Why we should pay attention to culture

What exactly is Culture World?
Culture World is an organisation whose objective is to bring all cultures together. It is funny though, we only became a fully-fledged organisation last year, that is when we graduated from a shop that sold traditional clothing into trying to promote culture.

What was the motivation behind the My Culture My World?
The motivation was to celebrate all cultures. It was a dream that was inspired in 2018. At that time, we were part of the team that was designing Miss Tourism contestants, it is during some of their activations that we noticed there was a gap when it came to the way people understood and consumed culture. And when we looked around, indeed there was not a single festival dedicated to celebrating culture or our Africanness.

What should people expect from the cultural events you organise?
My Culture My World is educative and entertaining. We understand that many young Ugandans are out of touch with their culture or norms and thus, to ensure that this experience is rewarding. We are ensuring that for all our events, we shall be having elders that will be teaching people about different cultural norms.
They will elaborate about the dos and don’ts in different cultures, for instance of late we have picked an interest in talking about the introduction ceremony which is slowly losing its cultural gist which has made some people uncomfortable and thus staying away from the ceremonies. We want to have these conversations with our events engaging both the young and old.

For many people, culture starts with food, why is it absent in this festival?
It is true that food is a big part of African culture. In fact, there are many sayings that indicate friendship in an African community is usually ignited by food. Regardless of which African culture you visit, they have both good and bad sayings centred around sharing food. But the reason we don’t have emphasis on food it is because the focus of this edition was fashion. Because of our background of working with beauty contestants, we thought it wise to launch with something that we don’t only understand by identifies us in away - fashion. The purpose was to showcase how different people dress and what makes their dressing unique; clothing is a big part of what identifies people and that’s why we thought it was worth focusing on. And of course, who knows next year we may focus on food or another cultural aspect.

What does the future look like for the festival?
We want this to grow into something that doesn’t only attract subjects but leaders as well. We would want to see cultural leaders spearhead the attendance of the people they lead.

What was there for children?
It is unfortunate that today, young people don’t get a chance to interact with culture. Today, many would easily opt for English than their mother tongues and of course the mainstream set up doesn’t help things so much. Different western attires have been presented classy and trendy compared to our indegenous fashions. But with the event, we would want this to change, this year, a children’s fashion curated by Joram Muzira was organised and our aim was seeing these children leave with more knowledge about clothes from their heritage.