Professor Emeritus J.H. Kwabena Nketia of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (UG) has said Ghana cannot maintain its identity as a people and a nation, if the country continues to abandon its indigenous cultural heritage.
He said the country had neglected its cultural heritage over the years to copy an entirely “borrowed heritage” from elsewhere.
Prof. Nketia was speaking on the theme: “Our Creative Heritage” at a lecture series organised by the African University College of Communications in Accra.
He said the government, as the custodian of the nation, should make culture a political priority “as Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah did at Independence”.
“The subsequent cultural policies and programmes that issued from it and processes of recontextualisation of traditional culture in contemporary contexts have gone very far, and now call for deeper knowledge and intellectual understanding of our creative heritage and its complex of values, as well as the selection of innovative applications in such contexts that do not compromise our Ghanaian identity,” he said.
He said making cultural heritage a national priority would help to stimulate interest in the critical study and practical application of the techniques and processes that shaped style and modes of expression.
Prof. Nketia is the longest serving director of the Institute of African Studies, UG and a former Director of the world renowned International Centre for African Music and Dance (ICAMD).
He has also served as a Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh and has lectured in many top universities in Europe, Asia, the United States and Africa.
Prof. Nketia said: “While I appreciate the importance of the programmatic implications of this, I am anxious that we should not land ourselves in a situation of over-using some aspects of our accumulated heritage without continually bringing new ideas and materials to it through creativity that explores their potential, as well as contemporary challenges.
It is only then that we can periodically move from the centre stage what has become stale or irrelevant through over-use and perhaps store it for a new generation that will find it exciting,” he said.
Prof. Nketia noted that the history, tradition and qualities that a country or society had had for many years were considered as important part of its character.
“That is why not so long ago UNESCO set up an international committee on which some of us were privileged to serve, to define the nature and potential of the world’s intangible cultural heritage and to set up a proposal and scheme for the visual and literary documentation of such intangible cultural heritage around the world, paying particular attention to those in danger of disappearing because of the ongoing technological and social changes taking place in many parts of the world”.
Prof. Nketia expressed the belief that the creation of cultural centres in the communities would give the youth and upcoming generation access to the indigenous cultural heritage of the country.
He said the youth must also be encouraged to be creative, since creativity played a role in preserving the cultural heritage of the country.
“There is the possibility of creating or promoting intercultural and cross-cultural creativity that builds bridges not only between the past and the present, indigenous and foreign forms but also of Pan African sources of Indigenous Heritage.
Until the post-colonial awakening became entrenched, this approach received scant attention from those trained primarily in the Western tradition,” Prof. Nketia said.
Prof. J.H. Kwabena Nketia is one of the most published and best known authority on African Music and Aesthetics.
He said the country had not fully recovered from the impact of missionary and colonial intervention, which devalued traditional arts and their modes of expression.
“What is of greater concern to me is not this modern concept of preservation in museums or promotion outside the particular contexts that sustain such heritage in daily or community life but ways of ensuring that the nexus between creative legacy and the social process that in the past ensured continuity is maintained by mechanisms that recontextualise the learning process so that acquisition of cultural knowledge is not confined to the institutional mechanisms of the past but extended to form a component of contemporary institutional arrangements”.
He, therefore, called on concerned authorities to ensure continuity and performance in appropriate contexts and to institutionalise the transmission process so that all children could acquire this legacy at appropriate stages in their educational career.
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