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.