and heard
during this conference. So I am, as the billing confirms, your rapporteur and I
must say I have no idea what a rapporteur does so as it is my first time I hope
you will be gentle with me and still respect me in the morning.
Since my contribution marks the end of the conference
I suppose I should start at the beginning when Hrvoje Hribar opened with an
observation that has stayed with me throughout this conference. Hribar made
reference to one of my favourite writers Jorge Luis Borges’ observation that
while God was whispering the surats of the Koran to the prophet Mohammed, God
in Her infinite wisdom somehow omitted any mention or reference to the camel.
Now I forget now what Borges’ speculation was but my own thoughts on this were
drawn from the very next contribution by Ludwig Laher who spoke about the
disconnect between the artists working on his/her or collective work, isolated
from the bureaucrats and networks that are advocating for the artists’ right to
self-expression.
As I heard Ludwig’s opening remarks the thought immediately
occurred to me and kept recurring as I observed and listened to the important
exchanges and deliberations over the last 48 hours that God is not only the
supreme artist but She is far smarter than all of us because in creating the
world She didn’t mention the camel because as someone once suggested the camel
is really a horse designed by committee.
I should say before I get ahead of myself that this
conference was entitled: Advancing Cultural Diversity Globally: The Role of
Civil Society Movements. I think it is always important to refer to the title
of the topic under discussion since I imagine these things are carefully chosen
to provide a framework and reference point for thought and contributions. And
the next session did offer a backgrounder and orientation for those of us like
me who came to the INCD without a backstory.
That session I think offered the first insight into
the complexities and challenges as well as the advances that have been made by
INCD in the brief history of its existence. Gary Neil gave us the genesis of
INCD highlighting his comments that cultural diversity was not an academic and
abstract concept because UNESCO was at that very moment debating the proposals
to launch formal negotiations to develop a legal instrument on cultural
diversity.
Mike van Graan’s contribution offered a perspective
from the South reminding us that cultural diversity is regarded with some
suspicion and I gather that delegates from the Transition states raised the
same issues in workshops. I had
actually imagined that since this conference was being held in Croatia because
it offered a poignant setting for this kind of discussions about cultural
diversity but I now know there is a much more prosaic reason for why we are
here. At any rate Mike’s presentation highlighted why there is a need to have a
multiple perspective that while it may be difficult to adopt a one size fit all
policy it is also important that an international organisation on cultural
diversity is alive to the urgency for it to be a model of flexibility and
diversity. Which I suppose illustrates why even the best designed horse can
turn out to be a camel.
In the next session we heard speakers from the
globalisation movements offering their perspectives on cultural diversity. I
thought that this session provided the most controversial, thought provoking
and visually stimulating presentations. I hate to be up here reading from a
script while urging more variety and colour in presentations but some of us
here are artists and presentation unfortunately catches the wandering eye of
sympathetic but intellectually challenged journalists like myself. Anyway Julie
Ann Delos Reyes made the suggestion that what we need is deglobalisation,
(interestingly enough Microsoft word spellchecker did not recognise the word
delgobalisation and suggested delocalisation instead) At any rate Julie Ann
told put forward the idea of deglobalisation as a two-phase process involving deconstruction
and reconstruction of the world order. Deconstruction meant
dismantling and paralysing the undemocratic institutions like the WTO to create
a breathing space where reconstruction could take place along lines that
emphasised a trade system that organised production for local markets instead
of production for export.
You could almost hear the silent groans at such a
revolutionary prospect but Julie Ann’s radical proposition reminded me of an
anecdote I heard a few years ago - I forget who it was now but someone once
likened our inability to heed the limits to growth with travelling in a car to
Washington along a road at 80 miles an hour when you suddenly discover that
your are heading in the wrong direction, the solution to your problem is not to
slow down but to stop and turn around.
I thought the optics of Jane Kelsey’s presentation
was an excellent example how creative presentation does not distract from a
good case well made. She offered us a slideshow powerpoint, presentation of
pictures from Cancun underscoring the pictures with a strong argument that the
division of social movements articulated a unified opposition to the WTO. In
simple words opposition was expressed through difference. She also posited the
idea that Cancun was a success and not a failure.
Fiona Dove reiterated the point stating that we do
have to buck the system creatively and reminded us that there is an underground
movement out there, an in important countercultural and critical mass, which, I
have to say, did not have a voice at this conference. I did wonder whether it
is that INCD is positioned within a mainstream response to this issue but then
I have to confess that I don’t know how many, if there are any, countercultural
voices there are in INCD.
I hate to suggest that there might be a
generational gap in play but I don’t see enough young faces and voices up here
– and by the way I am 34 and maybe past the age of informed consent on the
counterculture but despite being on the wrong side of this zeitgeist I like to
align myself with its unconventional, leftfield philosophy because it is not only
my prerogative as an artist to keep myself open but if we are going to think
creatively about the world as Fiona Dove said we do have to be open to
different ways of thinking.
At that
point or at least earlier in the conference James Early made an intervention
suggesting that cultural diversity should not be considered only in terms of
the nation state but in areas like rights of women, minorities and so on. Which
clearly resonated with delegates but I felt his thoughts stalked the political
debates at this conference. My comrade Mike Deerham brought this up fleetingly
in his report from the African caucus yesterday but it was most emphatically
articulated by Simon Mundy when he suggested that INCD should be renamed NCD –
Simon suggested that the International in INCD was predicated on the notion of
the nation state, which, as Simon pointed out, is the problem and therefore
cannot be the source of the solution. I have strong sympathies for this point
of view but I will come back to this later.
The next session on A Diversity of Coalitions
seemed to usher in some controversy and I have to confess that I was a little
lost here through no fault of the presenters but the post lunch session is a
graveyard shift and perhaps something that needs to be addressed in future is
that there is already too much information out there and to come to a
conference on cultural diversity of all things, bringing together experts from
all corners of the globe to riff on what are related but different disciplines
is, as I said at the outset, an admirable enterprise but a marathon for the
mind and an enemy of strategic thinking. And I am lucky that I speak English. I
have to say that I am always quietly amused by interpreters at conferences like
these because they always seem so relaxed and I trust that my ironic nuances
are not being lost in translation. No I’m joking of course and I hope they are
smiling because they have the unenviable task of making sense of the confusions
that happens when languages attempt to communicate with each other and perhaps
we should be consulting them because they can offer us some insights critical
about cultural diversity. Now if they are not smiling at this point it is
probably because my written speech usually only bears a passing resemblance to
what I actually end up saying!
Anyway I digress again but I think it was at this
point in the conference - the post lunch session on the first day - that we that we were introduced to the
large Korean delegation here in Opatija. Some delegates I spoke to in private
felt that this was an example of unreconciled politics within the organisation
and I have thought long and hard about this and decided not to pass comment
since there isn’t an organisation in the world without its internal issues but
if an organisation has to wash its laundry I think it is best to air it
indoors. Whatever the outcome of these internal debates I hope INCD does not
lose sight of the fact that it is in the vanguard of an important debate on the
Convention cultural diversity.
So the appearance of the Korean delegation gave us
an insight into the state of the debate – allowing me to see how a two-pronged
attack on cultural diversity is being conducted through the offices of the WTO
and via bilateral agreements. I had not made that link before and many of the
delegates here had not conceived of the issue in those terms so that was an
important departure.
Now please I hope the speakers of the graveyard
shift will forgive me but in my notes I forgot to attribute these observations
but the points raised were as follows:
At this juncture the conference broke up into
workshops and my general observations are specific to the workshops I was able
to attend. Now if I managed to rouse myself from the deprivations of the
graveyard shift at this point on Monday it was because I selected the workshops
that are pertinent to my areas of enquiry as a cultural professional and or
activist. I think generally though that conferences might work better by having
general sessions in the morning and workshops in the afternoon.
I attended the workshop on the State of the Debate
on Culture and Development. In it we were introduced to the idea of culture as
development and development as culture. I love the way language is interrogated
and dissected at conferences like this because there you are asleep at the
wheel and then suddenly you wake up and are confronted with a fork in the road
and the signposts say almost the same thing but you have to be alert or you end
up taking the wrong turning.
At any rate the debate on culture and development
was centred on the concept of CIA’s – which Burama Sagnia has been developing
as a part of his brief. Now I have particular interest in this area because as
an activist and artist – the idea is not mutually exclusive by the way – but I
have seen that my community was vulnerable to poaching of our resources because
we did not have a databank of who or what we are…
Buruma gave an interesting outline of the state of
the debate on cultural impact assessments, offering some interesting examples
and suggesting in essence that while many examples of good practise are
available, there needs to be a common standard with basic minimum practise just
as there are with Environmental Impact Assessments.
If day one challenged my stamina levels then day
two was a marathon but that was more to do with the acoustics of this hotel,
which meant I was entertained until the early hours of the morning. Still
whenever I hear the words information technology my heart skips a beat because
while I am not evangelical about its efficacy I really do think that technology
will make monkeys of us all unless we confront its revolutionary and disruptive
potential.
In the session entitled: Cultural Diversity is more
than a fight for audiovisual market share; I attended the session on technology
as a tool for diversity. I have to say that even though I am a technology
wonk and have even bet some money I cant afford to lose in the sector, I still
get very nervous when I am talking tech. One of the reasons is that although I
am part the first generation that grew up with the PC, I still don’t know my
HTML from my SMTP. Moreover there is so much information out there, technology
is advancing at such a pace that developments in the sector are far ahead of
our conceptual frameworks. The discussion in my group centred around copyright
issues.
As a content provider I am of course concerned
about copyright issues but there is a part of me, which views copyright as a
weapon of the nation-state designed to silence or appropriate my voice. For me
the nation-state is the ultimate copyright contract and in this way of looking
at things you could describe the map of the world as a provision or clauses
under that contract. As someone from a community who has been dealt a harsh
hand by the clauses of that contract I naturally gravitate towards the copyleft
movement, the open-source people, the iconoclasts and authors of disruptive
technologies that are giving multinationals and George Bush a run for their
money. Now this is a tough call I know and copyleft treads a fine line between
anarchy and freedom but it would have been interesting to have a mature voice
of the copyleft movement here to at least offer another perspective.
I think many artists might find that the
consequences of copyleft may not actually destroy art and the artist but can
also liberate content providers from the yoke of publishers who are
increasingly taking on the form and aspect of multinationals.
Having criticised this conference on a lack of
diversity I think I should also put things in perspective: Last week I attended
a summit in London on ICT for development. It was organised by the Commonwealth
Business Summit and I noticed that in a room of about 200 delegates there were
less than 10 women and none of them were white. I have to say that while INCD
may not have fulfilled a satisfactory inclusivity factor it is far more
democratic, global than many conferences.
So with that observation my role as rapporteur ends
– I wish I could summarise the rest of the debates but it is hard to provide an
overview of something while it is still going on. While the conference was
wending towards these concluding remarks, the activist in me insisted that I
take some time to do some networking on the side which is after all what these
things are essentially about. The debates may have been repetitive at times but
I found most of them thought provoking. If nothing else I have come to value
what networks do because when I think of my own experience as an activist I
realise how important it is to build links in the chain…
I hope all of this has been of some value – I think
before I go I should explain why I was selected as your rapporteur by way of
qualifying my observations, comments and opinions.
I have gathered that I was invited here on account
of a weekly column I write for Canada’s Globe and Mail. The column for those
who are not familiar with it is called Without Borders and the mandate of the
column is to observe the world through the eyes of someone who apparently sees
the world in stereo. That is I am, as some of you may know my history, both a
member of an indigenous people in Africa and at the same time make tentative
claims to being a global citizen. I was born and brought up in an indigenous
community in Nigeria but I have also lived and been educated in Europe as well
as in North America. I suppose if I am going to be a truly global citizen I
will have to live in Latin America, Asia and Australasia before I can claim
full citizenship.
Anyway in writing my column I try to probe and
interrogate the dilemmas, questions, assumptions we have about culture through
the lens of my dual citizenship as it were. As an Ogoni I am involved and
invested in defending my community’s cultural integrity against the
imperialisms of a nation state and a multinational. As some of you know, one of
my identities is as the son of Ken Saro-Wiwa who was hanged by the corporate
state of ShellNigeria in 1995. My father’s crime was to challenge a political
arrangement that transferred the resources of an indigenous people to the bank
accounts of an Anglo-Dutch corporation as well as the private fortunes of the
unelected and undemocratic leaders and elites of a state that was invented and
patented to transfer the ownership and resources of 130 million Nigerians into
the hands of an elite minority.
As a global citizen I have enjoyed all the
advantages of a world created by the free movement of capital and ideas and
culture. I have been able to travel to every corner of the world, enjoyed the
kind of life unimaginable if I had remained within the limits of my community.
Whenever I am campaigning to preserve the integrity of my community I am always
conscious of the irony that I, an Ogoni, is able to make a case for my
community in the language of our coloniser. I often make the case in the media
that are probably owned by the same financial structures and instruments that
threaten to obliterate the integrity of my community. And yet I see no contradiction
in those terms. Why?
Because of the English language. Whenever I think
of cultural diversity and cultural survival I think of the example of the
English language. I wonder at how a small island has been able to disseminate,
propagate its culture around the world. Yes violence played a large part in the
endeavour but I think there is genius to English in that it has been able to
become a near universal language despite the fact that 95% of its vocabulary is
taken from other languages. It is the lingua franca. I believe that last
sentence only contains one word from the original English language.
To me English is a great example of the
transversality of culture and its ability to protect its integrity yet open up
to foreign influences should be adopted as a motif for a world without the
dogma of borders.