The Minister of Culture of Angola, Carolina Cerqueira, today asked cultural agents for “greater creativity” in order to provide the public with a “quality cultural product that enhances national culture”.
The minister was speaking to journalists, in Luanda, at the end of a ceremony to lay a wreath next to the bust of the first Angolan President, António Agostinho Neto, as part of the National Day of National Culture, which is celebrated today.
For Carolina Cerqueira, the appreciation, preservation and dissemination of Angolan culture is an action that must be combined with the production of goods with desirable quality for the domestic and foreign markets.
Hence, he added, “the public must be provided with access to quality cultural products, which is why creators and cultural agents must, above all, look at the qualitative factor as fundamental to Angolan culture”.
Angola’s National Culture Day was established in 1986, due to the speech given by the first Angolan President, António Agostinho Neto, in 1979, at the inauguration of the managing bodies of the Union of Angolan Writers (UEA). The date was approved by decree nº21 and published in the Official Gazette nº 87, I series, of November 1986.
In 1979, in the official and only version of the MPLA, “the distinguished man of Culture, the poet and President Agostinho Neto, during the inauguration of the management bodies of the UEA, made an approach to National Culture, which, from then on , became a fundamental reference in all discussions on the issue of Angolan Culture”.
In recognition of his thinking, regarding the problems linked to National Culture, and the importance that culture has as one of the constituent elements of the substrate of national unity and an essential factor in asserting the country’s sovereignty and promoting development, the the date.
Exhibitions, lectures, conferences, theater, dance and musical shows are scheduled in Angola to mark National Culture Day.
Meanwhile, from today, Tuesday, the National Library of Angola is promoting a bibliographic exhibition on Angolan ethnography in its space in Luanda, as part of National Culture Day.
This is a sample, according to the institution’s general director, João Pedro Lourenço, designed to draw students’ attention to the facts that marked and continue to mark the history of Angola.
The collection on display is part of a collection of more than 100 thousand copies that are in the library’s archives. The exhibition will be on display until the 12th of this month.
João Pedro Lourenço informed that the library has books produced from colonial times to the present day and that portray national history in different national and foreign languages.
With almost no physical space for the books, the director made it known that they would soon be on a digital platform, highlighting the need to build a new infrastructure, taking into account that the current space is unable to meet market demand. In 2018, the library received more than 100 thousand users.