Africa Grantee in the Spotlight: Kwoto Cultural Center
Although barely noticed by the outside world, events and transformations in Africa during 2002 were momentous, filled with hope but also foreboding. The year began with democratic elections in Sierra Leone, marking the end to that nation’s vicious civil war. The year closed with democratic elections in Kenya, ending the reign of Daniel arap Moi, one of Africa’s longest-lasting dictators. Against all predictions, meaningful progress was made in resolving the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Sudan. Even in Burundi and Somalia, negotiators forged ahead.
African leaders presented a number of initiatives, such as the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). America announced a Millennium Challenge Account that raised hopes among Africans that struggle and sacrifice could bring big dividends. The actual potential of these initiatives, however, is still hard to discern at this early stage.
On the negative side, political instability and crisis continue to plague Africa. Elections in Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo, and Zambia were filled with violence and fraud. Liberia, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Central African Republic were wracked by armed insurgencies. As Nigeria prepared for its first civilian elections, violence and corruption still threatened. The scourge of HIV/AIDS condemned tens of millions of Africans to death, a toll compounded by the famine in Southern Africa and the Horn, which threatens the lives of some fifty million people.
In this context, NED’s program proved both prescient and effective. Nearly one-fifth of its total funding to Africa was directed at the Congo, where NED grantees in civil society assumed a major role in pressing the belligerents to negotiate an end to war. These grantees are laying the foundations for a democratic transition. In Sudan, NED’s grantees have been leaders of the peace movement, creating a domestic political environment for negotiations while inculcating a greater awareness of human rights and democracy. NED grantees also form the core of the human rights movements in Sierra Leone and Liberia consolidating democratic gains in the former and resisting their erosion in the latter. NED’s grantees in Nigeria continued to press for political reform in the free but volatile prelude to elections.
NED support for programs in Africa carried out by its four affiliated institutes was significant. In Kenya, for example, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) played a critical role in bringing political parties together into coalitions that transformed the electoral equation. With NED funding, the International Republican Institute (IRI) provided electoral assistance to bolster nascent democratic trends in Somaliland and began efforts to reconcile the political parties in Côte d’Ivoire. The American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS) used NED support to provide vital assistance to the trade unions during the elections in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and both NDI and IRI helped democrats in Zimbabwe’s sadly unsuccessful process. NED funding also helped the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) press forward with innovative Internet programs connecting business associations around the continent, and brought greater attention to the issue of corporate governance and accountability.
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Africa Grantee in the Spotlight: Kwoto Cultural Center
For twenty long years Sudan has been besieged by internal warring over religion, political power, resources, and geopolitical interests. Two million people have died in the conflict. Four million have either fled the country or abandoned its war-torn southern region to settle in encampments to the north. Muslims and Arabs in the north are fighting not only against the Christians and traditionalists of the south but also against each other. Southerners are killing one another as well. Alliances have been formed and broken across the religious, ethnic, partisan, and regional divides, creating an environment of death, displacement, distrust, and despair. In this environment, hope and a sense of belonging are rare commodities, whose importance in creating fertile ground for democracy is often underestimated.
“The displacement situation, which most of the Southern Sudanese, Nuba Mountains, and the Southern Blue Nile peoples who fled the civil war are enduring in Khartoum’s outskirts in displaced person camps, poses serious human and social problems,” says Derik Uya Alfred, managing director of Kwoto Cultural Center in Sudan. The center, founded in 1994 and a NED grantee since 2000, is a popular cultural arts group that brings together youth from twenty southern Sudanese language groups through dance, music, poetry, and drama. Kwoto reaches hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in the north and south, in displaced persons camps, universities, prisons, and even the national theater, with a subtle but powerful message of pride and dignity in diversity and with an appeal for peace, democracy, and human rights.
Alfred has found that the arts are a potent, versatile vehicle for provoking communication and understanding among Kwoto’s diverse audiences. While the center tackles an impressive variety of tough issues, like nonviolent conflict resolution and respect for human rights, an intended side-effect of its work is the democratic empowerment of displaced southerners hungry for a sense of community and hope. Alfred points out that Kwoto’s performances also provide a much-needed form of entertainment to these communities, which are typically burdened with monotony, poverty, despair, and sundry other social ills. “Music and performance are very straight and direct means of communication,” he explains. “They go deep into people’s hearts and minds, and they are relevant to all the categories—to the illiterate and the elite.”
This year, the Kwoto Cultural Center received a $40,000 grant from NED. A portion of the grant was used to hold forty theater performances on critical themes such as war, displacement, immigration, peace and justice, human rights, HIV/AIDS, children in war-torn areas, diversity in cooperation, and conflict resolution. During the tour, which included thirteen performances in displaced-person camps, Kwoto provided training to children in drama, singing, dancing, and puppetry. Kwoto’s inspirational work has already led many youth from southern Sudan and other marginalized areas of the country to emerge with similar performance groups of their own. “That indicates that the message behind Kwoto’s program—for instance, unity, cultural diversity, acceptance, and appreciation of each other’s cultures—has reached them clearly,” says Alfred.
NED funding this year also helped Kwoto to extend the reach of its performances and training through electronic media, including television, video, radio, and audio recordings. Alfred says Kwoto members are being empowered with basic training in filming, script-writing, directing, and editing, with ambitions to produce a series of television programs tackling themes such as HIV/AIDS, poverty, and patterns of local cultures.
“The performances and work of Kwoto echo the core issues people are looking for: cultural diversity, peace, tolerance, and mutual understanding based on respect and human dignity,” says Alfred. “Kwoto will always keep uttering words of thanks and gratitude to NED for the grants, support, and profound understanding of southern Sudan’s desires for cultural revival that Kwoto is trying to tackle.”
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