ASPIRATIONS AND CONCERNS IN AFRICAN CULTURAL LIFE

The area discussed in this contribution covers in its northern reaches all of the African territories stretching from the Atlantic Ocean through Senegal across the desert of the southern Sahara as well as the semi-desert of the Sahel eastward through the highlands of Ethiopia to the Indian Ocean. Southward, it extends to the tip of the continent at the Cape, as well as taking in the island of Nadagascar. In terrain, this massive area is highly variegated, comprising forbidding deserts punctured by numerous oases, mountain ranges and their watered valleys, arid steppes, rain Savannah and rain forests. In climate, it spans tropical, temperate, and Mediterranean types.

Its peoples are as diverse as its terrain and climatic types. They include Black Africans, who are by far the most numerous of its inhabitants, Khoisan (formerly known as Bushmen and Hottentots), and Pygmies. These different peoples are also culturally diverse, especially if culture is understood to include the whole distinctive complex of spiritual, material, intellectual, ethical and emotional features which characterize the heritage of a society or social group.

The diversity of cultures indeed attests to the richness of human creativity and invention; it also ensures, however, that there will be variations in the mind-set of human cultures, variations in the specific aspirations and concerns of their peoples, variations in the principles of action and sensibility which they invoke in their attempts to solve culturally rooted problems as well as variations in their efforts to advance reality towards ideals.

Even so, the institutions and customs are, in the end, animated by mankind's common intellectual, emotional and physical dispositions. Indeed, such common human dispositions constitute one reason why the salient problems besetting people all over the specified territories have universalist aspects. A second reason is the general interconnections today among the societies of the world, with the consequent intermingling of their cultures through their mutual acknowledgement and the mutual influences of their politics, economics, religion, literature, art and education. In this way, the aspirations and concerns within local cultures come to take on a hue and a complexion not homegrown. Although this hue and this complexion can become locally present only through local expressions and cultural idioms, the dimensions which problems within societies acquire cannot be explained or resolved completely through the idea of local cultures, operating in isolation, and without beneficial infusions from other cultures.

How deeply these interconnections affect African cultures depends on several parameters. Among these are the sources and the depth of the individual's feeling of identity within his or her own culture; beliefs and practices which govern the individual's relation to the community; those mores of the culture which express the individual's relation to nature; demands of the technological culture on the individual; and concerns about the felt role and destiny of the local cultures in the world comity of cultures.

Perceived as a cultural being, the African today is highly complex, being in fact an accumulation of a variety of cultural fragments. He is endowed with a base of his traditional culture, which is by now irreversibly impregnated at various levels by elements of other cultures, some of which were imposed and others sought and acquired. His base of traditional culture is informed with beliefs about the nature of human beings as members of his society, beliefs about the ethics which should regulate human behavior within the family and its extensions as well as regulate general behavior towards members of the same society, and even higher beliefs which inspire the ethics. It is informed by beliefs concerning the place of human beings in the environment of nature, and the ethics which should govern human behavior towards that environment.

The populations of African countries are, like those of every other country on earth, ethnically diverse. In Africa, this is because the erstwhile colonial administrations created congeries of numerous culturally diverse ethnic groups within each colonial territory, and almost without exception the colonial boundaries have been retained and maintained by the independent countries. For this reason, every African, as a bearer of one basal traditional culture, is called upon to interact with fellow citizens who are themselves bearers of different basal traditional cultures.

Again, all African countries have experienced urbanization and technological expansion. These are processes which have brought with them influxes of populations from the country into the cities. These movements have disrupted the protective connections and the certitudes which generate the bonds and fellowship of rural life. The material facet of rural life, including property systems, and relations to land and labor; the institutional facet of rural life, including customs, ritual, political and social relations; the value facet of rural life, including ethics, religion, art, and the aspirations and wisdom which they enshrine: everything falls, in different degrees, into abeyance in the face of such mass population movements. In this context, even leisure becomes a problem because its setting is new and now unfamiliar.

There are many ways to explain this great population drain from rural areas, which has in some African countries transferred more than half of the national population to urban areas. In the end, however, lying behind all of the explanations, and making them possible, is the frustration of these traditional cultures. This frustration has been brought about because the new centers of political authority have not evolved from the traditional cultures, but have either been continued, with modifications, from colonial models which were earlier counterpoised to local institutions, or have been installed through coups d'etat. In consequence of their lacking roots in earlier African traditions, visions of the good life, problems involved in its pursuit, and stocks of ideas relating to the problems' solution are no longer generated (even in rural areas where traditional cultures hold the most sway) within the parameters of traditional institutions and their begetting cultures. In hopes of a solution, many flock to the cities, which are perceived as today's centers of administration, power, and authority. Indeed, the more centralized the administration, power and authority, the greater the rural drift.

The masses that move to urban areas, being mostly illiterate, also mostly lack the active skills and mental outlook relevant for acquiring the means to a satisfying life in an urban setting. This lack exacerbates problems of urban unemployment, and severely distorts the urban burden of welfare and social security. In this way, it creates within the urban areas wildernesses of homelessness and impoverishment.

The rural migrants bring some of the attitudes and domestic practices of rural life to urban areas; for example, they bring a fertility rate which would compensate for high infant mortalities in rural settings. But in urban settings, with their reduced rates of infant mortality, such fertility rates lead to high population growths which existing African urban economic, social, and cultural institutions are unable to accommodate properly.

Modern means of communication and central political authorities have a great reach indeed, and nowhere are traditional cultures able to insulate their people and hold exclusive sway over them. Still, in rural settings, the largest masses of people continue to conduct their lives against the background of their traditional cultures. There, the able are self-motivated to be productive, and the ability of cultural institutions to guarantee the welfare and protection of those too old, too young or too ill to be productive is never overtaxed. But now, examples of the desirable life held up by modern mass media and the rhetoric of governments have convinced many that they ought to be dissatisfied with their circumstances; and it comes to seem a matter of enlightenment and ambition to succumb to the lure of the city and to abandon their ancestral homes.

The frustration of traditional cultures mentioned earlier has increasingly dislocated the traditional cultures from their aims and weakened their credibility. Everywhere in Africa, this has been a major goad to migration. There have been several other local causes -- some natural, others man made. The periodic devastation of the Sahel region by protracted drought, compounded by the reluctance or inability of the national governments to introduce palliative measures to relieve their own people, has cost millions of lives, and triggered incessant wanderings and cultural collapse among its victims. The scale of the tragedy has been limited only by the heroic efforts of various nations, agencies, and sundry arms of the United Nations Organization.

Civil war is another man-made calamity and disrupter of cultures in Africa. In some areas, internecine war has been pursued without cessation for thirty years. Sporadic acts of irredentism and attempts at forced religious suppression and domination have wreaked their own havoc. These acts have especially intensified the cultural dislocation experienced inside the rural areas. Farms, grazing lands, livestock and entire villages have been overrun by armies, with bands of brigands following in their wake.

Elsewhere, there has been cultural suppression. The Hottentots of south Africa have been partly assimilated, and partly pushed into the area of the Cape, the Land's End of the continent, as cattle herders. The Bushmen, too, have been decimated, and their remnants pushed into the Kalahari Desert. Like the Pygmies of the Ituri forest, they were originally awesome warriors and exquisite hunters, immensely courageous, skilled trackers, and fantastic experts in their knowledge of poisons, people whose ancestors left records of their own prowess on rock paintings. Exploited by farmers of different races, a people without chiefs and brooking orders from none, Bushmen have been forced to retreat into the desert depths for self-protection. Remnants of them live in Botswana, on the veldt of Namibia and south-west Zambia, as well as in the Republic of South Africa.

The cultural problems of sub-Saharan Africa are by no means confined to its rural populations. Indeed, wherever western educational, economic, and social practices have been established in Africa there too the greatest dislocation from traditional cultures has occurred. Among administrators, among managers of the national economy and all who work in it, among educators and those they teach, in the armed forces, in religious institutions, in art and literature, and in family relations, problems take shape, and the manner of their resolution becomes determined, without significant consideration of the canons of traditional cultures.

Urban Africans and Africans trained for urban living think, learn, work, conceive their hopes and aspirations within a new belief system which comes with its own axioms and postulates, its own norms, and its own ethic. In consequence, problems of the individual psyche, problems of the relations between individuals, problems relating to the responsibilities of individuals to the group, and the individual's attitude to nature, indeed the very idioms of interpersonal discourse, are deprived of the context of traditional cultures, and arise like outcroppings of rock in a bed of sand.

These western practices and norms have undermined the westernized Africans' moorings in their traditional cultures. Where before they were driven by a sacred sense of responsibility towards their immediate families, their lineage groups and their societies, now they have a greatly weakened sense of their lineage groups, and almost replace a sense of their cultural society with a still developing national sense.

The purposes and contexts of labor become mutated. Before, work would be possible only in groups, an exception being made solely in the case of the artist. Work would regularly be with other members of one's family or age set; and its purpose would be the sustenance and well-being of the family, lineage group or community. In general, there would be no hiring of labor, each person carrying out family or social obligations as a matter of ethical imperatives. Now, labor is individual, and its competence, just like its rewards, is the individual's. To-day, its driving force is economic necessity.

The beneficiary of labor is now the employer; and its products are not chosen within the framework or dictates of traditional cultures. Even agricultural crops are to-day often cash crops rather than the producers' staples. Hired farm hands who would have enjoyed usufructuary rights in the land, and that only in virtue of their membership in their lineage groups, now work instead for wages, and have neither the inclination nor the power to continue the attitude of solicitude and respect towards the land, which the clan demands and fosters.

In the urban environment, the very idea of a family becomes different. The couple usurps the functions and prerogatives of the old lineage group in the education and upbringing of children. In their upbringing, urban children tend not to pursue the ideals of their cultural patrimony, and, as a result, tend not to be well acquainted with its traditions. In the past, and to-day in rural settings, their age-set would supply a framework for their training in social institutions and their initiation as adults. In the new urban settings, street gangs are as likely as not to take the place of the age-set. Social control is typically weakened, as the instruments and sanctions of traditional cultures are thwarted without equivalent substitutes. Punishment in its urban practice appears formal and cold, and its very purpose becomes a topic of debate among different theories, whereas in the traditional society its purpose is always agreed.

The new and complex set-up has not shown the same efficiency or success in establishing social coherence and unity as traditional cultures show where they have authority and dominance. In their hey-day, traditional cultures satisfied the wants which were defined and accepted, and generally achieved the cultivation and coherence of their societies. The new set-ups have been unable to satisfy wants which they themselves defined and accepted, and have almost everywhere fallen into regression. The difficulties and perplexities which people experience today have encouraged the strengthening of ethnic and religious factors in politics, and these do not aid the cultivation and coherence of the multicultural complexes that all African countries today are.

Many Africans do not even live in their ancestral lands anymore, and are in Diaspora in technologically advanced countries. Least able to follow the traditions of their original cultures in their new surroundings, in them or in their children the cultural lines from their ancestors will come to an end. Like urban Africans, their way of life is not bound by the ethical and social norms of their original cultures, and they hold aspirations of individual (as distinct from family) success. They are little inclined to sacrifice their own opportunities in favor of their siblings, or their children's opportunities in favor of their nephews and nieces. Their decisions on important matters of their lives are taken without calculation of the interests of their lineage group or kin group.

What makes all of the above problematic and disturbing to the mind-set of today's Africans is the fact that most urban Africans are only the first generation of their lineage to be urbanized. They, in fact, carry within themselves a base of traditional cultures upon which profoundly wrenching demands are made. Indeed, the process of westernization which began even before colonialism in Africa, and continues under the aegis of African governments, has created a cultural transition everywhere in Saharan Africa.

Every country of the region now exhibits different cultural systems which are not complementary fragments of one whole, but are divergent in their structure, in their inspiration and orientation, and in their aims and methods of inculcation. The family, which is the traditional inculcator of the cultural education of the youth, the western-style school, which is the inculcator of a new education with a different conception of the individual and his responsibility to others as well as a new attitude to nature, and the street, whose gangs constitute the new age sets -- these are the disparate systems by which the development of the youth must now be guided.

Sub-Saharan African governments look to western schooling to equip the people with the means of transforming their societies into effective and prosperous modern nations. And yet, on the basis of performance, these aspirations and promises appear to have seen fulfillment only with educated individuals, but not with the societies at large. While individuals prosper, the economies of most sub-Saharan African countries have become retrograde, and hopes for recovery and progress have become entrusted to the tutelage of international monetary organizations.

Western schooling, as well as aspirations for the occupations and ways of life which it makes possible, dominates the growing child's life and determines his future. The African family has not constructed a composite of values and norms culled from the traditional culture and the ideals of western education by means of which inclusive yet coherent models could be set before its growing youth.

THE CHARACTER OF THE TRADITIONAL BACKGROUND

The area discussed above is the home of over one thousand different ethnic groups. Nevertheless, in addition to pragmatic necessity, there is empirical justification for considering African cultural phenomena across wide areas. As a matter of fact, it is easy to be unduly impressed by the sheer number of ethnic groups, each endowed with its own cultural heritage, and overlook the repetitive elements and manifestations which they contain. Categories of such repetitive elements include belief systems, relations between art, on the one hand, and, on the other, political, economic, religious, and familial institutions and practice, social stratification and political systems, other specific institutions, basic rules for counting descent.

The aim of this section is to discuss some of the characteristics and elements of the traditional cultures, and the history which has brought them to the circumstances described in the previous section. Like any other society, African societies are preexisting networks into which individuals are born. These networks define relations which its new members are to bear to one another, and relations through which their personal growth is to be nurtured and sustained. Through their cultures, the members are nurtured on common beliefs, ranges of values, attitudes, and actions, which make life in their society orderly. Through the same cultures, the members acquire skills and develop initiatives, by which life in society becomes satisfying. The family is the initial institution through which this formation and nurture are fostered.

The institution of family life is surely a human cultural universal; and the needs which it is primed to serve are among the deepest seething in the human psyche. This institution creates a constant and well understood social framework for the nurture of the young until maturity; it establishes a hospitable and forgiving ambience in which the young can safely and securely train for eventual social responsibilities and intercourse; it also provides a regulated and protective framework for the responsible advancement of sexual life.

Kinship in Africa is unalterably social in focus, and where social kinship and the biological kinship diverge, the social prevails. Thus, in many east and west African societies, and among many Bantu-speaking peoples, a child may call his natural mother's sister's husband "father". In many areas, a woman is permitted to undertake rites of marriage to another woman, and act as, and be, father to the progeny who come about by the action of a chosen sexual partner for the mother. Among many Bantu-speaking peoples, e.g. for the Mukongo, the terms "father" and "mother" are not even restricted to the biological parents of a child, but are applicable to every adult member, male or female, of the father's siblings in the one case and the mother's siblings in the other. Hence, some fathers turn out to be female, and some mothers male. The same practice exists among the Kitara, the Ndaw, the Yao and the Huana. It is more usual, however, to call one's father's brother father, and one's mother's sister mother.

The simple point underlying these complex facts is that in African tradition, fatherhood is a social concept, at whose center lie systems of sacral, legal, and economic relations and responsibilities. Children are held to be born into the society via the clan. The elementary family is in this context merely the child's gateway into society. Accordingly, it is whatever group to which the duty of raising the child to the status of a full and competently functioning member of society is entrusted which constitutes its parents. This group may be a man and his wife, or, may include their own agnate.

Even so, one can still say that two sorts of kinship relations define and knit the members of African families together: descent and sexual. Descent can be uterine or semenal. When it is uterine, the issue are full siblings. When descent is merely semenal, there are co-wives, whose children from their joint husband are linked by descent. The co-wives themselves are related only by virtue of their joint husband, and so merely sexually. Marriage is that institution which forgathers members of both kinship relations.

In African traditions, marriage is procreative in its primary purpose. Accordingly, women who have attained menopause do not in general remarry, and, in some societies, e.g. among the Nargi, their current marriage can be terminated in this circumstance. Men, likewise, are not expected to marry, unless they have a chance of fathering children; and subsequent impotence or sterility in a married man can cause him to lose his wife.

Even so, the procreative purpose has been traditionally regulated, and children of the same mother are by custom separated by three years or more, except in the case of infant death, in order to safeguard the physical and mental health of the nursing mother and her children, as Kikuyu elders, for example, painstakingly explain to young initiates. This spacing was achieved by absolute abstention, reinforced by a series of taboos, forbidding sexual contact during the period of nursing, by husband and wife maintaining separate rooms, often in separate houses, and by the new mother retreating to the home of her own folk.

A traditional African marriage is a linking of two families through the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others on the part of both, except in the case of the man in a polygynous marriage. The state of marriage bestows mutual rights on man and wife, and thereby imposes entailed obligations on them, and indeed on members of their original families. These rights and obligations are explicit, and are designed to foster conditions of domestic peace and tranquillity for the procreation and upbringing of children. Reliance is placed on the common knowledge as well as on the breeding of the partners. On this dual basis, the partners execute those silent adjustments which tailor practice to ideals.

Apart from these, marriages are maintained by legal connections as well as by prescribed economic responsibilities towards wives, children, and, if need be, other kin; sacral duties, rights, and privileges, social sanction, and the reverence required of children and wives. Stylized behavior is often instituted for the purpose of strengthening positive relations between the families. In some societies, this is sought through the display of exaggerated respect. Thus, among the Ganda, as an exaggerated expression of respect, tete-a-tete encounters and conversations between a man and his wife's mother are traditionally proscribed. Among patrilineal societies, the person to avoid is a man's wife's father. Traditionally, both the Toro and the Lendu scrupulously avoid such contact. In many societies of southern Africa, a woman cannot mention her husband's father by name. In other societies, good relations are sought through the stylized reduction of chances of adversarial encounters between the families, which would force upon a wife a choice between her husband and her own family. For this, a certain amount of bantering is enjoined between members of the two families as a method of conflict prevention, especially between a man and his brothers- sand sisters-in-law, none of whom can take umbrage at the seeming insults.

The relations created in the marriage rite are involuntary, and inherent in the state of marriage. They may in many cases persist after the death of the husband. For example, among the Nuer, the Zulu, the Margi and others, who recognize levirate obligations, a deceased man's wife, if she so chooses, can continue to bear him children by the action of his surviving brother, as his surrogate regarding his rights as well as his obligations. The complex of relations between husband and wife can only be dissolved, barring an annulment, through divorce and only in societies where provision for this exists. Some of the rights of the husband, apart from reciprocal sexual rights, are rights in rem, such that the man, aggrieved by reason of the adultery of his wife with another man, or of her death at the hand of another, or of her abduction, or of the alienation of her affection, can demand adjudication and the invocation of sanctions. Rights in rem may also be shared or collectively held. The woman's kin however retain the right of protecting her against abuse and ill usage by her husband.

A wife can hold independent wealth, since the duty of support rests with the husband, and the means of one wife cannot be used to support children of a second wife. She enjoys legal rights and discharges sacral and political responsibilities which add up to a high social position. In societies where there is a king, there also is a queen-mother. To wives is entrusted the initial training of a children and the transmission of the traditions, religion, morals, manners, tastes of the society. A wife enshrines the moral force of a society; a being more mysterious than a man, she is more sacral, and is the object of many taboos and rites, and is often revealed as the innermost secret of male religious societies.

Wives have the same rights even in a situation of polygyny. In general, a man cannot even take a second wife without the consent of the first, the consent being signified by the acceptance of a pacification fee. In polygamy, steps are taken to foster a spirit of cooperation and friendliness between the wives. To this end, it is important that they do not share kitchens. In the spirit of cooperation and friendliness, they afford one another the companionship and conversation of adults.

Marriage in African traditions is the joining of two families through the union of one man and one woman and their children, always to the exclusion of all other men as regards the woman, and in monogamous societies to the exclusion of all other women as regards the man. The first step is the selection of a maiden on the basis of her own beauty, known character and good health. Besides, she must not be related to murderers or the insane. The proposal of marriage is made through a deputation from the man's kin-folk to the woman's father and kin-folk. As earnest of their good faith, and as an expression of the degree of honor and esteem held for the woman's family, they make a series of prestations consisting of items of wealth, however locally expressed - e.g. livestock, hunting implements, money. Without such prestations, any eventual liaison is only an irregular union and enjoys no protection. In some societies, the prestation is not material, and the man is required to serve the kin of the woman for a period of time, during which he is subject to exhaustive scrutiny. In yet others, they include an exchange of marriageable women into the two families.

The marriage is itself concluded in a public ceremony which proclaims the new status of the partners. Unless it is a remarriage on the woman's part, proof that she was not virginal at the consummation of the marriage can be sufficient cause for its immediate annulment. Her persistent infertility after consummation can be sufficient ground for the termination of the marriage and a demand for the return of the prestations. However, in societies with a sororate tradition, the marriage can be saved by the provision of the wife's sister to bear children for her.

The children of the marriage are in general filiated into the father's kinship group or the mother's depending on the social determination of descent. In some societies of both east Africa and west Africa, this determination takes into account the size of the prestations. And in a few, filiation is cognatic. The children absorb the traditions, mores, and etiquette of their kinship groups, are instilled with the deepest feelings of affection and esteem for their kinship group and its members, and are cushioned and nurtured by a substantive kinship group whose motivation is sacral, and into which the children are bonded. Grandparents hold a position of special honor and affection, enjoy special friendship with their grandchildren, and act to prevent parental excesses. As elders, they are cherished as the repository of communal wisdom, and their words are regarded as stronger than an amulet.

A man, his wives, their unmarried children, and, sometimes, also their married children with their spouses and children live together in a set of buildings collectively making a household. A household thus constitutes a kinship group of kin descended from common ancestors, but only to a shallow depth, typically spanning three generations. It is strictly exogamous. It is a corporate body, holding land in trust for the exclusive use of its members. A collection of such households, which trace their kinship to a deeper and commonly known level, is an exogamous lineage group. Also a corporate body, it renews and strengthens the inter-household relations by retaining responsibility for the rites of passage of all members of its constituent households. It fixes a man's social status, and determines his succession to office. In general, it performs and supervises sacral rites.

A wide net of households which are interconnected through unilineal descent to great depths, whose details are known only in the lore of the clan, fuses the households together. As a means of mutual recognition, each clan is associated in a totemic manner with a natural species of plant, bird or other animal. Members of a clan who are otherwise mutual strangers come through such totemic association to recognize their mutual kinship, and to invoke the responsibilities and privileges designed into the kinship of the clan. Although in theory, a clan must ensure the welfare of each member, actual solicitude regarding this in practice falls on members of the household. The clan is the vehicle of multilineal social organization. It is the true land owning body, holds it in perpetuity, and has no power to alienate it in part or in whole. The clan regulates production, and constitutes a political and supreme religious body, which apportions social responsibility to lineage groups, and determines fields of succession. Differences between the assigned responsibilities cause some lineage groups to take precedence over others in the succession to political and religious offices. Likewise, although each clan is entrusted with special responsibilities of state, the differences between the social and political offices and duties create differences in prestige and status between clans.

Almost all African societies traditionally are unions of clans, and the administration of the union of clans is most often through the instrument of the state. The state is the more or less organized sum of the legislative, judicial, administrative and coercive organs of the society instituted for the order, protection and welfare of its citizens. The highest authority in this scheme of functions in centralized states, as most African traditional states are, is the paramount chief or king. Societies, like the Tiv, are not really stateless, but only diffuse and decentralized in their manner of carrying out functions of state.

A king or paramount chief is to be distinguished strictly from the office which he bears. The office itself is a sacred one, the object of awe and reverence, and the focus of the deepest religious performances. It is defended by a system of taboos and observances. It is the legitimizer of the hierarchy of authority and power by which the functions of the state are carried out. It is only derivatively, and not inherently, that the person of the king is likewise sacred. His accession is on the basis of the consent of electors, and his continuance in office is at the sufferance of his council and his people. Without inherent power to subjugate his people or territory, his own ascendancy is entrenched by the mystique he derives from his office as sacerdotal leader. Accordingly, he is required to be a paragon of the spiritual and moral purity of his people and a repository of their intellectual virtues and wisdom. He is the symbol of the fecundity of society and the fields, and is celebrated at harvest festivals. In line with this, his virility and fruitfulness should be evident, or he could be deposed.

The king is surrounded by a council of chiefs and courts. It is an African saying that there are no bad kings, only bad counsellors. Even so, he can be deposed for a variety of causes. These include contumacy with respect to his council, oppressiveness, corruption in office, neglect of affairs of state, moral turpitude, and physical or psychological incapacitation.

Although the king's council is subordinate to him, it has inherent rights and competencies, and powers reserved from the king. From the council devolves the authority whereby many functions are carried out by families and village committees, and, in some places, age-sets and religious societies. Typically, there are lower chiefs acting as local governors, who in many societies are kinsmen of the king. They make local rules, raise taxes and tribute, extract labor, sacrifices, and the means of festivals and public celebrations. They must be acceptable not only to the king but also to the people.

The local governors or provincial chiefs were entrusted with judicial functions. They presided over courts which comprised members of principal social groups in the area, like clans, lineage groups and kinship units, and in areas age-sets also. Trials were attended by the principals in the suit, their witnesses, their local supporters, and members of the community at large, who were there to see to it that cases were equitably adjudicated. At the end of all the statements by the principals and their witnesses, opinions were delivered including disquisitions on civic responsibilities in an ascending order of privilege and protocol from the most junior judge to the president of the court who gave the final decision, after weighing all testimony and the opinions of his colleagues. The community saw to it that the decisions of the court were obeyed under threat of social and religious sanctions. Even so, the aim of the court is not purely punitive. Its intent in the arbitration of disputes is the restoration of norms, restitution for injuries inflicted, and in general reconciliation. Always, dissatisfied parties retained a right of appeal.

Of course, there are African societies whose traditions do not include a strong centralized authority, like the Logoli, the Tallensi, the Tiv and the Nuer. In such societies, however segmented, procedures nevertheless exist for preserving and defending public peace, and for establishing and sustaining public harmony. Disputes are thrashed out not in regularly constituted court, but in moots attended by factions from the same or different lineage groups. The aim here is to secure a consensus upon which the restoration of social norms could be based. In centralized and diffused states, alike, in cases where witnesses are unavailable or inappropriate, recourse may be made to oracles and divination to obtain the judgment of interested gods. Steps are often taken to correct the possible bias of one oracle by a demand for the opinion of a second oracle.

The institutions were expressions of comprehensive belief systems, which were organized around mythic creeds. These creeds define a view of the character of the world and the place therein of human beings. Typically, society is conceived as having a sacral unity, which comprises its living members, its dead (who survive in less substantial form) and its as yet unborn children. The living are in constant communion with the dead on grounds of kinship.

Each class of members is credited with distinctive privileges and responsibilities. The shades of the dead are ascribed a vision made clear by their acquaintance with the past, made wise by their selflessness and their solicitude for living generations, and made prophetic by their diachronic insight into the future. Ever watchful, they admonish and rebuke the living in whom alone dwells the right of decision. On account of the peculiar vision by the shades of the dead and the succor which they are able to give, they are invoked as a group, and the most distinguished among them celebrated by name.

Powerful as the spirits of the dead are believed to be, they themselves are subordinate to higher powers and, in almost all sub-Saharan cultures, to a supreme being. This supreme being is held to be the original source of order in the world, which he generally administers through the intervention of minor powers. It is these subordinate powers which are associated with various natural objects, such as mountains, groves, trees, rivers and lakes, where they can be summoned through the right invocations.

The supreme being is variously described. In many cultures, he is a sky deity, whose unhappy intervention in human affairs led to the birth of culture, as the Ganda account has it. This is true of the Dinka account, too, in which the birth of human culture comes with the cessation of human dependence on the sky deity for daily sustenance. With the Acholi, the supreme being is more a power with many local presences than a single individual which depends on the services of subordinates. Among the Bantu, generally, there is a vital essence in which lies the unity of all living things, and which is manifested in the highest degree by the supreme being and in lower degrees by ordinary members of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms.

A human being was thought of as a complex whole of various constituents derived from the mother, the father, the clan, and the supreme being. Some of these constituents outline his personality, his character and his destiny. Others represent an ineducable and unswerveable element in him and are the basis of the fatalist tendencies in sub-Saharan cultures. A few represent an element educable through precepts, example, and sanctions. Still more mark an element connected with the tutelary spirits of the clan, and which is molded by the prescription of due practices and the avoidance of others. Above all, there are factors ensuring that a man was amenable to reason. Finally, a person's well-being was based on the harmonious functioning of all these constituents.

The same mythic creeds dominated artistic expression. Saharan African art, whether figurative or not, convex or concave in lines, symbolic or imitative in representation, is mostly functional. The artist, who is almost always a sculptor, accepts a long apprenticeship, during which he perfects his skills, and also studies themes of festivals and ceremonies, the stylizations associated with the themes, the prescribed media and the prayers and incantations required for their rightful use.

When the sculptures are not totemic, they rely on an exaggeration of physical forms and disproportion. Some of these features at first struck mystified observers as frightfully grotesque, and of the same order of degradation as gargoyles. As a result of the subsequent influence which the same features exerted on the minds of non-African artists like Picasso and Braque in Paris, Kirchner and the German Expressionists, Henry MNoore and Jacob Epstein in England, they gained a different appreciation, and the same vibrant conatus and Immediate power of most African sculptures which made them so effective in African ritual ceremony have become more widely experienced.

It is true that in certain African societies, mainly in west Africa, there was a late court art which was decorative in effect, though still functional in intent. It placed symbols and motifs on walls and entrance arches of palaces. These symbols and motifs were supposed to proclaim the power and glory of kings, and the sacred sources of their authority. It also placed symbols on the weapons of hunters and canoes of fishermen. In perhaps every case, except with artistic doodling, the finished work was described, among the Tiv, for example, as the self-expression of the supreme being relying on human instruments.

No account of African art can be complete without mention of the centuries-old highly representational Benin and Ife bronzes. These applied Yoruba discoveries in metallurgy and alloys. They are Iconic and monumental images of the head rather than the full figure, which when depicted at all is given a truncated body with a disproportionately large head. Severed heads and stunted torsos would indeed be grotesque if intended to be decorative. Many African cultures, including the Benin, in fact associate the perpetual constituent of a human being with the head. This is the constituent in charge of a person's destiny and the person's intelligence and craftiness. The bronze figures were without doubt connected with such beliefs, and in all probability depicted the heads of the most successful and powerful kings, kings of a manifest and accomplished destiny.

As a whole, sub-Saharan African cultures achieved considerable triumphs. Throughout the west, east, and south of the continent, they constructed a succession of empires and kingdoms from the 5th century A.D., strong monarchies with effective administrations and systems of taxation, as well as a flourishing external trade. The most renowned include the Ghana and Songhai empires in the west, the Azanian empire in the east, and the Monomotapa kingdom of Zimbabwe in the south. The stone ruins of Monomotapa still arouse wonder today. Indeed, one of only nine autochthonous cities in the history of the world was founded by the Yoruba in west Africa; and with its Vai script, Africa is one of only three continents to originate a system of writing.

The traditional cultures described above were penetrated by Islam and Christianity and dominated by colonialism. Colonial administrations in sub-Saharan Africa irreversibly put an end to the political hegemony of local cultures, not only by their assumption of the powers of coercion and the introduction of new social institutions, new ways of doing things, and new reasons for doing them, but also by their juxtaposition of the local cultures within newly defined geographic boundaries, which did not coincide with any previously existing.

Colonialism brought in new systems of education, an inquisitive and acquisitive attitude towards nature, the promise of mass literacy, scientific approaches to disease, the infrastructure of modern communication and commerce, cultural and religious enrichment, an expanded vision of moral ideas and ideals, the suppression of tribal warfare, party politics, and techniques of management and government unavoidable in the modern state. It brought ideals of constitutional government in contrast with sacred tradition, the ideal of legal egalitarianism and an impartial judiciary intended to pursue it, an efficient though impersonal civil administration, and the promise of a free press.

Colonialism also ushered in unbridled economic exploitation and sapped sub-Saharan cultures of their vitality. They became deprived of direction and internal impetus, and increasingly survived mainly as pageant and ceremonial. New ideas concerning individual accountability and individual reward, the spreading sense of individual vision and the ascendancy of self-interest in contrast with community interest as a basis of action, the growing sense of private power arising from self-action rather than clan direction, all of these atomizing factors, acting in concert, have loosened the internal bonds and efficacy of lineage-based clans.

The penetration of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa is extensive, and it is a force in different degrees in west, east and south Africa, along with Christianity. The nature of its presence and the effect which it has through its presence on traditional cultures is, however, diverse. In some cultures, it is hardly a factor. Among others, it is overwhelming. Where it is a factor, some local cultures acknowledged and coexisted with it, took advantage of its talents, while insulating the centers of its own traditions from Muslim influence. The Asantes are the clearest example of this. Their king was not permitted to convert to Islam, but his kingdom freely used Muslims as accountants, conductors of its external trade, scribes and indeed ambassadors.

The Asantes also sought to graft onto a substratum of their vigorous culture approved elements of Christian doctrine and ethics, selected ideas of western science and some technological practices.

Some other cultures were more receptive as regards Islamic acculturation. Many in the Yoruba culture, for example, in response to some racialist attitudes in colonialism, converted to Islam which preached the equality of believers.

There are cultures however which were completely receptive to Islam. Prime examples of this are the Hausa in west Africa and certain Swahili cultures in south-east Africa, where the Islamic experience is vastly longer. Indeed, the Swahili language can be traced back to the 9th century, and its literature began to be set down in Arabic script only a few centuries later.

It is however only since the 19th century and through force majeure that Islamic hegemony has been attained. Many Muslims in such areas consider that elements of traditional African religion have been duly purged, and that what survives is but custom as distinct from the prophetic tradition and revealed religion. The continuance of traditional religious practices are however evident in all rites of passage. Islamic and traditional African practices run parallel.

Christianity, like Islam, enjoyed its most formative influx into sub-Saharan cultures in the 19th century. However, ancient African kingdoms had very early presence contact with it. The ambassador of Queen Candace's court mentioned in the Book of Acts hailed in all probability from Meroe beyond the southern borders of Egypt.

The Nubian kingdoms, whose territory is now part of the Republic of Sudan, had a very early established presence of Christianity. It was in the 6th century that Monophysite and Orthodox missions were sent from Constantinople and brought their theological disputes and practices to Nubia. This early Nubian Christianity was, however, to vanish under pressure of Muslim traders and adventurers, and the strong intervention of the sultans of Egypt in the 12th and 13th centuries. While it lasted, however, it injected African ideas and practices into Christian observance. Its iconography was distinctly African, and its nativity scenes depicted African donkeys and cattle and a black royal wet-nurse as well as three black kings bearing gifts. Under the leadership of Unesco and through a vast international effort, many of its relics were rescued before they could be swamped by the flooding arising from the construction of the great Aswan High Dam.

Somewhat eastward, Ethiopia displays both a Judaic and a Christian influence. The Jewish presence in Ethiopia dates by tradition from the days of King Solomon. The Falasha, descendants of the Ethiopian converts to Judaism of that time, combine ancient forms of Judaism with ancient African practices. Presumably, today's Falasha are descendants of those who declined to convert to Christianity in the early centuries.

The history of Christianity in Ethiopia goes back with certainty to the 4th century when it was connected with the archbishopric of Alexandria. Through the centuries, it engaged in a program me of proselytization of non-Muslims and non-Christians, all the time, like African religions, connecting Christianity with issues of daily existence. Its traditional African features are quite evident, and include more than the religious integration of drumming, singing and dancing. Its achievements include the spectacular architecture of the churches at Lalibela, excavated out of one solid rock, an eclectic artistic tradition which combines early Christian styles with African motifs and ideas, illustrated manuscript texts of early Christian works now disclosed to the world, hagiological works and works of critical philosophy.

The changes wrought in sub-Saharan Africa since the 19th century reach deeply. The main problem posed is one of acculturation. The problem exists because up till the middle of the 19th century and in many places down into the 20th century, traditional cultures provided a close interconnection between social structure, laws, belief system, and work and art, and was the cradle of certitudes according to which people led generally harmonious lives. To-day, sub-Saharan African countries are transitional agglomerations of ill assorted cultures, racked at present with the conundrum of generating and supporting coherent and unified nations.

TRENDS IN THE CULTURAL TRANSITION

The culture of a people has many dimensions. They include a pedagogical one, teaching the common wisdom to succeeding generations and yielding the symbols and means for communicating that wisdom; an ethical one, declaring principles of sensibility and action, and sketching out the basis and limits of tolerance and cooperation; a prophetic one, bearing on the norms and future history of its people. All in all, it is a fecund womb of national identity. Acculturation in sub-Saharan Africa will be the means for interweaving the present diversity of cultures into a coherent whole from which can be derived the ends and the means of the general flourishing of society.

The anticipated result of the acculturation will be the re-invigoration of sub-Saharan African cultures, enriched by the colonial, the Islamic, and the Christian experience in a manner and to an extent which are beneficial to the peoples of the areas. The goal is the evolution of cultures within which the transformation from disrupted, diseased, untechnical and largely illiterate post-colonial societies into harmonious, literate, technical, industrial, prosperous and thoroughly emancipated ones can be assured.

The social problems in the midst of which the acculturation is taking place are many, forbidding, and unequally distributed among constituent cultures. They include problems of refugees, education, communications, health, food, water, rural development, urban planning, economic progress, and unappeased and recrudescent tribalism.

These problems are already being vigorously tackled. The civil wars, chief cause of refugees, are winding down and yielding to negotiations. Medical facilities and delivery have improved dramatically; agricultural production of selected crops has increased tremendously; considerable expansion of the economic infrastructure has been engineered. However, an exclusive concentration on the technical problems of economic development, without attention to cultural development and support, has led to general steep declines in gross national products and per capita incomes. Sub-Saharan African reconstruction ought to mean not simply the creation of a productive economy but also the fostering and sustaining of culturally coherent, vibrant and tolerant societies.

Indispensable to any such reconstruction will be a literate population. The dynamics of consciousness, the will to progress, the skills and the psychological attitudes necessary for progress can only accrue from widespread education based on soundly designed curricula. Universal, compulsory and consequently free education for all children in urban as well as rural areas will be the means to bring all into the context of the modern state. Already, scores of millions of children are already in school, with education at all levels locally available.

Sub-Saharan African illiteracy to-day is not confined to children. Much of it is adult illiteracy, and it cannot be glossed over. After all, education is the means of liberation from some of the limiting factors in our immediate environment--physical, social, and cultural.

THE MIND-SET OF AFRICAN CULTURES

The above sections have discussed characteristic features of the cultural scenes in Africa, the aspirations and concerns in that cultural region of the world, the original world-views of its peoples and the historical encounters which have contributed to the formation of their present mind-set together with its trends.

African societies traditionally were mostly unions of clans. These clans consisted of a wide network of households which were interwoven through lineal descent. The clans were generally responsible for instilling common beliefs, social norms, and living skills in members in order to bring about loyalty to communal purposes and assurance of security and provision for all.

The traditional societies were irreversibly penetrated by brand of Islam and Christianity, and dominated by colonial powers. These encounters altered the force and direction of the host cultures, altered social relations and the rationale underlying the organization of traditional societies, introduced new ways of doing things and new reasons for doing them, and brought within common territories cultures which before were highly territorial. In a word, these encounters changed in many different ways at one and the same time relations between individuals and relations with the environment.

Whereas the host cultures provided a coherent interconnection between social structure, laws, belief system, work, and art, a coherence providing the certitude and trust making for harmonious lives, the historical encounters have produced accumulations of cultural fragments still struggling to promote and support unified nations. Here lies a new challenge.

Since its beginnings in Africa, human culture has responded to great changes in its physical and social environments by creative adaptations and adjustments; but to-day, the changes and challenges facing African cultures are at their most acute and most pervasive yet. The perplexities thus caused have to some served as the occasion for devising programmatic social theories and cultural proposals, in whose light certain features of African cultures, which are held to be non-traditional, are to be curbed, because they are thought of as corrupting; at least, they are deplored because they are still thought of as being inauthentic and alien; for others, these same features are, with some caution and conscious purpose, to be integrated and internalized, and welcomed as triggers of beneficent evolution and catalysts of progress.

The stress of the changes is manifest at the seams of society, where individuals are bonded to one another and to groups, and groups are bonded to one another and to the ethnic society. The stress tends to weaken and to dissolve some of these bonds which make a society solidarist and cohesive. In view of the cultural realities of Africa, a few observers have also proposed theories of the traditional and ancient society, and have, besides, suggested hypotheses concerning its origins and the motives of its cultural forms. Relying upon these, they have developed grounds of comment, clarified a basis of acculturation, and synthesized principles meant to govern the crystallization of cultural identity. The cultural facts besetting Africa pose two general needs: i) the need to achieve cultural coherence and cohesion in the modern trans-ethnic nations of Africa, and ii) the need to establish new comprehensive ways of life, which will be grasped as being of value, and to incorporate a more or less common understanding of that value.

This weakening, this dissolution of bonds, is sufficiently widespread to suggest an approach of methodological atomism to the problem of fostering national cultures in today's Africa. It is a similar methodological atomism which underlies the universal suffrage with its "one person one vote" principle as a way of ascertaining the will of the group. However, a methodological atomism does not in itself carry any further philosophical implications. In particular, methodological atomism does not imply a social atomism, and is quite consistent with the general African view in which a person is an ethical being, inescapably rooted in social life, and subject to well-defined norms, typically imparted in the framework of the clan.

To-day's juxtaposition of diverse cultural strands in Africa, coupled with the general absence of an imperative culture, turns the people of Africa into cultural atoms, each person, it is true, imbued with cultural tendencies and cultural predispositions, but at the same time having open to him or her the attractions and the promise of every one of a rich and variegated landscape of cultures present. In this post-colonial era, when the power and authority of decision making lie with Africans themselves, there exists an embarrassment of riches in the shape of theories and methods upon which political and social decision makers can draw.

There is in Africa today an unabated and constant objective need for a consensus on the nature of the societies which are thought by African themselves, and the encouragement of positive impulses towards fostering such societies. The cultural features and practices which make up Africa today reflect the degree of diversity whose acceptance is necessary both for the growth of trans-ethnic national cultures and for regional, inter-regional, and international cultural communions.

The subjective need to form national cultures is a keenly felt one in Africa. There is clear realization that, without such trans-ethnic cultures, provincial cultural differences are apt to sprout separatist tendencies and actions, which have led to apprehension, oppression, civil war and general unrest. Certainly, the basis for such trans-ethnic cultures exists in the internal similarities among African cultures themselves and in the similarities between the historical experiences of the cultures. If the internal similarities are sufficiently acted upon by elements of cultures from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, which are present in Africa and belong in the historical experience of African cultures, the similarities can be enhanced and can eventually spur the irreversible flowering of national cultures.

Elements of cultures from Asia, Europe, and the Americas are already well known to enough millions, among whom they are admired and indulged. The scientific, technological, literary, and artistic content of these cultures, the goods which they have generated, and the high degree of self-expression which this content permits, all find great favor in Africa. These are all goals approved and desired in Africa for Africa; and there exists a brimming eagerness to engage in fruitful dialogue with the respective cultures, not only as the cultures supported by those achievements, but also as the cultures whose fruit they are.

In a way, these elements are only making a return to Africa, home of the Adam and Eve of cultures, where all culture first arose in the mists before recorded history. They are elements which resonate in every department of human life in Africa. In political concepts and organization, in economic practice and structure, in educational institutions, methods, and curricula, in employment patterns and labor practices, in agricultural crops, farming methods, and husbandry, in the forms and uses of leisure, in music, dance, literature, and the arts, in family relations and practices, in the rites of birth, marriage, and death, in language, belief, values, dress, and manners, cultures from all continents of the world have found firm footing in Africa.

THE OPENNESS OF AFRICAN CULTURES

On gaining political independence and sovereignty, African nations sought to fortify their independence by an assertion of an African personality or negritude. Attempts were made to characterize what is African and to declare an imperative to preserve and foster it as a way of exploiting political independence for the reclamation and pursuit of an African destiny, a destiny believed to have been interrupted by the colonialist episode. The attempts led to brilliant philosophical essays. Their cultural as well as their programmatic content was, however, quite sparse. They advanced philosophical speculation rather than a way of life. The concrete African features which they envisaged often consisted in ceremonial and pageantry, in spectacle rather than in conviction. It was more a promulgation for official functions than an expression of the life of the people.

Indeed, as regards the life of the people, such speculations represented a real danger. In terms of the a land, a language, a belief system, mores, customs, savoir faire, and art, nothing in the heritage covered anything like the entire territory of Africa. Proposals to pursue the African personality were bound, if taken seriously, to promote a divisiveness, dissolving the links forged in the colonial era. The independent African countries were amalgams of such collocations.

Because the certitudes of "negritude" and "the African personality" tended to be discovered by officials of government and the political parties in power, the practical expression was in an area of most interest to government: the very form of government itself. Attempts were made to establish instruments of rule and practices which officials conceived as conforming most closely to their vision of the African personality and negritude. In practice, this meant the introduction of a high degree of centralization, paralyzing to local initiative, and forgetful of the checks and balances conceived in the wisdom of African traditions.

The practices were called African socialism and communalism. In fact, they were by and large species of authoritarianism which were neither African in spirit nor communalistic in manifestation. The proposal to create political institutions which would be African in spirit was however not amiss: it is not that the specific nature of the institutions was inscrutable, but that the spirit of Africa, to which the institutions would give manifest expression, has not yet taken secure form. A confident and secure culture is an indispensable condition for workable political institutions, the source of their effective authentication, their defence and their sustainer. National political institutions call for national, and so, trans-ethnic elements of culture. This national culture will be a complementarity of local cultures, coopting their virtues and their psychic strengths and creative power, and the inspiration of its people.

The times are now favorable for such a development. The political and social upheavals which African countries have experienced have now concluded the first stage of their post-colonial era. That stage was marked by a dogmatism, inflexibility, and general combativeness, which, cumulatively, were the assertion of a separate identity, the specification of a cloak and a persona, through which thoughtful spokesmen for their African compatriots sought to be grasped, for the departing colonialism had left Africans naked. This is hardly a unique reaction, and is entirely similar to the efforts of various European spokesmen, in particular, certain German thinkers, to describe and thereby constitute the `Volkgeist' or `Spirit of the people' in reaction to the eighteenth century domination of Europe by French culture.

To-day, there is a greater intellectual acceptance as something applicable to Africa, too, the fact that all national cultures are now syncretist, that this is an inescapable existential condition of modern viability. The valorization of African cultures in this post colonial era requires an impulse forward from an idealized and static conception of traditions to the espousing of a vital syncretist heritage of elements derived from diverse sources, able to constitute for Africans a total resource for living, and to offer to non-Africans a familiar feeling.

This should not be an indiscriminate syncretism. The problematique of African cultures was not the cause but the result of the colonial impact; with national sovereignty gained, such consequences of colonialism as remain harmful persist in spite of the withdrawal of their cause. Their acceptance is what is often called the colonial mentality. They have no place in the syncretism.

African countries formerly ruled by France have always showed a greater acceptance of French influences, at least. They had a tradition of participation in the political and cultural institutions of France, which on account of its `France overseas' conceptions practiced somewhat assimilationist policies. In turn, French personnel participated in notable numbers in the administration and other institutions of the countries. The willing cultural openness in those countries led in some of them to a readiness to seek political, military, and other institutional assistance from France even in matters relating to internal politics. The same openness led to suggestions of an eventual multinational confederation with France.

All in all, however, the new openness in Africa derives to some extent from an appreciation of the realities of the African condition as described in the first section. Some national problems indeed need to be tackled internationally. Not only is there an increasing cooperation with reconstructive agencies like the World Bank, there is also a greater sense of trust in regional and pan-African contacts and undertakings. A more thorough inter-penetration among ethnic groups has also made for mutual acceptance and cooperation. In fact, religious difference is a greater cause of mistrust and exclusion in Africa now than is sheer ethnic affiliation, even though the trans-ethnic dimensions of religion in Africa have helped to foster transethnic harmony.

Another harmonizing factor is the relatively low number of high schools and universities. These are often residential and have served as centers of re-acculturation for students drawn from different areas and ethnic groups and even countries. With the effect of uniform curricula added, cultural barriers are broken down and loyalty to more universal cultural norms is advanced.

The role of government in all of this is not the reconciliation of well developed and self-propelled interests, but the fostering and nurturing of new and more comprehensive societies through initiatives in areas like education, personal liberty, health, agriculture, the facilitation of cultural contacts, support of enlightened rural policies, and the maintenance of public peace. These aims can be advanced through free public discussion and recommendation.

In the past, African governments have proclaimed the public good as the motive of their decisions and actions. In this, they have only proclaimed a democratization of ends. In social and national development, no end however lofty in idea can justify every and all means. The democratization of means, of practice, and of institutions that recognize and defend practice is an unexcludable and irreplaceable expression of human dignity in the political life of a nation. In the belief systems of Africa, in which human beings are typically invested with an ultimate and ineradicable dignity, there should be no justification for any kind of authoritarianism, least of all one in which citizens have no inalienable rights in their own country. The pursuit of democratic aims and practices all the way down to regional and local assemblies holds the best promise for arousing the faith of people in their destiny, for galvanizing their energies, and for fostering the degrees of self-realization and self-creation needed by each individual for rewarding participation in cultural life.