Shooting the breeze about cities
@ Nakasero about Kampala’s creative industries?
Unnie Wamala-Luwaga and myself were late to a reception at the British High Commissioner’s residence in Kampala. Instead of sipping wine, nibbling on finger food on a cool evening beneath a pergola tinged terrace, we were huddled around various laptops in a small coding studio, absorbed by Matatu and some of its production team (Jasper Onono and Okalany Daniel) at work.
“…Matatu is the most popular card game in Uganda. This game is played by all age groups, from school going kids to the elders. With time constraints people get busy, move to other places and no longer have time to sit down and enjoy the physical version of this game with their friends.
So Kola Studios came up with a great solution to this , putting the game on mobile devices so people can play wherever and whenever…” says Jasper Onono, Game Engine Developer @ Kola Studios
They have tapped into into long held socio-cultural fascination, with card games, shared in Tanzania and Kenya (known as Karata)
Seating across the room faces glued to screens are colleagues from Code-Sync who have developed “Mafutago”, an application which motorists use around Kampala to locate petrol stations with comparative price advantage in fuel costs.
Dennis Kahindi and Richard Zulu had given us a heads up on Outbox’s purpose: “..to invest in developing know-how of tech-entrepreneurs who have ideas to develop and prototype whilst stimulating demand..”
What is interesting is as much about the type of projects some of this type of spaces (which has gone viral internationally and are generally called innovation hubs) spawn as it is the creative occupations that inhabit them.
Assuming one had to consider places where concern about where creative occupations reside outside of the Outbox types, Kampala City Capital Authority (KCCA) might not sprint to mind. The “tech-enterprise world” has its hubs but what does a public sector quango in Kampala have to do with stimulating a narrative of creative occupations as drivers of innovation, new product and service development?
The idea that within the sensory overload of Nakasero Market , the road in from Entebbe airport to Kampala lined with brickworks, surrounded by small kilns and stacks of hand-made local bricks, hustle and bustle of Gaba Fish Market may lie cues with which fragments of Kampala’s narrative exists. This made for a curious discussion, about how the city might engage citizen experts, experimentally, to map its creative occupations and assets.
Enter Richard kikonyogo an ardent believer in the role of connected spaces across the city each with its peculiar forms of creativity and (un)productive creative occupations, that are important for Kampala’s community of thriving small businesses, residents and visitors.
I found Richard to be a curious and informed professional in KCCA . He is navigating a public sector quango where people (and citizens) may be unaware they are anxious to hold on to unexamined culture and traditions, whilst filled with judgemental curiosity about wealth and consumption patterns in the developed world.
Herein lies Richard’s ability to open up opportunities to fill the insight gap (with colleagues and direct reports), as his breadth of cultural references is not limited to the traditions of Uganda, East Africa or Africa. I detected a whiff of literary texture in his insights about inter-generational resistance to change.“..It cannot happen here!”, sounds like an instinctive refrain at the slightest sight of status-quo challenging suggestions. He is aware of the need to bring people around a set of practical initiatives he has discovered comes with their own set of issues; amid the noise, wheeling, dealing and bustle of vested interests.
Key issues on mind are these, how to foster over the long term an incredibly vibrant, ardently supportive community of creative entrepreneurs across multiple publicly accessible spaces? How to facilitate innovation rich collaborations, independent work, learning and growth inducing connections?
As Outbox and many other private initiatives across Kampala testify there is a growing community mix of citizens across all age groups, small business owners, technologists, financial managers, expatriates and creative occupations critical to Kampala’s economic growth. The long-view is to continue developing a range of initiatives around which an entrepreneurial mix of Kampala’s citizens will generate ideas that not only make money for their creators, attract international investment, but also end up helping Kampala in addressing the environment, transportation, visual arts, education, conservation, communication, poverty, food issues and a variety of urban challenges.
Does this sound far fetched? Could KCCA in part be a think and do tank, a laboratory, a partner catalyst for ideas that might not come out of Kampala’s traditional public sector environments. At the moment Richard and his colleagues are asking themselves how should Kampala’s specialist sme sectors take advantage of shared knowledge, access a density of transnational customers, suppliers and workers to create new products and services.
The notion of the City as a revenue collector and basic public goods provider is a one dimensional concept. City councils or their equivalents can be places for creative thinking in ways we don’t normally expect. Here is where understanding diversity inherent within creative industries as well as cultural context is intrinsically linked to a city’s ability to become a place where scalable products and services are made.
There is the question of agreeing culturally what constitutes parts of the creative industries peculiar to Kampala, then mapping the creative industry itself across Kampala or having a classification framework for the creative industries, geographically, across Kampala.
“…sources of creative industry expertise have to be identified, and an assessment has to be made of which industries it would be useful to map. it might make more sense in this case to provide a broad overview of the creative sector followed by detailed work on a handful of industries: product design, food and drink, high quality batch manufacturing, theatre, drama and digital media. In the meantime, projects (ideas for public value) could be shaped by holding productive “participatory design thinking-sessions” on topics of interest to local firms, such as brand experience, service design, innovation and strengthening creative networks..” — adapted from British Council’s tool-kit on Mapping the Creative Industry Case study: Binh Duong Province, Vietnam.
The British Council have done some work in this area within and outside the UK with various versions “mapping the creative industry tool-kit ”.
Crucially it will be interesting to get a sense for where propensity for new product or service development exists or indeed what this means to the average citizen of Kampala.
When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it Super Normal — Innovation Starts with the Ordinary
What is normal to the world and what is normal to Kampala is relative and depends on how internationally elastic people’s local cultural references are. This works the other way round i.e. how elastic is the worlds’ cultural references of Kampala?
Cultural intelligence and sensitivity is a needs must as an alternative to the idea that simply translating local language into English or vice versa is all there is to do in order to resonate.
Some folks at KCCA and across Kampala are aware that for a “Real Kampala Cosmopolitan” it is less about language. Might it be more about connecting and identifying with the aerial of global citizens mindfully immersed in Kampala’s psyche and the roots of local people culturally?
Here is a test of how elastic our cultural references are: one wonders how many viewers might find whether or not this comedy sketch by Anne Kansiime has a cross over appeal?
We may just want to reflect on the types of holistic creative collaboration charged with promise, that opens up to us the essentials that persevere in certain cultural approaches and outcomes.
