Culture

The digital revolution has caught up fast in the world of African creativity! Over the last ten years, the increase in African Internet users has been 16 times greater than that of North American users. Alongside this, a growing number of African organisations and cultural operators are creating and participating in websites and social networks, offering an ever-increasing range of resources to allow people to keep up-to-date with African creativity, enjoy African art and contact African creators. Examples of this can be seen in various fields, but the philosophy is always the same: that of sharing content, involving users and facilitating participation and access.

The Uganda National Museum is one of the most important heritage sites in Eastern Africa, but if all goes as the Ugandan government plans, it could be destroyed. In fact, the government has planned to construct a 60-story ultra modern building in Kampala, at plot 5 Kiira Road, the exact location where the Museum building currently stands.

Jeffry Feeger’s paintings are far from the traditional images of Papua New Guinea of the Asaro mud men and the colourful sing songs of the Highlands. He says he is tackling the issues of “a society in transition”.

Papua New Guinea’s early settlers still live remote lives in the Highlands, yet the country was centre stage during one of the fiercest campaigns of World War II. The country’s past and present are full of paradoxes.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) could be described as a mini continent. It is a country of extraordinary diversity both on land and sea from its fauna and fauna to its economic potential:  oil, gas, minerals, forests and fish.

The Non-Governmental Organisation, Tulele Peisa, is trying to resettle the estimated 1,000 strong population of the Carteret islands, a horseshoe-shaped cluster of islands to the north-east of Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Province of Bougainville. Climate-change induced sea level rises could completely submerge their landmass by 2015.

The storyteller

“Stories matter … stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Interview with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux
Head of the Ethnography section of the MRAC Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), ethnologist and writer*
by Hegel Goutier