Hanging on the wall of the Sport Against Racism Ireland office is a BBC poster with images of African icons from the world of arts, sport and politics. For a while I used to get a great kick out of quizzing our young African visitors on the personalities until I realised that many of them could not identify the portraits.
Hanging on the wall of the Sport Against Racism Ireland office is a BBC poster with images of African icons from the world of arts, sport and politics. For a while I used to get a great kick out of quizzing our young African visitors on the personalities until I realised that many of them could not identify the portraits.
There was one exception, and that was Nelson Mandela, but to my surprise young Congolese did not recognise their first prime minister Patrice Lumumba, while the Nigerians were clueless when it came to the image of late writer Chinua Achebe.
Working on Count Us In, Sari’s education through programme in schools in Ireland, it was obvious to our tutors that the process of assimilation was leaving cultural integration at the back of the class, and that often the only references to Africa were on the side of the Trócaire box.
Even subjects like visual arts and music where one might expect a flavour of Africa to reach the surface were devoid of any reference to the continent. The curriculum in teacher training colleges, it seems, does not make the connection between Picasso’s development of Cubism and the Yoruba mask, nor any tie-in made with the origins of jazz, blues and salsa.
Even in the world of science, the achievements of Nigerian computer scientist Philip Emeagwali in the development of the supercomputer along with the work of African-American medical doctor Prof Ben Carson, who pioneered conjoined twin surgery in South Africa, have been totally ignored.
So what to do? Firstly, the Government could sign the Unesco Charter on Intangible Cultural Heritage and weave African studies into all subjects on offer at junior and senior levels, along with replacing the old imperial maps of the world with true projection maps. Human rights and race education must also be programmed straight away.
And lastly, as a companion to Dublin City Libraries’ One City, One Book project, I suggest that a novel by an African writer be chosen. I would like to kick this off by suggesting Chinua Achebe’s groundbreaking 1958 novel Things Fall Apart.
Ken Mc Cue is a cultural planner at the international office of Sport Against Racism Ireland (Sari). He is the co-founder (along with his wife Mutale Kampuni) of Insaka, the All-African diaspora youth organisation.
