Africa – the passionate continent

What an inspiring four days. Firstly Nairobi is an amazingly fertile, green and lush place – at times I felt like I was travelling in a dense forest and the big five would emerge before me (so sorry to be playing to stereotypes...). It’s also the wet season and a couple of times the heavens opened up – filling up the very large potholes in the roads (Gautengers should NOT complain!) – and slowing the traffic down to an a-l-m-o-s-t v-i-r-t-u-a-l s-t-a-n-d-s-t-i-l-l. It took me 2 hours to get through 30 km from the airport to my hotel mid Saturday afternoon. Now that’s a traffic jam!

From a purely anecdotal point of view it seems to me that Nairobi is booming. Large numbers of cars on the road aside, the last time I was there (in 2004 to climb Mt Kenya – yes I did!) I don’t recall the huge corporate buildings lining the ‘highway’ from the airport... or the sprawling shopping centres and very lavish restaurants we visited.

Coincidentally, while I was having my own epiphany, the 3 December cover page story of The Economist headlined: “The hopeful continent: Africa Rising” describes how “over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan ... allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia.”

Growth drivers are said to be political stability, demands of the resource hungry economies of China and India (“the rate of foreign investment has soared around tenfold in the past decade”); and the spread of technology – an estimated 600million Africans will have cell phones by next year – 10% of these will have smart phones (in South Africa estimates are that by 2016, 80% of cell phone users will be using smart phones – currently only 16%). And of course a rapidly expanding middle class – the fastest growing around the world: “... according to Standard Bank, around 60m Africans have an income of $3,000 a year, and 100m will in 2015”.

This doesn’t mean there still aren’t challenges on the continent. Is the growth linked to jobs; increased incomes; better quality of life; access to housing, basic services, decent health care and education...? But at least the narrative is shifting.

... so much for context... back to the conference where the balance of numbers changes quite dramatically.

UNCTAD’s 2008 Creative Economy report, and an update in 2010, describes how trade in creative goods is growing faster than other areas of country economies. Between 2002-2008 world exports grew by an average of 14% and despite global economic turmoil, indications are that the sector continues to grow. The main traders are to be expected: Italy, France, Germany, USA, Japan, Canada and China. Africa, unfortunately is a microscopic blip in this picture. One of the reasons might be that we are so bad at capturing data that our contribution is not adequately quantified. The other, and probably more likely, is that we are just not competing effectively enough because of systemic problems and historical factors.

So in this light, the Conference was necessary and historic - probably the first conversation in Africa, by Africans, about a Pan-African creative economy.

About 45 of the 52 countries on the continent were there. At some stage I started making a list of all the people I was meeting: Botswana, Cameroon, Cape Verdes, Chad, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Niger, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zimbabwe…

These countries, previously just names on a map or in news stories about rigged elections, war, famine, corruption and revolution, started to take on human form as a person emerged to talk about what they were doing. Artists, administrators, thinkers, dreamers, doers... absolutely passionate about the arts; totally committed to creating opportunities for artists to manifest their talent. Certain in the belief in the transformative power of the arts to influence and shape the nature and quality of our lives and those of our fellow citizens.

Of course there was a lot to discuss and debate. And just because we live on the same continent it does not mean there is consensus, coherence – or even that there should be. But more about that next year… In the meantime, have happy, peaceful and love-filled holidays and we’ll continue this conversation in the February 2012 newsletter.