To win big on the international scene, I always tell people you need to export your own culture and package it properly in the form of art. It is your culture that the international scene doesn’t have.
You can’t go and expect a Nigerian rapper to go far rapping in English; how does he expect to compete with a Kendrick, Cole, Kanye or Hov? Or expect to do a movie in English and expect it to compete favorably with the likes of movies having a Bullock or Aniston? Our culture is what they don’t have, and it’s the only thing that keeps them looking into us because our culture is our uniqueness that we ought to sell to the world.
I write this because of the recent disqualifications of some Nigerian movies by the Oscars due to language barriers. Perusing through the list of African Grammy Winners, one thing is certain, all of them hardly or never sing in English and they all won under the World TRADITIONAL Music Category – this is evident that foreigners need to learn more about our culture because they love it. It is already evident with the collaborations between foreign musicians and the Nigerian musicians: we only get to win big locally internationally when we export our cultures.
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The same goes for movies; check out movies that have performed very well on the international scenes, they are all deeply talking about happenings in Africa that the outside didn’t know about.
Check out a few of those movies:
- Cairo Station (Egypt, 1958) …
- Sambizanga (1973, Congo/Angola) …
- Chronicle of the Year of Embers (Algeria, 1975) …
- The Wind (Mali, 1983) …
- Hyenas (Senegal, 1992) …
- Guelwaar (Senegal, 1993) …
- The Silences of the Palace (Tunisia, 1994) …
- Keita, The Heritage of the Griot (Burkina Faso, 1996)