When I was a child, I lived in two worlds. The first world was a creative one, filled with music, a teeming treasure of sounds that stretched from church to nature. It included thunderous organ chords, melodious tube fiddles, and raspy frog choruses. My second world, meanwhile, was more sober in nature, marked with political instability, hardships, and poverty. These two worlds came together in a loud cacophony that is my home country, Uganda.
Like many so-called developing countries, Uganda is no stranger to strife. As the story often goes, many of us grew up wearing imported second-hand clothes, which some say crashed our textile industry. Many of us walked to school for miles barefoot, only to be spanked for lateness or poor grades. Potholes ruled the roads (they still do), turning some streets into muddy swimming pools after heavy rains.
The list of problems goes on and on, frequently overshadowing the reality and progress of developing countries, and detracting from the visibility of their creative wealth. As a musician, the arts world helped me understand how culture can enrich our lives. When HIV/AIDS descended on Uganda, infecting even fellow classmates who where just coming of age, a Ugandan singer, Philly Lutaaya, took it upon himself to sing messages raising awareness of the disease across the country. When artillery rocked my home city of Kampala, escaping to sing in a choir kept my spirits high. When I was hungry, I bought food using income from playing and teaching music. Simply put, my first world guarded me; it overrode my second world.
I was fortunate to escape my second world and to continue my education in the United States. After studying music at The Juilliard School in New York and teaching at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, intrigued by my “two-world” experience, I began to consider the possibility of mobilizing the arts behind development, in Africa and elsewhere. And so, I decided to complement my music vocation with studies in international affairs. The idea was to explore how creative output promotes development. The outcome was a thesis on music and international trade and more recently, a working paper that became the basis for this book.
The Creative Wealth of Nations considers both monetary and nonmonetary contributions of the arts to development. Drawing on examples from around the world, it touches on such areas as arts education, environmental stewardship, intellectual property, nation branding, digital technology, tourism, gender equality, mental health, social healing, urban renewal, and creative data collection.
Heeding advice from my writing guru, William Zinsser, I more or less pivot on the performing arts just to bite off one corner of the subject I can chew over now to sustain my zest. By the performing arts, I mean generally dance, drama, and music. Although most examples in this book center on music, examples from dance, theater, and movies are also provided. For the sake of readers unfamiliar with some musical terms, I provide a glossary for those used here.
The book, however, has a comprehensive purpose. It takes a broader perspective – namely, it deals with the performing arts as an exemplar of the wider contribution of the arts to human welfare. After all, from architecture to dance, painting to poetry, the arts tend to feed off each other. This is true, whether they inspire us to innovate, deal with the inevitable, or push us to not only ask questions, but also critically assess the answers we get.
The message of this book rings loud and clear: the importance of the arts is undervalued. As someone whose life has been enriched by music, I must join those challenging this undervaluation, building a case for a strategy that captures the diverse contributions of culture to human welfare. Such creative wealth can unleash all sorts of possibilities – possibilities that harmonize with what meaningful development is all about. That what motivated me to focus on this subject was fueled by personal conviction is to concur with Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein that feeling and intuition are not impediments to rational thought. They lie at the heart of its foundation.
