In 1987, during a lecture tour in black Africa, I was arrested in one country and brought before the ministry of youth, sports, culture and scientific research, which considered my speech on African culture suspicious. At the end of a prolonged interrogation, a white man walked into the office. He spoke out on my behalf. The minister immediately changed his tone. After a few phone calls, he opened doors for me to all the media while the most beautiful conference hall in the city, the place used by the country s sole political party, was placed at my disposal.
Similar things happen every day in our countries.
This inferiority complex can also be seen in the relationship with traditional dance. Sometimes, African artists who have acquired a veneer of training in Western dance hurriedly denigrate their roots. Likewise, instead of developing their own analyses, African intellectuals just repeat everything that some foreign pseudo-specialists say and write about their culture. The problem is that the discourse of these specialists often locks African dance in a ghetto and denies the continent the right to evolve and modernize. They see Africa as a living museum of past traditions.