31 artists from 23 African countries have been selected by the African Culture Fund (ACF) to receive financial subsidies under its “Special Covid-19/Individual Artists” grant, the fourth of such disbursements.
ACF is a pan-African organisation that supports creativity and professionalism in the cultural sector, cultural diversity, and social justice.
Dubbed the Solidarity Fund for Artists and Cultural Organizations in Africa (SOFACO), the grant is provided through the charitable donations of some public entities and private citizens.
It has been earmarked for the talented beneficiaries from Namibia, Benin, Cabo Verde, South Africa, Cameroon, Mali, Tunisia, Côte D’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Angola, and Senegal.
Other countries in the roll call are Mauritius, Comoros, Mauritania, Niger, Togo, Morocco, T’Chad, Ghana, Zambia, Nigeria, and Uganda.
The award of this grant is coming on the heels of the ACF academy, a boot camp designed to strengthen the profession of creative arts on the continent held in Bamako, Mali between last November and December.
The organisers, in a statement, said the support from ACF is particularly timely as the surge in COVID-19 cases due to the spread of the Omicron variant led to a flurry of cancellations of art and cultural activities globally during the festive season of Christmas and the celebrations of the New Year.
Set up by ACF at the onset of Covid-19 two years ago, SOFACO is mainly geared toward ensuring that African artists continue their work despite the severe challenges posed by the global health crisis.
SOFACO
Two types of grants are available under the SOFACO scheme.
First, the subsistence assistance which essentially covers living and health subsidies.
The other is the creation assistance that targets innovative art projects especially those “adapted to the context of Covid-19 in Africa.”
Each grantee is guaranteed a sum of 3,000 euros to execute the project detailed in their proposal.
In the contract, the grantees are mandated to submit two narrative and financial reports: at the midpoint and conclusion of their projects – a standard practice in international philanthropy that ensures effective monitoring and evaluation of the use of monetary subventions.
“In many African countries, the majority of creation, production and distribution centres remain closed,” Abdoulaye Konaté, the current administrator of the African Culture Fund, said in an interview.
“Given this observation, we have launched the SOFACO fund…to preserve the already fragile socio-economic fabric of the African creative sector.”
Yinka Davies, a Nigerian musician, shares the same view with Mr Konaté.
“Covid-19 has shrunk the pockets,” she remarked on the last day of 2021, explaining how deep budget cuts by supporters of the crafts had slowed down the pace of the entertainment industry.
In recent years, domestic financing of creative and cultural industries on the continent is gaining momentum.
In his 2019 budget speech, the then South African finance minister, Tito Mboweni, justified the need to invest huge capital expenditure for his country’s new national theatre and museum. I
If judiciously allocated, such investments will benefit South African artists like Sipho Ganafana, a graphic designer, digital artist, filmmaker, and one of the thirty-one ACF grantees.
COVID-19: Disruptor of conventional art, promoter of digital culture
Mr Ganafana says he started his career in 1996 while still in high school by entering drawing contests and joining a theatre production ensemble. He would later enrol at the Vaal University of Technology where he bagged a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 2005.
Over the next six years, he worked for a media company. He also volunteered as an art facilitator at a youth art and culture centre for four years. Then Covid-19 hit the creative and cultural industries in South Africa, halting his work trajectory and impeding his social mobility.
“From 2018, I [started] working in the Art in School Project,” he said, “until we were stopped by Covid-19.”
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With his source of income gone, he turned to digital art even though he had always worked as a traditional artist majoring in drawing, printmaking, painting, and theatre throughout his decades-long career.
He discovered ACF’s SOFACO program through the forum of the artists’ WhatsApp groups he frequently participates in.
Ganafana confirmed receiving relief funds from the South African government and other stakeholders, but he complained that the one-time was grossly insufficient for the protracted health emergency and the payments from the public purse were marred by corruption during the lockdown.
“It was difficult to access other Relief Funds due to strict requirements and bureaucratic complications,” Ganafana added later.
His winning proposal, “I Care: creative platforms in digital arts and design, to encourage young people to develop new behaviours and build healthy relationships to reduce the risk of gender-based violence”, perfectly captures his mission.
Fast-tracking digital transformation of Africa’s art industry
The progress being made in Africa’s art industry which Ganafana explained is partly due to the proactive work of home-grown charitable organisations with expertise that best serves regional interests.
The African Culture Fund is part of this new wave of Afrocentric donors assisting creative innovators to break new grounds thereby facilitating the promotion of African artforms and the preservation of our cultures.
But serious challenges remain besides the sustainable financing of art and culture. Artificially intelligent systems are poised to redraft the rules of all human endeavours in the coming decade as algorithms and analytics start driving how operations are done, decisions are made, and outcomes are judged.
The state of AI in 2021 report, published by McKinsey, reveals that corporations are accelerating their adoption of machine-learning operations (MLOps) for business functions despite Covid-19 disruptions.
Web 3.0 is another emergent technology that promises to disrupt current internet systems and displace its established incumbents and powerbrokers.
The rise of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) has taken the industry by storm. Digital artists are deploying the medium to amass a following and generate streams of income. But not everyone is enthusiastic about these disruptive technologies.
Allen Wilson, a 3D character artist and animator from Rivers State in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region, is unapologetically disinterested in NFTs.
“I do not believe in the NFTs craze,” he confided in an email. “Any artist looking to go into the NFTs space must have a huge following or else [their] NFTs will not be sold.”
Samuel Onibiyo, another grantee in the SOFACO scheme, thinks Africa’s diverse culture may debar artificially intelligent systems from disrupting how art is carried out on the continent.
Mr Onibiyo is a Nigerian computer scientist and performance artist. He has been active in the cultural and creative industry since 1988.
His argument is based on the fact that natural language processing, particularly speech recognition, is a key component of machine learning. Africa has the distinction of being home to over 2,000 living languages and Nigeria, the continent’s most populous country, accounts for about a quarter of this figure.
“An average African is desirous of seeing performances by real people,” Mr Onibiyo said, “especially by their own [people] and in their language.”
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