11 Questions: Kona Khasu, Cultural Aficionado
Khasu is a long
time Liberian culture promoter and currently heads the Liberian Arts and
Culture Council in Liberia as post war Liberia moves to position the arts at
the center of national development. To simply called Kona Khasu a cultural
enthusiast would be unfair, he has been at the center of education and social
policies in his native Liberia for close a decade and half, and if anyone knows
anything about Liberian theatre also, they would know Kona Khasu.
1. What has James Emmanuel Roberts aka Kona Khasu been doing since
his tenure ended as the Artistic Director at Kendeja?
I have been into so
many things, it might just be better to send you an abridged CV. Briefly, since
I transferred from Bureau of Cultural Affairs, Ministry of Information,
Culture and Tourism to the Liberia Development Corporation to work for Tourism
Development in Liberia, against my will, I must add, I founded the Liberia’s
professional theatre training program, the Blamadon Theatre Workshop, produced
Liberia’s television series, was sent to every prison in Liberia beginning with
the Police Cell and ending up in the notorious Belle Yala Maximum Prison. The
camel’s back got broken in 1985 when I was nearly executed by the Doe
Regime during the aftermath of the abortive Thomas Quinwonkpa Coup
d’état. After my release from prison in 1986 (due to national and international
pressure on the military regime) I escaped to the United States where I had
been offered a Visiting Scholar position at Boston University; and taught at
African Dance and some theatre classes at the School for Arts, and Creative
Writing at its College of Liberal Arts.
Visa conditions [J-1]
proscribed that I remained in the employ of Boston University after two years.
Since I could not immediately returned to Liberia, I took up employment with
various academic institutions in Boston: UMASS/Boston’s Adult Literacy Resource
Institute where I coordinated two State and Federal-funded literacy projects,
Publishing for Literacy, and Setting the Stage for Literacy. These were
projects designed to develop new readers and learner-generated reading
materials. I also acquired a graduate degree from the Harvard University School
of Education, specializing in Administration, Planning and Social Policy
Analysis in 1995.
2. What can we look forward to seeing from the Blamadon Arts
and Cultural Center that you founded in the near future?
The Blamadon Center
for Arts (BCA) is an arts collaboration to support creative people in the arts
(music, theatre, poetry, and visual arts), and to support them applying what we
learn from the arts to transform thinking and behavior in the lives of
Liberians. It establishes the social context for communicating shared values
derived from common beliefs, mythology, symbols and history of the society.
The BCA also embraces
skills training, promotion, and marketing. Its objective is to support
self-reliance, confidence, and national identity; it will significantly
contribute to mitigating the hatred and political instability that the nation
experienced during the last 30 years. BCA will implement special programs for
marginalized youths who feel abandoned, and those who have neither basic
education nor critical thinking skills, both of which are pre-requisites for
acquiring employment. The BCA therefore, is a response to the great societal
need to regain national equilibrium through a community of artists sharing a
common environment and synergizing their creativity while producing vibrant new
ideas that catalyze social change.
The BCA encourages and
supports ethnic diversity, cross-ethnic collaborations, engage its expertise
and networks to market and distribute creative products, and train its members
to manage successful creative businesses. In this way, it will be fulfilling
its multiple responsibilities to the nation.
At the height of the
Liberian Civil War in the early 90’s, I realized there would be horrific
destruction of the country, especially the education system. None would have
more impact than the lost of self-respect, dignity and self-confidence of the
Liberian people. The proliferation of NGOs inevitably followed millions of aid
money in Liberia during the emergency period, encouraging and developing a
‘welfare mentality’. The population first lost its dignity, then its confidence
becoming increasingly reliant on gratuitous ‘foreign assistance’. The result
was a near incurable dependency mentality, the exact opposite of what was
really needed for a sensible, sustainable national reconstruction. The nation
needed to invest in the ‘human infrastructure’; instead there is a
disproportionate focus on physical infrastructures, leading down the cascading
path of insatiable appetite for bricks and mortar development devoid of
cultural context that make the bricks and mortar development meaningful and
satisfying to Liberians. Surely, a nation needs the ‘bricks and mortar’; it
needs bread. But the nation also longs for a meaning in life that is not
satisfied by ‘bricks and mortar’ and bread.
Returning and settling
in Liberia in early 2000, I was amazed how the adult population still
remembered the “Kotati” series, the popular Liberian television program
produced by Blamadon Theatre workshop. This television series, which ran for a
year, kept viewers glued to their seats and was the topic of Monday morning
conversations.
But this was not what drove me back to the theatre. The credit
must go to my son, Kona Khasu, Jr. This young man argued with me for 10 years
while we were in exile that I return to the theatre so I could pass on the
skills and knowledge to the younger generation of Liberians. Fast forward to
January 14, 2013 when Marlene Cooper gave her Sugar Beach mansion to Blamadon
Center for Arts to develop an arts center, I realize the power in his vision
because it was through his efforts in organizing a Blamadon event to celebrate
our 165th Independence Anniversary in Silver Springs,
MD that we got this gift.
Our first major project together is the highly acclaimed
documentary on the 2005 Liberian elections titled “No More Selections We Want
Elections! It premiered at the Africa World Documentary Film Festival,
University of Missouri, St. Louis, MO, February 2012, and was shown at Shiloh
Baptist Church Trenton, NJ. , the New African Films Festival, Silver Springs, MD,
Harvard University 2012, the African Development Conference, Cambridge, MA, 44th Annual Conference of the LSA, Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY., and at the Boston University’s 20th Annual Graduate Conference in African Studies.
“No Selection We Want Elections!” is a
documentary portraying the challenges of holding free and fair elections after
14 years of civil war. It has been praised by viewers for its balance, ‘uncharacteristic
non-partisanship’. A self reliant population does not have to wait to be employed. With its innate talents, it just needs to
acquire the mentality and attitudes for self-employment.
3. Can you elaborate on the goal and aims of the just
founded Liberia Arts & Culture Council?
The goals and
objectives of the Arts and Culture Council of Liberia are:
·
Encourage, promote,
and advocate for arts and culture in the Republic of Liberia;
·
Mobilize financial,
material and moral support for Liberian arts and culture by encouraging,
supporting artists and strengthening organizations that work in arts and
culture;
·
Encourage the private
sector to support arts and culture as an effective tool for reconciliation, and
the re-establishment of social and political stability pre-requites for
securing its investments; and encourage building coalitions and partnerships
with the business community;
·
Support the establishment
of public policies for the creation, preservation, and protection of Liberian
arts and culture;
·
Support the inclusion
of arts and culture in the national curricula at all levels of our education
system;
·
Enhance the quality of
artistic production through support for the training and professional
development of artists and art institutions;
·
Encourage, promote and
advocate for the establishment of public buildings such as museums, concert
halls, theatres, art galleries, public sculptures, archives, recording and film
studios, that display, preserve, protect and pass on the arts and culture of
Liberia to succeeding generations;
·
Support the
organization of local and national festivals, competitions, awards, prizes in
arts and culture;
·
Ensure that the arts
and culture of this country are passed on to succeeding generations
4. Has the Sirleaf government been receptive to your
efforts, and what level of involvement and cooperation does the Council expect
from the president?
We are hopeful that President Sirleaf soon will respond to our
letter requesting that she endorse a Legislative action and the recommendation
of Dr. Elwood Dunn’s 165th Independence
Celebration Oration: (1) turn over the E. J. Roye Building to civil society
group for use as a national Arts Center for Liberia, and request the
Legislature to pass a law stipulating a certain percentage of the Annual Budget
of the Republic of Liberia to support the country’s arts and culture. At the
recent National Vision Conference in Gbarnga, the president mentioned my work
with the Blamadon Center for Arts, and my leadership in organizing the Council
and said ‘now is the time’. I assumed she meant she was giving favorable
consideration to our request. Perhaps we will receive a formal response during
the impending Annual Message.
5. What role do you desire for the private
sector to play in support of the Liberia Arts & Culture
Council as has been done successfully in other countries?
The ACCL is finalizing
a Declaration on the Role of Arts and Culture on National Development that
should be proclaimed shortly. In that Declaration, we describe the role of the
private sector in paragraphs Sections 4, 6, and 7 of CHAPTER VIII: OUR CALL TO
ACTION:
Section 4. We
call upon the private sector to promote arts and culture by increasing its
direct support to artists of this country who work tirelessly to create,
preserve, and protect their creations for posterity.
Section 6. We
call upon the Government of the Republic of Liberia to establish institutions,
which support the creation of art, the study of arts, the public access to art,
and research of our traditional and contemporary arts so that our emerging
culture is inclusive, relevant and responsive to our contemporary existence.
Section 7. We
call upon the international development community of Liberia to broaden their
development agenda to include recognition that a people without a strong sense
of cultural identity can never truly perceive nor sustain genuine development.
6. Can you comment on the approximately $300,000
dollars from the government and the private sector to the Lone Star football
mobilization committee for them to play just one game against the
Super Eagles—which it lost 6-1—at a time when our traditional arts and
cultural heritage suffer neglect?
Look Sports is
important. I played it in my youth; in fact I played several sports, so I do
not begrudge the government or the private sector for supporting the Lone Star.
But I want both government and the private sector to understand that arts and
culture is much more critical to the fundamentals of national identity,
self-confidence and the broader question of national development than sports.
Arts and culture engenders and supports love and passion for Liberia. It
provides the most basic justification for why we should unite to develop
Liberia, it provide a platform for equitable sharing of the nation’s wealth by
its entire citizens. Over the years, and especially during this present government,
which is generally considered one of the most enlightened Liberian government
in recent times, arts and culture has been completely neglected. The current
Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism recently revealed that his
Ministry has no budget for arts, culture and tourism. This shocking revelation
leaves one to conclude that arts and culture is not a priority of the Sirleaf
Government’s development agenda.
7. What have been your major challenges since
the Council embarked on this key effort of an arts &
cultural revival?
Our major challenges
during these formative years of the ACCL are the same as would attain to
founding and developing a new entity. We are still debating what the broad
mission of the organization will be: providing support, advocacy, resources to
artists and arts institutions or actually the ACCL itself recreating art. Most
seem to agree that doing the later would be counter-productive as it would tend
to replace or duplicate the role and responsibility of the individual artists
and art institutions, leaving a huge void in the areas of support for public
policy for arts and culture, public advocacy, support to individual artists as
well as institutions, and resource mobilization. I side with the later
view. I think we will come to an agreement on this matter very soon.
8. Do you have any knowledge about whether Kendeja will
be revived or if we will see a new national arts
& cultural center?
I have seen a few
structures on the site on the Marshall Road designated for the new Kendeja.
However, there is no public information on what will be on the site, timetable
for completion etc. More importantly, the process is inadequate in the sense
that there were no public meetings to solicit and encourage diverse views on
the design and function of this major public institution that played such a
vital role in the cultural life of Liberians for 30 years. In the absence of
this open public hearing, I am pessimistic the facility constructed could be
ill-conceived.
9. You have been in the vanguard of arts and culture since the
1970s. Can you tell us what have been your greatest joys and disappointments?
Among the joys are:
The modernization of the National Cultural Troupe and establishment of the
Junior National Cultural Troupe (mid 70s), the Kotati television series (an
achievement of the Blamadon Theatre Workshop in the late 70s), and the documentary,
No More Selections We Want Elections! For the disappointments my list includes:
Destruction of the national Cultural Center, destruction of the Kotati series
tapes by the late by T-Kla Williams, who succeeded Chauncey Cooper as Director
General of the Liberia Broadcasting Service. The destruction took place just
when UNESCO had expressed interest in the series, and the US actor John Amos
(of Good Times, Roots, Coming to America, and Die Hard 2 fame) had visited
Liberia to discuss with me a version of the Kotati series for a US television
version.
10. Efforts such as The Revelation in the 70s and more
recently Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings have
all been impacted by lack of government support and public support. Why do
you think this is, and what do you think can be done to generate passion
for the arts throughout society?
Magazine such as the
Revelation and especially Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian writings
are immensely important to arts and culture, and the creative process. The
absence of these kinds of magazine in every sense accounts for the poor productivity
of Liberian artists, and the equally poor quality of their product, and lastly
the lack of support from the Liberian people because support often is the
product of awareness of promotion. The absence of Sea Breeze Journal is a
tremendous loss because it provided a platform to share art and enjoy it.
11. Thank you for making time for this interview despite your
busy schedule. Are there any last thoughts you would like to end with,
specifically to those of us in the Diaspora?
I cannot end these
thoughts without thanking Stephanie Horton, a wonderful Liberian writer, a
passionate lover of the arts, a committed spirit who has drunk very deeply from
our ancestors’ gourds of inspiration and provided support and inspiration to
many.
It is my hope that the
writers and artists of Liberia will unite for the arts, it is also my
expectation that the president, her cabinet, and the Legislature would embrace
a passionate cultural awakening and that they will begun to support the one
thing Liberia has in natural abundance, and of which we should be rightly
proud: our unique arts and culture. Jackie Kennedy, the former first lady of
the United States in opposing the demolition of the Grand Central Station in
New York City reportedly said, “If we destroy our past, something dies in all
of us.” This was true then, and it is true today. It’s universal and applies to
all humanity.
I am also grateful for
the interest in our efforts and thank you for giving us your time and space to
talk about something which we are unabashedly passionate, and unapologetic---our
arts and culture.
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