By Timothy Kalyegira.
Since earlier this year I have asked some friends a question that they so far have failed to get an answer to, so I’ve decided to go public.
The question is, in the 21st Century what does it mean to be an African, a genuine African? Other than our appearance, names, food, languages and traditional wear what else identifies one as an African today?
It seems to me that one of the most common characteristics about African culture is in how much it looks back for its sense of identity.
From Buganda to the Zulu in South Africa, the Kikuyu in Kenya, the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Shona of Zimbabwe and the thousands of other tribes in Africa, the call is always for the younger generation to not forget their culture but rather to stick to tradition.
African culture is defined by its conservatism, its holding onto the past, to maintaining an unchanging nature.
Assaulted from all sides by the rapid spread of Western technology and culture, African cultures are perennially on the defensive.
Two things we lack: the first is a deep embedment of philosophy in our cultures and the second the lack of a technological mindset in these cultures.
What helps the more advanced cultures, particularly those of Europe, is the degree to which they are underpinned by philosophy.
The basis of education, law, government, norms, fashion, architecture and other expressions of culture has been thoroughly thought out, defined and implemented.
Europe has a full and clear understanding and explanation of how they arrived at the things they do – the separation of church and state, the basis of laws, the justification for parliamentary democracy, the logic behind their architecture, the purpose of their industrial systems.
The basis of all these systems is laid out in detail in thousands of books, academic papers and policies.
Tied with the philosophical underpinning of their culture is the technological mindset.
Europe was the first continent and its people the first to put at the front and centre of their society the application of their material culture to the solving of practical challenges.
“There was more to the technological disparity between Europe and the world than mere know-how. One of the assets Europe enjoyed at the beginning of her era was not only new knowledge, but an attitude to knowledge different from that of other cultures. There was a readiness to bring it to bear upon practical problems, a technological approach. In it lay the roots of what would become a characteristic of European elites during the Enlightenment, their growing confidence in the power to change things.” (J.M. Roberts & Odd Arne Westad, The Penguin History of the World, Penguin Books, Sixth Edition 2013, page 636)
This is crucial in understanding the reason for the dominance of the world by Europe and Western civilisation.
To recap: for the European or Euro-American culture, what works works and what works is what is to be used.
If papyrus is what works for the publication of books or news, then papyrus will be used. When paper is discovered and proves to be much better than papyrus, then paper will be used.
When thousands of years later electronic means are developed on which to write messages, news and ideas in the new form of Microsoft Word programmes and email, then that is what will become the new format.
Always and every time to the European mind, what works is what will be used.
They have no qualms about incorporating elements from other cultures and other lands into their own if these elements make for more efficient manufacturing, production and convenient living.
Most of us around the world have largely adopted this European outlook of going with that works.
That is why most of us wear Euro-American fashions, drive Japanese and European cars, like in homes and work in offices designed largely after the European model and in music use European instruments and songwriting techniques.
However, the difference between us and the Europeans is in how we feel about adopting the methods and material of other cultures. We are left with a great feeling of unease and guilt when we adopt the European way.
The whole outlook and basis of the literature of post-independence Africa from Wole Soyinka to Ngugi wa Thiongo, Okot p’Bitek, Chinua Achebe and others was this wrestling with the effects of European colonialism and Western culture on our own African cultures.
The attitude of these African writers and among many African intellectuals and pan-Africanists is that to remain authentically African we must resist as much as possible the onslaught of Western civilisation on our own.
African, Arab and Asian culture are cultures on the defensive. That is why westernised Africans, Arabs and Asians are often accused of being “brainwashed”.
Our cultures look into the past and believe in holding onto that past as faithfully as possible.
This is one of the crises facing Islam today. It is increasingly finding itself swept into the Western- and technologically-dominated late 20th and early 21st Century world and is not sure what to make of this.
Just to take an example of the call to prayer. Why was that custom started? The answer is in order to alert the mostly illiterate faithful of the seventh and eighth centuries about the times of prayer, an educated Imam or other official at the local mosque announced the times.
But today in the second decade of the 21st Century, when more than half of the world’s population has phones with alarms or clocks and watches that can alert them to the time for prayer, is that call from the mosque still necessary?
To be able to address such sensitive questions, a culture and a society must be willing or able to get to the bottom of things – why are things the way they are? What is truth?
Did our ancestors wear bark cloth for the sake of being identified as Baganda or Basoga or wear leopard skins in order to be authentically Zulu and for that alone?
Did our ancestors craft drums from animal skins and wood as an act of cultural expression or purely for practical reasons?
What happens when leopards become extinct and kings and chiefs can no longer find these animal skins? Do they cease to be Zulu?
And if it was for practical reasons, with the advancement of science and better synthetic materials being discovered that can be manufactured in computerised factories, shouldn’t the royal drums of Tooro, Buganda, Ankole, the Zulu or Swazi now be ordered from factories rather than remain made from rudimentary wood and animal skins?
In other words, for a society to advance it has to be able to think philosophically.
For Africans to make our way into the 21st Century, we shall have to do similar soul-searching concerning each and every premise of our culture and why that particular culture or cultural assumption is so.
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