The Day of the African Pentacost of an Artistic Nature

Kenya Wed 03-08-2005

The Day of the African Pentacost of an Artistic Nature
A Speech by Dr. PLO Lumumba

Many Africans have subconsciously allowed themselves to be culturally exiled. So it is a welcome wake-up call when you are pointed not only to a rich, flourishing contemporary art scene, but are given a rich crash course in everything that has led to it.

Dr P L O Lumumba

Dr P L O Lumumba speechifies at the opening of the African Cultures, African Colours art exhibition in Nairobi, Kenya.

'Today is the day of art and, as my good friend Tom Mshindi was speaking, I was transported back to 1978. I was then a form 4 [4th year of secondary school] student and I was being taken through the rigours of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

I remembered that at that time Chinua Achebe had been exiled to Mbaino and was on his way back. He had hosted a big dinner, his uncle Uchendu had been invited to make the opening speech and he said among other things that ‘if I say that I did not expect that my nephew would organize a big feast, it would be as if I did not know he was generous.

But I want to state that when a person organizes a big feast it is not because people cannot see the moonlight from their houses, they can. It is not because he is saving his people from starvation we have food in our homes. But it is because it is good that people should be together…’

It is good that we are together. I was also transported to 1982 when I used to engage in drama. [Njuguna] Wakanyote [master of ceremony] may not remember this, but I remember Joe de Graft’s book Muntu “some things we know, some things we do not know, but this one we know, that Ottoman created the world and when Ottoman had created the world, he created hence the arts.”

Ladies and gentlemen, when African scholars and educated people talk about the arts, if it is in the realm of music and they want to appear sophisticated, they will say that they love Mozart, that they love Mendelssohn, that they love Beethoven; in the realm of paintings they will claim that they like Michelangelo, that they love Van Gogh, that they like Leonardo de Vinci. This is what Africans are in the business of doing.

But time has come that we must liberate ourselves from that mental colonization because I believe those who claim that they love Mozart or Mendelssohn or Beethoven, don’t even know what the tones are… It is a status symbol. I also refuse to believe that they even know the paintings of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci or Van Gogh; it is once again a status symbol.

But I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that sometimes we behave as if Africa was a continent that did not know the arts… But [by] my own historical survey, I invite you to read Cheikh Ante Diop’s The Book of the Dead and you will be able to appreciate that Africa had a history. If you went to the Zulu of South Africa, they painted, if you came to the great Monomotapa Empire, they painted; if you came to east Africa the Ethiopians are here, the great Lalibela was a centre not only of a pilgrimage for modern Christianity but a place of pilgrimage for the arts.

If you went to Sundiata Keita’s Mali and Songhai, they painted. If you went to the Ovambo and Ovimbundu of Angola, they painted. If you went to the pyramids in Egypt, they painted. If you went to the Ashanti and Fanti in Nigeria, they painted. If you came to east Africa, the Kikuyu of Kenya painted, as did the Wanyamwezi in Tanzania, as did the Baganda in Uganda. We did these things.

So today it is a renaissance; it is not as if we are starting in a manner of speaking, on what the Latin people call the tabula rasa – we are merely re-igniting something that is innately African, and this is something that has to be celebrated. The Swahili have a beautiful saying, ‘mwachamila ni mtumwa’ (he who abandons his culture is a slave).

For a long time, we Africans have abandoned our cultures, this is why - I don’t know whether Tanya van Gool [Dutch ambassador to Kenya] is here, if she has left, she will tell you that her country is a small country… but wherever they go, they have a Dutch school, wherever the Swedish go, they have a Swedish school, when the Italians come to Kenya, they have the Italian Cultural Centre, when the British come here they have the British Cultural Centre, when Americans come here they have an American Cultural Centre, when the Germans come here they have a cultural centre. Yet when Kenyans go to New York or Washington, they don’t have a cultural centre.

We must ask ourselves: what is it that we must do? What AfricanColours is trying to do here is to rudely awaken the African spirit, because it is necessary to shake us from our slumber… I would like to see in our middle class and upper middle class walls in our Cinderella houses in the Cinderella estates that we live in in this part of the world to be adorned with paintings from Africa. Not that you will not have a painting of Michelangelo because art knows no boundaries, but let it be juxtaposed with an African artist.

This is what we are asking of you because many of us here are pretenders. I like to speak my and you will excuse me for it, because part of the African problem is pretence. What we say at forums such as these, is what we don’t do, until the day that the African learns to bridge the gulf between what he says and what he does, Africa will always be the Third World. I have since discovered that the only way to liberate ourselves from being called the Third World is to liberate our minds…. When you liberate your mind, you begin to express yourselves.

Njoroge, today, you are imbued with the spirit of Sundiata Keita. You are imbued with the spirit of Shaka, the Amazulu. You are imbued with the spirit of great Africans… What one can say, therefore, is that this is the day of an African Pentecost of an artistic nature… You are being charged to go yonder into the world and paint things that are African. We want to see the walls of our parliament adorned with murals done by Africans.

I would love to see the walls of the East African Community adorned with paintings of Africans and that is when we will be able to say that truly we are Africans.

The only thing that I am saying, ladies and gentlemen, is that time must come that the Africans must begin to realize that his and her salvation lies in what is essentially an African renaissance and that renaissance must be in the arts, because history teaches me that before the agrarian and industrial revolution, it is the Leonardo da Vincis that invaded Europe with the arts. It is the Michelangelos that invaded Europe with the arts, it is the Van Gogh, and it is Wolfgang Amadeus and Goethe that invaded Europe with their arts.

I want to hear that it is Njoroge, Kamau, Musyoka, and it is ole Kaparo who are invading the arts and then Africa will begin to industrialize.

Lastly, I want to remind you that he or she who does not appreciate art, if even he or she claims to be an intellectual, it is intellectual dwarfism of the most absurd kind…

All intellectual giants must appreciate the arts. So let the spirit of the artistic Pentecost descend upon you and go yonder into the world and celebrate the arts.

^{Dr. Lumumba is a senior Kenyan constitutional lawyer, former secretary of the Constitutional Review Commission of Kenya and currently the Kenya Anti Corruption Director.}

Posted By: African Colours

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