Our Utamaduni Day and a few home thoughts about culture

Did you, like me, celebrate with joy and elation our inaugural Utamaduni Day last Tuesday? I hope you did.

Culture, which we Waswahili have agreed to call “utamaduni”, should be a matter always close to our minds and hearts. It certainly is close to my heart, and I make no apologies for frequently chatting about it.

I was telling you last week about the festival of African Arts and Culture (FESTAC2024) coming to Kisumu City next year.

I remember with nostalgia that there was a session, designated a Colloquium on African Culture, at, the Second Festival of African and Black Arts and Culture (FESTAC77) in Lagos in 1977.

That is where, for example, my Makerere teacher and colleague, Prof Pio Zirimu (posthumously) and I proposed oracy and orature as viable skills of African culture. I hope there will be a comparable session in Kisumu.

I feel that there are quite a number of fundamental issues that we have to keep raising and questions we have to keep asking or reminding ourselves of whenever we engage in matters “cultural”, as we did last Tuesday at the Bomas of Kenya.

As you would expect of the “simple-minded man” that I am, my questions remain childlike but, I believe, useful for creative and progressive thinking about “utamaduni”.

What, for example, is culture? Is culture something you have? Is it something you do, or is it something that you are? Do we need a culture and, if so, why? Is culture a given, a structure, or is it a construct and a process that we keep working on even as we live it? Do we have a Kenyan culture, or an African culture, and if so, what is it? I remember Prof Valerie Kibera, formerly of Kenyatta University, writing somewhere (was it in the Wajibu periodical) that when you hear an African man talking of “our African culture”, he probably means that he wants to take another wife.

Anyway, it is obviously impossible to answer satisfactorily all these questions, and many others, around culture, even in a whole library of books. But it is worth our while raising them and pondering them, for one main reason.

We human beings are culture. Whoever we are and wherever we might be living, so long as we live in a human society, we are defined by our adherence to the culture of that society, or by our deviation from it.

This inevitably brings us to the necessary definition and understanding of culture, utamaduni. I think I have told you a few times before that I subscribe to my teacher Taban lo Liyong’s definition of culture as “the way we live our lives”.

I elaborate on this and say that culture is the way members of a given society live their lives. We live our lives by identifying ourselves, organising and regulating ourselves, producing and sharing our means of survival and reflecting imaginatively on our existence and all our activities. This constitutes my oft-repeated four aspects of culture, namely, identity, regulation, production and creation.

We identify through markers like language, territory and history. We regulate ourselves through faith, ethics, customs, law and politics. We produce our survival needs through technology, trade and economics.

Fourthly, we creatively reflect on all these through the visual arts, music, orature and literature. Needless to say, there are close relationships among the four categories, each reinforcing the others.

I thought it appropriate to rehearse these basics of culture because I have noted that, often, whenever we gather to reflect on or celebrate our culture, the main features we bring out and emphasise are the material and performance aspects.

Out come the skin skirts and coats, the monkey-hide and feathered head-dresses and imitation spears and shields, and we cut intricate capers of our dances, croon our ancestral songs, pluck the strings of our nyatitis and kamba nanes while we pound our booming drums. A good time is had by all, as it should be.

Where the time and facilities allow, we may bring out some of our decorative arts, some of our precolonial attires, our pottery and metalwork, our carvings and our home culinary arts. Indeed, many of these were beautifully highlighted in the celebrations at the Bomas of Kenya, and not only encapsulated in our Guest of Honour’s powerful address but also gracefully symbolised in her radiant presence. I was genuinely inspired, and indeed, it is the inspiration that turns me into an Oliver Twist, asking, “Please Kenya, please Africa, can we have some more?”

This is mainly on two fronts. The first is the systematic illustration of the progressive, growing process of our ethnic cultures into a new national, continental or even global culture. Culture, as we hinted, is not a given, static fact. It is a continuous self-adaptation to the dynamic realities of our environment and our society. A national culture in the digital, AI (artificial intelligence) age will have to be drastically different from Liyong’s “Rutan”(rural, pastoral and agricultural) culture in which we retiring generations were raised. How we do this, is one of the main challenges facing our cultural planners and educators. I believe the cultural engineering concept of adopting, examining and adapting and blending the best from all that is available to us will come in handy.

Finally, we should not overconcentrate on the productive (material) and creative (artistic) aspects of culture, at the expense of the first two aspects of identity and regulation. Knowing exactly who we are and what we want to be, and how we achieve that, is probably one of the biggest cultural challenges for the African of the twenty-first century. Similarly, the self- regulating aspects of culture, comprising such essentials as faith (spirituality), ethics, the of how a human being should behave, and the sense of decency and fair play in private and public affairs, all these are foundation stones for a thriving culture.

At this rate, every day of the year should be a Utamaduni Day.

- Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]