Contemporary African culture as yet is a melting pot of nova et vetera, with raw material of traditional and more recent elements. The traditional element itself, the vetera, was only relatively stable: relative, that is, to the faster growing snowball of modern culture, the nova. But even then it was an accretion of elements gradually sedimented over the ages, much like the annual rings that mark the age of an ancient Iroko or Sequoia tree. The tree remains dynamic and grows by adding and rejecting, by being modified by these new elements. Frequently, however, this traditional element is treated as if it were whole and intact, having a clear, distinct and exclusive identity of its own which supposedly either survived or remained unchanged up to such a date, namely, up to contact with the West.
One of the well-known and well-worn methods of treating the subject of African philosophy is to retreat into the authentic purity of the pre-colonial culture in order to reconstruct a folk philosophy based on its elements.1 This is motivated as much by an urgent need to recapture a rapidly vanishing past as by the growing resistance to cultural invasion by a monolithic colossus that threatens all cultures with a totalitarian and impoverishing reductio ad unum. People are alarmed at the prospect that many individual cultures may die so that one monoculture might rule the world. But today's African culture is neither the romanticized, pre-colonial, Neanderthal museum piece arrested in its development and fossilized in its authentic purity; nor is it yet the much vaunted one-dimensional culture which the West relentlessly has continued to foist upon the rest of the world. Any African culture surviving today, as indeed any flesh and blood African, is a complex mix of old and new.
THE CONTINUUM OF NOVA ET VETERA
To have to choose between the modern and the traditional would translate into the agonizing choice of either:
a) identifying with one or the other set of values, or
b) living both of them as a continuity, since each individual life is in fact a continuum.
The first option is only theoretical, for it is not possible in actual life. To choose only the traditional, for instance, one would have to live in monastic isolation where only the circumstances of traditional life prevail. But there is no such oasis or cast iron laboratory, disinfected, deodorized, anaesthetized and insulated from outside influence. To be born at all, to survive and live in our world today is to be exposed to a wide range of extra-traditional conditions for living. The typical Nigerian child is born today in a maternity home or hospital and is inoculated against the six or so child killing diseases. He or she is fed and dressed in the modern way, including wearing diapers and feeding, at least part of the time, on cow's milk from baby's bottles. Soon enough one is baptized and labelled with the foreign name of a foreign saint, and in due time taken to the Church to be initiated and indoctrinated into the new religion. Sooner or later he or she goes, or is dragged however unwillingly, to school where for years one is to be exposed to the untraditional world of books, foreign languages and modern science, not to mention the mysteries and marvels of modern technology.
By the end of this encounter with the institutions of church and school, and thanks to a mixed dose of indoctrination, instruction, brainwashing and the programmatic devaluation of his own culture, the cultural purity of the adolescent's native tradition has been substantially compromisedcompromised, but not quite obliterated, because the resilience of the traditional culture is still evident in the very name(s) the child bears, the badge of circumcision, the facial scarification or other tribal mark with which he has been stamped and the relevance of the ancient institutions of family and village. Concurrently, the child learns to speak and think in his traditional language, is imbued with the values of the extended family, with respect for blood ties and for age and with an awareness of the implications of an abiding attachment to the native soil, community and ancestors. As the child grows through puberty, he or she is initiated into the adult world of male and female values and roles and into the deposit of the secrets of his or her people, thereby acquiring access to those values that pass from generation to generation and distinguish the perception of world and mankind unique to each people.
Thus the division into traditional and modern becomes essentially an academic abstraction since, in the continuity of the life of the individual and his society these various cultural forces and currents meet, sometimes in reconciliation, at others in conflict or at yet other levels in syncretic juxtaposition. But at whatever level of chemistry, all the elements are mixed within the one individual in whom they form but a single continuum. To a greater or lesser extent, the African today is a living confluence of cultural rivers, the major rivers being, on the one hand, the traditional culture with its various tributaries of religion, social structure, language, values and world view, and, on the other hand, the Christian-Western culture with its own tributaries. For many other Africans, Islam constitutes a third major river.
What is valid of the individual seems valid also of the larger Africa society. Institutions created in other places and at other times to meet the problems of those times and places have been imported into Africa by the colonial powers and missionary agencies. The values of the Judaeo-Graeco-Latin-Germanic-Christian-Secular West, as well as its dis-values, all passing for modernity, joust and clash in Africa like titans in mortal combat among themselves and together against the host culture. The contradictions of the West between, on the one hand, the philosophy of universal love and peace and the eschatological emphasis of Christianity, and, on the other hand, its perceived xenophobic and predatory self-centeredness and the hedonistic materialism of its secular arm contribute to create monumental ambiguities. Today African society bears not only the burden of its own native culture, but also the traces of continuities, harmonized assimilations, incipient dualisms and unresolved heterogeneities resulting from the impact of the West. All this should indicate the extremely dynamic fluidity of the cultural material with which the African philosopher has to work, as well as the all-embracing and ever-expanding inclusiveness of the experience which today we call African culture.
UNASSIMILATED IMPORTS EMPHASIZE LOSS OF
PRISTINE PURITY
An interesting example of unresolved heterogeneity is the introduction of the feudal hierarchical system into a community like the Igbo by both the colonial authority and the Christian church. Over the ages, the Igbo have lived in extremely democratic and acephalous village units, each one independent of its neighbor and, in its internal government, acknowledging no single, supreme ruler or reigning dynasty. Before the colonial era the facts show and a popular proverb of the Igbo declares defiantly that "Igbo enwegh eze"--the Igbo know no king. British anthropologist C. K. Meek puts it bluntly and succinctly: kingship is not and never was a feature of the Ibo constitution. Where it occurs it is clearly of exotic origin.2
The British colonial authority was puzzled by this anomaly, which imperial puzzlement found expression in the words of Margery Perham: Southeast Nigeria presented administrative problems which, in their "difficulty, are unique in Nigeria if not in all British Africa.3 "The British were . . . dealing with a suspicious people whose culture presented exceptional difficulties to the understanding of Europeans."4 To Her Majesty's government it was not only unBritish and therefore barbarous, but it was all the more incomprehensible since the neighbors of the Igbo of comparable size and "intelligence" and "state of evolution,"the Yoruba and Bini of the West and the Hausa-Fulani of the Northhad evolved intricate hierarchical systems of governance with "Obas" (kings) and "Emirs" (feudal Moslem rulers), at the apex of ruling houses and dynasties.
The colonial government found the existing social structure among these other peoples, which bore a close resemblance to their own, naturally usable and easy to integrate into their colonial policy of Indirect Rule. This was the policy of ruling the colonies, not directly from the Colonial Office in London, but indirectly through the use, or perhaps more appropriately the abuse, of these kings and emirs as native puppets and agents of a foreign rule over their own peoples. In Igboland, however, finding no kings or emirs, they went ahead nevertheless to invent and impose their equivalent, the so-called warrant chiefs. This foreign imposition of an alien idea and structure into the very fabric of Igbo political organization was resisted5 and led eventually to the well-known revolt of the women of Igboland in 1929, a revolt known to the history books as the Women's or Aba Riots but remembered among the people themselves as "Ogu Nwanyi"the Women's War.
Subsequent intensive studies of Igbo social institutions taught the British to wonder if they had not overreached themselves in attempting with such undue zeal to mutilate the structure of a fiercely democratic culture by imposing upon it a feudal structure. The Warrant Chiefs were withdrawn and even modified forms of the same policy continued to be problematic; nothing worked well until elective local government was introduced on the eve of Nigeria's independence. It is therefore the most bizar of ironies that nearly two score years into independence, indigenous military governments, desperate for legitimacy and hungry for allies easy to manoeuvre, reinvented the ruler and the dynasty, reimposing the alien feudal structure. Predictably, to date this has encouraged the proliferation of no fewer than three hundred "Royal Highnesses" in Imo State alone, heart of the Igbo heartland and originally the home of the purest specimen of Igbo democracy and republicanism.
The Christian church also, though without any such overt tampering with the people's social or religious organization, just by transporting the organizational structures it inherited from medieval Europe into the Igbo Christian church, has introduced a socio-religious novum. These structures, which divide clergy and laity along political power lines, whether horizontal as in the merging of separate but autonomous towns and village groups into parishes and dioceses or vertical as in the hierarchical ranks and orders of powerreligious, priests, monsignori, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and patriarchs and popesin ascending degrees of power not accountable to the people, do violence to the existing social and religious fact. They have engendered unhealthy rivalries and intrigue in the quest of the ambitious for the commanding heights of power in the church. They have been partly responsible also for the proliferation of mushroom churches, as ambitious and money-driven individuals stake out their own territory or jurisdiction where they endow themselves with titles and power as "supreme prophet," "Arch-Apostle," "Most Holy Patriarch" or some such awesome, hierarchical superlative. These new intrusions have not obliterated either the autonomy of the village unit or the egalitarian concept of the individual in his society, despite a policy statement to that effect by one of the founding colonial officers, Sir Ralph Moor, when he wrote to the Colonial Office: "Practically all the systems of the natives have to be done away with."6 But they have severely limited the impact of these principles, and, until they are absorbed, rejected or modified, will continue to create a situation of friction, confusion and even contradiction and chaos in the Igbo mind and in society.
THE CHRISTIAN ONSLAUGHT
Perhaps there has been no more effective agent in the de-stabilization of the old culture than Christianity itself whose frontal and total war on the traditional religion has led to the collapse of a well-wrought and integrated system of belief that formed the support of the culture.7 For if Christianity's monotheism and system of belief was alone true, as missionaries kept insistinga claim which seemed to be supported by the impressive wizardry of power, science, technology and material wealth associated with the new religionthen the familiar gods of the traditional pantheon were forever discredited. They were even demonized as evil agents of the Devil, a monster till then yet unknown.
However it came about, like the triumph of Elias against the priests of Baal, the undermining of belief in the traditional gods was a devastating rout that shook more than confidence. It led to the collapse of a whole philosophico-theological, moral and social system. It would reduce to meaninglessness and absurdity the panoply of beings, agents and factors that gave sense and purpose to life. It would lead to the destruction of the protective mantle of the gods over society and the individual, and to the loss of validity in their sacred sanction in the moral sphere. The other guardians of morality, the sacred ancestors, ipso facto would be unmasked as false impostors and their mystique and powers would come to be looked upon as myths woven out of ignorance, magic and fear.
Furthermore, since the new education seemed to hold the key to the knowledge that gave real power and competence, the children and young rather than their illiterate parents, had access to this. In itself this too helped to upset the traditional order in which old age was synonymous with wisdom and youth with ignorance, and in which the old were superior to the young by virtue of the wisdom and prestige which age and experience had conferred on them. This role reversal and loss of authority and prestige by the older generation would corrupt or spell the destruction and end of the very idea of tradition. The British saw this early on. Perham observes:
Christianity, with the secular education which was the missionaries' second and most eagerly accepted gift, was bound to sap the fundamental beliefs upon which all important native institutions rested. . . . The aged and responsible were seldom open to its influence; the young provided the converts. Thus, what to Africans is a deep and unnatural rift has been introduced between old and young. The basis of authority is shaken.8
It is with such lethal weapons that Christianity dealt a mortal blow on traditional African culture.
A TRANSFORMED CULTURE
Though wounded, however, this culture is far from dead. It continues its existence in a transformed yet still recognizable state, though indelibly marked and altered by its history. Or rather, it has taken on a new existence as a new culture. It is of this altered culture or mixed salad of old and new that we can legitimately speak when we talk of African culture today. This present culture is an amalgam of the sum total of all its parts: the pre-colonial, ancient past; the experience of the slave trade, colonization and Independence; the present multi-lingual, multi-ethnic form of political co-existence; the massive urbanization, industrialization and neo-colonial exploitation; the religious pluralism, exposure to modern education and growing capitalism; the growing mass poverty, consumerism and corruption; the mass urban unemployment and the deserted village syndrome. All the factors and elements labelled new, imported and foreign are part of the present culture.
Any honest discussion of African culture today must face again the question of its existence and identity. By the question of existence I do not mean the racist question of whether Africans have any worthwhile culture of which to boast; nor by the question of identity do I mean whether there is a unity of culture in Africa. Rather, here the question of the existence and identity of African culture is that of finding out what we mean when we use the phrase "African culture". What do we affirm or deny? Is it something that has identifiable boundaries in time and space; and does it have the same boundaries for the historian as for the philosopher, the cultural anthropologist, the scientist and the artist? In other words, what is its definition in the literal sense of its "fines" or limits? Though a search for what is distinctively African must naturally direct us towards the past, here "naturally" does not mean "exclusively" as has often been taken to be the case. In fact the "naturalness" of such an orientation to the past as a privileged part of culture is contestable and suspicious as it looks too much like a relic from the times when African peoples and cultures, apparently because they were generally poor, peasant and pre-industrial, were treated by curious foreign cultural anthropologists as retarded fossils from the past of humanity. But no living culture is so arrested. Some cultures are slow to change, but all cultures willy-nilly are in a state of permanent change, so that the only exact definition of any culture would seem to be the sum total of all it has been together with all it is up to and including the moment of that definition. Any prior fixing or closure imposed on a living culture, as if it was some abstract section like a period of history, is always premature; it always misses another vital section, namely, "the present," meaningmore than timethe abiding consciousness of the whole and the unique singularity of the synthesis of its accumulated experience.
FUTURE SHOCK
No doubt African culture is now quite changed from what it was 500 years ago, but this only reflects the extraordinary experience through which it has passed. To appreciate the scale of change and what this change has done to this culture, one may consult the predictions of a renowned futurist on the evolution of Western technological culture. Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock9 itself shocked the world in the 70s when he exposed with prophetic apodicticity the logical destination of the racing current of change gripping super-industrialized societies. Predicting the consequences of the ongoing technological revolution, he foresaw a future that would dislocate the social and psychological balance by Western society if this rate of change continued without a corresponding program of adaptation by Western society and its psyche. He surveyed the impressive array of industrial and technological change that has taken place in the last 300 years and spoke of it as a "fire storm of change," affecting institutions, values and even roots. He laments this "racing rate of change that makes reality seem sometimes like a kaleidoscope run wild". It is not only the content of culture change from old to new that dazzles, but especially its scale, scope and pace. This accelerated pace of change whereby so many revolutionary changes occur within so short a time has brought about a culture of transience and flux, in which nothing is permanent except perhaps impermanence itself.
This has so revolutionized the environment of the super-industrialized man that it has affected and dislocated his consciousness, his responses and his relations to people and things, to time and space. It affects his universe of ideas, art and values, and taxes to the utmost his very ability to cope. He is in shockor almost. Future shock is the physico-psychological and social response to overstimulation by aggravated and uncontrolled change. It is a breakdown of the coping mechanism, a problem of adaptivity to change, and ultimately a question of human possibilities. Though the author sees its symptoms as already evident in society, he really projects future shock into the future and offers remedies, coping techniques and even preventive measures to forestall its full destructive impact.10
What Toffler projects so ominously into the future culture of the super-industrialized nations as future shock has, in a way, already been taking place for the cultures and peoples of Africa. However, the catalyst for change in this case has been not any dramatic, technological revolution peculiar to Africa, but rather the volume and rate at which the West itself has impacted upon Africa, in the past 500 years. In the beginning there was the "discovery" of Africa by European adventurers. This was followed by the rape, plunder and degradation of the transatlantic Slave Trade lasting some three centuries. After a brief spell of normal trading there came the scramble for Africa and ultimately its partitioning by European powers, leading to the colonial wars and to colonization itself.
The religious proselytism of the Christian churches and missions opened yet another and perhaps more lethal front against the indigenous culture. The post-independence era of new dependency, marked by control over political and economic forces by foreign powers and interests, as well as the imposition of foreign languages as lingua franca, have added to the forces of culture change and confusion. Between them, these forces have let loose a Pandora's box of effectsimmediate, mediate and delayed-actionwhich have modified, mutilated and virtually overwhelmed the African host culture.
If one adds the impact of the present Western, media-driven cultural offensive whose own rate of change forms the reason for the emergency alert of Future Shock, then one can appreciate better the shock Africa has and is going through. One is bound to use the expression "African culture" with more than a thousand qualifications. In fact we are obliged to take the general view that owing to these enormous changes and influences, their volume, rate and protracted onslaught on African culture, the denotation of the term itself is no longer sufficiently stable to be unequivocal.
CULTURE CONFLICT: AFRICAN VERSUS WESTERN
But the Western impact on traditional Africa and the ensuing conflict of cultures has not only profoundly influenced the present modes of material and spiritual life. It also has become the dominant theme of African literary discourse. E. N. Obiechina's careful study of the West African novel, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel shows how perversively the subject of culture contact and conflict captivates the imagination of the best African novelists. He explains the phenomenon as follows:
It is the overwhelming awareness that the old traditional culture with its attendant values is breaking up and is being replaced by a new culture with its emergent values which has made culture change the all-pervasive theme in the West African novel. Because novelists share the background of the generality of the people they write about, they feel with them that the culture change is the most important reality of modern West Africa.11
The treatment of this theme in literature emphasizes the following features: the various stages of cultural and social change, and the dichotomy between the traditional and modern, the rural and urban, and the pagan and Christian. It dramatizes the tensions and conflicts resulting from this change, portraying characters in a way that reflects these tensions and conflicts and the lack of integration and resolution between old and new.12 Obiechiana's study covers a good crosssection of the best known novels devoted to this theme, but the novels of Chinua Achebe, especially Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, are given special attention. From them we get an impressive delineation of the traditional culture, its values and its salient characteristics. Found there are: the dynamics of the individual and the community, and the dialectics between the freedom of the individual and the collective responsibility of the group; the pervasiveness of religion and the supernatural, where divinities and ancestors receive honor and worship, provide explanation for events and preside over morality and the law; and the ambiguous anthropology where man in his destiny is partly sport for the gods and partly a lord who works out his own destiny.
The major conflict area consists in the confrontation of two religious systems as Christianity fights to discredit and eliminate the traditional religion with the sugared pill of modern education as the Greeks have been fabled to give gifts. We see the loss of societal cohesion as Christians try to operate their own rival community within the community,13 and the personal tensions and conflicts in the individual conscience as it mirrors the pull of conflicting beliefs and moral codes. We experience the effects of the usurpation of the administrative, judicial and coercive powers of the community by the colonial government as the traditional structure and center of authority became marginalized and eventually empty and void. We also notice the pollution and disintegration of traditional values due to influences and pressures from the new urban, commercial culture. It was this combination of the corrosive power of Christianity, the colonial regime and foreign commercial enterprise that, in the famous words of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, "put a knife on the things that held us together and (so) we have fallen apart."14
AFRICAN RESPONSES
In the face of this threat to its cultural identity and to specific difference, African reactions have been varied. Leopold Sedar Senghor has recommended the conscious promotion of a cultural metissage, a hybridization or mullattoing to be realized by the marriage of African with Western culture. On this account he has been derided for what looks like a capitulation before an enemy advance and a lack of will to fight for the purity of African cultural authenticity. In Zaire we have seen a contrary trend where a policy of a return to the roots and to African authenticity has been promulgated and pursued as a political program.
Already in the days of the anti-colonial campaign for Nigeria's independence, one of the most popular support movements headed by Mbonu Ojike rallied around the slogan: "Boycott boycottables". It called on Nigerians to learn to live and do without the gadgets and goods imported into Nigeria which served only to increase the people's dependence on foreigners and undermined their reliance and pride in the traditional, homemade goods. Everything foreign and nonessential (boycottable) was fair target of the campaigneating and modes of dressing, the spoken language and titles and names. When Mbonu Ojike applied the same principle to the higher cultural areas of values and beliefs and religion, especially through the medium of his regular "Week-end Catechism", the Christian churches branded him as an enemy and fought back.
It is clear that the tension between ancient and modern began as soon as the West started the first of its many incursions into the African world and that survives till today. There has been, and perhaps there always will be, varied reactions to this culture contact, from total rejection to suicidal embrace. What seems certain though is the irreversible fact of the culture contact itself and therefore of a defacto preexisting culture mix as the point of departure for any contemporary African reflection.
This amounts to the following:
a. that the old culture as something separate, intact and retrievable is no longer alone valid for the individual African as constitutive of his universe; it has been forever affected;
b. that any contemporary individual African inherits all the elements of his cultural history from past to present; no one ever chooses his own genesis or history;
c. that the fusion, amalgamation or juxtaposition of these elements forms a new tertium quid, becoming the individual's necessary but adequate cultural datum;
d. that this tertium quid is not necessarily identical in every individual since one must allow for individual creative freedom; and
e. that this creative freedom is a freedom to modify, choose or to withhold commitment to any element, but at any rate involves some reaction to such elements.
CRITICISM OF THE NEW TERTIUM QUID
In effecting this fusion which alone would correspond adequately to the contemporary African's experience, one is bound to meet some criticism. On the one hand, purists would term it a betrayal of one's black African identity to root for anything less than its pristine cultural authenticity, simplicity and uniqueness: one is either black or white. Otherwise, one would find oneself in the position of the proverbial bat, neither fully a bird nor yet strictly a mammal, but dangling precariously between two identities. Into this category would fall many who, in reaction to the cultural ethnocentrism and imperialism of the West have proposed for Africa a radical and programmatic cultivation of difference. They have convinced themselves with V. Y. Mudimbe15 that the humiliating strangle hold which the West holds on Africa is based, supported and propagated by an underlying ethnocentrism of knowledge serving an ethnocentrism of power. By definition and therefore by necessity, this ethnocentrism of a Same sees the Other, the Different only as its mocknegative, its antipode, its anti-Christ. As the Other, Africa has thus always been defined by the Same to serve its own purposes, on its own terms, and to its own exclusive advantage. In reply and for its own good, Africa should reject the Africa invented by the West and go about cultivating its Otherness. What is needed is a salvage operation to extract from the confused mass of ideas and customs and other cultural ware currently on offer in the market place of African society today, the specific, pure, native African element and to insist on it as the only basis for future African thought.
On the other hand, the protagonists and crusaders for Western cultural imperialism also would be alarmed at the suggestion of fusion. Old Africa for them is dead and buried. A regress to the old would be a march into cultural limbo and into the veritable musée de l'homme. For these people, therefore, it is either democracy a l'occidentale or nothing at all; every other alternative or nuance is a dictatorship or at best not democracy "as we know it." It is either capitalism and the free market economy a l'americaine, or it is only a sham economic reform which is doomed to fail: not a jot, not a tittle may be dropped. One is not permitted to borrow in pieces or with any discrimination, or to make any indigenous contribution. One may bring along only the unique contribution of a magnificent tabula rasa and thereafter sit quietly docilely sucking in and sponging every oracle delivered from the mouth of Western wisdom.
THE CHURCH'S HISTORIC ROLE
The Christian church, especially in its Roman Catholic variety, presents perhaps one of the greatest obstacles to the culture of the tertium quid. The mother and inventor of such historic terms as heresy and orthodoxy, of anathema, schism and syncretism, of magisterium and depositum fidei long ago learned how to deal with dissensions from within and any rumors of heterodoxy from without. The taming of the barbarians and the homogeneization of their cultures under the Graeco-Roman monolith still counts today as one of the great highlights of the church's civilizing influence, though this was achieved at the expense of other living local cultures.
When, after one and one half millennia of Christianizing Europe and Europeanizing Christianity, it set out to go to teach all nations, its missionary enterprise came fatefully under the wings of the secular imperialist powers of Europe. In this regard, Mudimbe observes:
The more carefully one studies the history of missions in Africa, the more difficult it becomes not to identify it with cultural propaganda, patriotic motivations and commercial interests, since the mission program is indeed more complex than the simple transmission of the Christian faith. From the 16th century to the 18th, missionaries were, through all the "worlds," part of the political process of creating and extending the right of European sovereignty over "newly discovered" lands. . . . In doing so, they obeyed the "sacred instructions" of Pope Alexander VI in his bull Inter Caetera (1493): to overthrow paganism and establish the Christian faith in all barbarous nations. The bulls of Nicholas VDum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455)--had indeed given to the kings of Portugal the right to dispossess and eternally enslave Mahometans, pagans, and black peoples in general. . . . Dum Diversas clearly stipulates this right to invade, conquer, expel and fight (invadendi, conquirendi, expugnandi, debellandi) Muslims, pagans and other enemies of Christ (saracenos ac paganos, aliosque Christi inimicos) wherever they may be. Christian kings, following the Pope's decisions, could occupy pagan kingdoms, principalities, lordships, possessions (regna, principatus, dominia, possessiones) and dispossess them of their personal property, land, and whatever they might have (et mobilia et immobilia bona quaecumque per eos detenta ac possessa). The king and his successors have the power and right to put these peoples into perpetual slavery (subjugandi, illorumque personas in perpetuam servitutem).16
Even while allowing for the times and the zeitgeist, one is still shocked by the absolute and sweeping powers granted to the kings of Portugal and Spain by these bulls. Particularly repulsive is the total disdain by the Vicar of Christ for the lives and freedoms, the rights and cultures of these poor Mohammedans, pagans and black peoples over which he invites his Christian princes to ride roughshod. The Holy See was itself, on occasion, not beyond sharing in the loot and booty. "On the 4th of March 1488", writes Hubert Deschamps, "the Pope received 100 black slaves sent to him by the king of Spain, wearing around their necks collars tied with chains; the successor of St. Peter distributed them liberally among his cardinals."17 But there is no doubt that the empowerment by the papal bulls, stemming as it does from the seat of pre-reformation Christendom, must have served as moral justification, blessing and impetus for all subsequent colonial adventures and wars, and for the slave trade itself, for the longstanding racism and other inhumanities inflicted upon African peoples and cultures by Christian Europe.
This prepared the road for an embarrassing selfcompromise which made the Church the foremost accomplice in Europe's imperialism in Africa and America. The church then put to use in these new territories the same old techniques it had used in Europe, but now with the additional advantage of a cultural imperialism enforced by force of European arms when necessary, but insidiously and more effectively through the sweet medicine of religious doctrine backed up by sanctions that obliged the religious conscience.
We may be treated to declarations of policy in innumerable encyclicals purporting to treat indigenous cultures with respect.18 But, as in the question of the Chinese and Malabar rites then, as well as in that of South American liberation theology today, as in that of the integration of several indigenous African customs in a way that enables the people to recognize themselves in Worship, in theological articulation and in church structure and law, the church, beyond an accommodating appearance, offers nothing but the arrogant and massive integraty of "alles oder nichts":
Quicumque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat catholicam fidem: quam nisi quisque integram inviolatamque servaverit, absque dubio in eternum peribit.Whoever wishes to be saved must necessarily and before all else, profess the Catholic faith; and unless he preserves it integrally and inviolate, he will beyond any doubt, perish eternally.19
This preamble to the fourth century Athanasian Creed provides an insight into the spirit and mood of a church very early in history, infected by the Greek virus which demotes the Good and extols the True as the basic category of religion. Presuming already to know the truth and have it all, it thus paves the way for future ages of arrogance and intolerance vis a vis other cultures. This arrogant intolerance nurtured over the ages by the mania for orthodoxy and a phobia for heresy encouraged a veritable fanaticism for the true and right doctrine; a zeal that led people proudly to martyrdom on opposing sides and, indeed, to wars in the name of the truth. The two greatest schisms of Christianity, the Great Schism that separated the Eastern Orthodox and the Western, i.e. Roman Catholic Churches over the Filioque clause in the tenth century, and the 16th century Protestant reformation led by Luther essentially over the doctrine of justification, bear tragic evidence to the fact that not even the Church's own internal unity is untouchable or sacrosanct in the face of this rage for theological and doctrinal purity.20
INTOLERANCE IN AFRICA
Such intransigence was well in place when the Christian Church was faced suddenly with peoples and cultures outside of the familiar European Christian world. In fact, it had been reinforced by a certain identification of Christianity with Europe by the advantage of military power which Europe had over Africa and, in the last century, by the convenient abuse of Darwinism to support racism. Africans were generally regarded and treated as savages whose true humanity and spirituality was in question and whose culture had obviously nothing to offer. The Christian and ecclesiastical racism that initiated and encouraged both the slave trade and colonization was given more fillip by Darwin. The mission civilizatrice of Christian Europe's colonial imperialism and the mission evangelizatrice of Europe's Christian church become confounded. In such an atmosphere there could be little or no respect for the culture of the "primitives". Their indigenous religion was condemned as idolatry; their Gods were but demons or fetishes; their ancestors were lost souls, having lived and died outside the Church; their feasts and ceremonies were all idolatrous and pagan; their dances were immoral; their diviners were sorcerers; their medicine was magic and quackery; their languages were hopelessly tone-infested cacophonies, while their names were unpronounceable gibberish for which the canonized names of European canonized saints had to be substituted. All was one irredeemable massa damnata. With such a consistently intolerant and uncompromising attitude and, worse still, the imbibing of this attitude by its African faithful, Christianity continues to be an inhibitory factor in the process of retaining the Africanness of modern African culture and of developing a via media or a neo-African way of life.
A CONFUSED ELITE
This sapping of African self-respect has gone so far that even among the African elite there exist ambivalent attitudes regarding the reconciling of ancient Africa with modernity. In the chapter titled "Schizophrenia in the Arts" of his seminal work The West and the Rest of Us,21 Chinweizu gives the most pertinent account of the dilemma of modern Africans feeling their way towards a cultural identity. In the area of the arts he identifies and decries two tendencies: Those who cling only to modern Western values and those who identify only with antiquated African values and culture. The first group are busy aping Western modernity in anaemic and lifeless imitations that are little better than echoes of echoes of foreign originals, whether this in poetry, architecture or music. This assimilationist group has seemingly lost faith in Africa which it identifies with a past of backwardness and inferiority and has succumbed to a cringing Europhilia that identifies modernity and progress with the copying and mimicking of the latest fads of the Western avant-garde.
The other group, the traditionalists and purists, believe only in digging up the past, the whole past, and nothing but the past. They therefore are more interested in the archaeology of African culture: rehashing and serving up ur-ancestral elements of ancient Africa is seen as the only road to authenticity. That this simply would blanket out the more recent section of the history of Africa and, by that denial, would truncate and falsify this experience is in no doubt. That this selective remembering would privilege precisely the more distant and harder-to-remember past, to the detriment of the recent past and especially the present, makes such an effort all the more artificial and abstract and puts it all the more out of touch with existential reality.
Chinweizu rightly contends that there is in both camps a certain unwillingness to admit the possibility of anything being both African and modern simultaneously: The category "modern African" has been missing from the conceptual grid of the African elite. Outlining an African modernity must be seen as an indispensable critical preparation for any serious attempt at an African renaissance.22 Only some sort of a merger between the connotations of the two terms "Africa" and "modernity" can do justice to that symbiosis of old and new which alone makes up contemporary African culture and consciousness. Anything less will deny, ostrich-like, that history ever happened and so will deny that the present culture conflict even exists. Needless to say, the chemistry of such a synthesis in any given creative work will vary from one individual to the other, depending on the art form, the individual's personal experience and perspective, his creativity and vision, and, indeed, his ambition. But Chinweizu insists on behalf of Africanity, that any genuine African modernity must somehow grow out of the African tradition and must be seen as a revitalizing of that tradition.
A modern African culture, whatever else it might be, must be a continuation of old African culture. Whatever else it includes, it must include seminal and controlling elements from the African tradition, elements which determine its tone, hold it together, and give it a stamp of distinctness.23 In such a way, modernization of Africanity must really take into account also all that has happened to Africa and Africans from the very beginning, through the contact with the outside world, especially the West, right up to the present. African art and philosophy, in being African, must take its bearing from somewhere, must have some center, hard-core, or initial base. These necessarily are the traditional African, the original and primordial status or terminus a quo. But in being modern, it must also be the fruit of an all-inclusive contemporary consciousness.
Philosophy, like every other enterprise of the human spirit, will base
itself on its environing culture: as it has been in Greece and Europe, in
China and India, so also will it be in Africa. But an environing culture,
though possibly distinguishable into component regions of time and space,
in order to be in continuity with itself and identical with itself, must necessarily be a totum indivisibile. There is therefore no need for African thinkers today selectively to regress into their "pure past" in a vain, quixotic
quest for the "authentic" portion of the historic, but still ongoing,
experience which is their culture. Neither is there any possibility of getting
rid of their ancient, native Africanity in order to fall into the embrace of an
all-conquering but wholly imported culture that might pretend to the epithet
"mainstream" or "universal". Culture today in Africa, as any time and
anywhere, means total historical experience without denial or suppression
of past or present, a dynamic unity of ancient and modern, a two-headed
continuum with one head plunged into the immensity of the immemorial
past, and the other as firmly and deeply immersed in the contemporary here
and now. It is this total and holistic view of culture that has inspired the
approach we have chosen in developing this first volume of the Nigerian
Philosophy Series.
1. The debate, provoked by Placide Tempels' La Philosophie Bantoue (Elizabethville: Lovania, 1945) and Alexis Kagame's La Philosophie bantou-ruandaise de l'etre (Bruxelles, 1956) was continued in the works of a) Eboussi Boulaga, Le Bantou problematique (no. 66; Paris: Presence Africaine, 1968), pp. 4-40; b) Paulin Hountondji, "Remarques sur la Philosophie Africaine Contemporaine", Diogene (1970), no. 71; c) Theophilus Okere, Can There Be an African Philosophy? (Louvain, 1971; d) J.E. Wiredu, How Not to Compare African Thought with Western Thought in African Philosophy: An Introduction, R. Wright, ed. (Washington, University Press of America, 1977.)
2. C. K. Meek, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe (Oxford Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 185.
3. Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 1937, repr. 1962), p 201.
4. Ibid., p. 203.
5. Perham admits the absurdity of this mutilation of indigenous cultures: "In Africa," she writes, "we are setting heavy burdens upon native institutions which have been weakened by the abnormal strains of the last thirty or forty years. . . . (The Africans) have suddenly found themselves embraced by a world economy and an imperial order; . . . their members, yesterday active, independent and self-reliant have passed under the control of foreigners remote in culture from themselves, and suffer today a sense of bewilderment and inferiority that diminishes their full human stature." Ibid, p. 354.
6. Colonial Office 5/20/15, Moor to Colonial Office of 8/8/1902, quoted by Elizabeth Isichei in The Ibo People and the Europeansto 1906, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 161.
7. Isichei correctly observes that the Christian missions, unlike the trading firms "were dedicated to the proposition of change. Indeed, their whole raison d'être was to change the lives, both of individuals and of the societies of which they were members." Elizabeth Isichei, ibid., p. 99.
8. Margery Perham, op. cit., p. 238.
9. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, (New York: Random House, 1970).
10. Alvin Toffler, ibid., chapters 17-20. Another futurist, John McHale, armed with even more compelling and foreboding scientific and statistical data writes: "The last third of the twentieth century has become increasingly characterized as the age of critical transition, revolution and discontinuity. In this situation, two major aspects of change are now crucial. One is the explosive growth in man's actual and potential capacities to interfere on a large scale with the natural environmental processes through which we may manage change more effectively. . . . Our present waves of change differ from those of the recent past, not only in their quantitative interrelationships. . . . Global in scale, potentially affecting the physical balance of all life on the planet itself, and reaching into every aspect of individual human life and society, our ongoing change patterns now constitute a socio-ecological transition of evolutionary magnitude." J. McHale, World Facts and Trends, (New York: Collier Books 1972), pp. 3-4.
11. E. Obiechina, op. cit., p. 263.
12. Ibid., p. 262.
13. See also Ogbu Kalu, African Theology En Route, Kofi Appiah-Hubi & Sergio Torres, eds. (New York: Orbis Books Maryknoll, 1979), p. 20.
14. E. Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 224.
15. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988).
16. V. Y. Mudimbe, op. cit., p. 45.
17. Hubert Deschamps, Histoire de la traité des noirs de L'antiquité a nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1971), p. 146.
18. Cf. Pius XII, Evangelii Praecones, 1953.
19. Denzinger--Schoenmetzer, "Symbolum Quicumque Pseudo-Athanasianum" Enchiridion Symbolorum et Declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, (Editio XXXVI; Verlag Herder, 1965), nos. 75-76.
20. Adolf von Harnack in What is Christianity? laments that, "In the course of this controversy men put an end to brotherly fellowship for the sake of a nuance; and thousands were cast out, condemned, loaded with chains and done to death. It is a gruesome story. On the question of 'Christology' men beat their religious doctrines into terrible weapons, and spread fear and intimidation everywhere." Quoted in Readings in Christian Thought, Hugh Kerr, ed. (Abingdon Press, 1966), p. 250.
21. Chinweizu, The West and The Rest of Us (New York: Random House, 1975).
22. Ibid., p. 296.
23. Ibid., p. 298.