Five questions for Zachary Rosen (MA, 2019)
Zachary Rosen (MA, 2019), on the left, presenting long-term critical arts education scholarship with collaborators from Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) at the Documenta Festival in Kassel, Germany in 2022.
Zachary Rosen has more than 10 years experience designing and implementing social impact programs, including over 5 years in East, West and Southern Africa. To support media literacies and creative expression in Lesotho, Zachary co-founded Ba re e ne re Literary Arts Trust. Ba re e ne re is a nonprofit which cultivates the skills of young leaders through a myriad of initiatives including festivals, workshops, publishing, and socially-engaged art practice. Zachary holds a Master in International Affairs from The New School (GPIA ‘19), where he was awarded the most outstanding thesis for his research on the politics of public museums. He has served as an editorial board member of critical media and politics journal, Africa is a Country. Zachary started by answering a question about his involvement with ARAC.
Can you tell us about Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) and your involvement with it?
ARAC is a collective of cultural workers, artists and educators who are concerned with orienting arts education practice in African communities towards accessible, localized methods, countering colonial or Western notions of “arts” and “education” that have been dominant around the world. ARAC was founded in Namulanda, Uganda in 2015 at a convening organized by the remarkable artist-scholar Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa who sadly passed away in January 2023 (she is deeply missed). Since the original convening, more arts education practitioners have joined the network, and it now has contributors from Cairo, Johannesburg, Kampala, Kinshasa, Lagos, Lubumbashi, Maseru and Nyanza. The collective members organize projects in their local contexts and have come together many times for colloquia to share critical research and practices. Most of the gatherings have been hosted by ARAC working groups in African cities, though ARAC was also part of the recent Documenta XV in Kassel, Germany.
I joined the ARAC conversations as part of the working group in Maseru, Lesotho. For many years I have organized literary arts activities in Lesotho with an organization called Ba re e ne re. The name of the organization is the phrase used to begin epic stories in the Sesotho language. My collaborator in Lesotho, Lineo Seogete, was invited to the original ARAC convening and through that connection I have been able to contribute as well.
What has been the most rewarding aspect of your work on these issues?
It has been an honor to learn from and engage with incredible artists and educators from across the African continent who are passionate about uplifting enduring and emerging practices for creative production and knowledge sharing.
Many inspiring projects have been highlighted through the efforts of ARAC’s members. The group has taken up the challenge of describing and manifesting ideas such as “art”, “education”, “curation” and “exhibition” through locally-rooted expressions and practices including an un/chronological art history timeline, outdoor walking lessons, vocabulary creation and documentation, a traveling exhibition box, and a dance party series called “People who think together dance together” (PWTDT), among many other important works.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the engagement has been to experience how people in different parts of the world, with different schedules, time zones and heritages can work horizontally, in solidarity, despite resource constraints, language barriers and draconian border practices. I have aimed to be thoughtful about my positionality as a white American, and have sought to make my contributions as a supportive collaborator.
For many years, you were involved with Ba re e ne re, a literary festival in Lesotho. How did that come about? What are some of the highlights of the festival?
The Ba re e ne re organization was started in Lesotho around 2011 by a woman called Liepollo Rantekoa, who I was very close to. She was an innovative Mosotho thinker who had worked with the legendary Cape Town-based arts and politics journal Chimurenga and wanted to return to Lesotho to build arts infrastructure back home. The original festival was an amazing multi-week event which brought together writers, poets, publishers, oral historians for powerful conversations about the long literary tradition in Lesotho and its contemporary state of affairs. After Liepollo’s tragic early passing in 2012, I sought to memorialize her foundational creative work by reviving the literary festival. In the process, I got connected to the writer/poet Lineo Segoete and through our collaboration the festival was reborn in 2014. We ran the festival for many years, and expanded the project’s work to include writing/photography workshops, book publishing, spelling bees, exhibitions, and a dictionary of invented Sesotho words.
It was a major effort to build an international literary festival from the ground up, so I’m proud that we were successful in creating a legacy for Liepollo, while serving as a critical forum and performance space for Basotho creatives of all ages along with international guests. Highlights would be stunning performances from the likes of Tsebo Phakisi and Morena Leraba, contributing to important national conversations such as the future of the new Lesotho National Museum, launching our community short story collection Likheleke tsa Puo and hosting inspiring keynotes from ‘Me Mpho Letima and Sabata Mpho Mokae. Now that the festival has wound down, it’s inspiring to see young people who attended our events become creative organizers developing their own platforms.
When you were at The New School you wrote a MA thesis on public museums and national identity in Lesotho. Has Lesotho since succeeded in constructing that museum and have they avoided the mistakes made in other contexts?
What I learned doing my thesis research was just how fraught and contested the institution of “museum” truly is. Given the dominant model of museum, with its elite Western origins and tradition of imprisoning objects of distant heritage in glass cases described with status quo narratives, there was a concern about how a new national museum in Lesotho would manifest. My thesis was written as the design of the museum was taking shape and while the shell of the building was being constructed. Fortunately, the ministry organizing the museum held a series of community forums and worked with critically informed consultants as the plans were being developed so there was awareness to potentially avoid the pitfalls of borrowing too heavily from an external model. Yet the dominant versions of history and design are powerful and so the project was likely on the road to being a hybrid of a generic public museum with homage to local oral histories. I’ve heard however that funding is short and so the museum is currently on pause with an uncertain future.
Finally, how did GPIA prepare you for the work you’re doing now?
I’m grateful that GPIA provided me with tools and opportunities to engage in critical social research in a multi-dimensional manner. The practice I gained from research methods, documentary filmmaking, and discussions on issues of media, economics, and decolonization gave me the skills to incorporate a critical lens into my thinking, writing and media production. With the skills and knowledge I gained from GPIA, I’m now even more equipped to design and implement inclusive projects which interrogate the status quo and highlight counter narratives.