Culture, they say, is the untried force for the economic development of Africa.

The increasing value of cultural products such as literacy works, art, music, dance and drama, traditional festivals, rituals and ceremonies -- as economically saleable commodities as foreign exchange earners -- has become quite evident, says George Hagan, director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon.

He and other ranking policy and decision makers from West and central Africa discussed this and other cultural dimensions of development in Africa at a recent seminar in Dakar, Senegal, organized by the United Nations Institute of Development and Economic Planning .

Hagan says the rising tide of cultural tourism, accessibility to world markets of cultural festivals and visual arts by the electronic media has added value to traditional cultural goods.

Belief that culture is the basis for development stems from the conviction that development must centre on mass participation.

Otherwise, Hagan says, the target population will just stand and watch outside agents try to implement their plan. That is why so many development projects have failed in Africa.

We are saying people must be involved from the word go, he says.

People, he adds, have aspirations, needs, and moral values. They have leadership styles and these should be used to get people to understand that the program to be executed is going to have an impact on their lives.

Culture can be used in another way for development. For example, when introducing new agricultrual products and crops in order to ensure that peasants use them, cultural factors must be taken into consideration.

The executive secretary of Nigeria's National Institute for Cultural Orientation, Victoria Agodo, says African values must be taken into consideration for people to feel part of any developmental process.

Be it in health, architecture, housing, education it is very important that African culture is integrated so that there will be committed participation, she says.

She finds it horrific that children in some nursery schools in Nigeria still recite Pussy cat, pussy cat where have you been? I've been to London to see the queen.

She says: We (Africans) don't use cats as companions. Cats are for (chasing) rats.

Even in teaching the alphabet African students are taught A is for Apple when apples are not indigenous to much of Africa.

In home economic courses students learn to bake cakes and pastries instead of traditional African snacks.

Even in history we are told Mungo Park discovered the Niger, whereas the Niger was there before Mungo Park, she says.

The Chinese and Japanese have shown that a culture is our civilization and that no culture, no civilization is inferior to any and that developoment should be built based on culture, she adds.

So, efforts are being made in Nigeria to reorientate the country's cultural distortion. After viisiting China in 1994 and seeing culture on display there, her department introduced to Nigerians a national workshop series on culture.

Afrocentric cultural programs are being introduced in Nigerian schools and much African traditional aspects of culture is even appearing on Nigerian television stations, even in puppets.

Languages must be kept alive, as must its proverbs and idioms because, she says, these affect the mentality of the children.

We have achieved remarkable progress in sensitizing people on the need for cultural orientation, she says.

The thrust, she stresses, was different 20 years ago. At that time, the cultural drive from Africa was black is beautiful.

Culture is now being applied as a science: cultural strategies, cultrual approaches that's what makes the difference, she says.

Apart from starting this cultural revival in the nuclear family, she and other experts say African officials must lead from up front in the cultural dimension.

Their attitudes, clothing should reflect their culture. They must encourage a language policy in their countries such as has been introduced in Nigeria.

The education policy is such that children must learn in the language of the environment. This is a good beginning, Agodo says.

Emphasis here is not for the student to learn the language of ones ethnic group at a school away from ones ethnic area. Rather, it is for the student to learn the language of the area in which the school is located. So, a Hausa child schooling in Igbo communities will learn Igbo.

Your parents are supposed to have taught you your own language in the house, she says.

Hagan says that since independence in the 1960s not many African governemts have consciously manifested the conviction that a people's culture could promote economic and political development.

He says the first generation of leaders concentrated on creating images designed to return self confidence to the African. Ghana's Kwame NKrumah, in particular, emphasised the importance of the African genius, the African personality.

That was the best agenda at that stage of Africa's modern development, he says. The moment economic depressions began setting in there was destabilisation, soldiers took up guns, overthrew more knowledgable people and put themselves in power.

Many of these soldiers have very poor education and have absolutely no understanding of African culture, he adds. In fact, they don't care a hoot about African culture because they have been indoctrinated. They were fashioned to carry out orders. They were fashioned to see things in a certain way, in a European way.

So, the questions are whether or not African needs a cultural revolution on the dimension of the Chinese in the 1960s and whether Affica's intellectuals are ready to support this.

Well, we can't be judges in our own courts, Hagan says.

However, in the University of Ghana, academics have already made cultural changes. The largest chunk of work is in African studies. In the georgraphy, statistics and economics departments subjects are African centred. This progress has given the university confidence to branch into other cultures.

We now have the freedom to study Chinese, Indian and Japanese history, now we have got a firm foundation in African history, Hagan says.

It has taken long to reach this stage of acceptance. When in the 1950s the English-born lecturer in Legon, Basil Davidson, tried to give preeminence to African history, Hagan says, he was considered a crank.

We are still hooked to the use of intellectual paradigms from the West which is almost as bad as teaching European history, Hagan says. So, what we are saying is that let us start creating our own paradigms.

The feeling is that African models will lead to policy decisions on culture that will impact positively on development. This has been demonstrated in the automotive industries of Japan, Germany, Italy and the United States.

Conditioned by their tiny island, the short average height, their small families, the Japanese have built economical cars. When they sell to specific market outside Japan, the vehicles are adjusted for certain markets.

You look at the German machine. It doesn't go in for frivilous: It is robest, durable, efficient. These are German qualities which they try to put into anything they do, Hagan says.

Italian cars, he says, will cushion you with such comfortable upholsery that is what you buy not necessarily the efficiency of the car.

Americans, on the other hand, find it so difficult to produce a small car, and not because it is technical difficulty. The problem is cultural.

Their culture believes in big things. Everything must be the biggest. That is their way of assessing their standing in the world. We have the biggest this, the most powerful that, Hagan says.

Progressive African values can be injected into governments to spur development, and those that retard this, was not fully discussed by the seminar.

However, a number of cultural factors are clearly detrimental to development.

In modern economies monetary transactions are important in the exchange of goods and services. Coins and paper, as such, have no real value. In Africa, Hagan says, there are metaphysical and social underpinnings to the modern money economy. It is these that define the uses of money and some of the means used to acquire it.

In Ghana, most people believe that money has a spiritual force. Fresh paper money is thus mutilated either by being torn or crumbled to prevent it disappearing.

Some traders would even refuse to accept it, he says.

Among the Akan money is blood. Hagan says this means that it is the force that bonds people together.

One comes into money: one does not seek money. These ideas tend to make financial transactions more complex even as secular affairs, making them both profane and sublime, he says.

In many areas of Africa cattle is wealth and to kill cattle is, therefore, to destroy wealth. This means that the cattle cannot be converted into money and thus for development of other sectors. The outcome is that the cattle population increases with the resulting consequences of economic degradation through trampling of grass and overgrazing.

Similarly, money buried underground, a common practice, cannot be investment.

Certain cultural practices can be detrimental to the health, economy and development of a nation. Again, among the Akan, a bereaved spouse must be helped to overcome the grief by engaging in frequent sexual intercouse. It requires a widow or widower to have sexual intercourse with a total stranger before entering into stable sexual relationship with a lover.

In some cultures, sexual activities often form part of funerals and some traditional festivals.

In an era of AIDS, and the possiblity of unwanted pregnancies, the health and thus economic consequencies of these can be imaginably horrendous.

Understanding a people's sex culture is thus crucial to the control of disease as well as of fertility, Hagan says.

Nov. 21, 97