I was discussing with someone about the present sorry state of many African countries and I will like to share with you some of the gist.We both agreed that Africa (particularly, South Saharan African countries) ought to be more developed that it presently is. What is the cause, Why are we where we are? We did not find the cause in bad leadership or government nor did we attribute it to corruption or as some claim, to exploitation from the West. We went a step lower. The cause, we thought, is that we don't seem to have a concrete and proper substructure to support the superstructure of development. In other words, we lack the thought-foundation upon which we can base our evolution as a people.Take note of the words concrete and proper. By concrete, we meant that despite the fact that we have a so-called African philosophy, it is not well articulated, it is not strong enough. This is what I mean for example, my people say its not good to walk across the legs of someone, and that if by mistake you do it, you have to redo it so as to cancel the effect. Now have been asking what that means and the only answer I get is that it is not just good. Again, they say you don't have to point to a grave with your fingers and when you ask why, they will tell you "we don't just do it". I am sure that all these cultural practices have a basis, they must have a reason. Perhaps they got lost in the stream of oral tradition. So we tend to behave in certain ways without really knowing why, and no one can build anything solid on this kind of thing.
When we said we lacked a properly African thought system, we meant that we seem to see things through Western-coloured lenses. Some of the acclaimed African Philosophers are doing what can be called the Africanization of Western concepts and categories instead of producing our own proper philosophy without being ashamed of using African-made concepts. Take Nnamdi Azikiwe's neo-communialism for example. It is a good concept and may help us if we implement it. But exam it carefully and you will see that it was just an effort to africanise a synthesis of West-born ideas of Communialism and capitalism. Nyerere's "Leaders must be servants" philosophy seems to me like an african reformulation of the Western idea of democracy.
The problem is that we can not go very far with this kind of 'cut and join' philosophy. To develop, we need to discover and properly formulate "what works for us". We can't find this "what works for us" from outside. We need to search from within, from our roots, our origins, from what is(was) truly ours. Take the case of Democracy. Look at how it is working well for France, USA, Russia and other occidental nations. Why is it not working as well for countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Zimbabwe? Because the concept of democracy that we practice does not spring from us. It was adopted, it is foreign and alien. The point is not that we don't have the concept of democracy in our roots and tradition, but that what we are presently doing is not a development of our own proper concept of democracy, but an adoption of something else. And the problem cannot be solved by trying to domesticate the foreign concept, as many African nations are presently doing.
It is true that the power of influence of the West in the present world cannot be overlooked but at the same time we must not allow ourselves be cajoled and intimidated into the thinking that we have to follow their paradigm or appear odd and not-in-fashion. The waves of globalization may be gaining strenght and popularity, but we need the time to stop and see whether it is really leading us forward. Perhaps we might come to the discovery that most of what poses at globalization is actually cultural domination and we need the courage to stand against the waves for our own good.
The solution is, as we thought, that African historians and philosophers should go back to their duties and really mean business. They need to do their work so seriously that they draw attention. They need to be make themselves worth listening to. Let the historians go down as deep as is required into time so as to dig out our heritage and identity as a people. Let them use all the modern means that is available like fossil excavation, carbon dating and studying of ancient sciences and symbols. Let the philosophers too go to work. Let them gather all the concrete data available, let them do thorough reflection, analyzing and synthesis. Let them come out with something, a substructure, a thought basis, a philosophy that we can truly call our own. When this is done, it will be necessary to reform the education system such that from very young ages, children will be initiated into thinking and being Africans. Then we can begin to build the edifice that will make Africa the best place to live life on earth.
2 comments:
Johnson Igoh reacted to this posting in this way:
"This is a good start, paschalbread. Perhaps after dislodging the superstructure of African Philosophy because it has an alien substructure, we may have to truly begin a new edifice from a new foundation. At the end, we may discover that we have not done anything original but simply applied the Husserlian-Descartes'foundationalism.
Come to think of this: how can we produce any original philosophy that is completely free of Western concepts and ideas when we practice Western education? Obviously, if there is anything we could truly call African from the background of Western education, it must be "Africanization" of Western thoughts.
May be the yet-to-be-civilized Africans can truly create an original African Philosophy.
Yes, Johnson I perfectly agree with you that one of the obstacle we experience is that our system of education is western-oriented. But that is not a big deal; it will take only a determined and enlightened minister of education to change that.
But before we try changing the education system to properly suit us, we need to find and discover that which is proper ours, that which works for us. That is my point. And to discover this, i am not advocating a return to precolonial era or a mere escavation of the fossils of our culture. I am advocating and "adpatationalism". This entails seeking from our oral tradition, myths, proverbs, folk lore, wise saying, seeking from these cultural elements the soul of the african culture. When we, historians and philosophers in particular, this core of what marks us as a people, then you can know try to adapt it to the structures and reality on ground even if they are western.
In this approach, the point of departure is not the western; the point of departure is our African identity. take democracy for example, it is the form of the democracy we practice that is alien to us and not the concept. In our culture, we have seed and traces of a democratic government. We had our own form. For us the leader was not just a representative of the people, but was a father, a solidarity figure, and in this case there was no need for opposition party as we have it in the western-borrowed democracy. This is not a perfect example, but it shows how the 'form' of a system can be one things and the 'mater' or manifestation or application can be another. What needs to be done is a 'transformation' a changing of the form to suit our identity. And that is what my adaptationalism is all about.
You see it is different from foundationalism. I am not saying we shoukd start all over again, but that we can make what is on have our spirit. We should base our development in terms of what the west says as development. Our development, if it is to be worth its sort, must be driven by the soul of our culture identity.
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