It was 110 years ago that the roots were planted for a truly pan-African political and cultural movement and today we are still nourished by the fruit from that tree planted more than a century ago.
It was in 1900 that the first Pan-African Congress, spearheaded by the great and legendary WEB du Bois and Sylvester Williams, was held in London.
This important event sought to bring Africans together — those who resided on the African continent and those in the African diaspora — to seek unity and to fight collectively for the rights of Africans on the continent and all over the world.
This meeting discussed the African condition and was graced by intellectuals and luminaries from around the African world.
Three years later, in the preamble to his important book, The Soul of Black Folk, Du Bois declared: “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line.”
In this book he explored the achievements of Africans, their spiritual strivings, their sorrows and their struggle for emancipation. This was a milestone in African thinking and creativity.
A decade or so later the Garveyist Movement sprang into action with its rallying call: “Africa Is for Africans.” Later on, movements such as Ethiopianism would also emerge along the way.
Every decade that passed in the 20th century had its important milestone that took the quest for African unity further and took the world further in the struggle against racism and apartheid. It was the youth uprising in June 1976 that helped to propel the struggle until, in 1994, we in South Africa also became the proud possessors of our own freedom.
Through the help of our brothers and sisters on the continent and in the anti-apartheid movement in the world, we achieved our freedom, established a democracy and adopted a new Constitution founded on the principles of nonracism and nonsexism.
It was here on South African soil that the new African Union had its founding meeting. We also chose to host the Pan-African Parliament, an important institution of democracy on the African continent.
Last month, on May 25, we commemorated the 43rd anniversary of the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) when African leaders and representatives from organisations gathered in Addis Ababa — as the great Kwame Nkrumah said, “for the sake of Africa’s greater glory and infinite wellbeing”.
All of these milestones and important dates in our history are also significant because they were not simply the products of their times, but were also part of far-reaching cultural thinking that sought to centre Africa in the imagination of Africans.
Where would we be today without the Harlem Renaissance or the Negritude Movement? Where would we be today without the notion of an African culture, an African identity, an African personality and a people’s culture? Where would we be without Frantz Fanon or Sekou Toure? Where would our self-understanding of what it means to be a woman on the African continent be without Buchi Emecheta, Nadine Gordimer, Ama Ata Aidoo or Tsitsi Dangarengba? In more recent times, where would we be without Nelson Mandela?
I think that all these movements and ways of thinking and being have had a profound impact on us even in the present and, as we in Africa confront a rapidly changing world so we, too, reflect and assert ourselves through our creativity. We continue to imagine and shape the African cultural landscape with our songs, our poetry, our fine art, our literature, our films, our multimedia, our design and our craft.
African artists are at the forefront of an intellectual movement that asserts a new Africa — through bold individual acts of creativity, collective changes in mind-set and through cross-pollination we are taking firm steps into the second decade of the 21st century.
This exhibition, PACE2010, points out the new directions African crafters are moving towards and, in this way, creating pieces that speak to today’s world — the work is not replicated in the old curio mould of yesteryear, but rather seeks to present a new vision for the continent.
The curators sought out each of these new craft pieces, which have a distinct international flavour as the crafters concentrate more on shape, texture and design.
These pieces are therefore appropriately featured in a futuristic series of white pods as the curators heighten their contemporary value and challenge viewers about their vision of Africa.
The key is to be inventive and to look at the world with new eyes as, indeed, through our handiwork we add to the beauty and the functionality of that world. This cutting-edge African craft exhibition serves to position Africa in its rightful place on the global design stage.
This African craft exhibition is as much about forms and shapes as it is about the ideas and meanings contained in these forms and shapes. It is as much about history as it is about the contemporary world. In the making of new forms, new ideas emerge that resonate with a wider world.
In this way form and content continue to work together to make meaning on the African continent and to offer us directions and open new pathways about how we should lead our lives. In this way the new roads that emerge should ensure that the problems of the 20th century shall no longer be the problems of the 21st century.
Through this exhibition we witness the emergence of a truly vibrant pan-African voice that is being seen, felt and heard on the design stages of the world.