Abstract
This article questions the extent to which ‘Africa’ can simply buy into the creative economy discourse. This is necessary because the relative lack of attention to the cultural and creative industries on the continent in the academic literature creates a double blind. First, the empirical context in which culture is created, traded, and consumed remains absent from the largely Western literature. Second, the same Western literature serves as a way to make cultural production on the African continent fit the notion of the cultural and creative industries. This creates a tension between the cultural and creative industries models and the context in which most cultural stakeholders on the continent work. My argument is that far greater empirical attention is needed to the practices in the cultural sector across the continent, because ‘Africa’ cannot simply pick and adopt a model, it needs to conceptualize and theorize its own models and approaches to the cultural industries for this discourse to become a useful tool.
The rise of the cultural and creative industries in Africa
The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are increasingly popular throughout the African continent, where they serve as a guiding discourse for policy. In 2011, Arterial Network has established the annual African Creative Economy Conference. The yearly conference has been central to increasingly active and critical debates regarding the role cultural and creative economies play in the policy imaginary across the continent. Yet the multitude of cultural practices and policy trajectories across the 54 countries in Africa have made it difficult to find a common understanding of what ‘African’ CCIs do and should look like. This article engages with that question by the case that the conceptual understanding of the CCIs across Africa should build on empirical engagement with what exists, rather than with conceptual engagement with industry models and classifications that have emerged elsewhere.
This article is the extended and refined version of a paper delivered at a symposium that interrogated the normative dimension of the CCI discourse in African countries. The International Symposium of Ségou in Mali (4–8 February 2015) had a central question: ‘Culture and Employment: Which cultural industry for Africa?’ (‘Quelle industrie culturelle pour l’Afrique?’). My aim here is to refine this question so that it reflects the challenge at hand: ‘How can the CCIs in Africa be understood and conceptualized?’ By refining the focus of inquiry, I aim to stress that it is not possible to simply ‘pick and choose’ a CCI model that can be applied in African contexts, but that there is a need to develop an ‘African’ take on what this discourse can and should mean. This focus is deliberately normative: there is no CCI model that is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – there is rather a range of possible ways to devise such policies that have implications for the balance between public and private, the relationships between creator and audiences, the policy objectives and their implementation, and the balance between cultural participation and economic gains. In short, these decisions are about the kind of cultural sector should exist.
In spite of the salience of both empirical and normative questions regarding the ontological qualities of the CCIs across Africa (What are they? What should they be?), policy interest in CCIs is not novel. The early roots of the African uptake of the cultural industries lie in the Dakar Plan of Action (OAU and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1992) and the subsequent Nairobi Plan of Action (African Union, 2005), which were in turn inspired by earlier debates at UNESCO level (UNESCO, 1982a, 1982b). This was well before the rise of the ‘creative industries’ discourse that has emerged in Australia and the United Kingdom in the late 1990s. The policy discourse is thus not solely the result of African countries ‘doing a Florida thing’ (McGuigan, 2009) or importing the UK policies (O’Connor, 2005). Yet it was not until the adoption of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005) and the publication of the Creative Economy Reports (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and UNDP, 2008, 2010; UNESCO and UNDP, 2013) that this discourse has become central to public policy of countries across the continent (De Beukelaer, 2015). This uptake has occurred largely along two different spheres of influence. The UNESCO Convention (using ‘cultural industries’) has had a relatively greater influence and uptake in Francophone Africa, whereas the UNCTAD reports (using ‘creative economy/industries’) have had a stronger influence and visibility in Anglophone countries. Yet, the result of these different influences is practically the same: the CCIs are now central to many cultural policies and development plans throughout the continent. The question, however, remains what this concept precisely should mean in the context of the continent.
My argument here is that before we can ask what the CCIs should be in the context of African countries, we should ask what kinds of industries exist right now and have existed in the past rather than copying both policies and debates from the ‘West’. This is because the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural practices and expressions have long preceded the notion of the CCIs.
A global conceptual history?
It is important to point out that the ‘creative economy discourse’ comes in many different forms. This often leads to the conflation of several terms that do not mean the same thing. In this section, I aim to show that while this discourse is now global, its empirical foundations are not. The CCI debates largely remain confined to British, Australian, European, and (to some extent) American academic debates. Rather than providing an exhaustive overview of the literature, I merely aim to show that the conceptual debates (creative or cultural industries?) hardly incorporate the distinct uses of the terms across the world, in spite of some arguing to do so (such as Cunningham, 2009). The issue is only in part that the precise terms in use differ; the bigger issue is that there is hardly any non-Western empirical scholarship that engages with the ways the CCIs actually function around the world.
The ‘culture industry’ in the singular derives from the work of Marxist theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who coined the term in 1947 (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2008). In this context,
glittering novelty masked endless repetition and endless disappointment. As such the Culture Industry was a direct extension of the new industries of mass reproduction and distribution which had begun at the turn of the 19th century – film, sound recording, mass circulation dailies, popular prints and later, radio broadcasting. (O’Connor, 2011: 11)
It was only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that French communication scholars like Bernard Miège, François Mattelart, and Augustin Girard started using the term in the plural: les industries culturelles (or the cultural industries) became more central to both scholarship and policy (Girard, 1982; Miège, 1979; UNESCO, 1982a). The term retained a critical edge in that era, but the most important change was the increased empirical engagement with the sector (Hesmondhalgh, 2013), as the focus shifted from a conceptual critique to a more sector-oriented attempt to understand how these industries actually function (see, for example, Miège, 1987). In the 1990s, the discourse significantly shifted once more. British and Australian governments embraced a new version of the term: the creative industries (DCMS, 1998; Smith, 1998). This shift helped to broaden the scope of the sector to include a wider range of activities in order to ‘boost’ claims about the economic performance of the sector (Garnham, 2005). Suffice to say that the cultural and creative industries are not the same. But because these terms are used differently across the world, often along linguistic divides (‘industries culturelles’ in Francophone and ‘creative industries’ in Anglophone regions) – even though this is slowly changing as the Francophone debate is now translating and exploring the ‘creative’ discourse (Bouquillion, 2012), while the ‘cultural industries’ remain the term of choice for some Anglophone academics (Hesmondhalgh, 2013; Oakley and O’Connor, 2015).
This article does not discuss the divergent models that emanated from these debates in detail, because my argument is precisely that existing ‘African’ CCIs are unlikely to fit into any of these models. This is because much of the academic debates on the ‘creative economy’ have remained contained to a ‘Global North’ context, in which past and present socio-economic conditions are largely comparable. There has been some conceptual debates on the ‘translation’ and spread of these terms across the world (Cunningham, 2009; Wang, 2004), though this has not resonated much throughout Africa. There is surely some empirical engagement with the cultural sector across the continent (e.g. Collins, 2006; Daffé, 2013; Larkin, 2008; Perullo, 2011; Shipley, 2013; Spaas, 2012; Tade and Akinleye, 2012) but these approaches remain detached from the conceptual framework of the ‘creative economy debate’. Yet, while the empirical basis for most of the CCIs literature is geographically very narrow, these texts do influence most policy debates and texts around the world. This is an issue that cannot be overcome without conceptualizing CCIs across Africa.
African CCIs: ample policy engagement but little academic understanding?
The issue with the relative absence of African voices, particularly in the academic context, is twofold. First, academic debates and textbooks have developed without hardly any empirical engagement with cultural industries beyond the ‘Global North’ (see, for example, Hesmondhalgh, 2013) even if some works ostentatiously claim to focus on the ‘global creative industries’ (Flew, 2013). Second, among many stakeholders I interviewed throughout my research in Burkina Faso and Ghana, there is a widespread assumption that in order to develop ‘real’ cultural industries, they have to look like the discourse, which derives from practices in the ‘Global North’ (De Beukelaer, 2015).
This results in a paradox: while cultural practices across the continent do not serve as a basis to conceptualize and theorize the CCIs, the urge to buy into this discourse creates the necessity to turn to textbooks and ‘Western’ debates. Although the literature is not grounded in the realities of most African artists, managers, producers, organizers, publishers, and so on, the search for the model of the African cultural industries thus lies more in understanding the ways culture is currently practiced than in making this praxis fit existing taxonomies. And, while there is now a shift in policy debate toward the multitude of practices and models in the ‘creative economy’ (UNESCO and UNDP, 2013), such approaches remain stuck in providing a glossary of initiatives around the world, without much enquiry into their histories, ways of working, or challenges (De Beukelaer, 2014). The remainder of this article explores how existing practices could inform CCI models and policies in a grounded manner.
How can practice inform understanding?
In the remainder of my intervention, I make two related points based on my research in the Burkinabè and Ghanaian music industries. The first uses piracy to illustrate the tense ‘relationship between the word and the world’ (Appadurai, 1996: 51). The second is a conceptualization of that tension in relation to the historical debate on ‘culture and development’, where the focus on cultural expression (and thus cultural industries) has been limited as John Clammer (2012) argues.
Piracy: can the pirate speak?
The broad and varied praxis of media piracy forms a clear illustration of the challenge to the CCIs throughout much of Africa. The way this issue is constructed exemplifies the limited engagement with the actual workings of piracy in the debates and literature. This has only started to change recently, when the practices in African cultural industries have started to become part of the literature (Larkin, 2008; Lobato, 2010). More recently, Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz (2014b) have edited a very insightful volume on postcolonial piracy, by which they mean ‘any culture of the copy in print, analogue, or digital mediascapes across the global South’ (p. 5). They argue that ‘Western modernity and cultures of piracy are inextricably entwined, and … the global design of copyright regime based on specific notions of property, capitalism, [and] personhood has emerged from the local histories of such entanglements’ (Eckstein and Schwarz, 2014a: 7). This critique is important to understand both my discussion of piracy and my engagement with the ‘culture’ or CCIs below.
The decreasing returns from live music and the increased presence of illicit sales of bootlegged cassette tapes, contraband CDs, and MP3 files created a new challenge for the music industries in Burkina Faso and Ghana: piracy. This has become an increasingly pressing issue as the means for reproduction became cheaper as technology evolved. The spread of affordable smartphones made sharing music via Bluetooth and USB-sticks fast and easy. Throughout my research in Burkina Faso and Ghana, it became clear that most stakeholders rely on ‘textbook’ examples to construct their relation to piracy. In this approach, upholding copyright is always ‘good’, and piracy is always ‘bad’ which means that cracking down on pirates is a good thing, no matter what.
The point here is that the situation is more complicated. In Ghana, the copyright collection society, Ghana Music Rights Organization (GHAMRO), sent young adults and minors to jail for selling music from their laptop on streets and markets (Gankin, 2014; GhanaWeb, 2012), and, because in doing so, they infringe on copyright legislation. Yet, these young street vendors make up the strongest music distribution network in the country. They have a large catalog, operate in proximity to their customers, and provide a valued service. Instead of providing a way to legalize this practice, the authorities punish these entrepreneurs for their ignorance of the law. What is needed is a business model that makes it possible for artists and producers to earn a living from making music, not a war on piracy simply because it is seen as something inherently bad. So, the difficulty is to take a closer look at what is actually happening in the cultural industries across Africa in order to understand what works and what doesn’t, to make changes where needed, and to celebrate what works. While there are some attempts to move ‘legitimate’ music industries into the digital sphere (MUSIGA, 2013; Scratch Studios, 2014), these initiatives have not fully developed so far.
This is, however, not an issue exclusive to the digital age. In the 1980s, a Ghanaian alliance of ‘illegal’ street vendors initiated a scheme through which they paid a fair share in fees to the state copyright collection society (Copyright Society of Ghana (COSGA)), only to be dismantled because of pressure from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) (Collins, 2006). A potentially successful regularization of ‘piracy’ into the legitimate music distribution circuit stalled, with a lasting impact on music sales to date. Piracy cannot be eliminated by legislation alone, but can be controlled by incorporating their modus operandi in the mainstream circuit. The trade of pirates provides new ways of music consumption that are often innovative and popular with audiences, not solely because of lower prices. As a result, the history of music piracy shows that this advantage of pirates does not fade with legislation, but by incorporation of their practices in the legitimate circuit. This is true for song sheets in the early 19th century, as much as it is for tape recording and digital file sharing (see, for example, Kernfeld, 2011).
The point here is twofold. First, the dualistic opposition of legal and illegal practices in the CCIs does not reflect the fluid range of activities in cultural production, which cannot simply be captured in a legal category. This is in part because
the vast majority of the world’s population fails to access the flows of technology, media, goods and ideas according to the dominant logic of property set as a ‘modern’ standard. This standard, has a distinct local history; it basically evolved from British utilitarian legal models and German idealist notions of personal authorship. (Eckstein and Schwarz, 2014a: 1–2)
Second, in order to expose the practical and legal nuances in the CCIs, the full range of stakeholders in the sector should be able to have a say in policy and academic debates. They should not be spoken of, but simply spoken to; they should speak. This raises the question what kind of CCIs should be explored, and whose vision should count.
‘African’ CCIs: whose culture counts?
While technology is important to understand piracy, so is the role of people in this process. The success of Nollywood in Nigeria shows that strict copyright regulation is not a precondition for the development of thriving cultural industries (Lobato, 2010: 246). I am not saying this to argue that piracy is ‘good’, but it does illustrate that it is not simply ‘bad’ either. Yet, people working in Burkinabè and Ghanaian music industries have not really been able or willing to go along with the radical changes in consumption that have disrupted the ‘manageable chaos’ in the media industries (Sundaram, 2014: 38). These disruptions make clear that a change in approach is necessary, since audience habits have changed and music is now more linked to mobile phones than physical supports. But creating a strict distinction between ‘legality and illegality that divides pirates from others’ is not the way out of this conundrum, as it ‘renders almost impossible any serious understanding or engagement with the phenomenon of piracy’ (Sundaram, 2014: 59). The question then becomes, whose culture of CCIs should influence current debates? Should it be the neat and legal framework of CCIs as promoted by UNESCO, UNCTAD, the British Council, the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, and the likes? Or should it be the illegal practice of pirates that have helped create a context in which consumers buy but producers fail to earn from that? My argument is that the solution lies in neither: the former is a sterile notion of a broken industry system that is not worth copying (Diawara, 2013), while the latter is messy and unfair, and should not serve as an example either. The challenge is to look at variety of messy practices that exists in between.
The quest to understand existing often-messy practices across Africa does not mean that there is no room for innovation and change from abroad, although policy exchange (and transfer) should develop on equal footing: no country or policy is perfect. And in order to improve, there needs to be openness toward what others are trying. Yet, such exchange should also bear in mind why certain practices exist and persist, while others seem impossible to implement. In the case of the CCIs, this can be called the culture of cultural production.
When considering such a culture in a more general way, it is a key element of critical development thinking, where the role of culture is stressed as an important factor for successful attempts to generate change. In this context, culture is thus more a general ‘way of life’ than a form of ‘artistic expression’ as is common in the cultural industries. The first point here is that the ‘culture’ in cultural industries does not mean the same as the one in culture and development (De Beukelaer, 2015: 37–67). This ‘culture and development’ approach sees culture as the way societies are organized or the kind of normative framework used to see the future (Appadurai, 2013; Clammer, 2012; Schech and Haggis, 2000). This is the second point I want to make here: conceptualizing an ‘African’ take on CCIs means reconciling ‘developing cultural industries’ with ‘culture and development’.
The underlying problem with the shift from ‘culture and development’ to the ‘cultural and creative industries’ is that it largely ignores thinking about culture and development (De Beukelaer, 2015). This creates a tension between what Pratt (2014) calls ‘culture in development’ and ‘cultures of development’. There, precisely the cultural patterns that inform action are seen as keys to gradually, selectively, and partially alter practice in order to foster development that is in line with the cultural context. The approach heralded by the Festival sur le Niger (in Mali) is in fact a promising one that seemingly circumvents this pitfall. The integration of the Maaya principles in cultural entrepreneurship integrates culture into the development of Malian cultural industries (Daffé, 2013; Spaas, 2012). Unfortunately, this approach is a rare exception, both in terms of engagement and documentation. In Burkina Faso and Ghana, there seems to be a preoccupation with an orthodox notion of the CCIs. This makes it difficult to see that what exists are actually cultural industries, even if their form and organization differ somewhat from the models and taxonomies of the CCIs in the ‘Global North’.
Conclusion: what kinds of CCIs?
In closing, I want to stress that this article is more about asking questions than about giving answers. And in order to illustrate this, I would like to return to the question I mentioned at the outset of this piece. The seminar in Ségou, Mali, where I initially presented this argument was called ‘Which cultural industry for Africa?’ (‘Quelle industrie culturelle pour l’Afrique?’). This question is a pertinent one, but is also a bit misleading, as it suggests that ‘Africa’ could pick a model. Throughout this piece, I have tried to open up the debate but shifting the focus to the underlying question: ‘How can we make sure that the existing African cultural industries will form the basis for learning, reflection, and action across the continent?’ The discourse might be rather young, but the cultural industries as practice are certainly not.
So, the question I would like to end with is, ‘How can we share and conceptualize our joint knowledge about the cultural industries throughout Africa to build one or several models that help clarify how they actually work?’ The following two reasons highlight the need to reframe the debate. First, we need to listen to those who actually work in the (sometimes makeshift) cultural industries. This includes listening to pirates in order to hear what they have to say. Because, much like there are ample policies about CCIs, there is much talk about pirates. Yet they hardly get a chance to speak for themselves (as this otherwise excellent book illustrates: Eckstein and Schwarz, 2014b), even though postcolonial studies has prompted us to listen to those that remain outside of dominant social discourse (De Beukelaer, 2016). Second, beyond listening to those who actually do the work (and I merely refer to pirates to stress that many of them are not even seen as sufficiently legitimate to be part of such debates), it is crucial to conceptualize these practices to make sense of the CCIs that do in fact exist. This is where CCIs debates can learn from critical development studies. Thoroughly difficult challenges like formalizing, legalizing, expanding, and making fair the cultural industries throughout Africa do not have easy solutions. Yet focusing more on which ‘model’ to pick from elsewhere does suggest there is a simple thing we can do. Unless we ignore that these models derive from empirical engagement with the functioning of the CCIs (primarily in the United Kingdom), we cannot pretend that these models will neatly map onto the diverse realities across and within African countries. The journey toward an ‘African’ take on CCIs is a long but necessary struggle.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.