Culture and development

Aug 26, 2008 Editorial

Whatever the naysayers may have prognosticated, the Government of Guyana must be commended for hosting Carifesta X very credibly.

There are those who may quibble, for instance, about the quality of the production of the opening ceremony and complain that it just did not measure up to the standards of the Beijing Olympics’ opening that had been broadcast only a few days before. And in that comparison lays the subject of this editorial.

The prize guest of Carifesta X, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott on Sunday denounced what he claimed was the present stress of Caribbean governments on “development” which was bereft of a “cultural component”. Specifically he proposed that this cultural component, ought to be a conditionality on foreign investors before they are allowed into the region.

They should plunk down their money to fund “museums and theatre scholarships” rather than what evidently occurs in the present. “We are selling our land like whores to foreign investors, and the prostitution is a thing called development,” the great man thundered.

It was rather pathetic but here in a nutshell was the philosophy that has undergirded our thinking in the Caribbean guaranteeing, in the words of Mr Walcott’s bete noir VS Naipaul, that we “produced nothing”.

Mr Walcott is the product of a pre-war education system promulgated by the British in the Caribbean and its other colonies, designed to produce crippled “scholars” who could recite the complete works of Shakespeare and Virgil etc. but who could not organise the production of any of the minerals or crops that their lands were abundantly blessed with.

The products of these elitist institutions were taught to snicker at the efforts of their fellow countrymen who may not have been able to match their facility with words but who could manage quite well, the affairs of business and trade.

So as a region we ended up with a surfeit of those who could produce “high art” – writers, painters, historians etc – that, ironically, could be thrown at Naipaul’s face to prove that we have indeed produced “something”.

The further irony is that Mr Walcott is actually calling for a widening of the concept of “developmentalism” that has received trenchant criticism elsewhere, to now include “high art” and presumably, high artists.
Ivan Illich has traced the contemporary idea of development to a speech President Harry S.

Truman made in 1945. Till then, the word ‘development’ had had other associations, which had very little connection with what we understand by development today.

But such was the latent social need for a concept akin to development that, once Truman gave it a new meaning, not only did it quickly acquire wide currency, it was also retrospectively applied to the history of social change in Europe during the previous three hundred odd years.

Government now undertook to become involved with a plethora of activities that were intended to satisfy the basic needs of its citizenry and then some.

Some governments, under the ideology of socialism/communism, extended the role of the state to actually become the institution that would actually produce all the necessary goods. And these goods included “cultural” goods and personnel.

That experiment, which we experienced in Guyana, collapsed ignominiously worldwide, and the role of Government is now seen as a “facilitator” for other institutions that can satisfy the needs of the people.

It was discovered that without the development of the “material base” to satisfy the basic needs of the people, the cultural edifice, was so much fluff. The hungry peasant may be tempted to eat the Faberge Egg.

China, a holdout on the communist ideology, has accepted that it has to attract foreign investment by offering incentives, and when those firms are successful the taxes they pay can then fund cultural institutions. And they can have world-class openings.

Education is seen as one of the basic needs of modern governments and the culture of the people and elsewhere has become part and parcel of the educational curriculum. This government is spending a higher proportion on education than on many other countries.

From its limited taxes it funds an African and Amerindian Museum and several other cultural institutions. It does not need to be lectured on how to kill the goose that could deliver the golden egg of overall development by seeking to foist on foreign investors, the role of supporting “high culture”.