Africa

🇪🇹 Ethiopians have flocked to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Kuwait in search of blue-collar jobs since the 1980s. The work was usually arranged by Ethiopian recruitment agencies or human traffickers. But for Al Jazeera, Zecharias Zelalem reports that the Ethiopian government is now overseeing the process and plans to send up to half a million women to Saudi Arabia to fill domestic worker roles. Human rights experts have raised concerns about the mass recruitment drive due to Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record. “Ethiopian authorities.... shouldn’t be pushing women into migrating with false guarantees of protection,” said one.

🇳🇬 An update to Nigeria’s copyright laws should protect investors in the country’s prolific Nollywood industry but will only be effective if it’s properly implemented, argues Professor Samuel Samiai Andrews in The Conversation. Online film piracy becomes a criminal and civil offense under the changes. The new legislation, which now requires creators to register work they have created, also provides ways to resolve disputes over ownership of online content without necessarily going to court. However, Andrews strikes a note of caution: “If the new law is to benefit Nollywood and other digital industries, government institutions and policies will need revamping.”

🇿🇼 Since before independence, Zimbabwe has had a long tradition of pop music as protest music. At times it was referred to as chimurenga music or the music of resistance. Legendary artist Thomas Mapfumo had his song “Hokoyo” banned under British rule for its indirect lyrical reference in support of fighters opposed to the colonial administration. Zimbabwe’s independence day celebrations, 43 years ago this week, were marked by an iconic Bob Marley performance. But, as Mwai Daka writes for African Arguments, some of today’s artists are under pressure to toe the line and avoid controversial lyrics which might suggest dissent. This has been the case with an artist called Winky D whose shows have been shut down over performances of his hit song ‘Ibotso’, which refers to state-sanctioned corruption in the country.

The bumpy road to Africa’s returned artifacts attracting tourism investment

THE SCENE

BENIN CITY, Nigeria — One of the most recognizable landmarks when flying into the ancient city of Benin in Nigeria, home of the prestigious Benin bronzes, is the red cylindrical National Museum. On a recent visit on a Saturday, the museum was unexpectedly quiet, with just two visitors during the two hours I was there.

It was the first visit for both of them, one a Benin City resident, and they had been hoping to see Benin artifacts that had been returned to Nigeria. The museum’s curator, Mark Olaitan, said the returned items “haven’t been mounted or exhibited yet.”

The museum’s visitor numbers have risen slowly since the end of restrictions on movement imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Olaitan predicted confidently that the museum would soon be overwhelmed by the volume of visitors when exhibitions featuring the returned items are fully opened to the public.

KNOW MORE

The majority of African artifacts in museums are held outside Africa, with more than half a million in European institutions alone. Over 4,000 objects looted from Benin City by British soldiers in 1897 (pictured below)  — commonly referred to as the Benin Bronzes — are among the most notable of these artifacts. They have been at the forefront of campaigns calling for the restitution of African artifacts.

Museums and universities in Europe and America last year began returning looted Benin artifacts in their collections to Nigeria, nearly a century after traditional ruler Oba Akenzua II  championed the demand for restitution in 1935.

Last year the governments and intuitions of the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany transferred the “ownership” of about 121 Benin artifacts to Nigeria. The transfers often involve agreements whereby some of these objects remain in these foreign museums on loan. Olaitan said agreements signed by Nigeria with other countries include “capacity building, staff training, [and] exchange programs” that would help improve Nigerian museums.

The global campaign for the return of the bronzes has attracted investment to Edo state to build a cultural district in Benin City. The investment includes the building of the Edo Royal Museum, the Edo Museum of West African Arts (EMOWAA) with the EMOWAA Pavilion (research and educational facility), and Benin City Mall amongst other features. Olaitan is optimistic that the construction of these buildings as well as the staffing of these institutions will create job opportunities and attract visitors to the state, particularly leisure tourists.

UWAGBALE’S VIEW

The return of artifacts like these is an opportunity for African countries to reap huge economic benefits. Governments can boost revenues through museum attendance as well as through money spent by visitors, from hotel accommodation to restaurants and souvenir shops. A multi-layered domestic and international tourism industry also creates jobs.

The United Kingdom has shown the economic benefits of displaying cultural artifacts — many of which were plundered from Africa. In just three months between April and June 2022, some 8.3 million people visited the country’s 15 government-sponsored museums and galleries including the British Museum, which has the single largest collection of Benin bronzes in the world. Those visitor numbers are still down from between 11 million to 14 million each year before the pandemic. These museums and galleries contributed £73 million ($88 million) to the British economy in June 2022.

The Edo state government is working on ways to replicate that success once the items have been returned home. The state, leveraging its rich cultural heritage, launched a tourism master plan in September 2022. The plan includes the development of a tourism corridor connecting about 72 different tourism sites including a wildlife park, and cultural and natural sites, with the government targeting 2 trillion naira ($4.3 billion) of tourism revenue in the next 10 years.

“The artifacts being returned to Africa present a strong opportunity to develop cultural heritage tourism seriously,” said Adunola Okupe, the CEO of tourism consultancy Red Clay Advisory which has experience across West Africa. “There is a strong multiplier effect that will generate even more returns to other industries than tourism alone.”

THE VIEW FROM COTONOU

The modern-day Republic of Benin, to the west of Nigeria, is not to be confused with Nigeria’s Benin City. The West African country, which was colonized by France, was once dominated by the Dahomey Kingdom which produced many great art works. Today Benin Republic is developing its own cultural heritage tourism.

With the return, in November 2021, of 26 artifacts looted by France’s colonial troops, its government announced the creation of the Museum of the Epic of the Amazons and Kings of Dahomey in Abomey to house the items returned along with a collection of some 350 art objects. The project includes the rehabilitation of four royal palaces that attracted a grant and a loan together worth $38 million from the French Development Agency (AFD). A free exhibition last year which lasted several months reportedly attracted more than 200,000 visitors with domestic visitors making up 90% of the total.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

While there’s been much public and government support in both African countries and former colonial powers for the return of artifacts, there has been some push back. Some European curators have gone as far as questioning if these valuable items would be well preserved in countries without a strong museum tradition or investment. There has been displeasure from unexpected quarters as well. An African-American campaign group filed a lawsuit in November 2022 to stop the return of some Benin Bronzes from the Smithsonian Museum to Nigeria, arguing that returning the bronzes would deny them the opportunity to experience their shared culture and history. They claimed the artifacts are also part of their heritage as descendants of an enslaved person from the region controlled by ancient Benin.

NOTABLE

• While the push to return artifacts feels very much a late post-colonial movement in the age of Black Lives Matter and South Africa’s Rhodes Must Fall — it is not. Back in the sixties, the decade of independence for many African countries, there was a strong push for the return of artifacts but for a variety of reasons it had faded by the eighties.

Since Netflix started operating in Africa in 2016, it has spent $175 million commissioning new film titles, licensing existing ones, and undertaking initiatives with creators and regulators to develop filmmaking on the continent. The company’s six-year focus has been in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya.

South Africa has received 71% of Netflix’s Africa investment, with five times more originals commissioned there than in Nigeria, home to the world’s second largest film industry. Netflix’s operation in Kenya is more recent and the company does not reveal its investment there, but Country Queen became its first original from East Africa last July.

Five titles, including the second season of the South African series Blood & Water and the Kenyan film The Wedding Planner have spent one week each on Netflix’s weekly ranking of the top 10 films globally, an avenue for more discovery of African stories and production talent. Anikulapo, made in Nigeria by veteran filmmaker Kunle Afolayan, is the only Netflix title from Africa to spend three weeks on the global top 10.

When Yvette Tetteh thought about the pollution blighting Ghana’s waterways, she knew she wanted to help solve the problem. For her, that meant swimming the 450km length of the country’s longest waterway — the Volta River — to raise awareness about the debris from dumped textiles building up along the country’s coastline, tributaries and lakes. The waste is caused by discarded secondhand clothing imports produced by the global fast fashion industry.

Tetteh, an activist and entrepreneur who set off in March, is swimming alongside a solar-powered boat — aptly named The Woman Who Does Not Fear — carrying a laboratory and researchers collecting hundreds of water and air samples to monitor the extent of pollution. She teamed up with the Or Foundation, a U.S. and Ghana-based not-for-profit organization focused on environmental justice, whose team is behind the sample testing and collection.

Ghana has in recent years become one of the world’s biggest importers of secondhand clothing. The Or Foundation’s preliminary research found secondhand clothing enters Ghana and travels up north through the country through sales before traveling back down along the river as waste.

Swimming the length of Ghana’s longest river isn’t for the faint-hearted. “It is not impossible to swim 450km of the Volta River,” said Tetteh, who trained for nine months before embarking on the endurance test which is expected to end in May. She reasoned that the river could be broken down into 15km a day for 30 days. “Fifteen kilometers a day could be swum, with the current, in six hours (max.), and six hours could be completed in three sets of two hours,” she explained to climate-focused publication Atmos.

— Alexis

Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has the distinction of being Africa’s first elected female president, now she’ll have another string to her bow with what will be the world’s first presidential library dedicated to a female leader.

Renderings for the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development library were unveiled this week by Niger-based architecture and research firm Atelier Masōmī. The former president brought an all-woman team on board to work on the project with Atelier Masōmī’s Mariam Issoufou Kamara as the lead architect directing the building design, South African-born Sumayya Vally of Counterspace as the exhibitions architect, and Liberian architect Karen Richards Barnes as the local architect.

Kamara said the design was partly inspired by Liberian Palava huts, which are traditionally venues for reconciliation in the West African country. “The project is an introspection on the challenges faced and on the strength and hope brought about by inspirational leaders such as Madam Sirleaf,” she added.

Sirleaf’s team will announce a fundraising campaign for the library project at a later date.

— Muchira Gachenge

If you’re hungry in a Kenyan city, you’re rarely far from a smoky roadside grill selling popular sausages called mutura. The dish is typically prepared by mixing chopped vegetables, bell peppers, and hot pepper with minced meat and blood. The mixture is then stuffed into the cleaned intestines of a slaughtered goat or cow which are sewn up before being flame grilled.

Mutura, also known as a blood sausage, wasn’t always an everyday snack. It was originally prepared during special occasions, such as wedding ceremonies, within Kenya’s Agikuyu community, for whom goat slaughtering is used to mark important events. It was grilled by men but only eaten by women and children.

Now, mutura is a commonplace snack that usually costs around 10 Kenyan shillings  (10 cents) a piece. Connoisseurs say it’s best eaten under the cover of darkness (an unspoken rule) and with bare hands. It’s easy to spot a mutura spot because buyers surround the griller, usually a man clad in a stained white coat who chops the meat on a board beside salt, hot pepper, and kachumbari (pickle salad) can be added as garnish.

— Muchira Gachenge in Nairobi

• World Malaria Day: 95% of all malaria cases are in the WHO’s African Region. (April 25)
• US Ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman will attend a Prosper Africa business roundtable at the Harvard Club in New York, convening U.S. business leaders and Kenyan government leaders. (April 25)
• The NewSpace Africa conference, bringing together commercial companies and investors from the continent’s space industry in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. (April 25 - 28).
• The Forbes Under 30 conference for young entrepreneurs in Gaborone, Botswana. (April  23 - 26)

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— Yinka, Alexis, Marché Arends, Alexander Onukwue, and Muchira Gachenge