The Americans are at it again, this time seeking to rule the world with their weapons of mass distraction. Or so the French would have us believe.
Recently, Google, the American search-engine, announced that it will place 15-million (English) books from five leading libraries in the United States (University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and the Public Library of New York) and Britain (Oxford) on the Internet. In this way, said a Google spokesperson, ”the entire world has access to our collection”.
He forgot to say, ”And we will have access to the minds — and pockets — of the entire world.” He also forgot to qualify ”the entire world” as those who have Internet access, but then the Americans have always had a limited view of ”the world”, as attested to by the ”World Series” matches played among themselves.
In reaction, President Jacques Chirac of France announced that he will launch a ”counter-offensive” against this perceived American attempt at cultural domination by working with various governments to put the whole of European literature online.
A report in The Australian newspaper states: ”The realisation that the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were on the verge of a big breakthrough towards the dream of a universal library seriously rattled the cultural establishment in Paris, raising again the fear that the French language and ideas will one day be reduced to quaint regional peculiarity.” While conceding that the Google initiative would be of significant help to researchers and provide an opportunity for poorer nations to participate in global learning, the president of the French National Library, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, is quoted as saying, ”The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations conceive the world.”
Google estimates that the digitalisation will cost $7 per book. That would place the cost of putting 15-million books on the Internet at more than R630-million, about half of the entire budget of the Department of Arts and Culture. But this is not simply a philanthropic endeavour on the part of Google; it earns money from the project as soon as users click on a follow-on page. So, as with the digitalisation of movies and music, this is not simply a ”cultural project”, but a business initiative that has to do with developing new markets that cross national boundaries.
To place this battle for domination of the world’s cultural markets and for world hegemony of ideas and world views into some kind of perspective, a gala fund-raising dinner was held in Cape Town recently to raise funds for what was billed as the first major cultural project of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). That is, to build a library in which to house 13th-century manuscripts discovered in Timbuktu in Mali. These manuscripts provide evidence of reading and writing in Africa at very high levels of sophistication, hundreds of years before the advent of colonialism, so the symbolic importance of this initiative is obviously high. But in order to provide a place of safekeeping for these manuscripts in Mali, funds have to be raised from the private sector in South Africa, thereby throwing into sharp relief the relationship between global or regional cultural influence and access to resources.
Google can invest more than $100-million to digitalise the books of five major libraries, while a highly significant African cultural library has to raise less than $1-million from business to get it off the ground.
The structure and patterns of world trade, the inexorable need for corporations to find new markets, the ownership of media and cultural conglomerates in the north and their global reach, and the advancement of technology all mean that the values, the world views, the ideas and the interests of those who have resources will come to dominate increasingly. Where there are alternative values, ways of understanding and viewing the world, alternative systems of thought and patterns of human behaviour in relation to each other and their environment, there simply are not the resources to project these into the global terrain, where they may compete with those of the resourced.
But, before we complain too much or feel too resentful, let’s reflect on the resentment that others may feel towards us for the similar role that we are increasingly playing in Africa.