full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Jim Chuchu: Why are stolen African artifacts still in Western museums?
Unscramble the Blue Letters
I’m an artist and I tell stories for a lnviig. To tell stories you need imagination and memory. And in Kenya, we have a gap in our mmoery. So much of what happened in between the late 1800s until our independence in 1963 is missing because too many of the objects that tell the stoeris from that piroed are gone. According to a 2018 report on African cultural heritage, 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural legacy is housed outside the African cnneintot.
What does it mean for a society to lose so many objects? It means that we forget our religions and our spiritual practices. It means that we forget the names of our kingdoms and heroes. It means that we forget our music, our cratfs and our luganages. We forget our stories. And as a result, we adopt other people’s religions and call our own religions whtirafcct. We start to eat burgers and pasta and look down on our ingudineos foods and our children begin to believe in their hearts that other societies have rceihr cultures.
Open Cloze
I’m an artist and I tell stories for a ______. To tell stories you need imagination and memory. And in Kenya, we have a gap in our ______. So much of what happened in between the late 1800s until our independence in 1963 is missing because too many of the objects that tell the _______ from that ______ are gone. According to a 2018 report on African cultural heritage, 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural legacy is housed outside the African _________.
What does it mean for a society to lose so many objects? It means that we forget our religions and our spiritual practices. It means that we forget the names of our kingdoms and heroes. It means that we forget our music, our ______ and our _________. We forget our stories. And as a result, we adopt other people’s religions and call our own religions __________. We start to eat burgers and pasta and look down on our __________ foods and our children begin to believe in their hearts that other societies have ______ cultures.
Solution
- languages
- witchcraft
- memory
- stories
- living
- continent
- indigenous
- crafts
- period
- richer
Original Text
I’m an artist and I tell stories for a living. To tell stories you need imagination and memory. And in Kenya, we have a gap in our memory. So much of what happened in between the late 1800s until our independence in 1963 is missing because too many of the objects that tell the stories from that period are gone. According to a 2018 report on African cultural heritage, 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material cultural legacy is housed outside the African continent.
What does it mean for a society to lose so many objects? It means that we forget our religions and our spiritual practices. It means that we forget the names of our kingdoms and heroes. It means that we forget our music, our crafts and our languages. We forget our stories. And as a result, we adopt other people’s religions and call our own religions witchcraft. We start to eat burgers and pasta and look down on our indigenous foods and our children begin to believe in their hearts that other societies have richer cultures.
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
| collocation |
frequency |
| cultural objects |
3 |
| kenyan cultural |
2 |
| north america |
2 |
ngrams of length 3
| collocation |
frequency |
| kenyan cultural objects |
2 |
Important Words
- adopt
- african
- artist
- burgers
- call
- children
- continent
- crafts
- cultural
- cultures
- eat
- foods
- forget
- gap
- happened
- hearts
- heritage
- heroes
- housed
- imagination
- independence
- indigenous
- kenya
- kingdoms
- languages
- late
- legacy
- living
- lose
- material
- means
- memory
- missing
- music
- names
- objects
- pasta
- percent
- period
- practices
- religions
- report
- result
- richer
- societies
- society
- spiritual
- start
- stories
- witchcraft