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E-book Cultural Policy for Arts Education : African-European Practises and Perspectives
With this programme, the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster aims to make a lasting impact on Arts Education in Africa by creating a vibrant forum for exchange between Africa’s cultural scholars and practitioners and by producing research that is specifically targeted at Africa- based practitioners and policy makers.D. M.:The idea to decolonize art education seems to me to be overly ambitious, especially in Uganda where one of the local languages, Luganda, was used as a tool of colonialism. Don’t you think this is a futile agenda?E. W. W.: I agree that it is ambitious to attempt to decolonize artistic education. But the scale of the challenge does not mean that it is not worth the attempt. Far from it: colonial power relations, and, in particular, the subordinate mentality that it, as a system, sought to instil in Africans, continues to impact decisively on relations of power, and on concepts of knowledge and value in ways that are perilously and generationally debilitating for far too many people on this continent.A clear example of this is the extent to which European languages (admittedly for a complex range of reasons) continue to be widely used as what I once heard the Ghanaian academic Ato Quayson call the ‘languages of power’ in post- inde-pendence Africa. Indigenous African languages are regularly marginalized in law, in government, in journalism and in the education system within the very regions in which they originate. They are too rarely taken seriously by those with power as tools for serious discussion and debate. So- called “intelligent” people converse in the languages of former colonizers.
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