10 Dec 2023

National Arts Council of Botswana acting Chief Executive Officer Seakarea Rabalone says it is important to preserve culture for future sustainability.

In an interview following the 18.COM session, Rabalone said creativity should be preserved for tourism sustainability as studies have shown that tourists who visit for culture tend to stay more, than those who come for the wildlife. 

“So it is important that we preserve this culture so that we sustain the income of communities and various groups,” Rabalone said.

He added that they have noticed that some of the tourist attractions were slowly getting depleted as a result of various factors owing to climate change, but said culture remained. 

Therefore, he said it was important that it was transferred accordingly to future generation.

He said their role as NACB was to encourage and promote the living heritage among the communities and groups. 

Rabalone said his organisation was embarking on a national road show to engage communities and dialogue on how to preserve their culture, dance, food, artworks and others. He said they would be working with the Ministry of Youth, Sport, Gender and Culture.

Furthermore, he said the council would also be engaging communities on increasing their intangible cultural heritage inventory. 

Living heritage faces challenges of over commercialisation, and Rabalone said as a council, they have started dialogue with the creative on issues of safeguarding. 

He said the intention of the dialogue was to ensure that they upgrade and focus on development sustainability, without over commercialising. “Commercialisation has its own challenges, and we have to strike a balance in order to preserve and safeguard our living heritage,” Rabalone said

Meanwhile, Ghanzi Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) Committee vice chairperson Jesus Mosokwe said the 18.COM session has enlightened them as a community on issues of ICH. 

He said their main focus after the session would be to establish non-governmental organisations. 

“We need an NGO forum, which will represent NGOs that will work with communities in safeguarding our living heritage and help identify and increase our ICH elements in our community,” Mosokwe said.

He said Ghanzi inventory had 96 elements, and said they were planning to increase them. 

“Ghanzi has various groups of people who have many elements, and we need to approach them and identify such,” he said adding that Ghanzi had a lot to offer on the five domains of ICH. 

He said most of the elements in their inventory were from the performing arts domain, with song and dance leading and therefore they need to identify elements from other domains of ICH.

Mosokwe said to increase their inventory, they hope to get assistance from arts council for capacity building workshops to engage communities and sensitise them on safeguarding, preservation and promotion of the living heritage.  Ends