African society is in a moral crisis. While it can competently be defended that this moral crisis is a result of an identity crisis (Tshibangu, 1977: 29ff; Oduyoye, 1986:54; Ujomu, 1997; Magesa, 1999:235), the African identity crisis is, in fact, part of the moral crisis. I will argue here that the moral crisis comes from the fact that Africans have shifted away from their own value system and the moral values that go with it, to other value systems underpinned by other metaphysical foundations. This shift has two aspects. The first aspect is the fact that the leaders and scholars of the African independence and post-independence era have betrayed the African value system by analyzing it with socio-economic and political implications that are drawn from a different value system, namely Marxism. The second aspect is the fact that Africans are now engaged in the process of completely abandoning their value system by trying to embrace another value system, namely, liberalism which is articulated in Kantianism or/and utilitarianism. In both shifts, what has been neglected is to pause a bit for serious reflection and appreciation of what the African value system could offer.

It is true that some modernists could argue that modernism, which glorifies individual reason and autonomy and, therefore, challenges the prevailing social order and authority, was so powerful that the apparent precarious African value system would not have resisted and cannot still resist. In fact, Anthony Giddens has recently argued that modernism is producing a global civilization, a global culture (Giddens, 1990, 1991). Maybe Africans should like to give away their value system that is local and particular in view of the global culture and civilization. In any case, the attempt to do so has failed, and seems to be failing once more as is obvious in the parlous economic, social and political parlous state of the African continent. It is not in the scope of this paper to give an account of the power and the effect of modernism in the African society, whatever it is. Rather I intend to take a critical look at the ways in which African society has moved away from its own value system and the consequence of this shift and to try to see whether we can re-appreciate and to draw a mode of life from this re-appreciation.

The consequence of the shift in values is that the African is no longer defined by what he is but by what he has acquired by whatever means. The question, therefore, is how the moral crisis caused by this shift can be dealt with. I shall argue that virtue ethics could help us to redeem the African value system, as well as the individual, from moral crisis in so far as it seems to be an ethic of being which flourishes in the community and is geared to the reconstruction of the human being as a being-with-self (umuntu w’ubuntu) and a being-with/in-others (umuntu mu bantu).

The question of whether the recovery of the African value system yields a socio-economic and political arrangement cannot but be left in its own matrix. Yet, the motive behind my reflection is to show that there is a continuity between ethics and socio-economic and political arrangements. First and foremost virtue ethics is intended to provide a society in which citizens live meaningful social and political lives. Therefore, in this kind of society the expansion of the market and the maximal profit which are central to the present international order are not the end in themselves but a means to human ends.

Accordingly, this paper will be divided in three sections. In the first section, I give a brief presentation of the ontology that underlies the traditional African value system. The second section will deal with the decadence of the African traditional ethical system. The third section will deal with virtue ethics as a remedy to the moral crisis in African society via the moral reconstruction of the individual.

The African value system cannot be fully understood and appreciated outside the way we conceive the human being in the universe, on the one hand, and among others, on the other hand. The way we understand the human being in his universe and among others cannot be divorced from the Bantu ontology or notion of being. I am aware that there is a controversy regarding whether this Bantu ontology should be generalized to the whole of Africa South of the Sahara, or whether it should be limited simply to the Bantu people, who are mostly found in Africa south of the Equator. In his La Philosophie Bantu-Rwandaise de l’Etre, A. Kagame (1956) extends Bantu ontology as peculiar to the Africans in the south of the Equator or around it; whereas Janheinz Jahn, in his book, Muntu (1961) , applies the Bantu ontology to all Africans south of the Sahara. This debate does not fit in the scope of this reflection. Suffice it to note that the religious, social and ethical implications of Bantu ontology seem to be widely spread in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Being singular plural Meaning

mu-ntu ba-ntu Rational being, anything that has

intelligence: human being whether

living or dead or yet to come.

Some scholars include God in this

category (See Temples, 1959:

41ff; Tshiamalenga, 1975: 161)

Ntu ki-ntu bi-ntu Inanimate beings, or beings

without intelligence (animals,

plants, stones, etc.

ku-ntu ku-ntu Modal being, the way things are

(position, quality, action, relation,

quantity, passion, possession)

ha-ntu ha-ntu Spatiality/ temporality

The African is defined by the interaction with these different ntu or beings. He or she works in such a way that there is harmony in the universe of beings (cf. Jahn, 1961: 96ff, Adesanya, 1958: 39f). There is harmony when there is a balance or equilibrium of force between different beings. Even fear can contribute to the establishment of harmony. When Placide Tempels (1959) equated the Bantu notion of being with force (vital force), he was picturing the kind of interaction or the kind of relationship that exists in the Bantu universe of ntu or being. Of course, there is some reality in what Tempels wrote, namely, that the ntu of Bantu ontology is more dynamic than the static being of the so-called perennial classical philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. According to Alexis Kagame, being is defined not a priori by considering its essence, but a posteriori by considering its way of acting, the way it interacts with other ntu in its universe. Mu-ntu is a being which acts by intelligence; ki-ntu interacts without the use of intelligence; ha-ntu is the localizing being; ku-ntu is the modal being: it indicates the way things are or should be (Kagame, 1975:102). It is in this interaction, in this dynamics that the African conception of the community is grounded.

But the concern here is not to reflect on some cosmological ethics, but to give a general background against which one could understand the traditional African value system in its communitarian and socio-ethical character. Thus, the next point I want to explore is the notion of the mu-ntu – the being gifted with intelligence among other bantu or beings with intelligence.

There is a general agreement among Africans, and even non-African scholars on the fact that the African cannot be defined except in reference to the community. Of course, most of them did not articulate it as an ontology as some Bantu philosophers tried to do. It was taken for granted as a result of empirical observation. Even some thinkers who later were to become political leaders (like Senghor, Nkrumah, and even Nyerere) simply noted the fact that the community was central in the African value system without going more deeply into its ontological foundation. This in itself constitutes a betrayal of the African value system, for one cannot appreciate the interaction between the individual and the community before reflecting on the ultimate foundations that underlies it.

The relationship between the individual and the community, or the social nature of the African, has its roots deep in the ontology I have just articulated. This relationship has been expressed differently. We could recall for instance, Mbiti’s "I am because we are, since we are therefore I am." Or the Zulu/Xhosa: umuntu ngunmuntu ngabantu. Though, in apparently political terms and for political purposes, L. S. Senghor had also argued that the African society is communal more because it is a communion of souls than an aggregate of individuals (Senghor, 1964:49). What this means is that as far as the African value system is concerned, the reality of the community takes precedence over the reality of the individual. According to Ifeanyi Menkiti, the primacy of the community over the individual has an epistemic consequence. It is thanks to the centrality of the community that the individual has epistemic accessibility to his own self. He puts it thus:

It is in rooted-ness in an ongoing human community that the individual comes to see himself as a man, and it is by first knowing this community as a stubborn reality and perduring fact of the psychological world that the individual also comes to know himself as a durable, more or less permanent fact of this world. (Menkiti,1984: 171-2).

 

According to Gyekye, the sense of the community that characterises relations among individuals is a direct consequence of communitarian social arrangements (Gyekye, 1998: 318). For K. Dickson, the sense of the community is what defines Africanness (Dickson, 1977: 4). Of course, this sounds simplistic in that it is rather the ontology that lies behind the community and defines it that, in turn, defines Africanness. In other words, it is because I am a mu-ntu in a universe of ba-ntu that I belong to the community; and the community and the way I live in it define my Africanness.

From an ethical and structural viewpoint, the primacy of the community means that the community alone constitutes the context, the social and the cultural space in which the individual can realize oneself. In other words, the community is prior to the individual in so far as it is the medium through which the individual person works out and chooses one’s goals and life plans, one’s values and ends. A person is constituted by social relationships in which one necessarily finds oneself (Gyekye, 1998:320).

However, whether the community has been appreciated from an ontological ground or taken for granted as factual, it should be noted that African scholars and leaders failed to consider seriously the communitarian and socio-ethical character of the African value system as a system sufficient in itself. The moral decadence we live in today comes from the fact that Africans have moved away from their value system. The first was by thinking that because the African value system is socio-ethically communitarian, it was therefore a sure ground of Marxist socialism. But Marxist socialism has its own metaphysical foundation different from that of Africa. The second seems to be the consequence of the first. With the collapse of Marxist socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellites, Africans have embraced, or are in process of embracing liberalism central to the capitalist system. This also is grounded on metaphysical ground equally different from that of Africans.

The African value system has been used by most African scholars and political leaders of the independence era as a justification for their ideological choice of Marxist socialism. In fact, some of them were Marxist socialist before. This seems to be the case for Aimé Césaire and L.S. Senghor who, during their studies or careers, already belonged to the Communist Party in France. In fact, Tsenay Serequeberhan has accused African scholars who later became leaders in independent Africa as having done nothing more than universalizing Europe while they subordinated Africa. Accordingly, their efforts ended in ontologizing eurocentric ideas projected and presented as the African’s own self-conception (Serequeberhan, 1994:43 and 47).

In the course of his stay in France, we could see that Senghor transformed Mbiti’s "I am therefore we are and since we are therefore I am" into the existential Sartrean thesis: I am what I have decided to be. This means that Senghor, for instance, had already decided for himself and his country to be Marxist socialist without pausing to see whether there could be an alternative which the African value system could offer, in case Marxist socialism might be found inadequate. Marxist socialism became at the same time a method for analysing the African value system. As Senghor said, "We are socialist because we accept Marx and Engels, and believe in the usefulness of their analysis of societies" (in Mudimbe, 1988:93). The consequence of this was that the idea of community, the principle of harmony between human being and nature, the vision of a unitary universe could no longer be seen on an African metaphysical basis, but was seen with Marxism as a method. In other words, the African value system ceased to be an entity on its own. Nkwame Nkrumah, in choosing socialism thus argued, "If one seeks the socio-political ancestor of socialism, one must go to communalism. In socialism, the principles underlying communalism are given expression in modern circumstances." (Nkrumah, 1964:73)

The fact that African value system is socio-ethically communitarian does not necessarily suggest that the socio-economic and political arrangement that results from it is Marxist socialism. In fact, Nkrumah’s analysis, not less than that of Senghor did not go beyond the fact that the Marxism he was defending was part of the prevailing international developments in the aftermath of the World War II. He could not imagine that there could be other alternative(s) that could be provided by reflecting, for instance, on the African value system outside the Marxist metaphysical framework. In fact, I would go as far as saying that socialism as it was presented to the world was more concerned with economic means of production and competition than the liberation of a class of people from exploitation by another class.

The situation that Africans faced at that time was not that of capital and value and the alienation of human beings that result from it; it was not the problem of human beings becoming a means of production and strangers vis-à-vis of the product of their work. Instead, it was colonization according to which African people had no culture and civilization. This presumption did not produce the material alienation with which Marxists were concerned, but a spiritual alienation which needed to be addressed in the colonized and neo-colonized Africa. Thus, ironically, by defending and appropriating Marxism, Nkrumah, Senghor and other African Marxists seemed to prove true the very thesis which was the ground of colonization. In fact, one can but ask whether by choosing Marxism African scholars were not suggesting another way of being colonized, rather than considering some aspect of the African value system (cf. Serequeberhan, 1994:42)!

The African value system is not concerned with the modes of production and material alienation, it is concerned primarily with human beings in their relationships with one another in the community and in their natural environment (cf. Makhudu, 1993:40-1). Scholars and leaders like Kenneth Kaunda and Julius Nyerere seem to have been aware of this distinction even though, in the end they practised socialism in Marxist-Leninist fashion. Kaunda depicts the distinction when he wrote:

Zambia can say with pride that its humanism is originally based very much on the importance of man. In this case the state cares for man, the person. He, in return, as an individual will, or at least is expected to, care for his neighbour, thereby caring for the state. (Kaunda, 1976:12)

 

What is depicted in Kaunda’s understanding of African society is the mutual aid community. The fact that it is a mutual aid society does not mean that it is necessarily a ground of socialism or communism. In fact, it can be argued that socialism and capitalism coexist side-by-side. As Kaunda has once again observed:

Our ancestors worked collectively and cooperatively from start to finish. One might say this was a communist way of doing things and yet these gardens remained strongly the property of individuals. One might say here that this was capitalism. Collectively and cooperatively they harvested but when it came to storing and selling their produce they became strongly individualistic. When it came to sharing the fruits of their labour like meals, for instance, they shared communally. (Kaunda, 1976:13)

 

We can see here that things were done collectively and held individually to safeguard both the human being as an individual and at the same time the importance of the centrality of the community.

Julius Nyerere tried to distinguish between socialism and African values. He argued that in African socialism, what is important is not socialism, but African. In nearly the same argumentation as that of Kaunda, he argued that Africans need not convert to socialism or to democracy because the traditional African experience is socialist and democratic. If I may say from this point of view, Kaunda and Nyerere did not betray the African value system as much as did Senghor and Nkrumah. Nevertheless, the context in which they operated was such that in practice they were first Marxists who tried to apply the principles of socialism as they were offered by the international ordering. Probably out of doubt, distrust, and insufficient appreciation of Africans’ own individuality and possibilities instilled by colonization, they tried to indigenise Marxism (Onigu, 1978:17) without, albeit, being aware of the totalitarian and other contradictions attached to it.

In the end, there was nothing African in the kind of politics that was going on, nor does anything Marxist remain. When socialism was challenged by the triumph of liberalism and collapsed, even socialism in Africa collapsed. Yet one would have expected that since African socialism does not have the same metaphysical background as does Western Socialism, the collapse of the latter would not involve the collapse of the former.

While the African political leaders and scholars were embracing Marxist socialism, they did so by criticizing liberalism. For them, this criticism was intended to try to reintegrate the African in the community because, they argued, colonialism had destroyed the African community, such that the individual was no longer taking seriously the communitarian character of African society. The individual who chooses his own ends and values, unconstrained by any externalities is, as MacIntyre (1981) puts it, the Kantian subject.

Thomas Blakeley argues that the first serious European penetration in Africa was the work of Kantians, just as industrialization, which was to become the model of Africa, occurred in a Kantian context. By the same token, he argues that the universities of the African continent were staffed predominantly by Kantians and Neo-Kantians (Blakeley 1984:166). This may sound like an exaggeration, since we cannot neglect the importance of most Christian missionaries who held view other than Kantian, such as Thomism. Yet the focal point is that the era Africans entered since colonization is modernism in which the individual is free from any externalities: social authority, divine authority, and society itself. In short, the true modern individual is supposed to be democratic in a democratic society.

Now Africans, who hitherto criticized the liberal system as destructive of their society, embrace this very system, and to such a point that they abandon the communitarian character of the Africa value system, or at least what was remaining of its legacy. We have embraced or are embracing the kind of liberal society defended by Kantians and Utilitarians. Accordingly, we seem to be living in a kind of society wherein everything is permitted in the name of individual freedom and autonomy. This freedom and autonomy, which often are abused, are seldom balanced by individual responsibility.

Kantianism and utilitarianism seem to have attained their climax in the present age of economic globalization. Individual freedom and autonomy in determining one’s own ends and values are now translated in terms of the expansion of the market and the pursuit of maximal profit. The consequence of this new phenomenon is that, on the one hand, everything including human beings becomes a commodity, and on the other hand, there is a material alienation of some (human beings seen solely as purely means of production) and a spiritual alienation of others (the expansion of the market and the profit it yields become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end). While the expansion of the market and the pursuit of the maximal profit are a means of survival, the consequence of this new phenomenon is that we are defined no longer according to what we are, but according to what we have or are in the process of acquiring.

Africans have entered this kind of society first through different economic conditions (liberalization of the economy), and secondly through political conditions (political liberalization). Once again, no sufficient reflection on the African value system in itself has been made in order to see what it can offer. As far as economic and political liberalization are concerned, it would seem as if it is our material survival that is at stake. I would argue instead that this survival does not mean that Africans should lose what defines them, what makes them who they are. In other words, survival does not mean that they should lose their identity. Instead, what and who we are should give a key to how we should survive. Mbigi Lovemore suggests that for Africans fully to participate in the global arena, they need to draw upon their spiritual and social heritage (Mbigi and Maree, 1995:4).

The universal and the particular do not exclude each other. That we are entering the age of economic and, apparently, political universalism should not prevent Africans from redefining themselves on their own ontological foundation, rather than jumping on what is offered by other metaphysical grounds. I have no doubt that a redefinition of Africans on the basis of their own ontology could be their contribution to the world, for it is not enough for us to claim that we are Africans if we are not giving to the world the implications of our African-ness.

So far the point is that Africans have moved away from their own value system, defined on an African ontology, by embracing the economic, social and political arrangements derived from Western metaphysical grounds. Basically, the focus of the African value system is the human being as a community being, who, without losing one’s personal identity and morality, values one’s relationships with others. My suggestion is that virtue ethics can help redefine the African as a community being, who, in turn, can chart a way back to the ultimate African foundation of his being. In other words, virtue ethics is a means to educate the African on how to find the source of the self, and to make it a contribution to the world in which we live today.

Virtue ethics has attracted many thinkers in various societies throughout human history. These include Confucius in Ancient China, Buddha in Ancient India, as well as such various philosophers as Socrates and Aristotle in ancient Greece. In contemporary moral philosophy a renewed interest in virtue ethics has been revived by such thinkers as Philippa Foot (1972, 1978), James Wallace (1978), Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), Roger Crisp (1996), and G.E.M. Anscombe (1958) to name but a few. Among African scholars, we may include the defenders of the ubuntu philosophy such as Makhundu (1993), and Mbigi Lovemore (1992, 1995). Though these latter have not claimed that they are virtue ethicists, I list them so by extension.

What is virtue ethics? Virtue ethics is an agent-based ethics, as opposed to Kantian and Utilitarian ethical traditions which are act-based ethics. The latter are ethics of doing, whereas virtue ethics is the ethics of being (Trianoski, 1990; Mayo, 1993; Louden, 1997:210). Virtue ethics teaches people not what to do and how to do it, but what kind of person one is called to be and how one should live for oneself and for others, given who one is (Statman, 1997; cf. Nichomachean Ethics 1169a). It is concerned not much with how to do well but how to be good.

Because virtue ethics is an ethic of being, it is relevant for the moral reconstruction of the individual-self, on the one hand, and as a community-self, on the other hand. We will treat each in turn.

Even if it were the case that African communitarianism is unrestricted, we need to find a way in which freedom and responsibility are made the inner side of moral virtue. In inculcating such virtues as self-control, humility, prudence, moderation, faithfulness, magnanimity towards others, and reference to the society in one’s choice of one’s ends and values, African society was educating a person on how to manage one’s freedom and responsibility in society. In particular, this was a society in which an individual cannot be conceived apart from one’s relationships with others (Kigongo, 1988:15). Thus, to say that freedom and responsibility are the inner side of the moral virtue is to say that in acting the virtuous individual engages himself in a process of deliberation, weighing different choices, appreciating the circumstances and the relevance of his actions for his own good and the good of the community.

The second dimension of the reconstruction of the African refers to being-with/in-others (umu-ntu mu ba-ntu). With the notion of being-with-self, I have reconstructed individuality in the African context. Now with the notion of being-with/in-others, I want to reconstruct the individual in one’s harmony and solidarity with others, harmony and solidarity being central concepts in the African value system (Ruch & Anyanwu, 1984: 141). By being-with/in-others (u-mu-ntu-mu-ba-ntu) I mean sociality, solidarity, togetherness, the community-being of the person. This means that, in so far as one belongs to the community, one cannot define one’s goals and ends without reference (at least implicitly) to the community (cf. Gyekye, 1997:38). In fact, according to J. Mbiti, the human being cannot develop and achieve the fullness of one’s potentiality without relationships with other individuals.

Only in terms of other people does the individual become conscious of his own being, his own duties, privileges and responsibilities towards himself and towards other people. (Mbiti, 1969:141)

 

Such is the anthropological backbone from which I would like to reconstruct the individual and lead one to one’s African value system. Whether the African value system I have just defined will yield a different socio-economic and political arrangement which is not imported remains a question that needs seriously to be explored. Neither the Marxist socialism which animated the optimism of the independence and post-independence era, nor the political pluralism and its corresponding economic neoliberalism of the present time (which seems to be the only present resort), were deduced from the African value system; they are both acquired external injunctions. When the imported arrangements and methods turn out to be unhelpful, the only viable solution is to come back and ask what one’s own value system can offer once it is rediscovered as the constitution of one’s being. In fact, this adventure should be seen in the line of:

An exploration of the concrete process by which the Being (i.e, the freedom) of the African existence (i.e, its historicity) can be reclaimed and established anew out of the exigencies of the present. (Serequeberhan, 1994:10)

 

2. Some version of utilitarianism takes this good to be the aggregate of individual utilities. This may mean that utilitarianism is necessarily individualist, as it could be regarded as majoritarianist. However, the aggregation of individual utilities could provide an implicit ground on which individualism could develop (see MacPherson 1973:173).

3. See Ntibagirirwa, S 1999. A Retrieval of Aritotelian Virtue Ethics in African Social and Political Humanism: A Communitarian Perspective. M.A. Thesis. University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (unpublished).

Self-constancy is for each person that manner of conducting himself or herself so that others count on that person. Because someone is counting on me, I am accountable for my actions before another. The term "responsibility" unites both meanings: counting on/ being accountable for. It unites them, adding to them the idea of a response to the question "where are you?" asked by another who needs me. This response is the following: here I am!, a statement that is a statement of self-constancy. (Ricoeur, 1992: 165).

 

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