On the internet Ghana and Ghanaians, with a little help from some friends, have begun to live their culture through the new electronic form in which outsiders can participate. The diaspora of Ghanaians to the healthier economies of the west has produced the human resources acquaint with the power of the new technology and its new commercial forms, human resources which also have an active pride in their culture and display that pride in the patterns of cultural knowledge they make available to us on the internet.

The Kente connection already exists; entrepreneuring Ghanaians have started marketing cultural goods through the Internet; lead educational institutions have placed previously specialist knowledge on Ghanaian culture and cultural production on open access web sites; US trading companies have already recognised the mass market for African design goods and have started to place their catologues of goods on the net; designers, dancers and musicians have all found the net a useful tool to bring a wider audience to the appreciation of the forms they create. Art is no longer in the age of mechanical reproduction, it is now art in an age of electronic interconnection. The relational patterns of culture can now be disseminated in a form which is cohesive and not fragmented: the boundaries of the book are outdated and the users of the new electronic forms have opportunities to descibe patterns of cultural relations in a global framework which could only previously have been achieved within an on site, local framework. The paradigm has moved; the academic register of its movement has been a little slow in its coming. It is no surprise that the leading cultural and educational institutions are now making major use of the electronic forms (such as Wellesley College in the United States or the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences), following a path first carved by commercial catalogues of artefacts, but what does it mean for the villagers of rural Africa, the home of the craft culture which is now being so widely disseminated? Can the internet assist in ensuring that the revenue from artefact, craft and souvenir production, return to Africa and assist in the process of local economic development? We believe it can. What follows charts some of the organisational changes that need to be made in both social and business environment to enable Africa to display its vibrance and capture the benefits of that vibrance in its income levels.

Community Connections, Community Enterprise

The leader in the field of electronic marketing and purchasing is Hasa Ghana which has a high quality catalogue of cultural artefacts on electronic display and organised its distribution of goods to be serviced from Canada thus breaking the power hold of the bottlenecks found conventionally at African ports. Hasa Ghana export their goods to a warehouse in Canada and service the online visa card sales from that location.

Communities wishing to sell their goods would in the present in all probability have to develop a similar structure in order to provide customers with reliability and to grow their markets for craft goods. Ghanaian local communities could partner with a development aid agency or a reliable business partner on the warehousing and dispatch of goods and even on the electronic display and electronic sale of goods. Communities however could take a very active part in shaping the catalogues of what they want to sell.

The internet not only provides communities with the ability to catalogue their traditional crafts and artefacts in a way that will enable the market for these goods to grow but it also allows communities to have sight of what other use other locations make of their traditional fabrics and local materials. It can provide a vision of the trading opportunities open to a village or region which are not self evident within the locality itself. For example, Kente cloth itself could be harnessed to high quality, high revenue furniture design instead of being converted into small item tourist goods. The net can allow villagers in location to view the uses to which other communities put their traditional products in the bid for increased local revenue. The virtual catologue not only enables design products to be displayed out to the external world but it also enables design enhancements and alternative uses to be displayed in.

The net can enable remote villages to find business partners in other locations closer to the final markets for the goods, and permits of a new division of labour and equally importantly a new division of the spoils. Remote villages can produce the fine craft goods which have high value especially when incorporated as a design feature into high value items. Crafting customised designs to meet the needs of wealthy but distant customers is now a possibility: the desired designs can be transmitted electronically (an arrangement which has long held in western carpet design and the Italian knitwear industry). The technology can coordinate the market for customised goods at low administrative costs and in a way not previously possible: a client seeking a special design would have had to make a physical journey or hired the services of an agent to commission and procure the design for her or him. If customised craft production on a spot market sounds an implausible arrangement between Africa and its overseas market then we should focus our attention on the Mid West Trade Group which is involved in the commissioning of high quality, customised woven goods from Africa on just such a base.

The goods sold in America by Mid West trade group are produced in Africa and represent an 'authentic' symbol of African-ness as compared with the mass produced, printed imitation kente fabric produced in Pakistan, Hong Kong and Bangladesh. (Interestingly this printed kente cloth also finds a market in low income Ghana).

The Mid West Trade Group, as with HasaGhana, are growing the market for authentic African products. Their use of electronic catalogues has much the same educative quality as electronic museum exhibitions, with the difference that the browser can purchase the goods. In the case of HasaGhana, the company makes a percentage donation of sales to a children's charity in the struggle to alleviate Africa's poverty. In the case of the Mid West Trade Group there is no such donation system apparent in the information presented on the web site.

The production and use of African goods is not sufficient to ensure a growth in African community level resources - the price which African craftsmen receive for themselves in proportion to the total value the work sells for is clearly significant if craft production is to represent a source of major economic improvement.

The two commercial web sites we have described are not community businesses but community businesses could adopt the same techniques as these two sites and thrive. And even if community businesses do not set up independently of companies such as HasaGhana and the Mid West Trade group, they can obtain the information on the final retail prices of goods through web access whether this is directly or indirectly through a development worker or some other professional or technology literate person.

Once again, in case this seems fanciful, it should be noted that there are a number of community web sites set up to serve rural Ghana (Brong Ahafo, Wa, Navrongo) where such market information can be obtained. The transparency of trading through the new technology will over time permit craftsmen and women to make better bargains - especially where authenticity is highly valued for ethno-symbolic reasons. And such a concern with authenticity is likely to retain its importance for a sizeable section of the Afro-American market.

The transparency of the technology does not only permit craft persons to check out the rate they will receive against what is paid for goods on the external market, but it will also permit Ghanaian community business to monitor the performance and trustworthiness of their external business partners. The intenet not only enables Americans to be local in Africa, it also enables Africans to be local in America. African community businesses could through new technology check the level of orders, the value of payments and the stock remaining in partners warehouses through electronic administrative and stock control processes. A tradition of trust is now replaceable by the innovation of transparency and this increases the range of trading partners open to African community business. Long distance supervision of profits and sales are now more than possible - they are already a practice in a host of commercial arenas. And they have clearly began to happen in the arena of cultural production and within the framework of authenticity.

In this section we have talked to the issues of community connections between cultural production and commercial reward and raised the issue of measures that Ghanaian cloth producers, and other craft producers, can use to develop the structure of community enterprise more fully.

Maintaining Skills, Locating The Craft Tradition

So far we have talked to the role of the Internet in the display, sale and revenue monitoring of cultural products. We have indicated the Internet is also involved in disseminating knowledge about the symbolic meaning of such products, an activity which helps grow the market for the products. We have seen that prestige cultural exhibitions with their electronic catalogue also help in the growing of the market - the electronic cultural catalogues and the commercial craft catalogue share a form which is from many perspectives indistinguishable. But there are yet other levels of authenticity and cultural organisation embedded in the activities of the net.

The Davi Lojo web site devoted primarily to the skills of Ewe kente weaving contains instructional material on how to build a narrow loom and weave. It is material designed for the activities of the American school room and not for the African education system. Similarly the Lojo site contains information on how to make contact with authentic African weavers who can visit and provide demonstrations in the American school house not the African school room. The issue of how these crafts can be integrated into the African educational experience has been much neglected leaving us with the irony or paradox that the crafts of Africa receive greater educational acceptance overseas.

Of course such programmes fit with the American market for African authenticity but the bottom line is that Africa has been encouraged to adopt inappropriate education traditions in imitation of the west which is presently beginning to imitate through the new learning technology the techniques of traditional Africa. Escher's hand drawing a hand is the image that comes to mind meanwhile the elders of African society have been displaced from their traditional roles of educating the younger generations and their craft skills begin to be lost in Africa itself.

A Vibrant Culture, A Tale To Sell: Symbolic Life As Economic Good.

The moral and practical issues are many in the tale we have tried to sell. And not all can be resolved here. Indeed, African communities and enterprises trading in African goods have a deal of bargaining to do. But the market is not simply for the objects, it is for the tale which is embedded in them. The symbols tell the tale, their market is one of the fabric of existence, symbols woven on the small frame of life and stitched to shape and signal the vibrance of community.