Dawning of a new day?

Editorial Comment
THE RECENTLY held Nama awards were successful in the main in spite of the two glitches which have already been mentioned elsewhere.

THE RECENTLY held Nama awards were successful in the main in spite of the two glitches which have already been mentioned elsewhere.

As the dust settles, one qualifier for what I consider to have been the success of the awards was simply the fact that every prize came with a brown envelope. The envelope contained a cash prize of $500 apart from other goodies.

The cash prize would have come courtesy of a number of sponsors that came on board e.g. Old Mutual, Unilever, Hivos, Mighty Movies, ZiFM, Delta, and ZBC as the major ones along with 24 others.

The multi-award winner bagged a total of $2 000 in cash! In the “little” people’s world that is a fortune. I even heard whispers from those who won the prize last year wishing something could be done even for them. It is claimed that they got soap. Well, last year they got hampers with soap. But what is gratifying is the precedence set for the future in terms of dynamising the cultural industries via the cash incentives.

The Business of the Arts In Zimbabwe and Africa more widely, the arts are taken for granted. People sing at funerals, dance at weddings and sing in churches to a point where the idea of paying someone to sing at a funeral or better still in church seems like a ridiculous idea.

This all begs the question, does Africa appreciate the socio-economic value of its own narratives and storytelling especially in view of the economic challenges precipitated by the collapse of traditional industries.

Nigeria and South Africa are one of the notable exceptions with vibrant cultural industries that have spawned movies like Tsotsi and Mandela and Nollywood films. Apart from these examples, Africa effectively imports most of the content that is distributed across its television channels, radios and cinemas to its own economic and psycho-social detriment. Dreaming the dream: No Mickey Mouse Business! At the risk of sounding simplistic, the late Walter Elias Disney built his now multi-billion dollar Disney franchise with basically a cartoon and a boyish dream. He was a gifted small town boy artist from the American Midwest state of Kansas who could draw and went on to take advantage of technology i.e. Developments in animation and film to turn his cartoon characters into motion picture films.

The cartoon feature films have gone on to spawn a multi-billion dollar business encompassing fivevacation resorts, eleven theme parks, 39 hotels, two water parks, eight film studios, six record labels and 11 cable television networks. Need one mention the merchandising companies and thousands of jobs downstream?

To this day, the Disney brand is synonymous not just with Mickey Mouse cartoons but with family entertainment, fun and adventure. The brand has contributed massively to the GDP of the US It’s needful to mention that it took several decades to achieve this glorious result, through the Great Depression, through the Second World War and other factors. Arts and Tourism Thousands of tourists flock to Britain to visit the famous street address of Sherlock Holmes (a fictional character) in Britain! This is yet another simple and evocative example of the power of the arts to generate a buzz around a culture and draw millions in terms of revenue. France 24 reported last year that about 84 million tourists visit Paris. Are there Zebras in France? Maybe at the zoo. But that is not why folk flock there.

It is the arts and culture that they go to see. It is the romanticised idea of the French cafes, fashion, music, etc. Things intangible, things artistic . . . Just next door is South Africa. According to statistics supplied by the country’s president Jacob Zuma in his State-of-the-nation address last year, their cultural industries contribute 2 billion rands to the GDP annually.

According to the statistics that the president proffered, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival generates around 475 million rands and created 2 000 jobs in 2010! Okay it is debatable whether the jobs are permanent ones or not. The key point is to consider the overall importance of the cultural sector as a formidable driver of economic growth.

South Africa is doing well in the arts sector because it has a creative industry growth strategy (CIGS) that covers a wide sweep of the arts: music, publishing, architecture, dance, film, arts and crafts, fashion, tourism etc. We can borrow a leaf from them. We do not have to reinvent the wheel in this sense. The Arts and our epic memory We must be able to package our own stories and sell them. Another classic example is Britain’s Ian Fleming. An Eton educated author, Ian Fleming created the James Bond spy character which has gone on to spawn a global cultural phenomenon about a fictitious MI6 spy who is some kind of super hero saving the Western world from baddies bent on destroying civilisation as we know it.

Ian Fleming himself a former British serviceman is now dead but his legacy lives through the movies and the work of Ian Fleming Publications which is the family company that helps keep his name alive. The novels which continue to be turned into movies are written by authors such as William Boyd. It has ceased to matter that Fleming is dead. His creation is now a corporately run monolith with a vast network of employees working to profitably proliferate the legend and the myth of British sagacity.

In this sense then, the cascading effect of James Bond as a cultural icon, in my considered opinion is to perpetuate the idea of a nation’s potency and ability to rise above challenges. Art in this way serves the purpose, beyond just dollars and cents, of engendering patriotism and pride. But notice that it all starts with a fiction, or a figment of the human imagination- calling those things that are not as though they were. Going Forward The lesson in all this is that a nation needs to learn from other nations and attempt to adapt and adopt the things that have worked for the self same nations.

In any case, the whole idea of an African Union must transcend the political gamesmanship or fire fighting that tends to drain the energies of the continent and flood the discourse about Africa’s promise or renaissance. We can start with a serious look at how a nation treats its artists, its griots and minstrels. Europe’s renaissance was epitomised by the works of artist such Raphael and Michelangelo who were patronised by the wealthy governing classes e.g. the Medics.

These ruling classes would commission the works of art the Western world now considers to be seminal masterpieces. Our local businesses can vigorously follow the Nama sponsors’ lead and patronise the arts this way by providing vital funding. For me, it is not accidental that during the age when Michelangelo was painting his masterpieces or Da Vinci carving his masterpieces, Guttenberg was developing the world’s first printing press that went on to alter modern life in very real and fundamental ways.

What art, (in the generic sense of the word) does , which is often times lost to rulers and even churches, is to not only mirror society’s hopes and fears, but to challenge introspection and aspiration. It fires the imagination and challenges the spirits of man to dream beyond their dreary circumstances and reach for the best that is in man.