Prisoners as Cultural Practitioners

Cameroon Tue 24-02-2009

Prisoners as Cultural Practitioners
By Mwalimu George Ngwane

The public rose to a standing ovation on 11th February 2009 during celebrations marking Cameroon’s Youth Day in one of the cities in Cameroon when some 30 female and male prisoners marched along their warders with an array of handicrafts and other cultural objects fabricated by the prisoners themselves.

An interview with one of the prisoners revealed that an organization had drilled the prisoners in a series of workshops aimed at honing their skills in the production and marketing of various genres of crafts and art objects.

Art and Culture is already becoming a basis for economic empowerment and human development. For a long time, economic models paid less attention to the organic link between poverty reduction and cultural development.

Yet that link has become so vital that agencies and cultural professionals have been awakened to the reality that cultural investment is not only beneficial to the agencies themselves but serve as an income-generating spiral of wealth creation and self-employment among the vulnerable sectors of society (women and youths) and in the case of this paper, prisoners.Aware of the fact that our Prisons in Africa have become so congested; cognizant of the fact that the original policy of our governments to turn our prisons into Agricultural centers has not been satisfactory; conscious of the fact that most prisoners get acquitted only to return to prisons for crimes related to unemployment, there is a need to build a creative industry component within our prison system.

The focus of this component would be to train prisoners (capacity building) to produce art work(creative industries) that would enable them (prisoners) to improve on their livelihood while serving their prison sentences (poverty reduction) and establish cultural enterprises after they have left prison (sustainable development).

Prisoners may be trained to transform environmental waste (recycled plastics, wrappers, carrier bags, beer corks, airtime cards etc) into caps, toys, bags, belts, foot gears etc. In environmental cultural term, this is called closing the loop.

Female prisoners especially may trained in tie and dye, cloth industry, weaving, beadcraft, canning, painting and pottery. In the end the prisoners set up a show room or sales spot in their prison centers where their art products like cane furniture, clay pots, textiles and mats sold to the public.

Prisoners exercising byVincent Van Gogh

^{Vincent Van Gogh | Prisoners exercising}

The main objectives of this creative industry component should be to encourage citizens (prisoners) to express through knowledge and skills their creative talents hitherto exploited, to provide prisoners the possibility of reintegrating into society after prison sentence as well as tackle the vexing problems of unemployment, rising poverty and crime addiction, and to elaborate the notion of creative/cultural industries to a society that needs to preserve its heritage and promote the culture of local arts consumption.

More so the indigenous judicial modus operandi in Africa is based on restorative not retributive justice. The cases of the Truth and Reconciliation Committees started in South Africa and the gacaca experiment in Rwanda are cases in point. Our judicial systems therefore focus on reconciling the guilty with the victim, rehabilitating the guilty into his or former disconnected society and equipping the reintegrated guilty with tools that can lead to the reconstruction of his or her own life.

Granted that a couple of obstacles would be encountered. Because creative industries draw from the creative expressions of communities based on the wealth of their historical and contemporary values and cultural symbols, support for the industries should be seen as an integral part of the preservation, protection and promotion of our tangible cultural heritage. Funding would therefore be an obstacle.

Yet globally the creative industries account for over 7 percent of the world’s gross domestic product and are forecast to grow in coming years by 10 percent per annum (UNCTAD, 2004). African governments would need to understand the need to incorporate the arts and culture into state economic development strategies by providing direct grants to prisoners through government seed support and giving loans them with specific collaterals through micro-credit organizations.

Stigmatization where prisoners are still seen as dangerous criminals to be avoided by the public must be eradicated. This perception can be reversed if governments emphasize that prisons are rehabilitation or productive centers rather than punitive walls of shame.

Great opportunities exist for creative industry and prison system policies to be established.

In countries with a national cultural policy, the idea of developing plans to capitalize on creative industries and provide support to the marginalized or disadvantaged that in turn helps sustain the contribution of the arts and culture sector cannot be overemphasized.

Either because of low purchasing power or an upsurge in the love for homegrown material provides an opportunity for local art consumption. A market for the cultural products from prisoners shall therefore of necessity meet with public demand. Arts promoters and cultural entrepreneurs would have to see the opportunity of crossing national borders to embrace a wider pan African arts and culture market.

Job creation, poverty alleviation and economic empowerment are on the cutting edge of a bigger cultural picture. I strongly believe that if cultural industries can flourish, poverty reduction can be achieved.

In this light, organizations especially non-state actors would need to be supported to encourage activities that link art and culture to the deprived or marginalized so that in the end we improve the livelihoods of those who become cultural practitioners even by default and spiral the “trickle-down effect” of wealth creation to our citizens.

If this initiative that stood out conspicuously above the din of our National festivity can be replicated to other prisons there may come a day when a “Prison Art Festival” is organized.

That will be day we shall start responding to how creative economy can operate as a genuine solution for the development needs of deprived and stigmatized yet resourceful citizens and how the marginalization of productive members of society can inhibit the realization of their potential to contribute to national development.

This is an opinion piece. AfricanColours encourages debate on contemporary African art and the opinions expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of AfricanColours.

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