Is WOMAD a Colonialist Adventure?

The Main Square during the evening concerts

In this week’s Camino a Ítaca I take a look back at the legacy of the WOMAD festival in Caceres from a different perspective. Click over and read the original in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Winston Churchill once said that history would be kind to him. The funny
thing is that his belief in this deluded fact wasn’t precisely because he had
been benevolent, progressive, made people’s lives better or any such thing. It
was simply because he intended to write it. With a worldview like that, how
could someone go wrong?

 I mean, if you consider that out of the nearly 200 countries in the
world, the British have invaded all but 22. A worldview like that would make
sense. My math skills aren’t the best, but that is just about 90% of all
countries. Countries like Mongolia, Bolivia, Chad and Uzbekistan seem to have
avoided their umbrellas, tea and questionable food. But those few that have
slipped their noose, seem to have done so due to their lack of accessibility
than British desire for control.

 The stain of colonialism runs deep in the psyche of the country. I have
sat in pubs in the U.K and have had genuinely good-natured people buy me a
drink simply because I was from the colonies. Even stranger is that this misguided,
yet good-natured colonialism has been freely adopted and deeply internalized by
countries like Australia and my own, Canada, who continue to maintain a
foreigner, the Queen of England, as head of state. They happily remain under a
Wellington boot when even smaller nations like Barbados have been able to
emancipate from her cold embrace.

 This colonial outlook however isn’t limited to countries. Here in
Extremadura we have a case where, in their ‘benevolence’, the British came to bring
culture to this lost region of Spain. Back in 1992, Peter Gabriel came as a
messiah that was going to bring world music to this quiet corner of Spain with
WOMAD. I truly believe he did so with good intentions and the region was only
too happy to be recognized.

 But a lot has changed since. Close to 30 years later, we are still
paying considerable tithes to a foreign company that, while happy to take our
money, act like colonial leaders once did. It’s an attitude that smacks of,
‘they should be happy for what we have brought them’. But therein lies the
question, should we? Seriously ask yourselves, what is the legacy that WOMAD
has left behind? I can say that I have seen some great acts like Eliades Ochoa
and Salif Keita. Bands like Los Lobos and others were before my time, but it is
undeniable that they haven’t brought in some wonderful artists. But what else?

 After a relationship that is going on three decades, what have the left
behind other than what I once termed in these very pages, WOPAP, plastic and
piss? Is there any real commitment with the community beyond the actual
concerts? If you think of other festivals, and we need not look further than
the Irish Fleadh in Caceres, with their involvement in workshops in schools
across the city, where is the social exchange when we are paying them close to
half a million Euros every year?

 The idea of the festival is positive, but it’s time to negotiate as
equals and not as colonials happy to have the queen of another country’s face
stamped on your money.