INTRODUCTION

The introductory pages of Engels' short book, Feuerbach and the End of German Philosophy,¹ provides interesting testimony to the impact of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity upon his and Karl Marx's generation of German intellectuals. Engels' testimony not only throws light on a significant moment in the development of the ideological system to which he made such an important contribution, but also in broader terms illustrates the correlation between the political and social conditions of an historical period and of the movement of ideas of which it is a reflection. In the particular instance of mid-nineteenth century Germany and with specific reference to the development of Marxism as a system of thought, Engels' testimony points to the realization among young German intellectuals of the lack of a real correspondence between the idealism of established German philosophy--in particular its Hegelian brand--and the socio-economic transformations that then were taking place. Feuerbach was thus an important stage in the reaction against Hegel, of which Marx's dialectical materialism was to be, in one particular direction, a culmination.

The lesson one might derive from the above is best demonstrated in Chinua Achebe's two best novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Achebe believes that the task of a writer is to lead his people out of the mistakes of the past and onto new paths and in new directions for the future.

We would like to suggest in this chapter a comparable approach to the realm of thought in Africa. This would have implications for the way in which Africans perceive themselves and their position in the contemporary world, for the way in which they conceive not only their past historical reality, but their possibilities within the historical process as it unfolds in these times. The change we have in mind involves an overhaul of the assumptions and tenets that have gone into the formation of what is now the African Weltanschauung, and which have found an articulation in the prevailing intellectual reaction to the colonial experience. Gradually, a redefinition is beginning and the emergence of what one might call a new African worldview and problematic. This redefinition appears to be related to the changed realities of the contemporary African situation in the post-colonial era. This gradually unfolding new perception of African problems affects in consequence the mental processes implied in the emergence and evolution of the nationalist consciousness.²

THE PROBLEM OF MODERNITY

When one considers the broad movement and major preoccupation of contemporary African thought, it appears clear that the central problem is that of identity and that the central theme is the self-definition of Africans. According to Uchendu, the search for identity in Africa is comprised of four sometimes conflicting alternatives:

(1) A search for continental identity, in order to create a united Africa, became an instrument for decolonization and a weapon for post-independence international diplomacy.

(2) An integrating "black" racial identity, motivated by social pride, which makes it meaningful to speak of three Africas: Arab Africa, Black Africa and white minority Africa.

(3) A search for national identity.

(4) The demand for ethnic identity within the multi-ethnic state systems.³

Whatever its immediate purpose, the search for identity in Africa has always faced a dilemma in its choice of symbols to project continental, racial, national or ethnic identity.⁴ The notion that modern European scholars have engaged in the search for the "self" is a critical common-place, but this offers no guarantee that it is true. In fact, it could be argued that sincerity was no longer the problem for the European because he had lost his obsession with accomodating what one appears to be to what one is, that is, to one's self. This raises the issue of authenticity, the concern to transcend what one seems to be or what society, state, culture and history have tried to make man, by what one really is, beyond sincerity and hypocrisy.

For Africa, this authenticity is a curiosity. Though trained in systems dominated by European culture, the African's concern is not with an inner voyage of discovery of a self. The African's problem is his public role, not his private self. Where the European intellectual, though comfortable inside his culture and tradition, has an image of himself as an outsider, the African intellectual is an uncomfortable outsider, seeking to develop his culture in the directions that will give him a role. The relation of the African to his history is a web of delicate ambiguities. If he has learned to despise it or tries to ignore itand there are many indications of the difficulty of such a decolonization of the mindhe has still to learn how to assimilate and transcend it. Where the European may feel that the problem of who he is is his private problem, the African asks always not "who am I" but "who are we"--his problem is not his own, but his people's.

The fact that we are social beings raises the problem of authenticity, for in the end it is others who, according to Sartre, conceal ourselves from ourselves. The problem of who I am is raised by the fact of what I appear to be. It is essential to the mythology of authenticity that this fact should be obscured by its existential prophets. What I really appear to be is fundamentally how I appear to others, and only derivatively how I appear to myself.

Yet, and this is the crux of the matter, for the European these "others" who define the problem are his people, and he feels he knows who his people are and what is their worth. For the African, the answer is more complicatedhe is an ethnic: Ibo, Ashanti, Yoruba, Hausa, Bantu, Dogon, etc.; or he is a Marxist, feudalist or capitalist; or perhaps he is a Muslim or Christian. But does all this mean anything, for the African is a black man, and what then can be his worth? Regardless of how many skeptics and observers look at the situation, there is a growing consciousness that the African will one day overthrow his unlivable existence with the whole force of his oppressed personality. He will try either to become different or to reconquer all the dimensions which colonization tore away from him, and it is the latter which seems the more appealing for it could be a prelude to a positive movement of regaining self-control.

THE CREATION OF A NEW PHILOSOPHY

The demolition of an existing social order and the establishment of a new one are in an important sense a matter of style in doing culture. Every style of culture is in turn related to the religious question of how people view the ultimate meaning of their life and society, which question the religio-cultural impulses behind the evolution of western societies is easier to pose than to answer. It is Weber's famous thesis in this regard that the spirit of capitalism was shaped by Calvinism. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism⁵ he argues that in terms of ideal types capitalism can be characterized as a societal system in which the accumulation of capital is central; therefore it is constantly imperative to save. This system presupposes a spirit of industry, which considers labor, production, and accumulation of capital to be meaningful even when they do not lead directly to a commensurate increase in possibilities of consumption. Thus, on the one hand, rational labor acquires an ethical significance apart from the possibilities of consumption which it creates, while, on the other hand, saving and investing become independent virtues in the view that every human being will later have to give an account of his possessions before God. Weber's argument, therefore, rests on the premise that men can achieve a heavenly blessing here on earth: human labor on earth is as much a "call" or vocation as any other spiritual call.

What spiritual barriers characteristic of medieval European society had to be removed before that society, through the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, could become the vanguard of western culture? Only by finding an answer to this question can one hope to expose more clearly the deepest spiritual impulses underlying the rise of modern European society. For it seems very likely that the forces which ultimately made possible the easing of these barriers also evoked the spirit and reality of modern society.

The first barrier which had to be removed was that of church and heaven: the vertical orientation of life had to be transformed into a horizontal one. This transformation was the accomplishment of both the Renaissance and the Reformation whose meaning inadvertently was fixed by Cartesianism. The culture that emerged is essentially one in which the legal order, the prevailing public morality and the organization of socio-economic life all grant unobstructed play to the forces of economic growth and technological development. In such a social structure, the vertical direction of life loses its significance. Instead a horizontal orientation dominates so that development and expansion are directed to earthly possibilities.

The clear analogy is that a comparable horizontal orientation of the African cosmological vision would engender a new image of man in Africa in which, to quote Peter Gay, "Man is free, the master of his fortune, not chained to his place in a universal hierarchy but capable of all things."⁶ In other words, the earth becomes man's domain as the platform and instrument with which he can realize himself in the arts, in science, and in commerce as well as in his contacts with others, including people of other cultures. Man directs his attention to this world in order to gain a better understanding of it and consequently of himself.

This has not been the case in Africa, however, nor has there been any conscious sign of it. African society is structured cyclically. Everything is ordered and related in such a manner as to ascend, descend and disperse, from the realm of nature to that which alone ultimately can provide meaning to earthly existence--the spiritual realm. Tempel's Bantu Philosophy provides an excellent reading of this which he summarizes thus: "The world of forces is held like a spider's web of which no single thread can be caused to vibrate without shaking the whole network."⁷ In such a worldview, the dialectical contradiction between the opposites: matter and mind, inside and outside, theory and practice, etc., is reduced by making the one pole continuous with the other. Thus, one finds a synthesis of the dialectical moments by making them continuous or abolishing them in a holistic ontology. This apparent Hegelianism is relatively logical and interrelates such purely intellectual categories as subject and object, quality and quantity, limitation and infinity, and so forth. The thinker comes to understand the way in which his own determinate thought processes, and indeed the very forms of the problems from which he sets forth, limit the results of his thinking.

Dialectical thought is in its very structure self-consciousness; it may be described as an attempt to think about a given object on one level, and to observe our own thought processes as we do so. In other words, it reckons the position of the observer within the experiment itself.

In more recent times, this holistic view of African culture has been challenged by many radical Marxists. Their thesis is premised on the fact that the self-consciousness aimed at is the awareness of the individual's position in society and in history itself, and of the limits imposed on one's awareness by his or her class position. In short, it is awareness of the ideological and situational nature of all thought as of the initial delineation of the problems themselves.

To avoid entering into the polemics of Marxism and its prescriptions, it should be noted that insofar as Marxism is a critical rather that a systematic philosophy it is not in itself a coherent position, but rather a "correction" of other positions. It is a rectification in a dialectical fashion of some pre-existing phenomenon, rather than a positive doctrine in its own right. This is to say that the Marxist model cannot be applied in the African situation until we grasp that which it is directed against or which it is directed to correct. Marx came to critical self-consciousness through a critique of the varied intellectual traditions and attitudes of his time. His works therefore can be understood only within the ambit of the opposites to which Marx implicitly or explicitly makes reference. For instance, against the young Hegelians and their leader Bruno Bauer, Marx adduces the argument for materialism, defending the principles of activity and reciprocity which were central to Hegel's dialectic against the passive materialism of Feuerbach. Against absolute idealism and its fatalistic thesis, Marx asserts that man makes his own history.

It could be argued then that the dialectical strategy of Marx grows more profound whenever the ideology of the dominant classes takes on a religious or spiritualistic form, whenever religion becomes the principal weapon in the struggle against change and social revolution. This is the conviction of the so-called Marxists in Africa, who fail to understand the radical difference between the cultural settings of Marx's Europe and present-day Africa. In other words, a distinction has to be made between the idealism of Hegel in all its forms, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the unitary (holistic) world of the African.

For Hegel, through the dialectical process the absolute comes to realize itself as ultimate, but for the African this verticality is resolved by a cyclic view. Nothing realizes itself as ultimate because the synthesis of the dialectical moments is cyclically continuous. Thus, while Marxist materialism makes sense against the background of Hegel's pantheism, it is spurious to apply the same to the African context and hence our rejection of Marxism in Africa: a possible solution to the dilemma does not lie in Marxism.

Nor do we recommend straddling Western and African cultures because a society that does so is rarely well-seated. What is needed at this point is a re-examination of the question of the basic relationship of the African to other cultures.

DEFENSIBLE ALIENATION

In considering the question of the basic relationship to the cultures and achievements of other peoples one might begin by insisting on the priority of some fundamental reciprocity between peoples preceding any later, historical form of antagonism and conflict. Though the structure of that fundamental reciprocity is difficult to determine, the intention behind the concept is somewhat clearer. For the idea of initial reciprocity is intended to undermine the purely economic doctrine of the manner in which particular, historically determinate models of human relationships result from the modes of economic production at a particular period. Human relationships thus would seem to be merely instinctual or biological reactions and adjustments to different types of material surroundings. Thus human relationships are seen not only as thing-like, but actually as inert objects subject to geographical and external influences. Human relationship is a concept laced with alienation.

In his Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre notes that "There cannot be alienation unless there was first something to alienate, some prior form of human relationship to serve as the object of distortion."⁸ We are never simply alone with each other; every confrontation takes place against the background of what, a little hastily, is called human society, or at least against the background of many of other human relationships. In this light, Sartre's very pertinent aphorism of the couple and resistance to the idea of the "third" is a way of making room around ourselves, of trying as it were to persuade ourselves that our world is filled with empty spaces, and that there is no such thing as genuine solitude or privacy. Since the couple cannot really be a unity, unification must be mediated by a third party, an outside observer or witness. The crucial role played by this "third" confirms the priority of the triadic over the dyad relationship.

The historical heritage which Africa shares with the Western world is mediated through ancient Egypt as the third party. The primary objective of Cheikh Anta Diop's sociology, which we find highly important in this regard, is to demonstrate the Negro origin of ancient Egyptian civilization. As Immanuel Wallerstein in his work Africa: The Politics of Independence points out, "Other scholars, such as W. E. B. Dubois, had earlier presented the argument that ancient Egyptians were Negroes."⁹ Diop's works demonstrate the continuity between ancient Egyptian civilization and the contemporary cultures of black Africa. It is not our intention to review the whole of Diop's thesis here, but it is not without interest to trace the main lines of his thought to gain some understanding of his position. His thesis is, in fact, the intervention of an African in a debate that long had been going on in the West about the racial origin of ancient Egyptians.

Diop's motivation stems from his dissatisfaction with the point of view of those scholars who, against all objective evidence, deliberately classified ancient Egyptians among the white race. Diop attributes this point of view to the effect of racial prejudice against the black race resulting, as Abiola Irele puts it, "in a falsification of African history."¹⁰ Diop's examination of ancient Egyptian institutions and thought from a range of special fields provides him with a cultural argument for postulating an essential affinity between the forms of social organization and the cosmology of the ancient Egyptians and those that to him appear to characterize the traditional African world.

Two clear moments seem to evolve in Diop's thinking. First, there is an effort to establish a historical and cultural connection between ancient Egypt and black Africa in such a way as to place the African continent and the black race firmly within the movement of universal history. This provides a foundation for a second element, namely, that human life is in its very structure collective, rather than individualistic. This has the inherent value of encouraging avenues in which the isolated culture of Africa can overcome its weakness. Human beings can be united either in their search for cultural and intellectual evolution, by historical evolution or by the historical heritage they share. There is need to abandon the self-consciousness that goes with cultural particularism, and to transcend this position to an entirely new ground.

CONCLUSION

The key problem for Africa now is not necessarily between the dominant ideologies of the contemporary world: idealism and materialism, neo-colonialization and pan-Africanism, nor even Christianity and Islamism, but the much more deeply philosophic issue of the consensus concerning the framework within which dialogue may take place. Despite the differences of ultimate outlooks, this must enable leaders and citizens to build a culture that increases the quality of life, a society where people's deepest intuitions about life and destiny are not only tolerated but respected and cultivated. There is need for a new cosmological vision in Africa, a new spirit of adventure fired by a modern imagination, a new way of thinking that will enable a transformation of the present state of alienation from a passive condition we confusedly endure into an active, collective existential project. We need to take control of our objective alienation by assuming it and endowing it with positive significance. This implies a conscious and willed dynamic movement out of the "self" to a purposive drive for new horizons of experience.

The strands of argument we have so far elaborated, when taken together, answer to a common objective: to lay to rest the issue of African identity and to chart a new direction for African thought more appropriate to the changed historical situation of the continent. This thesis finds an expression in Frantz Fanon's Les Damnés de la Terre, which argues that culture does not refer to a predetermined model offered by the past, but lies in the future as a perpetual creation, a continuing effect of a vast, ever unfolding existential project. In a word, culture is not a state but a becoming.¹¹

The "Greek miracle" which marked the birth of a new cosmological vision in Europe was the result of human interrelationships. Given the contention that ancient Egypt, which was related thereto, was of black racial stock, it stands to reason that Africa may lay a claim to the evolution of Western civilization, as well as having in that civilization a considerable stake as the instrument for the necessary transformation of the African world. It is in our best interest to make good that claim and to adopt strategies that make our stake in that civilization pay handsome dividends. The black peril could one day (as the Japanese have proved in their own case) become the black paradigm. We cannot achieve this if we continue an illusory and endless search for identity, the unfortunate outcome of our colonial experience, which is only intensified by all forms of cultural nationalism.

1. Friedrick Engels, Feuerbach and the End of German Philosophy, (New York: International Publishers, 1941); (Marxist Library, Works of Marxism-Lenism, Vol. 15).

2. Cf. Abiola Irele, African Cultural and Intellectual Leaders and the Development of the New African Nations (Ibadan, Nigeria: University of Ibadan Press, 1982), p. 154.

3. Victor Uchendu, "The Dilemma of Ethnicity and Political Primacy in Black Africa," in Ethnic Identity Cultural Continuities and Change, edited by George de Vos and Lola Romanucci-Ross (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1975), p. 269.

4. Ibid., p. 269.

5. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. by Talcott Parsons with a foreword by R. H. Tawney (London: Unwin Univ. Books, 1930, 1967).

6. P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967-1969), vol. I: The Rise of Modern Paganism (1967), p. 266.

7. P. Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959), p. 61.

8. J. P. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), vol. I, p. 241.

9. Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), pp. 129-130; see also Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, ed. and trans. by Mercer Cook (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1974).

10. Abiola Irele, op. cit., p. 154.

11. F. Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961).