Culture in a box

Communiqué 40: Culture in a box

What does it take for a country to package and export its culture as a product?

1. The Awakening

It’s 3:20 PM on May 25. I’m standing at the back of the Terra Kulture Arena in Lagos, watching on as a teenage girl from southeastern Nigeria belts out notes to a song in fluent Korean. For three minutes, she performs “CHANGGWI (??)” by Ahn Ye Eun to an audience of hundreds of other kids (and a handful of adults). I listen in equal doses of awe and bewilderment as her voice undulates with the song’s pitches. I knew the Korean cultural wave was sweeping through urban Nigeria, but I had not fully realized the extent of its ubiquity.

Her performance is part of a singing competition at the K-Pop Festival organized by the Korean Cultural Center Nigeria. The center is located in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, and has been operating for over 14 years, hosting Korean language classes, dance and cooking classes, and teaching taekwondo while curating other events like the K-Pop Festival.

I visited it in March 2023—partly out of curiosity, but primarily to understand what it did and why it existed. There are thirty-one others worldwide, and they are essentially extensions of the Korean embassy and the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism.

That visit made it a thousand times clearer to me why Korean culture was gaining global traction.

The Korean Wave (or Hallyu), which began in the early 1990s, now has the world in a chokehold. Korean music, movies, TV shows, and food have become so popular that an East Asian country of just about 52 million people has become a cultural giant.

2. The Interlude

I first interacted with Korean culture in 2016 through Bong Joon-ho’s “Memories of Murder,” a neo-noir crime thriller easily one of the best movies ever made. I’d long resisted the urge, despite spending four years in the university with friends who wouldn’t keep quiet about “Boys Over Flowers.” I thought they were doing too much, that Korean shows were corny and beneath me. Oh, what a fool I was! Time has proved me wrong, and I’ve spent the last few years falling into a rabbit hole.

The deeper I’ve gone, the more interested I’ve become in figuring out Korea’s playbook, how it succeeded, and how its success can be replicated. I’ve also asked myself what other countries we can learn from. Is there a formula? What does it look like?

In 2021, I wrote an essay highlighting how important cultural goods could be for the economy using Nigeria as an example:

“We often think and speak of things Nigeria can export in tangible terms. We talk about oil; we talk about rice; we talk about wheat and other agricultural products. Sometimes, we talk about intangible things, but perhaps not often enough. We talk about how Nigeria can export some of its services to the world, especially in the financial industry. But there are far more options to explore. Stories, culture, and talent are three of Nigeria’s most priced assets, and they have been for many years. From the moment Nigerians realized they could package culture into stories and develop themselves into world-class talent, the door opened up for immense opportunities.”

I concluded that essay by saying:

“There is a lot more that Nigeria can offer the world and benefit from at the same time if it actively invests more in these assets.”

I can think of many other African countries that this idea applies to. But how can that happen?

3. The Framework

In 1986, UNESCO introduced a “cultural statistics” framework designed to systematically understand the “production, distribution, consumption of, and demand for cultural goods and services.” The framework was redesigned in 2009, and it covers six domains:

• Cultural and national heritage (museums, tourist attractions, historical landmarks)

• Performance and celebration (festivals, theater, dance)
• Visual arts and crafts (paintings, sculptures, handcrafted objects and other artifacts)
• Books and press (literature and the media)
• Audiovisual and interactive media (film, TV, video games, digital art)
• Design and creative services (architecture, advertising, marketing, the creator economy)

Each of these domains has something that can be packaged as a product and sold locally — or exported. UNESCO’s framework examines how well countries are exporting their cultural goods. It then ranks the countries using certain metrics.

Korea has featured prominently on the list alongside other countries like France, China, the U.S., the U.K., and India. But what do they all have in common? The ability (and willingness) to export their culture in neatly packaged, well-designed boxes.

France, for instance, spends about $1.4 billion annually to export its culture through a smorgasbord of initiatives. One is Alliance Fran?aise, an organization created in 1883 to spread French culture, first to its colonies, and then to other parts of the world by teaching the language, promoting its films, and operating libraries with educational resources. It also exports its national curriculum through schools, reaching hundreds of thousands of students annually.

The UK, another country with a history of colonialism, has also used the same playbook by continuing to spread its culture worldwide through entities like the BBC World Service and the British Council.

Other countries like China, India, and the US have succeeded in exporting their cultures through film, music, food, and sports.

Conversely, African countries have been unable to do the same. At least, not with overwhelmingly positive results.

How can we change that?

4. The Playbook

African countries aren’t homogenous. So, for illustration, I will focus on Nigeria and South Africa, two of the continent’s biggest cultural entities.

Both countries already have significant global footprints via their music and film, but they haven’t successfully expanded that in ways that benefit them economically, politically, and socio-culturally.

Nigeria, particularly, had a chance in the late 1990s and early 2000s to build upon the momentum of its film industry, which at the time was starting to gain continental ascendency. It had another window in the early to mid-2010s, then another in 2020. The industry has achieved some level of success, but whatever it has accomplished pales in comparison to what more it could have. The same goes for Afrobeats, a music genre that has enjoyed massive global success since 2017. Sadly, the growth of these two industries has happened separately, and not as part of one grand plan to make their home country a global cultural icon. Therein lies the gap.

Look at South Africa too, which is further along in maturity than Nigeria. According to Spotify, Amapiano, the country’s biggest music genre, was streamed about 1.4 billion times in 2023. 55% of those streams came from non-African countries. That is significant in any context.

Beyond movies and music, there’s language, fashion, and visual art, and they all provide materials for both countries to export. But this needs to happen as part of a much larger and deliberate plan, not separately.

There are a few ways to make this work:

• Funding: Korea, France, the US, and the UK have annual budgets for exporting their cultures. They also raise funds from partners such as foundations, wealthy individuals, and political allies. The UK does this well through its ‘Friends of the British Council’ model. African countries can take a cue from this.
• Institutionalization: Two vital parts of this equation are permanence and consistency. There must be a deliberate attempt to create a global network of cultural touchpoints that last a very long time. Cultural exportation needs physical reference points, something that people can often come back to and immerse themselves in.
• Messaging: This is good old-fashioned branding, and all successful cultural exporters have done it. It begins with deliberately outlining the image you want people to embrace, and then creating products and policies that align with that image. However, it is impossible to pull this off without buy-in from the government.
• Partnerships: Both Nigeria and South Africa have significant diaspora communities, and this is a good material to build upon. Their governments need to work with them to curate festivals and events integrating multiple cultural touchpoints. So, instead of a standalone Afrobeats festival in the UK, for instance, there could be a series of more robust festivals integrating Nigerian music, food, film, and art on multiple continents annually.

5. The Sell

A significant part of this equation is incentives. Why is it important to export cultural goods? And what are the benefits?

A. Economic growth

Korea was already reaping the rewards of cultural exports by the early 2000s. Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times report:

“The size of South Korea's entertainment industry…jumped from $8.5 billion in 1999 to $43.5 billion in 2003. In 2003, South Korea exported $650 million in cultural products; the amount was so insignificant before 1998 that the government could not provide figures.”

In March 2023, the Bank of Korea reported that the income from exporting audio and video content reached $1.7 billion, up nearly 48% from the previous year.

So, there is a clear economic benefit from exporting culture. What else?

B. Soft power and global cultural relevance

Soft power is a country’s ability to influence people’s perceptions of and relationships with its citizens without force or coercion. Yet another excerpt from the same New York Times report:

“The booming South Korean presence on television and in the movies has spurred Asians to buy up South Korean goods and to travel to South Korea, traditionally not a popular tourist destination. The images that Asians traditionally have associated with the country -- violent student marches, the demilitarized zone, division -- have given way to trendy entertainers and cutting-edge technology.”

When done right, cultural export can change how people perceive a country. A nation of “scam artists” and “brash individuals” could very well become a nation of creative, smart, and enterprising people. This change in perception spills over into how said people are treated at airports and embassies, and it impacts how others describe them on the Internet.

6. The Question

Nigeria and South Africa have the resources to pull off cultural exports at scale: vibrant youth populations, an abundance of creative talent, pop culture icons, appealing artistic expressions, a willing global market looking for more interesting products, and the technology to produce and distribute at an unprecedented level.

The real question is, how willing are these countries to leap? How willing are they to aggregate all they have into singularly focused and coherent plans? How willing are they to make the necessary investments and sacrifices? The opportunities are abundant, but can they take advantage of them?