In the contemporary world, modern technology has come to represent the means by which a people seek to transform their culture and advance to modernity. Such is the transforming power of technology that there is an unquestioned assumption in the Western world that the acceptance and incorporation of modern technological devices and gadgets into an African culture should not only overhaul and change the traditional culture in very significant material terms, but should also radically undermine traditional beliefs and ethical outlooks. The basis of this view is that scientific tools not only bring with them servicing skills and new knowledge; their location, ownership and use often lead as well to a new distribution of productive capacities, wealth and power. Technology introduces new social relationships that subvert old and revered institutions. In time, the influence of these tools subverts the established power structures and erodes the sanctions that ensure conformity to traditional norms and modes of behavior. In the vortex of technological transformation of traditional societies, the sacred values and norms themselves cannot resist corrosion.

So a question arises at the radical center of development discourse, that is: why do mystical beliefs and traditional values persist while a people display a penchant for acquiring and utilizing modern scientific gadgets and devices? For someone asking this question, there may appear to be a transparent conflict between the technologically-driven material culture of today, on the one hand, and African ideals and values, on the other. This conflict should be obvious to the African mind. Indeed, there is abundant evidence all around that African beliefs tend to place restrictions on the use of machines and on the use of space and time and generally tend to obstruct the economic exploitation of natural resources to which Africans attribute mystical powers. Mystical beliefs circumscribe the utility of technologies in agricultural production, in medicine and in human reproduction and influence the practical critical choices that people make. Suppose machines are required to operate in a cultural milieu wherein not only space and time, but also the nature and interactions between animate and inanimate things, are defined in the light of ontological and moral assumptions that obstruct the people’s capacity to advance the material quality of their lives. Then, it might be argued, a serious developmental problem confronts Africa.

To give a sense of the incorporation of modern technology into traditional African culture, this chapter first attempts to profile Akan technological domain by indicating the traditional Akan mode of treating tools and artifacts. It then proceeds to demonstrate the elements of convergence between Akan traditional discourse and modern scientific technological discourse by indicating proverbs that state empirical laws of nature. Finally, it shows the domain in which traditional discourse diverges from modern scientific discourse by uncovering the postulates by which the universe is constructed as an ethical and individuating system.

A tool or an artifact is not only born out of a conflict of opposites. In use, the device is also constantly under the control of opposites and its manipulation is fraught with danger: it can malfunction and cause serious injury to life and limb. The use of a tool is therefore also surrounded with do’s and don’ts. Because of this, tools and artifacts also require being constantly purified and re-energized or infused with more power and enhanced vitality. Therefore on festive occasions, buildings, boats, hoes and cutlasses, mortars and pestles, drums, drumsticks, hides and the entire tool kit of an Akan community will be cleansed and sprinkled with ritual food. In the context of this ideology, technological knowledge and skill are regarded as largely a spiritual or mysterious endowment. Such is the complex tissue of beliefs, attitudes and prescriptive behavior into which Akans and other Africans have incorporated Western technology.

In popular Ghanaian discourse, the gun — one of the earliest foreign devices introduced into African cultures — can, in the scheme of things, be rendered quite harmless by rituals which either reduce its dangerous potency or render human beings immune to gunshots. The camera has a mysterious power of capturing the shadow or the spirit of a person. The images that appear on the film are called ghosts; film negatives and photographic pictures of individual persons can be used to do injury to them. The aircraft — whatever the explanation of what makes it fly — reflects the power of European witchcraft. The African witch uses the same kind of power to defy gravity only to fly at night to do harm to others. Electricity is identified with the phenomenon of lightning, which in many cultures is a phenomenon associated with the Thunder god. Electronics seem to confirm the age-old African belief that entities can transmit vibrations at a distance; and thus witchcraft and sorcery are said to employ African electronics. The ubiquitous motor vehicle is fraught with danger and must be ritually cleansed when it carries a corpse. A driver who hires out his vehicle to carry a dead body must make it safe by purifying it; and he must therefore be given a bottle of gin to perform the rite of cleansing. And the catalogue goes on. All this seems to make a lot of sense to one who believes in the postulates of the African world-view. And this raises the question of whether an African does not or cannot accept the physical explanations offered for the workings of modern technological devices.

In the following, I intend to show that traditionally educated Akans understand nature in physical terms, but translate events into a different domain and use a different discourse to explain the spiritual and moral implications of events.

The corpus of Akan idioms exhibits unambiguously that Akan thinkers have always considered the metaphors or images of physical, non-human interactions and relationships as being more applicable to nature as a whole than are the metaphors or images of human interactions and relations. It might be argued that the representation of social facts using natural symbols or images offers a greater potential for more objectively detached reflective thinking about issues. Further, use of natural imagery also helps to concentrate the mind on a provocative topic without the emotions getting involved. For example, to make a statement about social conflict, Akans use the traditional motif of a Siamese twin crocodile with two separate heads and a common stomach. And the motif says: ‘Though they have one stomach they fight when they eat.’ This makes it clear that even as human beings seek to satisfy a common objective, they will fight.

[When one water-body collides with another water-body its strength subsides].

When two forces oppose each other, they become weaker. This speaks about the confrontation between two strong personalities or social forces.

[When you pull a rope and it does not yield, then there is something holding it.]

Literally, this means that when a force is exerted on any object and no movement occurs, then there must be a counterforce to it, or there must be something resisting the movement. This uses the image of human/non-human interactions to depict natural and political dynamics.

[A weak piece of wood does not recline against another weak.]

(4) Sor adze ye dur.

[A high object has weight.]

This refers to the power of elevated things and persons.

[When a bird dies, its feathers fall to the ground.]

[The lone tree that confronts the storm breaks.]

When one person faces a problem, he collapses.

[Had nothing touched the reed, the reed would not have rattled.]

Nothing occurs without a cause. There is no event without a cause.

I bring these proverbs up to demonstrate that a people with a traditionalist world-view can think in abstractions and can postulate laws of nature couched in images taken from nature. With such an understanding of the workings of nature, such a people may be equipped to understand the idiom of modern scientific and technological explanation in terms of their own paradigms. The proverbs suggest:

(i) that traditional thought derived many explanatory principles from a very keen observation of nature;

(ii) that proverbs using images derived from nature successfully posit universal facts of nature and universalize the relationships and interactions between entities in the physical world;

(iii) that traditional thought posited the law of causation and directed the mind to look for causes for every occurrence;

(iv) that such maxims indicate that nature could be understood on its own terms; and

(v) that some of the proverbs cited here are analogs of Newtonian principles of statics and classical dynamics.

Now, it should not be surprising that traditional thought formulated laws of nature. For, of course, without that, nature could neither be understood, approached nor utilized; and life as we know it would not be livable. In this connection, Horton claimed that traditional thought regards social relationships as more regular and rule-bound, tending more toward regularity and rule-boundedness than does nature itself. But then it could be argued that social systems and institutions may enjoy regularity and predictability only because the traditional mind sees nature (on which community survival and activities depend) as predictable and as likewise informed with regular recurrent patterns. The much noted cyclicality of traditional African reckoning of time, the regularity of ritual cycles and the cyclicity of planting and harvesting, all indeed rested on the experience of regularity. Periodicity and predictability of the rhythms of natural events are readily apparent in movements of the sun and the moon and in the succession of wet and dry seasons — although there always remained an element of uncertainty about these seasonal weather patterns.

On the basis of collective experience, the store of traditional knowledge and the understanding of nature, it is quite evident that some of the scientific principles and concepts — the laws of dynamics and statics and the law of gravity — may quite easily be explained through the idiom of some proverbial statement. And from this one might argue that there is a large measure of convergence between traditional and modern thought, not only in the realm of primary discourse but also in the realm of secondary discourse. For in the theorizing and generalizing apparent in both the traditional and the modern systems there occurs an ascent to the level where explanations demand conceptualization that would offer universal empirical rules for predicting natural occurrences.

Scientific technology rests on the assumption that all things are material or physical in nature; on this premise one searches for the causes of all things and occurrences in the realm of the physical. Also, power — the key concept in terms of which the efficiency and operation of machines are explained — is projected as an abstraction and is thought of exclusively in physical terms. In traditional Akan discourse, the existence of technology depends on the assumption that human beings are capable of manipulating physical things and that all things are physical in nature.

In the quest for the comprehension of nature, scientific theories as well as traditional belief systems have to confront empirical uncertainties; the fact is that some events seem to occur by accident or contrary to the assumed laws of nature. Nonetheless, human beings seek explanations for such events in order to comprehend them. I want to suggest that it is the inevitability of such uncertainties, together with the fact that the assumed physical laws of nature cannot serve to predict all events in human experience, that creates the intellectual urge to seek higher abstractions and postulates. Though they spring from perceptible experiences, such postulates cannot be submitted to standard empirical tests for confirmation. However, to satisfy the human mind such postulates have to serve the ends of rational discourse and must obey rules of rationality. In discourse of this kind, explanations attempt to go beyond universal statements about empirical reality or the dynamic relations and interactions between entities in their perceptible physical forms. Instead these explanations are offered in terms of hidden realities and relationships in order to subdue, rationalize and render comprehensible those empirical perceptions that otherwise appear incomprehensibly to contradict accepted facts of life.

In this regard, when adopting modern scientific technological devices and inventions, Africans incorporate them into a cognitive framework in which the modes of rationalizing accidents and uncertainties of nature and human life diverge significantly from an exclusively ‘physical’ conception of entities and relations. This seems to imply that accidents could be understood wholly in ‘physical’ terms if only human intelligence comprehended all the laws of nature. As indicated, the postulates underlying discourse about the uncertainties and oddities of life ideologically presuppose the unverifiable existence of certain types of entity. These non-evidential abstractions are regarded by the ‘scientifically’ minded as superstitious, metaphysical nonsense. However, for the traditionalist the realm of superstition is clearly another realm of rational discourse, from which issue principles and values to guide human conduct and responses when individuals encounter uncertainties in their personal lives.

In Akan culture the distinction between different realms of discourse emerges by reference to three elements:

1. The basic postulates concerning the nature of being or what exists.

2. The basic postulates concerning the nature of space and time.

3. The basic postulates concerning the nature of relations between entities.

Concerning what there is or the nature of existents, Akan ontology reveals a variety of claims, each appropriate for a particular kind of discourse. The claims are:

(i) All things are aduru.

(ii) All things have sunsum.

(iii) Every thing is a bosom.

(iv) All things have tumi.

The postulate that ‘everything is aduru’ provides a premise for perceiving and treating everything in nature as exploitable for human physical survival. Thus in traditional medicine, many kinds of animal, plant and mineral substances are seen as efficacious for treating a wide variety of diseases. The assertion ‘everything is aduru’ does not appear to be about anything other than the physical and natural attributes of existing things. As to what makes something efficacious in healing, the traditional response is that every entity or existent has a particular tumi or power that makes it specifically effective against a particular malady.

The postulate that ‘everything has a sunsum’ is embraced in conjunction with the belief that in the world there are entities that are both sunsum and also invisible — as well as entities that are not wholly sunsum, but bear sunsum as an aspect of their nature. In this respect, both visible and invisible entities are treated as being endowed with a principle of activity that enables all existents to interact in and of themselves. Akans believe that it is the strength of the sunsum of individual entities that determines their level of manifest activity. Some sunsum are thus spoken of as having greater tumi than others have, tumi again being the term that emerges in the attempt to explain the nature of things.

Note especially that in virtue of the affirmation that all things are gods, people do not wantonly destroy plants and animals, or even inanimate things. And this gives Akan people a strong sense of moral responsibility about their natural environment and the resources upon which society depends for survival. Indeed, in Akan culture the moral responsibility for destroying certain plants and animals has the same gravity as destroying human life.

Now, as with the postulate that things have sunsum, the assertion that they are bosom is predicated on the claim that things are essentially endowed with tumi. Tumi is the ultimate ‘stuff of the universe’; and Nyame the Creator is the source of all tumi, which therefore can neither be created, destroyed nor exhausted.

Inevitably when identifying different domains of discourse, space and time are critical to the definition of reality. Thanks to technology, space and time can be taken in bounded units measurable from point to point. Space and time are also divisible into standard units. Thus, while technologized space is evaluated in quantitative terms, space and time are conceived traditionally as unbounded elastic continual. These contrasting notions of space and time tend to inspire characteristic attitudes toward the use of time and the dynamics of social activity. Technologized time establishes a discipline of time economy in virtue of the fact that computational time imposes a rigid frame of reference for productive activities and programs of action. The contrasting elastic notion of time is expressed in the proverbial claim, ‘The dawn of the day is not in the hands of one person.’ Time is a fact of collective perception and determination.

Further, in sharp contrast with technological space and time, traditionalist thought posits that space and time have a moral quality. Thus space and time are described as either sacred or profane, good or evil. This dichotomy informs events and entities that occur in particular locations and times; it also determines the use of time and structures individual and collective activities. Space and spatial orientations are defined as sacred or profane and so are days of the week and segments of the day. Certain times and spaces are considered as either propitious or unpropitious for making decisions or initiating ventures. In this respect, Akans make the same distinction as the Greeks in ancient times who distinguished time as chronos — that is measurable chronological time or as kairos — time considered in terms of its propitiousness for a venture. And this brings us to a consideration of what I call the existential reference to time and space.

This is the logic of mystical beliefs. And this logical framework does not bear solely upon the way people perceive empirical reality or the way they compose the primary discourse of perceptual experience. It also affects how people prioritize the value they attribute to things in the physical world and how they find meaning in their individual and collective pursuits.

CONCLUSION

This essay demonstrates how a traditionalist culture has embraced Western technology and incorporated it into its world-view. Akan culture has adopted the products of Western technology both into the way of life as well as the mode of thought of the people. I have attempted to show that, although this cultural co-optation lends to technical devices and ideas a mystical flavor, we need to recognize the realm of discourse in which this occurs; for indeed, Akan discourse has different levels and domains.

I have attempted to show the nature of primary discourse and secondary discourse in the domain of the physical. And I have distinguished the domain of mystical or metaphysical discourse by indicating different postulates about existence, space-time and relationships. I have attempted to show particularly how the shift from second level experiential or physical discourse to mystical discourse occurs.

Clearly, in Akan culture we find abstract principles about nature couched in proverbial idioms that state more or less the ideas we find in the laws of classical mechanics. This enables Akans to resolve the urgency to understand nature in its own terms. However, in experiences of accidents and incidents that seem inexplicable, unpredictable and unexpected anomalies of nature, people confront the problem countenancing that which appears to contradict known laws of nature. The paradoxes of human experience, real and apparent, lead to the ascent to more abstract levels of discourse — involving reference to higher or non-physical orders of existence — to resolve experiential paradoxes.

In effect, traditionalist ideas about the mystical derive from provocative experiences of physical nature. They are postulated as affording useful insights in the service of making odd, subjective, unique or collective experiences meaningful and to help people respond to them.

1. Modern technology and way of life have created more anxieties in many communities, and many people attempt to understand and react to their conditions by appealing to witchcraft, sorcery and fate-concepts; this often allows them to deflect blame from themselves.

2. Though Darwinian evolutionary theory appeared at first to subvert the Biblical theory of creation, belief in the latter still persists. Indeed, many believers now accept the two accounts of how man came to be on this planet. This is an enigma. As the two doctrines cannot both be true, we are drawn to the conclusion that they must be true in different senses and offer us distinct kinds of insight or knowledge.

3. Galileo’s fight against the Church in the Middle Ages was to lead to the general conviction that the evidence of the senses must be the foundation of explanations of physical reality. No longer would appeal to the word of God be a safe premise for asserting anything about physical reality. In many African cultures there is a strong emphasis on sense perception as the basis of true assertions and certainty. The Ga of Ghana say: ‘My eyes are my god (own)’. What corresponds to the authority of the Bible is the force of tradition, and this proves difficult to overthrow.

4. The absorption of modern devices into the African traditionalist world-view may appear from a certain perspective to reflect "the alleged intense religiosity of the cultures," as a result of which "causality was generally understood in terms of spirit, of mystical power." See Kwame Gyekye, "Technology and Culture in a Developing Country," in Philosophy and Technology, Roger Fellows (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 38, pp.123 ff. Here I attempt to explain the basis of this co-optation as systematic and rational: Africans know about physical causation; however, physical events often have personal, spiritual and social effects. Such effects are linked to social causes, the roots of which are in the human mind, especially in the emotions of envy, hate and jealousy. And these are seen as attributes of the human or individual spirit.

5. In a fascinating essay that throws light on material objects as social products, Ray Ellen quotes Karl Marx as saying, "Productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relations both with one another and the human race." See Ray Ellen (1988) "Fetishism" in MAN Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23 no.2, June, p. 216. Ellen asserts that all cultures make fetishes of the objects human beings create; ibid., p.219.

6. Traditionally an Akan woman in her menses cannot cook. To protect it from the evil eye, a pot of palm soup had a ginger of red pepper and a piece of charcoal put into it.

7. Robin Horton, (1967) "African Traditional Thought and Western Science," Africa 37 1,B2. The postulates have been reformulated and not abandoned. See "Tradition and Modernity Persisted," in Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West, pp. 311 ff., especially p. 327. I go back to his original article because its errors, though apparently corrected, still seem a good starting point.

8. R. S. Rattery, (1914) Ashanti Proverbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press), gives a broad classification of Akan proverbs. This enables the author to observe that some proverb-makers were naturalists.

9. The enigma of twinship emerges in higher abstraction in the Akan saying, Ppap ne bone ye ntaa, ehyee nda ntamu, na nso wonsace. [God and Evil are twins: there is no dividing them; but they are incompatible]. Kofi Antoban, (1963) Ghana’s Heritage of Culture, Reipeig, Korhler and Ameking.

10. It needs to be emphasized that the importance of religion in traditional African cultures never did obstruct rational abstractions and speculations nor did it lead thinkers "to give up, but too soon, on the search for phenomena or events, and resort to supernatural causation" as asserted by Gyekye, p. 123. Physical causes and effects were known; so that not all events were referred to mystical causality, as E.E. Roams Prichard observed in his study of Azande witchcraft.

11. A people without some knowledge of the basic regularities of nature would find it difficult to develop any form of technology, however simple. In many of these proverbs, we see the use of some basic physical concepts for the observation and comprehension of nature: weight or mass, force or power, movement and resistance to movement, space, and time. Akan proverbs on the concepts of power, space and time show how far speculation went to attempt to define these basic concepts without capitulating to mysticism.

12. Kwame Gyekye, ibid., p.123.

13. What is common to power, whether profane or sacred, is that it represents a capacity to do things and to bring about a transformation.

14. Horton reconstructs this claim in later essays.

15. See Kwame Gyekye, op.cit., p. 124, where he alludes to "the belief that natural objects contained mystical powers to be feared or kept at bay or when convenient, to be exploited for man’s immediate material benefit." Material properties were exploited by material processes, and spiritual properties by spiritual processes.

16. I obtained the assertion and explanation of the mystical power of the vagina from a rural folk. See G.P. Hagan (1964) "Aspects of Akan Philosophy," unpublished MA thesis, Institute of African Studies. Roy Allen, ibid., p. 218 claims that there are three scholar traditions which employ a concept of fetishism, and these relate respectively to three principle spheres of human activity; religion, economy and sex. And he characterizes these as Anthropological, Marxist and Psychological. Traditional cultures attribute physical power to the penis; but the female organ was seen as charged with great mystical power — creative and destructive. In many cultures the bearing power of the female was closely bound up with religions rituals and observances.

17. John S. Mbiti’s claim (cf. African Religion and Philosophy), "for Africans time moves backward rather forward" has been accepted by many. However this cannot bear close scrutiny. Along with other counter-evidence, many Akan proverbs refer to Daakye — the indeterminable future.

18. In Dahomian cosmology the world is circled by a snake. The snake stands for sinuous movement. The snake moves in cycles and also linearly forward; cf. Herskovits, Dahomey, An African West African Kingdom, II, p. 248. Kwame Wiredu, (1980) Philosophy and African Culture (Cambridge University Press), pp. 16-17, makes a telling comment on an ethical problem endemic to this metaphysical image: this idea of destiny defines personal attitudes to success and failure — offering to many an excuse to deflect responsibility and to give up on projects prematurely.

19. Willy Abraham, (1962) The Mind of Africa, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, makes this clear. See Ch. 1, passim.

20. The search for causes is an attempt to make events meaningful. Perceived or assumed causal relationships in turn determine the human mind to give order to physical things and to relationships perceived in their environment in order to avoid harmful configurations.