Cultural Heritage: A Fountainhead For Africa’s Climate Action
Footage: Samson Ssewanya.
The exhaustive exploration of sub saharan Africa began in the 15th century, as Europeans looked for new trade routes to avoid taxes of the Arab and Ottoman empires.1 Subsequently, what started as a tax avoidance scheme, led into an unending staircase of systemic injustices against native Africans, and later their descendants. Among the historical injustices, perpetrated against African people over the centuries, the issue of cultural oppression has been widely overlooked. Cultural oppression played an enormous role in suffocating the advancement of African traditional sciences and technologies, in: textile, medicine, architecture, metallurgy, agriculture, astronomy, and cosmetology among others, and collapsed existing culturally preserved, natural and environmental knowledge systems which today can enhance climate action.
During colonisation, important factors for healthy acculturation, like knowledge sharing and innovating collaboratively, were ignored. This created misinformation and knowledge gaps between indigenous Africans and their European counterparts, with the latter controlling most aspects of knowledge distribution. For instance, in Buganda Kingdom (currently Uganda), bark cloth making was a craftsmanship entrusted to a particular clan.2 Each clan played a hereditary role in the Kingdom, although not exclusively. Every clan was represented by a plant or animal totem, and each clan member was expected to protect their totem, thus preserving biodiversity within the Kingdom. With the introduction of cotton in 1903, the barkcloth was abandoned as the Ganda were continually forced to grow cotton to pay colonial taxes. Although cotton is a sustainable fabric, the production of cotton is not. Cotton production requires destruction of biodiversity for agricultural land use, and heavy amounts of water. In contrast, bark cloth comes from peeling and beating the inner bark of a specific tree family. The bark always regenerates, making the fabric highly sustainable.3
Photo by: Samson Ssewanyana.
With new cultures and technologies imposed on Africans, a deliberate collapse of traditional knowledge systems to glorify European interests were enforced, indicating no regard or appreciation for indigenous knowledge systems, creating a knowledge gap, which subsequently led into social inequalities and have, over time, intensified Africa's climate crisis.
Furthermore, millions of African works of art were stolen from shrines behind a smoke screen of Christianity, indigenous cultures were continually suppressed, and African cultural beliefs were to be denounced and even characterised as satanic. Whereas today these art pieces are celebrated in major European museums - for Africa, it's a story of loss.4 These artifacts are of high cultural, social and historical value in the ethnic communities where they were stolen from. It is therefore unmistakable that besides plundering Africans of their heritage, colonisation facilitated a blatant religious and cultural oppression against Africans then, and now – not to mention the arbitrary boundaries that were created to force different tribes to live together; thus, suffocating cultural diversity.
African culture was so devalued to Africans that the colonists couldn't help but rename African landmarks which were not theirs name; for example, in Uganda, Lake Nalubaale, the source of the River Nile (Kiira), was renamed ‘Lake Victoria’.5
Sadly, as colonialism swept across Africa, and as a matter of National policy by Europe for the worldwide economic dominance of Europeans, African traditions that promoted environmental preservation, which today would aid in tackling Africa’s climate crisis, were replaced with a capitalist culture accompanied by economic dumping, that is now on the cusp of a climate emergency. Africa was subsequently subjected to a period of mass deforestation for timber and a catastrophic environmental degradation of natural resources for raw materials.6
Calling attention to Leopold's Belgian Congo genocide across Uganda's western border, and to the atrocities that adorned his quest for natural rubber in Africa, it is apparent that cultural oppression causes social vulnerability and inequalities that further worsen the climate crisis. Uganda's inequality problem is visibly vivid in its capital, Kampala. The city is built on seven beautiful hills booming in prosperity, and the valleys are covered in sluggish contaminated rivers and swamps. The swampy lands are very cheap in comparison to the hilltops, which makes them a haven for the urban poor and other many vulnerable groups of people.7 The absence of a sustainable waste collection systems for example, has turned these low lands into big dumpsters, oftentimes overwhelmed with waste. The hilltop upper class pay vulnerable individuals, who are usually casual laborers, to dump waste in these swamp valleys. Uganda's vulnerable communities are the most affected by the problems of climate change, plastic pollution, and pandemics.
Uganda is the most ethnically diverse country in the world, having very loose ethnic cultural boundaries that encourage creativity and social cohesion.8 By utilising culturally developed and understood knowledge systems of nature and the environment, such as traditional African technologies like bark cloth making and using localised content and information systems, which cultural minorities intuitively recognise, solutions for Africa’s widely ignored climate crisis can be realised today.