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Danny Boyle, you’re making a whole lot of sense.

Chinua Achebe once fulminated: “’Art for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorised dog s**t’.”

While Achebe went too far in my view – art for art’s sake can be great fun; I’m in the movie business after all – it’s lamentable that art in the West can too often be dismissed as a decorative frill or a recreational distraction from the doldrums of our comfortable Western existence.

But not in Africa, where ravaged by war, famine, disease and domestic violence, the arts are being invoked to help child victims of rape, Aids, and war to cope with and confront conditions that no human being was designed to endure.

Of course, as more UN aid convoys rumble into the rebel-held Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s impossible to deny that what is needed most in crisis-stricken Africa is hardly film, music and theatre but water, food and medicine. But after a catastrophe, these essential staples of life are not enough to restore it fully. Through the arts, young children living in catastrophic circumstances need to be given something to live for and something through which to express their lives.

During the time I spent in Uganda I was both struck by the lack of art and the huge potential for it. Art is not just putting “stuff” to paper, it’s part of an important pyschological development; the acknowledgement of pain and strife through textures, colors and shapes; the development of the brain to think abstratically and see the world through different, self-created lives; an opening of self-potential.

In Northern Uganda, where communities have deeply suffered under two decades of war, art has become a part of certain child-soldier rehabilitation curriculums through Fred Mutebi, a wonderful Ugandan artist. He showed me a variety of murals painted by communities around the region to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. Vivid pictures and words in Luo (the local dialect). He also assists with art-therapy programs, helping child-soldiers re-live their experiences in the bush in a safe and welcoming setting, cleansing their minds of the harm they may have caused or might have been caused to them.

Moreover, in Uganda there’s a strong emphasis on “memorization” in the schooling system. In this setting, art becomes a invaluable component. Art brings students away from simply digesting facts to creating, thinking abstractedly, analyzing the environment and issues.