Lu et approuvé :: Read And Approved

This is a text written by Aminata Traoré, a malian writer, and translated from french to english for a short film by Kan-si, a Senegalese artist. It is a powerful film entitles Lu et approuvé, featuring an African woman's mouth speaking these english words to us. They are painful words for us to hear, but they are powerful. I'm sharing them with you because not because I want to insite defensiveness, but because I believe they touch on important issues that all of us have to face. Living here, they are at the forefront of my mind daily.

~Jocelyn

"The African continent enters into globalization from below, absorbing the waste that you rich countries would have difficulty recycling if it were not for our own initiative and unpredictable behaviour. In this way, the structure and dynamic of the local urban and rural markets is seriously compromised.

The phenomenon is world wide, I agree. However, I would like to focus on one of the dimension of the open market, presented as being inevitable, that impoverishes, that alienates. If it is so, the expansionist West can expect an ever greater influx of immigrants, people who culturally uprooted due to an irresponsible, mindless globalization process.

In a world order that showed responsibility, and that respected the most basic of human rights, the Ivory Coast would not have to rip itself apart in order to supply the world market with products such as cocoa, coffee and wood, while its own people, mostly young, get poorer every day, and are forced to move , or turn to ethnic or religious contentions and /or violence in various forms.

Equally, Mali, a landlocked country in the Sahel without access to the sea, would not have worked so hard to produce significant quantities of cotton which subsequently it cannot sell because those same economic powers that invite Mali to join the open economy are flooding the market. The people of Mali would need to emigrate in such great numbers to Europe or elsewhere, nor wear our old clothes, not sleep beneath our old blankets, hoping to dream like us.The textile artisans Sénoufos, Peuhl, Bamanan, who are still working in our countryside and still create quality textiles by hand, would not be relegated to Bamako, the capital of Mali, waiting for an improbable visa in order to reach your cities.

The prevailing economic order not only robs us of the riches of our lands, which gives back, but also robs us of our dignity. We enter into the global world imitating you, masking our real selves. That is how your great companies can prosper and win the battle of competition. That is how you balance your budgets and disrupt ours. This outrage, that has gone on too long (Slavery, Berlin conference, Post-colonisation…) prevents the international community from being moved by the plight of Africa .

All the more reason why you have no right to judge our democracies, or tell us how we should make our society democratic. Robbed of the riches of our lands, of our knowledge and of our experience, in the near future our only resort will be to take up arms, just to survive."

-Aminata Traoré