By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THE last instalment for January 8 2016 alleged that with digitisation of the mass media there would be dire consequences for the public education of Zimbabwe’s children unless all content producers for the increased channels learn African aesthetics.
The challenge arises from the fact that almost all so-called educated Africans have been trained according to the linear perspective of Eurocentric aesthetics. In Europe and the People Without History, one of the more perceptive and sensitive Western historians, Eric Wolf, described the damage this linear perspective has done to interpretations of history as follows:
“We have been taught, both inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and a civilisation independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilisations. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance begat the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States (of America), embodying the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
The author wrote the book to try to debunk the myth of Western history and civilisation still prevailing in the 1980s.
I’m here interested in the tendency of this Western approach to isolate and separate related or connected events or processes, making each one look immaculate and self-driven.
Both Africans and the founders of what became European art understood that art and religion both spoke in images and symbols about the invisible meaning of what were visible. Both religion and art also dealt with the wonder and awe which humans felt toward the world, toward God’s creation, nature, ecology and the heavens.
But through class formation, the Western bourgeoisie, using ‘science’, fought to separate art from religion, art from science itself, art from engineering, manufacturing, trade and finance.
But the artist refused to replace God, nature and the universe with bourgeois mediocrity and decadence.
As a result the artist was cast as a rebel, an individualist; and the key subject of art became the artist’s own consciousness, the artist’s own experience in opposition to ‘vulgar’ capitalism.
This led to the idea of art as alienation. And the most rebellious artists looked elsewhere for more challenging subjects. In some cases the quest led to the idea of the artist as the romantic rebel who replaced the boring bourgeois subjects with ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ from the South. Artists such as Pablo Picasso renewed their art by copying the styles of African sculptures.
In other words bourgeois capitalism tried to impose a linear aesthetic in which science and industrial precision assumed that academic categories and technical slots produced a new world of efficient divisions of labour and separate professions such as priests, politicians, lawyers, engineers, artisans, musicians, dancers, painters and teachers.
It was assumed that ‘modern’ human consciousness would also fall into these categories, leaving behind what were thought to be primitive and demonic expressions together with their ‘uncivilised’ societies and cultures.
But, in real life, aesthetics could not be limited to products of the consciousness of the outcast whom capitalism categorised and ostracised as the ‘artist’. Photography came to be recognised as art; film came to be recognised as art; and new tools made possible the discovery and production of new arts.
The real challenge was that aesthetics could not be limited to what the Euro-American bourgeoisie tried to define and confine as art and the study of ‘beauty’.
Moreover, the artificial and superficial categories of ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ or superstitious and scientific failed to hold. As sociologist Michael Harrington put it:
“Why does the primitive continue to exist in the time of the modern? (Karl) Jung would answer: Because the primitive is still there in our collective, and our individual and private dreams are usually made of the stuff of myths, even if we do not know it.”
From the perspective of African aesthetics however, the answer is that the linear categories of ‘primitive’ versus ‘modern’ are false. The priest is not immune to the powers of the painter and dramatist. The engineer is not immune to sculpture and to handicrafts. So-called scientists also cling to their own myths and superstitions.
Western society itself has been shocked to find education and educators imitating entertainers and advertisers; political campaigns imitating Hollywood spectacles and celebrities; and now so-called churches and prophets moulding themselves after TV shows, TV spectacles and soap opera celebrities.
A society occupies one moral and aesthetic universe. That is why Dr Ireen Mahamba, in her articles on education, has asked serious questions about our lazy acceptance of Euro-American categories based on bogus assumptions: That it is morally responsible to licence prostitutes as long as they are made available to adults only and not to juveniles; that pornography may be broadcast as long as parents are aware which channels contain pornography and can therefore keep their children from watching what they themselves watch; and that we can broadcast, publish and distribute harmful and even evil materials as long as we separate toddlers from adolescents; adolescents from teens; and teens from adults!
There are four basic and precious experiences to watch for in the aesthetic and moral education of a child.
First is perception, referring to the power and act of sensing the world in its richness.
Second is orientation, referring to the child’s finding and taking a position or stance in relation to that world and other actors in it.
Third is appropriation, the choosing of objects, signs, symbols, sounds, colours and even themes of special interest from the world being experienced.
Fourth is symbolising capacity, the development of distinct capabilities to shape a worldview, to create one’s own original images, symbols, sounds and systems made of these, from the world being experienced.
The question for Madzimbahwe is: Who is taking our children through these four experiences? Who gave them the power, the authority to do so?
African Aesthetics as African Reading
For millennia, the spectacle has been created and used to produce in audiences the experience or feeling of wonder, awe, even shock.
What has changed with digitisation is universal access to a screen — TV, smart phone, billboard, power-point — which can now carry and multiply repetitions of the spectacle.
Once everyone everywhere has access to this screen, divergent forces converge on it and compete to make the same screen carry their content. These forces include big corporations, sporting organisations, governments, NGOs, terrorists, education institutions, advertisers, political campaign managers and film-makers.
The screen is more powerful than the old frame of print media because of its use of speed, colour, sound, print and movement to block competing alternatives.
The screen excludes or downplays reason, thought, truth, reflection and nuances in favour of impact, interruption, hassle, panic, impression, expression, erasure and obsolescence leading to amnesia.