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ISSN: 2574 -1241
ISSN: 2574 -1241
Received: March 18, 2024; Published: April 01, 2024
*Corresponding author: Kourouma Sory, Enseignant-chercheur (Doctorant UJKZ de Ouagadougou), Institut Supérieur des Arts Mory Kanté de Dubréka (ISAMK/D), Republique de Guinée
DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2024.55.008766
Each community is a social determinant which corresponds to a cultural entity. The community therefore constitutes the social base in administrative, political and socio-cultural management. However, this management is lacking due to the inadequacy of our policies to our culture because an essential relationship that our leaders ignore exists. Except in times of crisis or major socio-political events. It is right that those in power are really interested in these communities except during electoral periods (political campaign) and/or in times of health crisis (Epidemic) and social crisis. This creates resistance, sometimes revolt or violence. However, this interest in communities should be permanent. The means necessary to achieve this is communication. However, the means of communication that exist today (radio, television, social networks.) have almost no credibility in community games due to a certain number of considerations: political management, rumors, lack of confidence for be left behind. Thus, it is conceivable that artistic communication through Cinema can play this role through image and Sound. This is why such a theme “African Cinemas and Culture of Peace. Is well suited to appease because cinema, despite its role of entertainment, is an art of information, mobilization, and education.
Cinema has the character of reality. It is the association of art and technique whose essence is movement. Also, the cinema is coherent and treats the stories in a believable way while hooking the spectators. Develop the story well, when the hero laughs, cries and dies, the spectator lives the life of the hero laughs, cries and dies. As an illustration, some health researchers have used image and sound in order to achieve their objectives. That is to say, making videos (called the Toolbox) with fictional or real stories in order to help researchers and participants in clinical research. These toolboxes, which are a Canada-Guinea initiative (CEFORPAG), have made an impact in the context of ethics and clinical research in health. But also, allow communities victims of the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and DR Congo to participate in research and raise awareness of the right to be informed about the results of the study. which they participated in. Then, the stigmatization of victims are topics covered. We believe that cinema can participate in the development of the culture of peace to inform, mobilize and educate communities on a socio-cultural, political, legal and above all economic level.
In our African countries, all the potential is in rural communities and these localities are threatened by recurring crises of insecurity (terrorism), food, etc. which we can eradicate through cinematographic creations. So, these community issues will be addressed to raise awareness on the promotion of peace, cohesion and living together. Therefore, communities deserve well-being to be supported and maintained because they are the lungs of national development. Hence the interest in this study of artistic communication through cinema [1]. The intention of this present communication is to contribute to revitalizing African cinema in an increasingly modern communication context. Associations and networks that were set up from this period created numerous opportunities for meetings and the dissemination of the arts of image and sound to improve the living conditions of the populations. Some countries can draw on the long traditional artistic and cultural experience of others. This missed opportunity with history challenges decision-makers and the average citizen. However, from our point of view, cinema constitutes an important vector in community development, particularly in Guinea which has already experimented with popular theater. For several centuries, writing, drawing and painting remained the only means of communicating an idea, information, testimony.
Like archeology and history, they have also remained throughout this time the only supports that bear witness to the historical and cultural heritage of the lives of men, societies and humanity. The advent of audiovisual technology, the history of which dates back to the invention of the phonograph by Thomas EDISON in 1877, revolutionized the means of communication. Cinema, art and industry is a means of exploring man, his environment, his history and his culture. It is, like any other means of communication and expression, due to the grandiose influence that the image has on human beings, one of the most powerful vectors for establishing and consolidating cultural identities. Cinema has proven over time to be one of the means of transmitting information on the lifestyle, ideologies, practices and cultures of the peoples of the world. It is about finding an artistic approach to communication on the development of cinema for peace. This artistic approach will have to mix the cultural traditions of the targeted populations while scrupulously ensuring that artistic innovation in film production does not affect cultural authenticity at a time when the digital revolution is taking over all human activities.
In the digital age, “the processes of globalization and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create for renewed dialogue between communities, […] also pose serious threats of degradation, disappearance and destruction on intangible cultural heritage…”, recognizes the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the text of the convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Certainly, there are today, in different parts of the world, peoples who have developed a real culture of communication, such as in the media, cinema and other essential supports for the transmission of their history, acquisition and sharing of knowledge in their daily experience, and as a mode of artistic expression [2]. This is the case in several African countries, such as Burkina Faso, Tunisia.
Cinema is above all a universal cultural heritage whose different practices are effective even in societies that could be considered hostile to the media. Cinema is a means of information, education, mobilization, and entertainment. There are also popular practices within families, communities, and social groups in which cinematographic creation can be interested. Which made this art an excellent means of communication, of transmitting values such as language for example. Later, the development of mass broadcast technologies such as radio, television, records, cinema, computers, and the Internet helped to create new cultural practices beyond traditions, beyond community or national borders. As for Africa, at the dawn of independence, during the 1960s, there appeared a flowering of national ballets, traditional instrumental ensembles, cinematographic creations, modern orchestras, and theater troupes working on the repertoire epics, tales, and other popular songs to create choreographies, dramaturgies, and contemporary concerts. It is in this context that we will try to understand the problem of this theme, its role and impact in supporting the culture of peace in the African countries which interests us in this reflection. Finally, for African Cinema and the culture of peace, let us tell our stories, lives and realities to achieve the objectives, that of the harmonious and sustainable development of an Africa in peace and in the social cohesion of living together [3].
On April 3, 1984, the military took power in Guinea and put an end to the first socialist regime. On the same date, the military who came to power announced their desire to lead Guinea towards economic liberalism. What we can remember from the first regime of independent Guinea (1958-1984) is its centralized character where the welfare state has a monopoly on the economy. It owns the means of production and intervenes in the process of socio-economic development. In this perspective, the State has found its strategy of communication with the productive forces represented by the people. This communication strategy was in fact its powerful radio broadcasting called "the Voice of the Revolution" which, until 1977, was the only medium through which power conveyed its message. Also, popular theater from the base to the top played a leading role in the dissemination of the development policy that the regime had instituted [4]. Thus, community development was supported by broadcasting and the Arts, the means of impact in the hands of the public authorities to pass its policies including that of community development. Indeed, the first regime of independent Guinea had made agriculture and livestock the engine of its economic development; two key activities practiced by a majority illiterate population and for a long time acting solely in accordance with agrarian customs.
With such a population, written forms of development strategies cannot produce impacts [5]. This is why, Henry TOUATI, founding director of the Center des Arts du Récit in Isère (France), affirms that in questions linked to orality, the place of black Africa like that of the Maghreb is particular: “The cultures and civilizations are nourished, built and transmitted through orality.” This assertion which accredits orality as a value of communication in black Africa clearly implies that the first regime, by making popular theater a means of communication, had perceived that the people of Guinea, mostly illiterate, would more easily understand the distilled message. through the theater. Whatever one wants to believe about the first Guinean regime, it nevertheless succeeded in imposing a strategic orientation in terms of agriculture and livestock through the District Agro-Pastoral Farms (FAPA) established in each village of Guinea with modern means [6]. Also, this strategy not only occupied the people in the fields and on the farms but also occupied the armed forces which, alongside their sovereign function, became real production units.
Here and there, theater has significantly contributed to raising awareness among the people of the need to achieve food self-sufficiency, which is the best path to sustainable economic development. On the artistic and cultural level, the first regime left laudatory traces which deserved to be perpetuated. Unfortunately, this was not the case when in 1984 the death of President Ahmed Sékou TOURE sounded the death knell for his regime. However, the Pan-African Cinema Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) was inspired by the Guinean example during the major festivals that the country organized from 1968 to 1984 and which mobilized the whole world in Conakry. The intention to revitalize the ancient theater of Guinea in an increasingly modern communication context comes from an observation that we made by paraphrasing Henri Touati, who maintains that all Western countries have gradually followed the same path [7]. (oral resources). Associations and networks which were set up, from this period, created numerous opportunities for meetings and the dissemination of the arts of speech and for improving the living conditions of communities, almost everywhere in Europe and in North America.
This evidence is not exclusive, moreover; Guinea can use it in the name of its long artistic and cultural tradition. This missed opportunity with history challenges decision-makers and the average citizen. This is why the advent of the second republic (1984-2008) had the merit of initiating the Community Development policy by establishing a Ministry responsible for Decentralization. The essential mission of this ministry should be to leave grassroots development in the hands of only the potential beneficiaries who are at the same time the thought leaders. The State only provided technical support, assistance and expertise if the beneficiaries expressed the need; of course, everything is molded into the general policy envisaged by the government. To be precise, the general policy on community development has not supported the roles and possible impacts of communication in terms of community development. However, from our point of view, communication constitutes an important vector in community development, particularly in Guinea, which has already experimented with popular theater, which we will revisit to measure the strengths and weaknesses and then make projections for improvement.
By looking more closely at the roles and impacts of communication in the community development of our country, it will be difficult to determine its roles in terms of operational strategy which affects the peasant layers who are the main actors in local development [8]. The fashionable, superficial strategies are limited to Audiovisual and Radio reports whose messages only concern intellectuals. Most often, the aspects of impact that National Television and Radio relay on decentralized activities are in principle local development achievements which are indicators by which development partners measure the effectiveness of the commitments made. Should we then reorient existing approaches or find new ones? Indeed, the dizzying growth of the culture and ICT industries, characterized by innovation and market conquest, and underpinned by economic logic, will then lead to what the ethnologist and anthropologist Jean-Pierre WARNIER designates by “cultural confrontation between industry and tradition”.
In the digital age, “the processes of globalization and social transformation, alongside the conditions they create for a renewed dialogue between communities, […] also pose serious threats of degradation, disappearance and destruction on intangible cultural heritage…”, recognizes the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the text of the convention for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage [9]. Curiously, at the very moment when the world seems completely dominated by these information and communication technologies, and this in almost all areas of human activity including that of artistic expressions and community-led development, we are also witnessing a renewed interest in popular traditions including storytelling and the spoken arts in general, as a manifestation of this intangible cultural heritage. Rural environments having been gradually deserted in favor of urban centers, modern societies have continued, despite everything, to express "an imperative need to nourish spaces of transmission, to build in a sensitive and emotional world, a relationship with our stories intimate, those of our families, of our communities, to live better together…”. This awareness will give rise to a major movement in France, during the 1970s, under the concept of “Storytelling Revival”, attempting to reconnect with oral storytelling, firstly, as a popular tradition, an element of heritage., then, as an artistic discipline and for which it was now necessary to delimit and organize the field of practice. “Whenever we talk about oral tradition, we think of societies lost deep in the jungle or on inaccessible mountain peaks, with bizarre customs, colorful clothing, craftsmanship more than art…”. Louis-Jean CALVET” This assertion by the ethnolinguist Louis Jean Calvet taken from his work entitled The Oral Tradition, evokes the difficulty of being able to understand communication by the media through the prism of a society with a written tradition [10].
At the end of this study on the foundations and issues of communication in societies with a community tradition, the author arrives at the opposite meaning of his study (orality), of the "refusal of this bazaar exoticism, of this voyeuristic attitude who only accepts the other by their strangeness and not by their simple difference.” Should it be emphasized that between communication as an element of media and communication as transmission of historical information and knowledge in communities the gap is considerable. Certainly, there are today, in different parts of the world, people who have developed a real culture of communication, such as in the media, essential supports for the transmission of their history, acquisition and sharing of knowledge in their daily lives., and also as a mode of artistic expression [11]. This is the case in most of Africa. In a study carried out for the Ministry of Culture in France, these remarks recall the famous sentence pronounced by Amadou Hampathé Bâ, Malian writer and researcher: “In Africa, an old man who dies is a library that burns”. But orality is above all a universal cultural heritage whose different practices are effective even in societies that could be considered to have a writing tradition. From the bards of Greek antiquity, through the European troubadours of the medieval era, the bards to the Djéli or Gawlo of black Africa, there have always existed, within human communities, people devoted to the arts of speech, thereby fulfilling specific social functions depending on the cultural areas: witnesses of collective memory, genealogists, advisors and confidants of kings, mediators, informants, educators, hosts of popular events or storytellers.
There have also been popular practices of speaking within families, communities, and groups [12]. Which made these arts excellent means of communication, of transmitting values such as language for example. Louis Jean CALVET recognizes this universality of orality as the basis of all culture: “All children in the world have learned, generally from their mothers, nursery rhymes, songs, tales, which build the cultural funds common to their linguistic group, as they will then learn proverbs, fixed forms etc. Furthermore, the industrial revolution of the 18th century considerably changed the ways of life and work of societies, and consequently the modes of artistic expression, the channels of diffusion, and therefore cultural practices [13]. The book and press industry experienced considerable growth from this period. Later, the development of mass broadcast technologies such as radio, television, records, cinema, computers, and the Internet, helped to create new cultural practices beyond traditions, beyond community or national borders Oral heritage, in its content and themes, was then put at the service of new artistic forms inspired by models inherited from the colonial school. The few rare people who remained attached to the practice of the art of communicating in public had to turn to the Media such as radio stations to continue practicing their art. It was only very late that some initiatives emerged from individual artists, theater companies, or associations, for the promotion and preservation of the spoken arts in certain French-speaking countries such as Togo and Burkina Faso. Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Congo, and Guinea.
It is in this context that we will try to understand the problem of the evolution of communication (media) in rural areas, its role and impact in supporting community development in Guinea, a West African country that interests us here. We specifically want to study the insertion of artistic forms in the scheme of communication in terms of community development which inspired us in our master’s courses at the Abidjan campus of Senghor University (2014-2015) as well as the failure of communication traditional during the crisis period (Ebola virus epidemic) of the same period. If the communication had been artistic, the journalists and the police would not have been lynched [14]. Also inspiring us from the first event dedicated to the Arts of Speech in 2002 by BANGOURA Ousmane Coléah. The project has since been carried out by the Ahmed Tidjani CISSE theater company in Conakry, an associative structure which he contributed to the founding in 1996 and for which he worked as an actor and director. This apprehension of the idea allowed us to ask ourselves the following question: Does artistic communication constitute a vector of community development in Guinea?
In other words, do artistic forms (word art, cinema, video, theater, etc.) play a role and impact on community development? It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to imagine community development without first thinking about strategies that unite rural people around an action of obvious benefit to the community [15]. If strategies had previously been implemented to support community development, did they really play this role and where, what explains their failure? By responding to the questions raised above, the approach would lead us to consider for Guinea the design and implementation of a project which will aim to create a specialized communication observatory, dedicated not only to the safeguarding of artistic heritage, but also to the definition of strategies that integrate artistic forms into the community development process. Our main objective of this study is to make artistic communication a vector of community development in Guinea. Specifically, this will involve:
• Go through artistic forms (word art, cinema, video, etc.) to support community development and the culture of peace.
• Strengthen the strategic capacities of communities in the context of development and peace;
• Transform the desire for fulfillment into reality.
• For its realization we have put forward two hypotheses which this study will allow us to assess against the facts. It is:
• H1: Artistic communication can be a vector of community development in Guinea.
• H2: Artistic forms (word art, cinema, video, etc.) can support community development.
• H2: Stakeholders in the promotion of Media in communities are unable to stimulate it because they have not put in place a coordination mechanism to govern interactions between them.
Finally, using the apprehensions identified from the results of hypothesis H1, we have carried out a sectoral analysis focused on the forms of artistic communication from the perspective of promoting community development and we will propose an approach (methodology) of implementation leading to a grassroots development action strategy.
Through the evidence that cinematographic and audiovisual art has been able to provide in crisis management, the emancipation of peoples but also in the development process, we affirm that Cinema is a vector of information, education and mobilization. Guinea has this tradition like other countries on the continent or elsewhere that needs to be revitalized. This is a subject that will contribute to the socio-political, economic, and cultural development of the Republic of Guinea. The memory of Guinea's past in the field of Theater partly motivates our temptation to use Cinema as one of the factors in bringing populations together. Despite the absence of a cultural policy, the cinema sector has evolved within a liberal framework with a certain freedom of expression which therefore enriches the themes presented. All this constitutes a field of action for us researchers.
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