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I was recently invited to Japan by the
National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka to participate in a
symposium on the situation of cultural heritage in Africa. The
symposium is part of a two-year project led by Professor Kenji
Yoshida, one of the frontline scholars at the National Museum of
Ethnology.
My trip to Japan was a very long one, starting from the issuance
of visa at the Embassy of Japan in Lagos. As is the requirement,
I submitted all sorts of documents including my letter of
employment at the University of Nigeria, my letter of
appointment as a postgraduate supervisor at the university, a
bank statement, tax clearance, e-ticket and sundry documents.
After the interview, several phone calls were made to the
embassy before the visa was finally issued. Peter Areh, Director
of Pendulum Centre for Culture and Development, helped in
tracking the visa section of the embassy.
When I arrived the Murtala Mohammed International Airport on
February 26, 2006 to board the Emirates airplane, the check-in
officials were suspicious of my ticket and asked all sorts of
annoying questions. At the customs and immigration checks, kites
in uniform oscillated between artificial friendliness and
practiced intimidation in an attempt to squeeze cash or other
goodies out of travelers. The Emirates flight was punctual. We
were airborne before 7.00pm, 30 minutes after the advertised
departure time.
My transit in Dubai was an unbearably long lonely dream. I spent
23 hours. When I sought to find a hotel in town, I was told I
would need a visa for $50.00 and the hotel room would cost
$250.00. I opted to spend the time in the airport, shopping,
window shopping, reading, writing e-mails, and taking naps
in-between. Time wore out the long wait sooner than I had
imagined and we were in flight again to Osaka, traveling for 9
hours.
Japan was very cold when I arrived via the international airport
in Kansai. As I looked out for Prof. Yukiya Kawaguchi, an old
friend and one of my hosts, who was supposed to pick me up at
the airport, I was accosted by a police man and woman. They
requested to know whether I was looking for someone or
something. They looked quite polite and harmless, but I found
their question curious and stupid, for the airport was a public
arena which provided passage and transit to people of different
backgrounds. Of course, being there, I must be looking for
someone or something. So I said I was a guest of the National
Museum of Ethnology and I was a lecturer at the University of
Nigeria. They noted all that in their notebook and offered to
have Kawaguchi’s name announced at the Information Desk to see
if he would come up to pick me. I tried to be grateful. But I
could see through their vacuous smiles that they had considered
me another sucker, another prodigal fleeing some African country
in search of greener pastures in their prosperous country. Of
course there are Nigerian politico-economic nomads in Japan,
with a good number involved in the sex industry in Tokyo. To the
obviously prejudiced pair, I could be, in spite of my
explanations, another hopeless African coming to beef up the sex
industry or I could be a prospective gigolo looking for an old
Japanese woman’s neck to hang on. After all, there were
innumerable people milling around that airport at the time as
always; the tendency to pick on the black person is one of the
realities of internationalism. I was so annoyed and depressed,
but the appearance of Mr. Kawaguchi helped to hold my emotions
in check.
We took a bus to Osaka. When we got off the bus after about a
fifty-minute ride and were trudging towards the Hotel Nikko
Ibaraki where I was to stay with the other participants, I was
struck by the extremely cold temperature. Japan seemed like one
strange huge deep freezer and I was taking a walk in it. My body
chemistry was upset and harassed and it remained so throughout
the 6-day visit.
The next morning, when I got down to the hotel lobby, I found
the other three participants waiting. Anitra Nettleton was a
Professor of Art History at the University of Witwatersand in
South Africa; George Mudenda was the Director of the National
Museum in Lusaka, Zambia, Abong Shu Samuel, an English-speaking
Cameroonian was the Director of the Bafut Royal Museum in
Cameroon. As we exchanged pleasantries, a lady, apparently a
research student at the National Museum of Ethnology came to
convey as to the museum.
The symposium opened with a brief introduction by Prof. Kenji
Yoshida, the coordinator of the project “Preserving the Cultural
Heritage of Africa”. His speech was followed by presentations by
the African participants. George Mudenda was the first speaker.
He spoke on “Museums as Links of Memories to Histories: Emerging
Trends in Africa,” highlighting the efforts made by the National
Museum of Zambia to get the community interested and involved in
artistic and museum activities as a means of socialization and
cultural democracy. After a critical discussion of his thesis, I
took the floor and presented a personal experience of working in
Igbo villages with uli women painters, using it as a pastiche
for the gradual decimation of cultural heritage in Africa.
Having outlined the general scenario, I identified
hunger/poverty, the jaundiced eye of religion, lack of sound and
composite education, and government’s poor orientation and
inadequate culture administration as the bane of sustainable, if
successful, cultural heritage management in Africa.
The reaction of the other African participants was mixed. They
agreed with me on almost all points but seemed to surmise that
the Nigerian experience was particularly problematic and in a
class of its own. But I insisted that the scenario painted by my
paper was the classic African situation, although it may vary
from one country to another. I was not arguing, I clarified,
that Nigeria suffered a dearth of cultural institutions. My
position was that the institutions existed but that a number of
factors had combined to truncate or even obviate their effective
relevance to the highly contradictory social systems in Nigeria.
And I believed that this was a pan-African experience, a
by-product of the colonial encounter which results in the
separation of art and society.
Perhaps my paper was unique in raising these issues directly, as
the presentations by Professor Nettleton and Abong Samuel the
following day touched mainly on means of engaging people with
cultural heritage through the possibilities offered by the
museum. But in spite of the different realities embodied by each
presentation, the consensual thesis that seemed to emerge was
that Africa had not fully come to town in terms of appreciating
and managing her cultural heritage in the most practical,
professional and fructifying manner.
This fact became more amplified the next day when our hosts took
us round the Minpaku (National Museum of Ethnology) exhibition
of African art to enable us appraise it and advise them on
possible ways of reorganizing the exhibition in the near future.
Scanty as the exhibition appeared, it haboured a sublime sense
of promise and ambition. Without being uncomplimentary to their
effort at preserving a wide range of cultural objects from
Africa and elsewhere, we pointed out some of the exhibition’s
low points especially as they relate to contextualization, the
use of space, the colour of the exhibition hall, and the
audio-visual facilities. The museum walk was rounded off with a
courtesy call on the Director-General of the museum where most
of the points raised in the museum concerning the African
exhibition were solemnly restated. The Director-General thanked
us for our advice and promised that it would inform their new
strategy for the planned re-organisation of the African section.
But once again, I could not deny nor fail to envy the Japanese’s
sense of commitment to the presentation of cultural heritage as
a veritable means of the perpetuation of mankind. The
architecture of the museums, their content and human resources
all attest to a people who understand the role art can play in
shaping the collective consciousness as a concrete testimonial
to history and civilization.
The fact that the museums themselves espouse a highly social
vision also positions them as feed-back institutions with which
the individual and the society at large must maintain a healthy,
if symbiotic, relationship. Little wonder we saw school pupils
in their large numbers thronging the museums to study the
collections alongside an equally remarkable number of ordinary
visitors and researchers that were always present.
The same feelings were no doubt re-enacted the following day
when we visited Inuyama Castle and the Little World Museum where
most of the exhibitions were contextualised. While the visit to
Inuyama Castle was like a walk through the corridors of Japanese
history, Little World Museum was really a little world, as it
embodies capsules of culture from different parts of the world,
including Africa. Covering 13,000 square meters of land, its
sense of museology runs across material culture, food/culinary
culture, fashion, and music. When one visited any section, one
was immersed in the culture concerned, not just viewing it, but
interacting with it to a considerable content.
Our visits to the Ise Shrine and the Momo Taro Monument were not
less engaging and thought-provoking. Like most Japanese shrines,
Ise Shrine was a place where religion, spirituality, tourism and
conviviality conjoined joyfully. Ise Shrine is rebuilt every 20
years and is one of the cherished national heritage sites.
Visitors swam like bees, some for sight-seeing, others for
devotional exercise. The devotion was devoid of drama and fury,
such as are normal in these parts; one stood at a designated
spot, tossed a coin – preferably the one with a hole in the
middle – into an ad hoc receptacle and clapped twice. This, they
believed, would bring good luck. At times when a pilgrim threw
in much money, he could be invited in for a special prayer by
one of the many priests.
But the interesting thing is the liberty that surrounded
religion in Japan. The general belief is a cross between animism
and pantheism. God is everywhere, they believe. And there are
about eight million gods available to the ordinary Japanese
believer. When he/she fell out with one, he/she could turn to
another. Some advantage over monotheism, perhaps! But the
fundamental beauty apparently lies in its lack of bigotry,
dangerous fundamentalism, and nihilist fanaticism. Yet the
Japanese cosmos does not seem to have been over-awed or
overwhelmed by millions of demons waiting to be bound and cast
out every minute by an army of soi-disant, fire-eating, and
brutally-mercantile churchmen. The citizens are not
self-professed cherubs as we are down here; yet corruption,
violence and pathological dishonesty have not taken a front seat
in the country. As if he read my thoughts, Abong Shu Samuel of
Cameroon walked up to me at some point and said worriedly, “You
see, they believe in eight million gods and they proper; we
believe in only one God and we have not gone far”.
I am not sure that I sympathise with his defeatist logic. I
refuse to contemplate of a God who delights in the hardship of
his people, especially Africans. Africa is merely living in a
dream and does not want to wake up. When she does eventually,
she will discover that God or gods only help(s) those who help
themselves. She will also come to agree with St. Paul that faith
without work is nothing, and she will recognize that no culture
or civilization has ever sung or clapped its way to high and
sustainable achievement. Nations, like individuals, are expected
to earn their greatness and the attendant respect.
Every society has its own problems – social, political, economic
and otherwise. Japan is no exception. But Africa, indeed
Nigeria, has a lot to learn from Japan, if it must rise
victorious from the throes of nescience and underdevelopment.
The cultural heritage project as coordinated by Japanese
scholars (led by Prof. Kenji Yoshida) at the National Museum of
Ethnology is a possible means of exploring and exploiting the
Japanese experience. Nigeria must realize that culture permeates
all spheres of human endeavour and that a people cannot live
outside their cultural heritage while chocking themselves on
that of others imported wholesale through the media and aided by
the neo-colonising tendencies of globalisation.
The cultural industry in Nigeria is cast on quicksand; it lacks
imagination and a sense of continuity and permanence. My recent
visit to Japan convinces me, once again, that we – the
government, policy makers, and cultural actors – have failed.
Now is the time to salvage and empower Nigeria’s cultural sector
so that it may become the veritable the purveyor of our
collective identity, consciousness and civilization.
Post Script
The cultural heritage project continues till 2007. In the course
of the project, workshops and symposia will be organized in
Africa to intensify the envisaged goals. Nigeria has been
selected as a location for these activities in August 2006.
Perhaps, the events may provide the much needed basis for a
serious engagement of the cultural enterprise in these parts.
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