(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)
Heritage Day is upon us again. How do creativity and innovation fit into the picture? For most people, they don’t.
Most people who care about heritage define it as a form of cultural defence that brings the past to the present without changing it. For these traditionalists, the differences between cultures are what make them distinct and therefore valuable.
And so the purpose of heritage is to keep cultures separate to preserve them. Which makes innovation in heritage an oxymoron.
This newspaper ran an opinion piece two years ago that defined heritage as this sort of collection of artefacts to “be preserved for the benefit of future generations”. It also pointed out that “general interest in heritage is at an all-time low”.
Could there be a connection between our inflexible attitude toward culture and this falling interest?
Last week, I ran into a colleague. He was wearing a multicoloured bead pin on his lapel he said represented his commitment to Heritage Month. But when I asked him what the commitment was — what he was doing to commemorate his heritage — it turned out the pin was it. Celebrating the importance of heritage as a concept had replaced the importance of his actual heritage.
People want to spend time on things that help us navigate our lives. We value effectiveness and relevance. As such, whatever we say about how important heritage is, we don’t appreciate it when it gets in the way of what we want to get done. We might integrate a few core beliefs or a bracelet into our daily routine. But when heritage is about repeating what our grandfathers did, exactly as they taught it, most of us smile and wave and just pretend it matters.
We know that honouring our ancestors requires more than a costumed dinner party some of us call “Braai Day” but that’s the best we can come up with.
Heritage does not have to stay frozen in time to be secure. Afro-futurism innovates traditional culture in ways that can empower heritage. It embraces heritage as a living, adaptive building block for creating original stories and new forms.
In the movie Wakanda, for example, traditional African values form the basis of the world’s most advanced society. That’s Hollywood but there are real-life examples.
Credo Mutwa was devoted to revealing hidden African history and using it as the basis for his own art, including works of science fiction, and even incorporating evidence of aliens. His approach to traditional culture was, to put it mildly, unique.
Creativity requires recombination, putting old things together in new ways. Everything new is an adaptation.
Often the easiest way to get a creative breakthrough is to add a random object to your situation to trigger more open thinking. For example, if you can’t figure out the next step in your business negotiation, how would an elephant in a bathtub help? This is a real image I have used to stimulate more open thinking from clients, and it works like a charm.
Yet we often act like the tiniest change in heritage is dangerous. Many people adapt heritage in small ways, like putting on sangoma beads with sweatpants, but often it is hidden, because people are afraid to innovate heritage.
That is the privilege of cultural authorities, who get that authority from keeping heritage as it’s been. As a result, we leave innovation in heritage to happen by accident.
Accident does work from time to time but it’s the least effective and efficient way to innovate. Innovation works best when it’s intentional, directed to solving a specific problem. It’s not so effective when the problem is just “it needs an update”. To innovate culture powerfully, we need to know why we want to innovate it.
So here’s one good reason: artificial intelligence (AI). Part of the mission of generative AI is to integrate all knowledge into a system that allows it to make decisions and express them. As long as we keep heritage stuck and don’t provide examples of how to develop and reuse it, it becomes more and more a museum exhibit — data that cannot be used for anything.
I asked ChatGPT what it thought of this: “Chat, how might we celebrate South African heritage using creativity? Answer in South African languages.” The reply was: “Anega puo, gqoka iziqhaza, apaya mogodu [tell stories, wear beads, cook intestines].”
I objected: “Music, dance, fashion, food are not what I mean by creativity. I mean thinking new thoughts. Being flexible with African heritage. ChatGPT, how might we do this?”
ChatGPT began by qualifying: “I am only a generative learning model and cannot say definitively what is possible.” But then it said this: “In traditional societies there is often a strong emphasis on preserving cultural heritage exactly as it is. This is driven by a sense of vulnerability to globalisation or assimilation or defending against cultural bias.”
“Good point Chat,” I agreed. “We have to defend against your cultural bias. African history is harder to access for you.”
Chat replied: “This is accurate. Most of the data that feeds into large-scale machine learning models like mine originates from developed economies. If the data used for my training contains racial biases, those biases will be reflected in my outputs.”
I asked:“So why are you biased?”
Chat listed specific factors: underrepresentation of African content on the internet; lower penetration of internet into developing economies; developing economies tend toward oral rather than written history; and a tendency for traditional societies to fear adapting their heritage.
There it was again at the bottom of the list: fear of change. The enemy of creativity.
When I asked Chat how to celebrate “Western” heritage, it told a different story. It recommended celebrations such as 4 July and Bastille Day and offered contemporary ethnic accomplishments I could commemorate.
In other words, the cultures that control the information fuelling artificial intelligence have positioned their own heritage as living and vibrant.
We in developing economies are following practices that threaten to make ours irrelevant even to machines.
The concept of a rainbow nation may not help. In a rainbow, colours remain separate but equal. Our national seal says it better: !ke e: /xarra //ke — diverse people unite.
This doesn’t mean we should homogenise our heritage. I’m not suggesting we make everything the same. Quite the opposite.
Fifteen years ago, a couple of partners and I launched a show called Jam Sandwich on SABC. Each episode brought together two musical artists from different cultural backgrounds to create a new song together. The show was wildly popular — we won four South African TV and Film awards in our four seasons.
More importantly, in 80-plus instalments, we never once had a failure in synthesising divergent cultures. Mixing, say, deep rural maskanda with Afrikaans pop in just two days unlocked explosive synergies. The viewers loved the new cultures that remixing heritage created. And some of the artists continued to collaborate long after the broadcast.
Keeping heritage static is as likely to make it disappear as assimilation is. The more we try to keep heritage frozen in time, the less it will contribute to the global reality.
Everything needs attention and care as it ages. If we don’t look for ways to make our heritage active, the AI machines will probably recombine it for us — but randomly, not based on human needs or productive creativity.
Innovating heritage means creating options and finding ways to maximise its importance to each individual.
The quality of our solutions depends on the quality of our questions. So we need to start asking better questions about our heritage than “How do we preserve it?” Let’s start with: How can we apply our past in new ways? How can we adapt our traditions to improve our lives today? Why are we wearing colourful pins?
Michael Lee is a creativity expert, an advisory board member of World Creativity and Innovation Week/Day, and Radio 702 creativity contributor.