OjuOponIfa

ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN PROMOTION OF CULTURE AND TOURISM June 07, 2010 "...the crucial job of information management of our various cultural and tourism agencies will no longer be left in the hands of non-professional, untrained, over red-taped or overcooked civil servants who have no clue what the role of the media is in the promotion, packaging, and presentation of aspects of our cultural and tourism products and ideas to the larger public -- local and international." (Being a paper presented by Jahman Anikulapo at a Workshop on Review of Parastatals under Ministry of Culture and Tourism) I LIKE to open with two preambles: both of which will suggest where my conclusion is headed. I would be a fraud to pretend that anything I say here before the gathering is NEW. In fact, I should be sanctioned if I or any other person make such a claim. There is nothing I am going to say today that had not been said in the past about how best to engage the media as an instrument of articulati...

Culled from The Cultural Weapon Should artists accept “dirty money”? Mike van Graan A number of things strike one on entering Bamako, the capital of Mali. The first is the majestic Niger River responsible for much of the green in an otherwise dusty, gravelly, semi-desert city. Another is the industriousness of the people in an obviously poor country, as everyone is trying to generate even a meagre income selling mangoes, chickens and home-made furniture, or Chinese-manufactured T-shirts, electricity adapters and slip slops. Then there are some incongruously tall buildings and hotels, a number of the latter bearing the name “Libya Hotels”. One garish building is named after the Libyan dictator, Gaddafi, who has funded this – still empty - structure to house the Malian cabinet. There are two bridges across the Niger with a third being built by the Chinese. As one walks through the market, there are hand-made posters in defence of Gaddafi, and in conversation with some of the locals, it i...

Perhaps, it was that short conversation last week between Biyi Bandele and myself in the thick of the First Lagos International Jazz Festival that has brought me to this conundrum. Otherwise, why would I all of a sudden be filled with the thought of the late Hubert Adedeji Ogunde, 18 years after his passage to higher service on April 4, 1990. Last Sunday after a soak in the classic jazz menu flowing from the guitar-riddled jazz ensemble led by Bright Gain, I had strolled over to the corner where Makin Soyinka, Lemmy ‘Radio’, Jide Bello and Biyi Bandele were reveling. I hadn’t noticed Biyi minutes earlier when I saw the group trooped to the venue of the Inspiro-organised jazz fiesta at Studio 868 on Aboyade Cole Street, VI, Lagos. It must have been the missing dreadlocks, of course. Okay, I had been hinted earlier on Mama Pako’s blogsite that Biyi had indeed jettisoned the locks for a skin-scraped look – in protestation against certain iniquities in world affairs… it must be the tibeti...

That the dancer may be fulfilled *Being a talk delivered by Jahman Anikulapo at the World Dance Day 2005 on the theme Dance: A Hobby or Profession, organised by the Guild of Nigerian Dancers, GOND INTRODUCTION: Documentation I SHOULD like to begin this talk by paying tribute to our senior colleagues in the various disciplines of the arts, who have devoted aspects of their career to documentation of our artistic and cultural productions and experiences. This for me is as important as the performance or production of the creative work itself. Without their work we will be like a ship without an anchor. We will know neither where we are coming from nor where we should head. Documentation is one vital venture in our profession, which we artists have neglected; and this has affected the quality of our production as well as discourse on our artistic and cultural experiences. The Nigerian artists, no doubt, have been very productive, perhaps sometimes hyper-productive. But we have not sp...