We cannot allow others to tell our story

By Hafsa Obeng / Dorphina Ansah

Accra, Aug. 01, GNA – Dr Joseph Silver, Managing Partner of Silver and Associates, has charged African story tellers to help tell unfiltered stories of Africa’s creative genius through the creative arts.

That, he said, would display and teach the uniqueness of the African people.

Dr Silver said at the third international conference on African arts organised by the Pan African Heritage World Museum in partnership with the African University College of Communications (AUCC) in Accra.

The three-day conference was on the theme: “Global Africa: (re)narrating our stories with our creative arts”.

He said Africans had mostly been misrepresented hence the need to have the world unlearn what it had been taught about the African and learn the correct history and the contributions of the African people to global peace and development.

He said the goal of the third and the previous two conferences was the building of the Pan African Heritage Museum.

“Let us unleash the power of knowledge through the museum that we have, a lead that tells the contributions of the African throughout the African Continent in the diaspora, to show the visible expertise of the Africans from a standpoint as well as a contemporary one,” he said.

Professor Kofi Anyidoho, an African novelist and poet, at the conference, presented three narratives of the enslavement of the African People.

A narrative that links the diaspora to continental Africa with three texts that demonstrate the many ways, which brutal historic experiences may be redeemed by the transforming power of migration.

The first text is a two-part video by Paul Medley, which was originally recorded in 1999 in Accra. The second is a novel titled “call me by my rightful name” by Osidore Opkewho, a Nigerian. The third is a narrative of history of the Atlantic Slave Trade from the Sahel regions of West Africa through the port across the turbulent of the Atlantic.

“Central to all these three narratives is a significant role a creative imagination can explain in documenting experiences of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” he said.

The conference also showed a documentary by Professor Sheila S Walker, a Cultural Anthropologist, Filmmaker, and a Writer, which throws more light on African descendants living across the world.

In the documentary, she said more than 200 million African descendants now lived in the Americas.

It has representations of African Culture; Music and dance and rhythm, their technology, and games.

A mathematical game called “wari”, also known as “owari” in Ghana, was seen in the documentary.

It also showed how Afro-Brazilians portrayed a pageantry of a royal court of Kings and Queens of Congo.

The documentary told stories of how the people were quite aware of their origin and how proudly they embraced it where others had no knowledge of who they were.

The Pan African Heritage Museum is a new museum under construction located at Pomadze in Winneba, Ghana. It aims to communicate the true and authentic history, arts, culture, and ideal story of Africa using African voices, tools and culture.

GNA

Related