Sunday, 6
Simon Njami's answer to Enos Nyamor's critical review on the Kampala Art Biennale 2018
I am an outsider who has been travelling African countries for six months every year for 30 years in order to learn about practices, politics, and societies. Being an outsider – which I really enjoy – provides me with the necessary distance we need in order to understand processes. That necessary critical distance enables us to grasp a bigger picture and to escape the easy game of ethnocentrism. One can only decipher a phenomenon by comparing it to similar situations. If my younger brother had that distance, he would have known, for instance, that the Bidjocka studio did not use bamboo but papyrus. It might seem a tiny detail, if papyrus were not the first “paper” that was used to produce the first written documents. As an outsider, I have decided to call myself a librettist because a librettist is nothing but a storyteller. I feel guilty, I must confess. I should have used the word “griot” which would have been more situationally correct.

Letter from an outsider
Simon Njami: “The masters acted as mentors, big brothers, uncles” C&
Kampala Art Biennale 2018
From Missionaries to Artists, Enos Nyamor C&