The recently-concluded summit of the African Union largely focused on urgent political and economic challenges facing the continent while it gave relatively little attention to cultural issues. However, whenever one speaks of the political or economic integration of Africa, on is bound to raise cultural issues that are as important as political or economic ones. Even though the summit did not deal with the role that cultures play in the process of regional or continental integration, many African intellectuals have in the past raised this issue and highlighted its importance.
According to recent study by Nigerian Gabriel E. Idang of the Department of Philosophy, University of Uyo, “The culture of a people is what marks them out distinctively from other human societies in the family of humanity. The full study of culture in all its vastness and dimensions belongs to the discipline known as anthropology, which studies human beings and takes time to examine their characteristics and their relationship to their environments.
“Culture, as it is usually understood, entails a totality of traits and characters that are peculiar to a people to the extent that it marks them out from other peoples or societies. These peculiar traits go on to include the people’s language, dressing, music, work, arts, religion, dancing and so on. It also goes on to include a people’s social norms, taboos and values. Values here are to be understood as beliefs that are held about what is right and wrong and what is important in life.”
Another scholar called Edward B. Taylor is considered the first person “who has coined and defined culture in his work entitled Primitive Culture in 1871 and reprinted in 1958. Taylor saw culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs or any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” This definition is obviously narrow in scope than the one given by Nigerian Gabriel E. Idang in the first quotation. Idang’s definition is broader and looks at culture from the point of communities and not individuals and as such it is more comprehensive than the definition by the European scholar.
In this sense, Africans have cultures that are peculiar to Africa that mark them out from other peoples or societies elsewhere in the world. Africans have indeed their own languages, dressing, music, work, arts, religion and so on. These cultural markers are different from one communities to the other both within and among the peoples of the continent and together they are separate from cultures outside the continent. Cultures take shape and emerge as characteristics of particular societies after centuries of gestation. Comparatively speaking politics or economic developments take relatively less time to grow or take shape while cultures take centuries to crystallize.
When it comes to politics or economics, integration can be achieved quicker than cultural assimilation. According to Agenda 2063, the political and economic integration of Africa is expected to be effected sometimes into the next few decade if not by 2063 in. It is however different with culture. One cannot give definite time frame for cultural growth or assimilation. Political integration can be promoted from above, through laws, agreements or similar initiatives. Whether this kind of integration will survive or not is another matter. Many political integrations or unifications have failed soon after their formations. Yet, it is impossible to enact laws for cultural growth or assimilation.
As we said above, it goes without saying that the integration and unification of Africa should also take into consideration cultural dimensions. Of course, we may not expect African countries to achieve “cultural integration’ because this is simply unrealistic. It is impossible to bring together positive elements from each African culture and produce an-all African common culture. We cannot bring all cultures together and merge them to produce something common to all African countries. What we can do is to promote the cultural interconnections or exchanges as ways of expediting political or economic integration. There are also powerful factors that militate against Africa’s cultural expression or cultural emancipation.
The long centuries of domination of colonial and neocolonial cultures in Africa over traditional or indigenous cultural values have led to the weakening, distortion or replacement by alien values. During the centuries of colonialism, Western cultural values were imposed on Africans by force in order to cement or secure European political domination and economic exploitation. The penetration of European cultures into African ones was not however always smooth or passive. The process was rather marked by clashes, violence and the use of open or subtle force. This process was nowhere better described than in Chinua Achebe’s classic novel entitled “Things Fall Apart”. The encounter of indigenous culture with European political domination always produced the kind of violent contradictions and culture clashes described by Achebe in his acclaimed work.
Neocolonialism has obviously taken this contradiction one step further and made it less violent and more subtle. During colonialism, the gun was used more often than the Bible or the Bible was used first to be soon followed by the gun. This was not however the case under neocolonialism that is still under way. The gun was less often used to impose Western values on traditional cultures. The process took place subtly, with European or American soft power taking the place of the missionaries or the colonial armies.
The end result of this process was however similar in both colonialism and neocolonialism: African cultures were undermined, distorted or in the worst case suppressed and Africans were made to hate their traditional values and adopt Western ones. Education has played a pivotal role in this process. New generations of Africans trained in Western education chose to reject their own cultural values and adopt the culture of the oppressors but this was done over the long run and deviously.
The final result of this process was the production and reproduction of new African generations that have unintentionally or subtly forced to adopt the cultures of their oppressors as the only byways to economic and political development. The Western cultural stereotypes were readily accepted as byways to success in Africa. Being westernized was accepted as synonymous to being educated, cultured or enlightened. As a result of this, increasing numbers of Africans of succeeding generations looked for a shortcut to civilization by neglecting their cultural heritages and their traditional values. Neocolonialism perpetuated the myth of looking culturally western as the only path to being civilized in the political and economic sense.
There is one important ramification of this kind of western myth. The more young Africans were alienated from their traditional cultures, the more they were alienated from one another and discouraged to converse in their common traditions and cultural values. Western or American educated young Africans were encourage to study European or American philosophy, anthropology and aesthetics by neglecting their own heritages.
They were both alienated from themselves and from their fellow Africans. Many Western universities perpetuated the other myth that Africans have no philosophy of their own and this was picked up by young Africans who readily accepted the falsehood and refrained to study African philosophy, culture or anthropology because it did not pay much to do so. Even in African universities, the study of African culture or philosophy was not promoted enthusiastically because there is a pervading fear that graduates from the faculties of philosophy could not get a well-paying job after they graduated. In the past graduates from the faculty of philosophy at the Addis Ababa university could not find a decent job after graduation and many of them became teachers of foreign languages or literature.
The combined effect of all this led to the alienation of African intellectuals and youngsters from themselves as well as from one another. As they were encouraged to ignore their cultures, they were led to ignore the cultures of other Africans. Thus young Africans became well versed in Western traditions and values while they remained ignorant of their own cultural values as well as those of their fellow Africans. The situation remains the same as we pen these few lines.
Africans know a great deal about Europe and America than they know about themselves or about their fellow Africans. Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi (Americanha) has written an interesting novel about the fate of young Nigerians who migrated to the United States and dealt with self-alienation and alienation from their loved ones in order to finally return to their homeland after a great deal of trials and tribulations in the West.
The African Union is of course an august body that is committed to the welfare of Africans at the continental level. It is promoting the unity and integration of Africans politically and economically. However the same commitment is not the case when it comes to bringing Africans together culturally or get to know one another. As we said above, the aim of African Renaissance is to bring about the rise and/or rebirth of the continent in all its aspects, including culturally. Nowadays, more young Africans know European culture more than they do the culture of Africans living next door to their countries. Even in case of Africans living in countries that share common borders, the level of cultural exchange is negligible or more distant than with people living in Europe or America.
The only exception may be music which is a universal language as they say and easily moveable from one corner of Africa to the other thanks to modern technology. That is perhaps why Nigerian music genres are popular in virtually all corners of the continent. That may also why the Afro-Jazz vibes of Ethiopian Mulatu Astatke are popular in Dakar or Johannesburg as well as Vienna. Culture is of course wider than music and include many aspects.
When it comes to knowing African philosophy, anthropology, languages, arts and morality, the result can only be disappointing. Young people in Africa have no interest in learning other African languages if they do not fit into the global rankings of European or Western languages in general that are considered “superior” to other languages simply because they have become common tools of communication for colonized peoples as well as mediums of instruction in prestigious Western universities. In this way, English and French have maintained their status as “superior languages” that people from the developing world could only dream to speak. This is of course cultural and linguistic neocolonialism pure and simple.
It is generally agreed that the complete liberation of the African continent is tied to the liberation of the African mind from colonial and post-colonial Western cultural influences whose objective has always been to perpetuation the domination of the cultures and values of the dominant Western metropolises
The African Union, being a body supremely engaged in the renaissance of all aspects of Africa’s existence as a free, equal and emancipated continent, it is duty bound to give equal attention to Africa’s cultural independence and interdependence as a precondition for the complete emancipation of all Africans politically, economically and socially. Africa’s quest for political and economic emancipation should go hand in hand with efforts to liberate the continent from the yokes of colonialism and neocolonialism. To this end, the AU is expected to encourage linguistic, literary, artistic, and philosophical encounters among African intellectuals and ordinary people as well. To this end, it would perhaps be timely to establish an all-African cultural center in Addis Ababa where the ideals of Africa’s cultural exchanges and knowledge would be promoted more vigorously.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 17 FEBRUARY 2022
