[Reader-list] That mysterious culture software

[Vivek Narayanan]

An excerpt from a recent column by Wainana. This shouldn't be news to 
us, but the conceptions of culture he parodies remind me exactly of how 
many on this list speak of culture. Hmmmm...............

Vivek

To make a king
BINYAVANGA WAINAINA: CONTINETAL DRIFT - Sep 23 2008
http://www.mg.co.za/article/2008-09-24-to-make-a-king

I was travelling in Uganda a few months ago and walked into a bookstore 
in a small town near the Rwanda border and bought a school history text. 
As we drove towards Rwanda, I browsed it. It was a familiar text -- we 
had studied it in school.

The book suggested that the Tutsi were a mysterious and special people. 
Very tall and elegant, they had been thought to be ancient Phoenicians 
-- the book mentions casually -- then says this idea was debunked. They 
glided effortlessly and superiorly down from the North, with longhorned 
cattle. They carried with them a sort of vague cultural Kingdom-forming 
software, which they applied wherever they went.

When I was in school, we learned that before colonialism we lived inside 
our cultures. Like tortoises. Those cultures had characteristics, things 
you could list like bullet points: nomads, banana-growers. Before tribes 
came, there were hunter-gatherers, who disappeared into holes in the ground.

The tribes landed from the Nile Valley and from the Congo basin. These 
tribes spoke languages that were related to one another. After some 
migrations and wars, the tribes settled comfortably in the school maps 
and waited for colonialism, independence and the visionary ideas of new 
leaders to come.

At some point, somewhere -- page 13 maybe, the world changed -- and 
ideas and brains mysteriously appeared in our universe. Mercantilism, 
communism, Islam. Some of these ideas were bad. Colonialism, 
imperialism. Some were good. Education. Erm … hygiene. Nationalism.

The history book changes and becomes a work of biography of individuals 
who built the continent. Kenya becomes Kenyatta.

So, inside my head are these images of people wandering down the Nile 
valley like the wildebeest from the Serengeti. Each tribal citizen is 
surrounded by a large bubble called language culture. Inside language 
culture elders run around a 400m track called ritual -- and when they 
are tired they pass the baton down to the New Age set. This baton 
contains a software program called WISDOM -- which is passed down from 
generation to generation. Nobody knows who invented it. Wisdom is not a 
creation of a thinking man -- it is a silent and sullen gizmo. It just 
works. When a new generation wears it, presto, their limbs and manner 
change and they become traditional leaders.

Human will and intelligence do not play much of a role in any of these 
transactions.

So we become cultural botanists: looking for characteristics -- and 
registering them and remaking them for the purposes of wearing 
traditional clothes at the Beijing Olympics, the Reed Dance or 
encouraging cultural tourism, or strategising for post electoral 
violence. Cultural tourism is sort of like eco-tourism: people, plants 
and animals are arranged into a dutiful ecology. A performance.

CONTINUES BELOW


After we have learned about ourselves like this, it becomes easy to say 
things like: "This is not true Africa." "This is not African." 
"According to African culture."

We can move from one conversation where ideas are shared, into one where 
ideas are bounced against culture, which we have come to see as a thing 
without a brain. It is never a world view, or an engagement with time 
and space by thinking, breathing, interacting human beings.

We start to become museums of ourselves. We rush about making 
exhibitions of our culture. In the absence of self-understanding that 
can stand the test of our times, we speak of our neighbours as cultural 
artefacts, whose fate is decided by their immovable and unthinking 
stereotypes.