July 4, 2009
By Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
I RETURNED to the USA recently after a three-week trip to Nigeria to launch my new book on Ben Enwonwu in Lagos. International travel wears you down over time, and I am reaching that stage where every trip seems to take more and more out of me. Clear signs include a longer recovery time from jet lag (the nine hours difference between Pacific Coast US time and Nigerian time now takes me more than two weeks to readjust to, whereas in the past I was up and running in no more than four days), more urgent backlog to take care of upon my return (and this a supreme irony, that the more professionally accomplished one becomes, the more work there is to do), and more importantly, a greater sense of psychological dissonance occasioned by the rapid mental shift from one system of operational protocols to another, between two social and economic systems as disparate as Nigeria and the USA.
This last one is becoming much harder, since I am actually two different persons in both countries. In the USA where I live and work, I am an increasingly accomplished professional presence in my field, with a growing global reputation.
In Nigeria, my home country, I am a very well known person and national authority on arts and cultural affairs, which means I am often in meetings with different individuals and arts organizations. All these add up to a hectic schedule of 16-hour workdays and over time, this kind of focus exacts a toll on body and mind.
I live and work in the USA as an art historian at the University of California Santa Barbara. I was in Nigeria mainly to launch my new book (Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist. Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 2008). I received very good national coverage of this event in print, TV and Internet media, most of which noted my ongoing involvement in art and cultural affairs of Nigeria. A Nigerian book launch (and any other Nigerian social affair for that matter) is a particular type of event.
Mine unfolded quite nicely and was very well organized by the Ben Enwonwu Foundation, which, through its director, Mr. Oliver Enwonwu, oversaw all aspects of the event. Although we both grossly underestimated the turnout for the event, the much larger turnout was well managed within the small confines of the Goethe Institut’s Lagos headquarters in Victoria Island. Wall to wall coverage of the event began to appear in the national newspapers three weeks before the date and weeks after.
The audience and media were very much interested in my book for its exhaustive analysis of Ben Enwonwu’s art and career. The artist is very well regarded in Nigeria and many reporters suggested that the book provides a template for future detailed analysis of modern and contemporary Nigerian artists. A lot of these articles, written in the peculiar Victorian English common to Nigerian journalism, contained worrisome misquotes and slightly off-kilter facts, which in themselves reflect an ongoing need for better craftsmanship among Nigerian journalists. In saying this, I do not mean to criticize the journalists who were kind enough to show up and interview me for their stories. In this they were very diligent: translating their interviews and composing selected quotes and citations into error-free reports seem to be the problem.
I HAVE been reflecting on the aftermath of this event, mainly on the subject of distributing my books in Nigeria, which has taken up all my time since I returned from Nigeria. I flew on Delta Airlines to Lagos from the USA. However, due to Delta Airlines’ luggage restriction on travel to Nigeria, I was unable to travel with enough books for the book launch. My publishers, the University of Rochester Press, also requested that I purchase every copy of my book intended for this launch (an expensive upfront cost that I ultimately had to assume) but carrying them to Nigeria became a problem.
In the summer of 2008, Delta Airlines imposed an arbitrary restriction on luggage allowance to Nigeria during last year’s hike in oil prices. I was highly critical of this move at that time mainly because it seemed to unduly single out Lagos among a few other Caribbean countries (five or six in all) for these restrictions. Oil was trading at $147 a barrel at its height in summer 2008 but is now trading for $49 a barrel, a price difference of $98 lower in favor of the airlines.
Despite this tectonic price shift, Delta Airlines has so far not rescinded its restriction. Given that the Lagos route is a highly lucrative route, it seemed to me quite problematic that Delta’s restriction on luggage has not been reviewed or rescinded since then, especially since the price of air tickets on international travel doesn’t seem to have gone down along with the price of oil. Summer travel on Delta is pricing at $2300 for economy class seats and even at this high cost, they won’t let you carry additional luggage even if you offer to pay for it. In addition, the airline often forces Lagos-bound passengers to check their carry-on luggage in Atlanta, thus imposing what is in effect an additional fee of $80-150 on already expensive ticket costs.
I bring up this issue to reaffirm my ongoing criticism of the inequities of access to international borders that afflicts African travelers (I did an extensive seven-part analysis of the major issues titled “Borders and Access” in a series of postings to my blog from November 2007: see aachronym.blogspot.com/2007/10/borders-and-access-or-lack-of-access-to.html).
International travel to Africa continues to be very difficult in terms of travel costs and scheduling. In this case, I was struck with a double dose of difficulty getting my books to Nigeria by the high cost of carrying excess luggage and the overly restrictive luggage rules of Delta Airlines. I’ve flown this airline to Lagos on previous four trips from December 2007, my most recent trip in March being my fifth flight on the same route. I’m now investigating other options but none seems immediately viable.
Travel to Lagos from the West Coast of the USA (Los Angeles in this instance) is quite onerous and the Delta route is, ironically, the most direct: the outbound flight gets you into Lagos from Los Angeles in 17 hours and inbound to the USA in 19 hours if you manage your Atlanta layover judiciously. Europe connections range from the tedious (British Airways runs 21 hours outbound and 26 inbound on the fastest flights through Heathrow airport) to the ridiculous (Virgin Atlantic logs 27 hours outbound and 40 hours inbound for the longest layover times I’ve yet seen while paradoxically charging one of the most expensive ticket prices–$3600 and above for a round-trip ticket).
I had decided to stop flying through Europe because of their racist attitudes to African travelers and I am now reviewing the option of flying Ethiopian Airlines and other routes to Nigeria to offset Delta’s restriction on luggage.
Given how expensive it is to travel to Lagos in the first place, I think travelers should be able to take when they need within reason, especially if they are willing to pay for it. I have seen people fly horses and cars from the USA to Europe on the kinds of big jets that fly to Lagos (Boeing 747s and 767s; Airbus A340s, etc) and don’t see any reason why a Nigerian flying with two extra suitcases should be forced to dump their luggage in an airport just to make their flight. And I have observed this happen on both ends of the trip, at Los Angeles and Atlanta airports, and at Lagos. In a supposedly free market, you are really marginal if you aren’t allowed access to specific services even when you are able to pay for them.
I have spoken to many Nigerians suffering through various discomforts on the Lagos route, asking how they feel about restrictions that severely limit their choices of what to take with them on their trips. They are often livid but almost immediately start blaming the Nigerian government for allowing its citizens to be treated in such a shabby manner in their international travels. I agree that the Nigerian government has not done enough to protect its citizens on international travel (let’s leave aside the oft repeated indictment of Nigeria for poor leadership and the demonization of Nigerians in the Western media) but I think this criticism misses the point.
The transaction between Lagos passengers and Delta Airlines is an economic one and it is governed by well-established legal rules in the USA that forbid discrimination on racial or national grounds. Now, I’m not a lawyer but I think a case can me made that Delta and other airlines that fly to Africa from Europe engage in routine behavior that systematic discriminates against passengers on this route. Start with the fact that Delta flies exactly the same very old airplane, a Boeing 767-300, designated Delta 57 outbound – on the Atlanta to Lagos route and struggles to provide decent service on these flights (the old jet, bless its heart, flies quite well, the pilots are top notch and the crew works very hard). Add the arbitrary luggage restriction and the large numbers of complaints of really bad treatment of Nigerians by foreign airlines over the past year alone and you could conceivably put together a good class action lawsuit.
It falls to Lagos-bound Nigerian passengers, especially those who live in the USA as American citizens, to defend their rights under this process of economic transaction but I don’t expect to see this kind of proactive passenger reaction from our people anytime soon: you see, the other notable trait of Nigerians (and black peoples in general) is that they are very good at working against their own self interests. More than anything, I think this is what ensures the persistence of a black underclass in the global economy for a long time to come, and dear reader, you can quote me on this.
TO return to the topic at hand: while Delta frustrated my effort to get enough books to Lagos for the book launch, things proved similarly difficult with my publishers. Let me state upfront that I think my publishers did a fantastic job with publishing the book and distributing it in the Western world. All commentators point out that the book is very well produced – it is in fact a beautiful book. It is also well presented for sale by Internet vendors such as on Amazon.com and the University of Rochester Press’s online catalog. One can order the book from their websites and many other places online. The problem is that Amazon.com does not honor orders from Nigeria or if they do, it takes 12 weeks to ship the product to Lagos. I may be wrong here but I haven’t yet met anyone in Lagos who successfully placed an order on Amazon.com.
I know that most Internet vendors automatically reject credit cards issued in Nigeria, and often reject orders placed for delivery to Nigeria even when you pay for them with credit cards issued elsewhere. This means that even those prospective buyers in Nigeria who wanted to purchase my book online couldn’t do so. At the launch, I was besieged by people, who wanted to buy copies of my book (at the last count, the purchase list contains over 120 orders) and I had to explain to them that copies of the book were simply not yet available for sale in Nigeria. I had tried to arrange orders to ship copies of the book to Lagos since January but was unable to do so because the cost of shipping is more often two or three times higher than the actual cost of the books themselves.
For example, I mailed a FEDEX package to Lagos recently containing 18 sheets of paper, letters sent to invite several people for my upcoming Nollywood Foundation Convention in Los Angeles in June 2009. It cost me $107 to send the package for delivery in ten days. Consider relative to this example, what it will cost to send 50kgs worth of hardcover books on the same schedule. The price is considerably less to ship by sea but that takes from anywhere from 12-18 weeks for delivery.
As at this posting, I am still trying frantically to get additional copies of my book shipped to Lagos so that they can be distributed in Nigeria. My publishers have been very cooperative in this process but our combined efforts have only recently identified an economically viable means to accomplish this goal. I give my publishers a lot of credit in that regard, since they also are interested in selling as many copies of the book as possible, but given the difficulties I have encountered in this regard, I have had to ask the hard question of whether they had any plans at all for selling my books in Nigeria, given that ordering the books through the usual commercial and Internet channels is not really an option for most Nigerians.
IT is thus apparent that there is a real and significant economic cost associated with living in a country like Nigeria, which is an added cost not often factored into economic analyses involving the country. This added cost is part of a “poverty market” economics that actually penalizes Africans for living in Africa and penalizes African Diaspora peoples for living in ghettoes in the West by either a lack of access to much needed services or access to such services at extraordinarily high costs to the consumers. That this issue equally affects academics is not often taken into consideration in analysis of how knowledge about Africa is produced and consumed.
My experiences as an international scholar reveal to me that African knowledge has become another raw material produced in Africa, processed or refined in the West and resold to Africans at exorbitant costs if they are allowed to buy it at all. We are used to speaking of natural resources in this manner-oil and gas, cocoa, gold, diamonds, and many other items. I have been a harsh critic of this unequal access to and use of African knowledge for most of my professional career but it is only in the past few years that I have started to engage it as a quantifiable phenomenon, with shocking discoveries.
The lack of distribution of my books in Nigeria follows a standard trajectory where research done on Nigerian subjects by international scholars over the past five decades are rarely disseminated in Nigeria when such research is published. I personally know about hundreds of books published on Nigerian subjects that have never been distributed in Nigeria, which means that the Nigerians communities who often form the subject of such research do not event get a chance to see how the knowledge they impart to foreign scholars are packaged and presented in academic contexts. This effectively turns such knowledge into easily exploitable raw material and literally transfers its capital from its Nigerian producers to the scholar who now owns that knowledge by virtue of publishing it abroad.
The fact that this process impacts most aspects of African life is not yet properly taken into consideration in our analysis of the causes of African underdevelopment, which continue to subscribe to pseudo-scientific economic theories. The biggest issue is how this situation undermines our traditional understanding of economics, that given adequate demand for a commodity, supply always rises to meet demand. This is not always the case where African demand for products and services are concerned and its impact is often insidious but very real.
IN my speech to the audience during my book launch, I reiterated that my work on Enwonwu is part of a larger project to identify, document and preserve significant aspects of African knowledge especially in the area of Arts and Culture. In the information age, density of knowledge in any sector is fungible and if one does not lay claim to that knowledge that belongs to us, someone more enterprising will claim it, repackage it and resell it to us at exorbitant costs. I consider my scholarship and professional research as part of the urgently needed stewardship of African cultural knowledge, which I think is a grossly underserved in Nigeria’s political engagements.
At its most basic, we should be very worried if significant research on an important artist like Ben Enwonwu produced by a Nigerian scholar based abroad is not even available for use by a Nigerian audience simply because there are no mechanisms for delivering the book to a Nigerian audience. It is very important that the nation starts to focus on these issues. We have spent the last 100 years suffering the very real impact of colonially induced underdevelopment aided by our own inept management of viable natural and cultural resources. We must learn how to gain and manage greater access to various forms of knowledge (especially those produced from research carried out in Nigeria) if we do not want to spend the next 100 years repeating the mistakes of the past century.
I RETURNED to the USA recently after a three-week trip to Nigeria to launch my new book on Ben Enwonwu in Lagos. International travel wears you down over time, and I am reaching that stage where every trip seems to take more and more out of me. Clear signs include a longer recovery time from jet lag (the nine hours difference between Pacific Coast US time and Nigerian time now takes me more than two weeks to readjust to, whereas in the past I was up and running in no more than four days), more urgent backlog to take care of upon my return (and this a supreme irony, that the more professionally accomplished one becomes, the more work there is to do), and more importantly, a greater sense of psychological dissonance occasioned by the rapid mental shift from one system of operational protocols to another, between two social and economic systems as disparate as Nigeria and the USA.
This last one is becoming much harder, since I am actually two different persons in both countries. In the USA where I live and work, I am an increasingly accomplished professional presence in my field, with a growing global reputation.
In Nigeria, my home country, I am a very well known person and national authority on arts and cultural affairs, which means I am often in meetings with different individuals and arts organizations. All these add up to a hectic schedule of 16-hour workdays and over time, this kind of focus exacts a toll on body and mind.
I live and work in the USA as an art historian at the University of California Santa Barbara. I was in Nigeria mainly to launch my new book (Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist. Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 2008). I received very good national coverage of this event in print, TV and Internet media, most of which noted my ongoing involvement in art and cultural affairs of Nigeria. A Nigerian book launch (and any other Nigerian social affair for that matter) is a particular type of event.
Mine unfolded quite nicely and was very well organized by the Ben Enwonwu Foundation, which, through its director, Mr. Oliver Enwonwu, oversaw all aspects of the event. Although we both grossly underestimated the turnout for the event, the much larger turnout was well managed within the small confines of the Goethe Institut’s Lagos headquarters in Victoria Island. Wall to wall coverage of the event began to appear in the national newspapers three weeks before the date and weeks after.
The audience and media were very much interested in my book for its exhaustive analysis of Ben Enwonwu’s art and career. The artist is very well regarded in Nigeria and many reporters suggested that the book provides a template for future detailed analysis of modern and contemporary Nigerian artists. A lot of these articles, written in the peculiar Victorian English common to Nigerian journalism, contained worrisome misquotes and slightly off-kilter facts, which in themselves reflect an ongoing need for better craftsmanship among Nigerian journalists. In saying this, I do not mean to criticize the journalists who were kind enough to show up and interview me for their stories. In this they were very diligent: translating their interviews and composing selected quotes and citations into error-free reports seem to be the problem.
I HAVE been reflecting on the aftermath of this event, mainly on the subject of distributing my books in Nigeria, which has taken up all my time since I returned from Nigeria. I flew on Delta Airlines to Lagos from the USA. However, due to Delta Airlines’ luggage restriction on travel to Nigeria, I was unable to travel with enough books for the book launch. My publishers, the University of Rochester Press, also requested that I purchase every copy of my book intended for this launch (an expensive upfront cost that I ultimately had to assume) but carrying them to Nigeria became a problem.
In the summer of 2008, Delta Airlines imposed an arbitrary restriction on luggage allowance to Nigeria during last year’s hike in oil prices. I was highly critical of this move at that time mainly because it seemed to unduly single out Lagos among a few other Caribbean countries (five or six in all) for these restrictions. Oil was trading at $147 a barrel at its height in summer 2008 but is now trading for $49 a barrel, a price difference of $98 lower in favor of the airlines.
Despite this tectonic price shift, Delta Airlines has so far not rescinded its restriction. Given that the Lagos route is a highly lucrative route, it seemed to me quite problematic that Delta’s restriction on luggage has not been reviewed or rescinded since then, especially since the price of air tickets on international travel doesn’t seem to have gone down along with the price of oil. Summer travel on Delta is pricing at $2300 for economy class seats and even at this high cost, they won’t let you carry additional luggage even if you offer to pay for it. In addition, the airline often forces Lagos-bound passengers to check their carry-on luggage in Atlanta, thus imposing what is in effect an additional fee of $80-150 on already expensive ticket costs.
I bring up this issue to reaffirm my ongoing criticism of the inequities of access to international borders that afflicts African travelers (I did an extensive seven-part analysis of the major issues titled “Borders and Access” in a series of postings to my blog from November 2007: see aachronym.blogspot.com/2007/10/borders-and-access-or-lack-of-access-to.html).
International travel to Africa continues to be very difficult in terms of travel costs and scheduling. In this case, I was struck with a double dose of difficulty getting my books to Nigeria by the high cost of carrying excess luggage and the overly restrictive luggage rules of Delta Airlines. I’ve flown this airline to Lagos on previous four trips from December 2007, my most recent trip in March being my fifth flight on the same route. I’m now investigating other options but none seems immediately viable.
Travel to Lagos from the West Coast of the USA (Los Angeles in this instance) is quite onerous and the Delta route is, ironically, the most direct: the outbound flight gets you into Lagos from Los Angeles in 17 hours and inbound to the USA in 19 hours if you manage your Atlanta layover judiciously. Europe connections range from the tedious (British Airways runs 21 hours outbound and 26 inbound on the fastest flights through Heathrow airport) to the ridiculous (Virgin Atlantic logs 27 hours outbound and 40 hours inbound for the longest layover times I’ve yet seen while paradoxically charging one of the most expensive ticket prices–$3600 and above for a round-trip ticket).
I had decided to stop flying through Europe because of their racist attitudes to African travelers and I am now reviewing the option of flying Ethiopian Airlines and other routes to Nigeria to offset Delta’s restriction on luggage.
Given how expensive it is to travel to Lagos in the first place, I think travelers should be able to take when they need within reason, especially if they are willing to pay for it. I have seen people fly horses and cars from the USA to Europe on the kinds of big jets that fly to Lagos (Boeing 747s and 767s; Airbus A340s, etc) and don’t see any reason why a Nigerian flying with two extra suitcases should be forced to dump their luggage in an airport just to make their flight. And I have observed this happen on both ends of the trip, at Los Angeles and Atlanta airports, and at Lagos. In a supposedly free market, you are really marginal if you aren’t allowed access to specific services even when you are able to pay for them.
I have spoken to many Nigerians suffering through various discomforts on the Lagos route, asking how they feel about restrictions that severely limit their choices of what to take with them on their trips. They are often livid but almost immediately start blaming the Nigerian government for allowing its citizens to be treated in such a shabby manner in their international travels. I agree that the Nigerian government has not done enough to protect its citizens on international travel (let’s leave aside the oft repeated indictment of Nigeria for poor leadership and the demonization of Nigerians in the Western media) but I think this criticism misses the point.
The transaction between Lagos passengers and Delta Airlines is an economic one and it is governed by well-established legal rules in the USA that forbid discrimination on racial or national grounds. Now, I’m not a lawyer but I think a case can me made that Delta and other airlines that fly to Africa from Europe engage in routine behavior that systematic discriminates against passengers on this route. Start with the fact that Delta flies exactly the same very old airplane, a Boeing 767-300, designated Delta 57 outbound – on the Atlanta to Lagos route and struggles to provide decent service on these flights (the old jet, bless its heart, flies quite well, the pilots are top notch and the crew works very hard). Add the arbitrary luggage restriction and the large numbers of complaints of really bad treatment of Nigerians by foreign airlines over the past year alone and you could conceivably put together a good class action lawsuit.
It falls to Lagos-bound Nigerian passengers, especially those who live in the USA as American citizens, to defend their rights under this process of economic transaction but I don’t expect to see this kind of proactive passenger reaction from our people anytime soon: you see, the other notable trait of Nigerians (and black peoples in general) is that they are very good at working against their own self interests. More than anything, I think this is what ensures the persistence of a black underclass in the global economy for a long time to come, and dear reader, you can quote me on this.
TO return to the topic at hand: while Delta frustrated my effort to get enough books to Lagos for the book launch, things proved similarly difficult with my publishers. Let me state upfront that I think my publishers did a fantastic job with publishing the book and distributing it in the Western world. All commentators point out that the book is very well produced – it is in fact a beautiful book. It is also well presented for sale by Internet vendors such as on Amazon.com and the University of Rochester Press’s online catalog. One can order the book from their websites and many other places online. The problem is that Amazon.com does not honor orders from Nigeria or if they do, it takes 12 weeks to ship the product to Lagos. I may be wrong here but I haven’t yet met anyone in Lagos who successfully placed an order on Amazon.com.
I know that most Internet vendors automatically reject credit cards issued in Nigeria, and often reject orders placed for delivery to Nigeria even when you pay for them with credit cards issued elsewhere. This means that even those prospective buyers in Nigeria who wanted to purchase my book online couldn’t do so. At the launch, I was besieged by people, who wanted to buy copies of my book (at the last count, the purchase list contains over 120 orders) and I had to explain to them that copies of the book were simply not yet available for sale in Nigeria. I had tried to arrange orders to ship copies of the book to Lagos since January but was unable to do so because the cost of shipping is more often two or three times higher than the actual cost of the books themselves.
For example, I mailed a FEDEX package to Lagos recently containing 18 sheets of paper, letters sent to invite several people for my upcoming Nollywood Foundation Convention in Los Angeles in June 2009. It cost me $107 to send the package for delivery in ten days. Consider relative to this example, what it will cost to send 50kgs worth of hardcover books on the same schedule. The price is considerably less to ship by sea but that takes from anywhere from 12-18 weeks for delivery.
As at this posting, I am still trying frantically to get additional copies of my book shipped to Lagos so that they can be distributed in Nigeria. My publishers have been very cooperative in this process but our combined efforts have only recently identified an economically viable means to accomplish this goal. I give my publishers a lot of credit in that regard, since they also are interested in selling as many copies of the book as possible, but given the difficulties I have encountered in this regard, I have had to ask the hard question of whether they had any plans at all for selling my books in Nigeria, given that ordering the books through the usual commercial and Internet channels is not really an option for most Nigerians.
IT is thus apparent that there is a real and significant economic cost associated with living in a country like Nigeria, which is an added cost not often factored into economic analyses involving the country. This added cost is part of a “poverty market” economics that actually penalizes Africans for living in Africa and penalizes African Diaspora peoples for living in ghettoes in the West by either a lack of access to much needed services or access to such services at extraordinarily high costs to the consumers. That this issue equally affects academics is not often taken into consideration in analysis of how knowledge about Africa is produced and consumed.
My experiences as an international scholar reveal to me that African knowledge has become another raw material produced in Africa, processed or refined in the West and resold to Africans at exorbitant costs if they are allowed to buy it at all. We are used to speaking of natural resources in this manner-oil and gas, cocoa, gold, diamonds, and many other items. I have been a harsh critic of this unequal access to and use of African knowledge for most of my professional career but it is only in the past few years that I have started to engage it as a quantifiable phenomenon, with shocking discoveries.
The lack of distribution of my books in Nigeria follows a standard trajectory where research done on Nigerian subjects by international scholars over the past five decades are rarely disseminated in Nigeria when such research is published. I personally know about hundreds of books published on Nigerian subjects that have never been distributed in Nigeria, which means that the Nigerians communities who often form the subject of such research do not event get a chance to see how the knowledge they impart to foreign scholars are packaged and presented in academic contexts. This effectively turns such knowledge into easily exploitable raw material and literally transfers its capital from its Nigerian producers to the scholar who now owns that knowledge by virtue of publishing it abroad.
The fact that this process impacts most aspects of African life is not yet properly taken into consideration in our analysis of the causes of African underdevelopment, which continue to subscribe to pseudo-scientific economic theories. The biggest issue is how this situation undermines our traditional understanding of economics, that given adequate demand for a commodity, supply always rises to meet demand. This is not always the case where African demand for products and services are concerned and its impact is often insidious but very real.
IN my speech to the audience during my book launch, I reiterated that my work on Enwonwu is part of a larger project to identify, document and preserve significant aspects of African knowledge especially in the area of Arts and Culture. In the information age, density of knowledge in any sector is fungible and if one does not lay claim to that knowledge that belongs to us, someone more enterprising will claim it, repackage it and resell it to us at exorbitant costs. I consider my scholarship and professional research as part of the urgently needed stewardship of African cultural knowledge, which I think is a grossly underserved in Nigeria’s political engagements.
At its most basic, we should be very worried if significant research on an important artist like Ben Enwonwu produced by a Nigerian scholar based abroad is not even available for use by a Nigerian audience simply because there are no mechanisms for delivering the book to a Nigerian audience. It is very important that the nation starts to focus on these issues. We have spent the last 100 years suffering the very real impact of colonially induced underdevelopment aided by our own inept management of viable natural and cultural resources. We must learn how to gain and manage greater access to various forms of knowledge (especially those produced from research carried out in Nigeria) if we do not want to spend the next 100 years repeating the mistakes of the past century.
- Prof. Ogbechie is Associate Prof. of Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Founder/Director of Aachron Knowledge Systems (www.aachron.com).
No comments:
Post a Comment