The business of creativity

It caused some in the audience to shudder. By implication, musicians may soon find themselves reeling under the taxman’s axe.  With time,  our artists need not be afraid to pay taxes to ZIMRA, just as soon as we fix the paradigm in which the cultural industries in most African countries operate under.
Still, in Zimbabwe and in Africa more widely, the arts are taken for granted. People sing at funerals, dance at weddings and sing in churches to a point where the idea of paying someone to sing at a funeral or better still in church, seems like a ridiculous idea.
This all begs the question: Does Africa appreciate the socio-economic value of its own narratives and story telling? Nigeria is one of the notable exceptions with its Nollywood film industries and Naija music. Apart from that, Africa effectively imports most of the content that is distributed across its television channels, radios and cinemas to its own economic and psycho-social detriment.
Just next door in South Africa, the cultural industry contributes two billion rands to the GDP annually. According to statistics, the Cape Town International Jazz Festival alone generates around 475 million rands and has created 2000 jobs in 2010! Okay it is  not whether the jobs are permanent ones or not. The point is still not lost on those that may wish to consider the overall importance of the cultural sector as a driver of economic growth. South Africa is doing well in the arts sector. We can borrow a leaf from them. We do not have to reinvent the wheel in this sense.
Dare I even mention the late Stephen Alumenda’s novel called “How Thopo became a great Wizard”? I remember wondering which came first JK Rowlings’ Harry Potter or Alumenda and the coincidence in the basic story line of an orphan boy who became a great wizard? Yes, the comparison is laboured, but the point is this; for better or for worse, African children know a lot about Harry Potter and nothing about “Thopo the Wizard”. Alumenda is dead and his family may not be living off his intellectual property estate. 
  JK Rowlings that British author and creator of Harry Potter is a bonafide billionaire !
At the risk of sounding simplistic, Walter Elias Disney built his now multi-billion dollar Disney franchise with basically a cartoon and a boyish dream. He was a gifted small town artist boy from the American Midwest state of Kansas who could draw and went on to take advantage of technology, i.e. developments in animation and film to turn his cartoon characters into motion picture films.
The cartoon feature films have gone on to spawn a multi- billion dollar business encompassing five vacation resorts, 11 theme parks, 39 hotels, two water parks, eight film studios, six record labels and 11 cable television networks.
We must be able to package our own stories and sell them. Another classic example is Britain’s Ian Fleming. An Eton educated author, Ian Fleming created the James Bond spy character which has gone on to spawn a global cultural phenomenon about a fictitious MI6 spy who is some kind of super hero saving the Western world from buddies bent on destroying civilisation as we know it.
The novels on which the James Bond action films are based, continue to be written by authors such as William Boyd. The effect of James Bond as a cultural icon, in my considered opinion, is to perpetuate the idea of a nation’s potency and ability to rise above challenges.
Art in this way serves the purpose , beyond just dollars and cents, of engendering patriotism and pride. But notice that it all starts with a fiction, or a figment of the human imagination- calling those things that are not as though they are.