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74 2 24 To Hell with Culture (Published September 20-27, 1991) Yes you heard me quite alright. Your ears are not deceiving you. I say, “To hell with culture!” What is culture? It is the total way of life of an identifiable group of people. The elements of a people’s culture are: their food and manner of eating, their clothes and manner of dressing, their songs, dances and musical instruments, their ceremonies, the manner and content of their education, their belief systems, their customs, taboos and morality, their technology, art, architecture etc. Now, do you need a national propaganda campaign to “promote” any of these things? The answer is blowing in the wind. Culture is something that manifests itself naturally, unobtrusively. If there is such a thing as “promoting culture,” the best way to do it would be to promote general welfare and well-being at all levels material , intellectual, spiritual. The view of culture as something separate and distinguishable from the way of life of a people, as something that can be put on display and admired per se, a spectacle that you go to watch in some hall during leisure time, something that can be bought and sold, is completely erroneous. This erroneous idea is one of the legacies of colonialism. Colonialists created ministries of culture and departments of anthropology to help them collect the “curiosities of the natives.” These curiosities they exported to the Metropoles where their exoticness generated great interest and speculation, and market forces raised their value. But, as Okot p’Bitek once asked, what is the meaning and significance of an African religious mask, for instance, hanging on a concrete wall of an apartment in Paris or Los Angeles, a room reeking with unbelief and aimlessness in life? What is the use of a drum on display? Drums are for drumming and dancing, not for being hung on the wall and merely gazed at. But, of course, when the colonialists departed, they left their successors. These are those who descend from the aircrafts at our 75 airports, in their three-piece stripped suits with tie to match, and stop for a while to be entertained by “traditional dancers” lustily chanting, on command, songs they do not believe in. It is the successors of the colonials, who, in fact, are strangers to and among their own people, who have continued to maintain ministries of culture. What use is a ministry of culture in a country like Cameroon? It is by no accident that the native colonial masters usually pick some uncultured fellow from among their ranks to head this superfluous institution. The recent hullabaloo about a national cultural forum on the general state of culture (whatever that means) is just diversionary tactics from people who don’t want to admit that they can no longer deal with a socio-political situation over which they insist on presiding. What is the use of culture, let alone a cultural forum, to the more that 50% of Cameroonians who are completely jobless? Or those who have jobs and yet go without pay, while over 250 million francs are spent in “organizing” the cultural forum? What is the use vaunting the “bottle dance” over the mass media when people can no longer go out of their houses to enjoy the bottle dance in its natural setting? All talk about culture, especially within our present circumstances, can only be calculated as a dope, an opium. I agree with Eric Bill who once declared: “… culture is a dope, a worse dope than religion: for if it were true that religion is the opium of the people, it is worse to poison yourself than to be poisoned… To hell with culture, culture as a thing added like sauce to otherwise unpalatable stale fish.” The recent national cultural forum on “the general state of culture” forcefully reminded me of a story I first heard from the novelist, Chinua Achebe. According to the story, someone whose house was on fire saw a rabbit escaping from the flames. He left the house flaming and went in pursuit of the rabbit. He so much loved rabbit meat, you see! Ah, Cameroonians! President Biya’s recent visit to the northern states was clearly calculated to remind the people of those states of his multifarious acts of magnanimity to them, which do not seem to have been sufficiently appreciated. What paternalism! “I created this state and built the road from X through Y to Z.” Nobody...

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