Botswana

The Domboshaba Festival of History & Culture

Bjørn Førde
UNDP Resident Representative
Domboshaba at Vukwi on 2nd October 2004

Kgosi Christopher Masunga
Chairmen of the Society for the Promotion of Ikalanga Language and the Mukani Action Campaign
Chairpersons of other Cultural and Languages Associations

Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen

It is a great pleasure for me to address you today on the occasion of celebrating this year’s Domboshaba Festival of Ikalanga Culture and History under the theme of Modernity: Challenge for Ikalanga Culture? I feel greatly honoured to be invited to speak to you, on an occasion where the Bakalanga meet to express their collective memory about their culture, language and history, and to discuss how various activities could be employed to sustain promotion and expression of language and culture of Bakalanga. This is an initiative that deserves to be congratulated. Let me also congratulate other organisations and associations for doing something similar – and for being here today.

I also feel great humility by knowing that Domboshaba in this beautiful part of your country was the provincial residence of the Chingamile of the Great Zimbabwe Mambo, or Mwenomotapa. I am sure that this provides all of you with a sense of belonging, in a historical as well as cultural, individual and immediately emotional sense.

‘Belonging’ to something above and beyond our immediate present and material existence is very fundamental to all of us, including myself. I will therefore take this opportunity to speak not only strictly on behalf of the UNDP that I represent, but also on behalf of myself. Hopefully what I have to share with you can put your own thoughts and aspirations in perspective.

As already mentioned, the organisers have chosen the theme of Modernity: Challenge for Ikalanga Culture for this year’s celebrations, to reflect on your culture and history in the context of broader developments taking place in Botswana as well as worldwide.

I find this to be highly relevant. I strongly believe that one of the major – if in fact not the major challenge confronting humankind in the 21st Century - is our ability to manage cultural diversity. Our ability to balance the forces of ‘harmonisation’ that come with globalisation on the one hand, and the right of individuals to ‘belong’ to a particular cultural grouping on the other hand, is a major challenge. And this is very much what I consider to be part of the ‘modernity’ issue.

When I grew up as a small boy in the 1950’ies, Denmark was passing through a rapid transformation from an agricultural society to a modern industrialised society. More than anything else, I loved to visit my grandfather on his small farm during weekends and holidays, and to be at his side when he milked the cows, fed the pigs and ploughed, sowed and harvested his fields.

Around 1960 he got his first tractor, but I vividly remember sitting on the back of one of the two big horses when he still had to plough like that. Once in a while he would stop the horses and pick up some cleverly shaped stones coming out of the soil – and telling me that they were artefacts from the Stone Age around 2000 years before Christ was born. Artefacts and tools from people who had once lived on this land! Our forefathers! Some of them were probably buried in the stone grave under the 4 majestic stones at the top of the hill where we used to play when we were not helping out. This was a national monument that my grandfather was not allowed to touch.

In school we were taught about life in Denmark during the Stone Age as well as in the Iron and Bronze ages, and of course also about the Viking Age from around 700 to 1000 after Christ, when Danish Vikings plundered and conquered various parts of Europe, including parts of the United Kingdom. I always found it exciting to learn how people had once lived on the land I was now a citizen of. Somehow, however distant and elusive, I have always felt that that history was part of what made me, my culture, and my country what it was now.

A few years ago I visited the farm that my grandfather had to give up in the 1970’ies because none of his children felt like living their lives on a farm. They had received education [my own father had become a high school principal], and decided to move to the modern life of the city to be part of industrialisation and modernisation. I was struck with disbelief and some sadness: The farm buildings were gone, and the whole area was plastered with rows of houses. The stone age grave was still there, in a small park with swings for children.

But the fact of the matter was that Denmark was no longer an agricultural society with an agricultural culture. Even agriculture had been industrialised, and what my grandfather and hundreds of his colleagues could produce through hard manual work could now be produced by just one farmer, using machinery and technologies that did not exist in the 1960’ies.

This is what change is about! This is what modernisation is about! This is also part of globalisation!

I know that the food my grandfather produced on his farm tasted better and was healthier than what I can buy today – filled with chemicals and pharmaceuticals as it is. He knew every cow and pig by name, and he cared for them. This is not possible today. Nor is it possible for my children to visit him and see how the food they eat is produced. Of course this is sad!

But I do not feel sad for the changes that have taken place in general, although I am sure we could disagree about whether all the changes are in fact what we could call progress. When I visited my grandfather, I also visited a family and gender structure that was very traditional and in some respects very unequal. My grandfather never in his life prepared a meal in the kitchen, and he never took care of his children’s upbringing. This was for women to do! I vividly remember how the men would move from the dining table into the ‘cigar room’, where they would be seated around a table, smoking cigars and drinking cognac while playing cards – we children would sit on the floor and follow the plays and the movement of money among the players.

This is no longer the pattern, although it still happens of course. Women have rights, and they are equals. Although my grandmother never complained about her life in the kitchen and the children’s rooms, I know that she would have enjoyed the fruits of the women’s movement that have slowly found its way into constitutions and all kinds of legislation during the past 25 years.

This is also what change and modernity is about! In that sense there is a lot of danger in some forms of cultural fundamentalism that tend to believe that everything needs to be maintained as it has always been, because otherwise our culture will die. On the contrary: Cultures die if they stop being part of a never ending dynamics of change and adaptation.

I wish to suggest that Bakalanga, just like my own people, as a people do not exist as an island, without any interaction with socio-economic processes of development and other people. What they acquire and adopt from other people through interaction has a direct bearing on their lives, and therefore their culture.

The question therefore should be how we manage change and interaction with other cultures: To what extent are we able to control the complicated and often invisible process of change and modernity? To what extent is the process of change being imposed on us by outside and stronger forces? These questions are important because if modernity is not engaged with circumspection, people could lose their culture – or the sense of ‘belonging’ that culture provides.

For Bakalanga – like for myself – I am sure that one of the major existential questions of our time is how we manage to establish a sense of ‘belonging’ for our particular culture in what is called the ‘global village’, a term that is used to illustrate that the forces inherent in the process of globalisation – like the increasing interdependence due to trade, the fact that money flows freely and quickly around the globe, and the ability to move speedily from one end of the globe to the other – is bringing all of us closer together.

I consider myself to be a globalist in the sense that I strongly believe in the advantage of people being able to interact more freely across physical and cultural borders, and because I have personally experienced the advantage of meeting peoples and cultures that are very different from myself and my own culture. I believe that my interaction with the Indians in the Andean mountains of Peru, ancestors of the Incas; my meetings with the Maasai people living in the Ngorongoro area of Tanzania; or experiences with the Tonga people living on the shores of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe and Zambia; I believe that all of this has contributed to a better understanding of the world I live in – and myself and my own culture.

But to some extent the concept of the ‘global village’ is also an illusion! The concept of the ‘village’ assumes that we share a minimum of fundamental values and a reasonable level of equality; that those who are strong accept responsibility for those who are weak; that there is room for diversity although uniformity might be the norm. This is of course not the case in the world we live in today, where 40 or so of the richest people in the world own assests that exceed the combined wealth of 800 million poor people in Asia. A world where media conglomerates larger than our imagination allows us to think dominate the airwaves, the newspapers, the magazines, the television networks and the movie industry.

This is an issue covered by the 2004 Human Development Report on the theme of Cultural Liberty in todays’s diverse world from UNDP, released only a few months ago. It states that cultural goods are different from other traded products because “they convey ideas, symbols and lifestyles and are an intrinsic part of the identity of the community that produces them.”

The authors of the report therefore favour exceptions for cultural goods in international trade agreements. Cultural diversity in the arts would radically decline if left to market forces alone, they say, to the ultimate detriment of world culture.

And the economic evidence is compelling: World trade in entertainment media—cinema, broadcasting, music, literature, the visual arts—has quadrupled over the past two decades, from US$95 billion yearly to an estimated $380 billion. About 80 percent of this cultural trade flow originates in only 13 countries, led by the United States.

US productions alone now account for about 85 percent of film screened worldwide. The 10 top-grossing films of all time in markets outside of the United States were all US-made, led by the 1997 movie Titanic, which earned more than $1.2 billion in international markets.

But the authors also caution against the use of quotas or trade barriers to restrict imports of cultural goods, using the film industry as the most economically significant example. The report cites alternative models, such as in Argentina and Brazil, which provide financial incentives to domestic film production without imposing barriers against cultural imports. France spends about $400 million a year to support a film industry that produces more than 180 feature films annually. In Egypt, a private-public partnership has helped the Egypt Film Society finance the construction of new film studios.

So modernization or globalization is not necessarily always good or advantageous for all of us, and it is certainly legitimate for smaller cultures to consider ways of strengthening and maintaining their particular ‘flavour’.

The Human Development Report 2004 provides a wide-ranging analysis of identity issues in scores of communities and nations, and it looks at many different policy approaches to multicultural nations and communities, from bilingual education and affirmative action plans to innovative systems of proportional representation and federalism.

The authors argue that all people have the right to maintain their ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. They further contend that the adoption of policies that recognize and protect these identities is the only sustainable approach to development in diverse societies. Economic globalization cannot succeed unless cultural freedoms are also respected and protected, and xenophobic resistance to cultural diversity should be addressed and overcome.

“If the world is to reach the Millennium Development Goals and ultimately eradicate poverty, it must first successfully confront the challenge of how to build inclusive, culturally diverse societies,” the UNDP Administrator Malloch Brown writes in his foreword. And Amartya Sen, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics and one of the originators of UNDP’s Human Development Reports, writes the following:

“Rather than glorify unreasoned endorsement of inherited traditions, or warn the world about the alleged inevitability of the clash of civilizations, the human development perspective demands that attention go to the importance of freedom in cultural spheres and to ways of defending and expanding the cultural freedoms that people can enjoy.”

When cultural freedoms are fully exercised, this pluralism can be a source of political harmony and economic vitality, the report stresses, pointing to many empirical examples of such success, from immigration-enriched industrial powers like Canada and United States to the indigenously multiethnic nations of Africa and Asia.

“Cultural liberty is a simple but profoundly disturbing idea, contrary to what most states have practiced over the centuries, but for which there is a rising clamour in the 21st century.”

There is no doubt that one of the biggest challenges is centered around language. There can of course be no serious talk about culture without talking about language. Language is culture – and culture is language. No doubt Bakalanga will be seriously challenged if they attempt to engage modernity without their language. It is an important element of ethnic identity – it is part of ‘belonging’. Without language the process of modernization will easily be one of assimilation.

This is also an issue for the 2004 Human Development Report. Here cultural identity is seen not as a zero-sum game. Speakers of a mother tongue that is not the dominant or official language of a country—be it Basque in Spain, Zulu in South Africa, or Urdu in the UK, or Spanish in the US—can still participate fully in national culture and politics.

“The state can be blind to religion, but it cannot be mute to language,” writes Fukuda-Parr, the main editor of the Human Development report, noting the wide variety of “official language” policies in multilingual countries.

Limitations on people’s ability to use their native language—and limited facility in speaking the dominant or official national language—can exclude people from education, political life and access to justice. Sub-Saharan Africa has more than 2,500 languages, but the ability of many people to use their language in education and in dealing with the state is particularly limited. In more than 30 countries in the region, the official language is different from the one most commonly used. Only 13 percent of the children who receive primary education do so in their native language.

Multilingual countries often need a three-language formula: First a national or official state language; then a lingua franca to facilitate communications among different groups (in some cases the official language serves this purpose); and finally an official recognition of the mother tongue or of indigenous languages for those without full command of the official language or lingua franca.

Having been brought up speaking Norwegian like my mother and Danish like my father, I know the importance of language. I would never have been able to learn from my Norwegian grandfather if I had not been able to communicate with him in his own language. Having written more than 30 books for children and youth in particular, I also know the importance of being able to communicate in your own language, in a world where English and other major languages increasingly dominate the way we express ourselves.

Being sensitive to this – as well as to the other aspects of culture and modernization that I have touched upon - is part of the nation building exercise that Botswana has undertaken since 1966. A process that has been highly successful in many respects, but one which needs to be constantly nurtured and expanded upon.

That you have chosen the theme of modernity for your celebrations at this particular point in time is both appropriate and interesting. Appropriate because much of the turmoil in the world today is one way or the other related to culture, and because there are many examples that show us that turmoil need not be the result.

The United Nations is a staunch proponent of cultural freedom. As stated in the report I have just mentioned, expression of cultural freedom and identity is bound to bring about tensions even in relatively stable societies such as Botswana. But such tensions are inevitable because the quest for cultural freedom is part of a process of social change that inevitably “… creates new frontiers in the advance of human freedoms and democracy”.

Batswana live in a multicultural society. Therefore, for various cultural communities like Bakalanga (or Baherero who recently celebrated their cultural day in Omaweneno) to celebrate their cultural heritage and express their cultural identity, it is an indication of the cultural mosaic the country is made up of.

Because of her democratic principles and tolerant traditions Botswana’s polices and laws therefore should of necessity embrace multiculturalism.

It is important for cultures to be dynamic. That is, culture like people who practice or live it, must of necessity evolve and adjust to the needs of our world today. Even as we call for cultural freedom, we must reject cultural conservatism, i.e. the tendency to hold onto cultural practices that have outlived their usefulness.