WHICH IS AFRICA'S MOST CREATIVE CITY?

In my view, its Lagos, Nigeria.


The creative energy in Lagos could light up the entire continent.

Arriving at Murtala Mohammed Airport for my three-month stay, I took a yellow taxi that had been sent to fetch me. (Thank God it was the actual one that had been sent to fetch me, but that's another story all together).
After a few surprises on the road from the airport, I managed to pull my gawking face away from the window to lean on the back-rest. Only then did I notice the huge gaping hole on the floor of the taxi. Probably corroded by the salty sea air. Or maybe not. Alarmed, I asked the taxi man what the hole was about.
"Oga, moto na injin, Oh!" Came the swift rejoinder, which, loosely translated, implies, sir, why are you bothered about the small stuff? Its the engine that makes a car! The man became my taxi driver for all of the three months in Lagos.

And so we slowly crawled along unrelenting traffic on the third mainland bridge, past hawkers weaving through the stationary cars, selling everything from sofas and TV sets all the way to plots of land and buildings, and finally on to Victoria Island. The nicer bit of Lagos town. Which means it has people with a lot of money (And a heli-pad for those who do not wish to crawl the three hours it takes to do the 9 kilometers from the airport) and street kids who want some of the money. One of those street kids then makes his way to the window of the taxi and asks me for cash. Smelling the drugs in his breath, I said that I wouldn't give him any cash, lest he ends up buying more drugs. Pointing to the pocket on his shirt, the boy smiles at me and impudently tells me not to worry, sir (oga!) Money for drugs is taken care of and is right here in the pocket. No problems with that. All he needed now was "mune fo chop", cash to buy food!

To beat the constant traffic grid-locks, Lagos found the answer in motorcycle taxis long before the East Africans found them out. Lagosian motorcycle taxis, known as "okada" are as permanent on the street as they are irritating. I'm told that a law was recently passed that compels okada riders to wear helmets. And, to illustrate the creative soul of that city, riders showed up on the streets the very next day wearing watermelon pods!


That is the kind of creative energy that feeds the city of Lagos. The city of Fela Kuti and Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. The city that has mastered teh craft of finding its own unique solutions to every challenge thrown at it.

To quote my good friend Femi Odugbemi: "Cities, like people, reveal themselves in different ways. There are those whose charms emerge shyly after long acquaintance; others whose grandeur inspire awe and respect; some others whose personality is instantly engaging, with confidence, leavened with humour, self-indulgence tempered with generosity, brashly modern yet strangely ancient...Lagos captures the essence and soul of Nigeria - it is at once progressive yet irredeemably confounding. It is multifacetted in appearance and personality. It is seemingly moving at the speed of a train yet can be tranquil and laid-back. Most of all, I love the city for its soul. There is a beauty to its chaos and a rhythm to its pulse. To live here you must have gravitas, a will-power not common to outsiders. You must feed off its energy and ride its intensity. There is no place like Lagos - it [has a] uniqueness of character, soul, [the] capacity to unendingly confound..."This is Lagos.""

What a creative soul it has.


(Photos used by kind permission of Femi Odugbemi)

THAT VILLAGE OF YOURS MIGHT JUST BE WAITING TO BECOME NASHVILLE!

Next time you're in a country bus, headed for the village, probably listening to Don Willams or Dolly Parton or Kenny Rogers, spare a thought for that village of yours. If it has a pub, with a resident local musician belting out tunes that we city dwellers sometimes think are unsophisticated, then with a bit of luck, something huge might just roll into that village of yours.

In their insightful paper entitled "Nashville in Africa: Culture, Institutions, Entrepreneurship" published by the International Policy Network, Mark Schultz & Alec van Gelder recount that Nashville, the iconic hub of American country music, was, in the 1920s, a struggling city in one of the poorest regions of the United States.

According to Schultz and van Gelder, “Like much of sub-Saharan Africa today, early 20th century policymakers pinned Nashville’s economic hopes on industrial development founded on access to raw materials and large, government-funded public works projects."

These hopes were never fully realised, but Nashville found success anyway – from its creative industries.

The unique talents and abilities of local artists were overlooked when government planners sought to invigorate Nashville’s economy. These skills were ridiculed at the time and local output was pejoratively referred to as “hill-billy” music.

Nevertheless, it was this talent that convinced entrepreneurs to make the significant investments that were required to bring modern recording and production technology to Nashville-based artists.
The story of Nashville's rise is well documented. Intrepid entrepreneurs left New York City with huge sound recording machines, hauled them up the mountains of Tennessee into "hill billy" country and the rest, as they say, is country music history.
Africa can learn many lessons from Nashville’s success.

Creative clusters, such as Nashville’s country music industry, can be powerful drivers of development for many reasons:

1. They play to local strengths, taking advantage of knowledge, skills and forms of expression that arise from local culture, and are thus, by definition, largely unique and non-duplicable.
2. For the most part they do not require cutting-edge technology, large capital investments, or a robust infrastructure.
3. Although creative work often requires a significant personal investment in training and development, it typically does not require the sort of extensive formal educational system that still remains unavailable to the poor in many African countries.

Vibrant creative industries can provide benefits beyond the economic activity they create directly. A thriving creative cluster stimulates investments elsewhere. For example, Nashville’s music industry has engendered a substantial tourism industry, with the additional transportation and lodging infrastructure that come with it. For the music industry, Nashville proved to be ideally suited to the spontaneous emergence of a creative cluster, despite its apparent “underdevelopment” ”.
The parallels between Nashville and Africa in this respect are strikingly similar. Africa has many vibrant and well-recognized music cultures, from Mbalax in Senagal, to Chakakacha in the coast of Kenya. Despite this, the continent has remained largely impoverishment economically.
Maybe its time to develop new models for economic development and start exploring ways in which we can take advantage of factors that are so readily at our disposal.
And with a little bit of luck, my village of Oriang', may just turn into Nashville, Karachuonyo.

ITS NOT EASY BEING A CREATIVE GUY

Its so hard being a "creative" guy.

The tag carries unreasonable expectations. The work is not any less burdensome. The first problem is that the creative person's stock-in-trade is intangible and subjective. They are ideas. There’s no telling whether they will fail or fly. And everyone has different ideas about ideas. Everyone has an opinion, especially those whose opinions don't count.

But in order to earn a living, creative guys have to keep generating ideas and presenting them to people who will pay for them. And so after minutes and minutes of trying to "come up" with a clever solution to a persistent problem (yes, only minutes, because as the world shrinks in this information age, so do the deadlines allowed for the creative process) the creative guy is required to turn up and present some ideas.

Then the show begins.
"Why couldn't you just do it this way?" asks the belligerent opinion. " I just don't like it" the obstinate opinion stone-walls the presentation. "So, what direction do you think we should take?" the creative guy attempts to hide his growing frustration by using the inclusive 'we'.
The rebuttal is swift and brutal. " I don't know! You're the creative guy! Go figure it out".
So much for the inclusive 'we'.

Two days later, the panel gathers again. Except this time, the ‘Capo di tutti capi’ is in attendance. Which means opinions are not are not in generous rations today. "You mean this is all you could come up with?" asks the boss after studying the presented ideas in pregnant silence. " Can I see the initial ideas? The ones that you discarded earlier?"
The creative guy pulls out hitherto stone-walled ideas.

"Brilliant!" Exclaims the 'Capo'.

Shock and awe all round. " Why didn't you show us that in the first place, instead of these...these..."
A cursive glance toward the lynch mob who only days ago killed the ideas that have just been “Lazarized”.
All eyes are on the floor. Nobody admits responsibility for killing such brilliant ideas.
In fact, when push comes to shove: “Wow! Yes, we never saw those ideas. They’re exactly what we’re looking for!” But the creative guy knows which battles to pick. The victory won, he figures it prudent to let this one slide.
Fight another one another day.

Such decisive ‘Capi’ are a God-sent to the ideas business.

Sometimes the creative guy is not so lucky. I once had the misfortune of presenting advertising ideas to a marketing director who had showed up with a 29-member committee.
It was late afternoon and after my presentation, I watched in shock as the marketing director proceeded to ask everyone around the table for their opinion. I switched off around 9 pm as the junior assistant trainee was expressing her dislike for the colour of socks that the man in the third row of the photograph was wearing.

But that is the burden that every creative person must bear. Because for our ideas to become meaningful, we must “midwife” them out of our minds and into the real world.
And as we all know, the process of midwifery is often painful and difficult.

Its not easy being a creative guy.

IS KENYA READY FOR THE CREATIVE ECONOMY?

The term "creative economy” was coined by John Howkins in his book published in 2001 about how people make money from ideas.
Since then, the debate around this idea has grown in both size and significance leading to the 2008 United Nations Report on the Creative Economy.

So, what exactly is the creative economy?

The Creative Economy is an economy where people’s ideas are the most important factors of production, and not land, labour nor capital.

And what, then, is creativity?

Creativity is often identified with the arts and its final product, which is culture. So when we talk of creativity we often think of fine art, music, design, architecture, fashion, theatre, publishing and so on.


This concept of the Creative Economy is especially significant in the Kenyan context as it proposes a new economic order built on ideas as a factor of production, replacing land, labour and capital, the factors upon which the industrial economy was built.


If its true that the industrial economy is giving way to the creative economy, and capital losing importance to ideas, then therein lies a significant opportunity for growing economies like ours to leap-frog the slow and capital-intensive process of industrialization and to begin using ideas as a means to accelerate social and economic development.


But designers and performers are not the only creative people. Prof Richard Florida, the American economist and urban theorist, in his influential book, “The Rise of The Creative Class” reckons that anyone involved in work that requires the forging of ideas, is a creative worker. And so he widens the “creative class” to include scientists, engineers, urban planners, researchers, and so on. People who add value to the economy with their creative input.

It is this creative class who build the creative economy.

Now, Kenya, with its much-respected human resource base, stands at an advantage to harness her “creative class” by establishing policies and programs that will grow the creative economy.

Much like China has done over the last few years.

In China, the “cultural creative industries” started booming several years ago. According to trade figures presented in the United Nations Creative Economy Report, 2008, China has become the leading player in the world market for creative goods. This has been the result of a clear determination by that government to fully explore the potential of the creative industries.

An illustration of the application of a creative-industry development policy in an urban setting is provided by Shanghai, where the Shanghai Municipal Government has clearly stated that the development of creative industries is one of its priorities during the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-2010).

According to the Shanghai Creative Industry Center, 3,000 companies from 30 countries had entered one of the 75 new creative industry parks (2.2 million sqm) around the city, creating job opportunities for more than 25,000 people. In 2005, the creative industries of Shanghai realized an increase of 54.9 billion yuan in turnover, nearly 18 per cent higher than that of the previous year. In 2005, the total turnover of the creative industries accounted for 6 per cent of the GDP of the city.

The statistics are impressive, no doubt.

But even more impressive is the thinking behind the statistics.
To demonstrate importance with which Chinese authorities consider this idea, John Howkins, the father of the creative economy, so to speak, is a leading figure in China’s creative economy.
Howkins is Chairman of the John Howkins Research Centre on the Creative Economy, launched in 2006 by the Shanghai Municipal Government at the Shanghai School of Creativity at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and also an adviser to the Shanghai Creative Industries Association and the Shanghai Creative Industry Centre.

Moreover, the impressive economic performance of China over the past several decades has made its development experience rather distinct from those of many other economies. China had the fastest economic growth in the world for more than 25 years and recently has been attracting FDI on the order of $60 billion per year. As a result, in a relatively short period starting in 1990, its exports of services increased eightfold, amounting to $70 billion in 2005. Much of this, can be attributed to China’s emphasis on the importance of tapping into the creative economy.


The question now is, can Kenya take advantage of its vastly skilled “Creative Class” both within and outside the country, and tap into the creative economy to fast-track social and economic development?