A Cultural Agenda For Peace

Wole-Soyinka

Prof. Wole Soyinka

By Wole Soyinka

It was purely by chance that the date decided upon for re-animating this establishment – The Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding – fell on the nation’s Armed Forces Day – and yet, how singularly appropriate it is! That may sound strange, since it can also be deemed an ironic, troubling coincidence. The aim of the Centre, after all, as its title indicates, is to promote mutual understanding both internally and externally, to extend the social deductions and humanistic aspirations of a people’s experience onto the international arena, and vice versa. Obviously, arms and armies are not the loftiest means of which humanity is capable for bringing about such understanding. At the same time, as we all must realistically accept, arms often prove an unavoidable recourse. Not merely this nation, but wide swathes of our continent and indeed of the world, find their peoples obliged to look to their armed forces for securing those very humane aspirations that constitute the direct antithesis of what an army represents, what it does best. In pursuit of such aspirations, Culture remains an unquantifiable asset, a weapon that answers that consistent yearning of humanity which, I believe, can be summed up in one word: Peace. Peace as the insistent condition of the environment in which society can best develop, flourish, enhance its daily existence and aspire to the very heights of its potential.

So we are caught in this bind, a historical, seemingly eternal paradox. We espouse the Culture of Peace and yet we celebrate the prowess of our military, condole with them on their losses, agitate for the enhancement of their fighting capability, calling on them to defend those activities that call to the deepest instinct in our humanity–creativity. To focus on our immediate portion of this existential dilemma, the nation faces one of the most perilous phases of her history, tormented by an enemy that commenced life from within, but has joined forces with other movements of brutal dictation outside our borders. Its aims? To stifle all aspects of cultural existence that do not conform with their narrow, constrictive, theocratic projection of an ideal human society. Within the world-view of that enemy, books are anathema. Learning is satanic. Music, dance, painting, sculpting, aesthetic explorations in no matter what form are all violations of a divine order, the penalty for these being death, often in the most sadistic manner. This is an enemy that is accuser, judge and executioner all in the same breath–most of the time, the accused are fellow beings they have never seen, whose charges are never read, no mitigating cause ever admitted, no considerations of a different natal origin, the absorption from birth of different cultural mores and beliefs–their very existence within Culture is accounted their sole crime, and the penalty is pre-ordained. Confronted with such implacable enemies of existence, the choice is either surrender and enslavement, or mobilising for the defence of one’s defining beliefs, rallying round that liberating banner known universally as – Culture.

Culture means both spiritual and intellectual liberation. It is all-encompassing, being the very expression of human productive existence. What we see around us–the artifacts, the dance performances, designs for living spaces, the simple tunes or soaring symphonies, the riveting stage drama or solemn, ritual enactments, even the comic modes of human expression–are the palpable precipitates of human creative intelligence – they come under the general name of the Arts. But even the food we eat, how we prepare and consume that food, how we celebrate and integrate it as a life-giver into the very rhythms of existence and harmonisation with the phenomena around us, how we arbitrate human relationships…and so on and on–these intimately articulate our own self-apprehension as human beings. While Culture goes beyond the mere adornment of existence, its aesthetic plenitude also distinguishes humanity from the mere ruminant and – for the religious – even brings humans closer to godly awareness.

Those who claim the opposite, those for whom these equate diabolical expressions of damned souls, and are obsessed with the mission that such advocates and practitioners of a cultured existence must be dispatched to hell without delay, are mere psychopaths. They must be defeated. To survive, to live Culture, we must neutralise them. We cannot therefore claim to be more virtuous than today’s ancestral Guest of Honour whose transitional masquerade – his egungun – showers this gathering with both honour and blessings. That universal avatar, Nelson Mandela, knew when it was time to take up arms, and when it was time to become a paraclete of the Culture of Peace. We therefore salute and honour our armed forces. While they play their part with a self-sacrificing commitment that responds to assaults on the integrity of society and its physical survival, we, on our part, must deploy that weaponry of which we are capable – Culture – as our means to the same survival ends – but in the spiritual domain. Across religion, gender, profession, class or race, Culture calls to the spiritual in every one of us.

Sometimes, Culture is confused with Tradition, and Tradition itself confused, indeed equated with – inertia.  Understandably perhaps, since traditional society is indeed one in which creativity and mundane productivity are so intricately intermeshed that the result appears to one as a near seamless, static condition, incapable of unraveling or altering. One thinks, for instance, of the calendar of festivals that reflects the productive cycle, where artistic preoccupation is an integrated aspect of life-reproducing activities and even an expression of society’s spirituality.  Community is not static, however, so how can any product, even the non-material product of a human community, lay claim to absolute purism–never changing, inflexible, incapable of even internal adjustment and responsiveness to the productive mechanisms of that very community itself. The cinema – or video these days – is only a century years of age – yet, for better or worse, it is now a routine feature of the cultures of virtually all societies–its products of questionable proficiency and quality oftentimes, but that is the price–and the adventurous excitation–of innovation. A serious, thinking community plots its trajectory, examines its potential for positive and negative contributions to society and regulates itself accordingly.

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The new phenomenon becomes an additional ingredient in the intellectual armoury on which youth is weaned and adult experience extended, a new fodder for ingestion and a prism for viewing both historic and contemporary human phenomena. That is Culture for you, in its dynamic march through the human evolutionary process – one, by the way, that did not end with Charles Darwin! Failure to recognise this timeless process is the fatal problem that besets fundamentalists–a terror of novelty and intellectual cowardice in face of the challenge of innovations. From this stems a craving to limit what exists, since the stunted mind finds this easier to dominate.

Culture is inexorably dynamic – but this does not mean that it excludes, or disdains preservation – very much the contrary! Intellectual growth is also nurtured on a comparative tendency of the human mind–without preservation therefore, there is a lamentable reduction in the foraging field accessible to the mind–not to mention the short-changing of a people’s history.

The preservation – indeed celebration – of human heritage also imbues society–no matter its level of development–with an optimism and confidence in the continuity of our species. In critical times such as ours in this present, Culture provides a bedrock resilience to the front-line targets and casualties of the onslaught of the mindless, atavistic hordes of extreme religionists. It expresses solidarity with those victims who, so far, have borne the brunt, who daily bear the brunt of a demented minority with their psychopathic hatred of the historic, indeed organic modes of existence of human society. Building on this imperishable bequest from those who came before us, we are enabled to reach out beyond our immediate confines, across national borders, to make common cause with all who also seek merely to bring their wares to the open market of human creativity.

These constitute the transformative agenda of the Centre. The celebration and enhancement of the banquet of life that surrounds us, and the extension of their extracts to the global arena of human discourse, leading to an understanding that can only promote the eternal quest of human interaction. That quest – if Christians will kindly permit my variation on their theological phrasing – that quest is not so much a ‘Peace that passeth all Understanding’ but, a Peace that comes with – Understanding.

—This address was delivered by Professor Soyinka, Chairman, Centre for Black Culture and International Understanding, on the occasion of the re-activation of the Centre on 15  January 2014.

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