The deep well of African cultural knowledge

Many of us, in ignorance, assume that traditional African cultures provide nothing of value, especially when juxtaposed to the spectacle of the West. This would be a profoundly erroneous assumption.

Part of the reason why we must delve deeply into African knowledges is to rehabilitate our deficient conceptions of African culture. We must, as Dr. Karenga suggests, draw upon African culture as a resource, and not as a merely as a reference (though too few do even this).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC2OzFoEqso&t=2524s

Forgetfulness

Many of us exist as signifiers of what is often a forgotten or ignored past. As Cynthia Dillard asserts, in this era forgetfulness is encouraged. Loss of historical knowledge augments the malleability of human beings, enabling those with power to forge them into whatever material they desire. Some of us have suggested that such is not to be the fate of the descendants of the enslaved and the colonized. Herein, history becomes, as Anderson Thompson says, “a heavy weapon in the battle for freedom”.

Language and worldview

“My position is not that language is merely facilitative of worldview, but that language is constitutive of worldview. Inherent within it are inevitable epistemological and ontological vectors. Those struggling to reclaim or safeguard their cultures should be mindful of this.”

From the forthcoming article, “Decolonizing the African Tongue: Language and the contested terrain of African consciousness”

Yorùbá wisdom on the cultivation of the mind

Let us not engage the world hurriedly.
Let us not grasp at the rope of wealth impatiently.
That which should be treated with mature judgement,
Let us not deal with in a state of uncontrolled passion.
When we arrive at a cool place,
Let us rest fully.
Let us give continuous attention to the future.
Let us give deep consideration to the consequences of things.
And this because of our eventual passing.
-Èjì Ogbè

While Buddhism is often central to the discourse on the cultivation of mindfulness, I propose that such insights are also present in African thought. The above text is one such example. The Odù Ifá is the sacred text of the Yorùbá people. It is a text that distills their wisdom and ethics. Below I will offer a succinct analysis of this text, seeking to explicate its implications for practice.

The first line compels us to approach the world from a standpoint which seeks to value the present. To engage the world hurriedly is to rush headlong into the future. While the future is our inevitable destination, striving for it at the expense of the present robs us of the beauty or insights of the present moment, which must be fully conjoined by our minds/hearts in order to be fully realized.

The second line seeks to temper the urge for avarice. In the US, the pursuit of wealth has been all-consuming throughout all of its history. While material wealth provides material comfort, it does not necessarily ensure the cultivation of good character or the perpetuation of the good condition in the world. Thus, while wealth is not decried, one is not encouraged to neglect other necessary endeavors (such as the cultivation of “mature judgement”) in its pursuit.

Mature judgement and the regulation of passion, or more specifically anger is a critical issue. As the text instructs, we should give due attention to the critical matters of our lives. Anger compromises clarity of the mind, and if indulged corrupts one’s being. Having mature judgement then begins with a temperance of passion, and this requires the practice of both awareness and restraint, awareness of one’s mental/emotional states and the practice of self-control. Mature judgement and the regulation of passion cannot be present absent these two types of practice.

Coolness is a notable theme in the Yorùbá wisdom literature, as coolness represents a place of mature judgement and intelligent discernment. It means to be in a place (both spatially and mentally/emotionally) where one is unperturbed by things which might cause imbalance. Further, one is compelled to rest fully in such a place, to imbibe its essence, and to refresh oneself at such an occasion. This is a replenishment that prepares one to, yet again, face the challenges of life and living, but not from a standpoint of fatigue or fury, but one of coolness or centeredness.

Lastly, one is encouraged to look to the future, that is to see one’s actions in the present as being inextricably linked to the future. The future is not merely the moment that has yet to arrive. It is the inevitable consequence of the present. Thus, we are forever the architects of the future, the authors of its history. This power lies within our purview, and our degree of awareness of the temporal linkages between that which is now and that which is yet to come, provides a basis for sound and intelligent judgement. Therefore we are, again, reminded of the necessity of mature judgement, not as an abstraction, but as a matter of practice.

Reference

Karenga, Maulana. Odu Ifa: The Ethical Teachings.  Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1999.

Decolonizing the African Tongue: Language and the contested terrain of African consciousness

Bibliography

Amen, Rkhty. n.d. Women’s History Month Address: The legitimacy of mdw nTr and the legitimacy of Kemet for resurrecting an African worldview. DVD.

Amen, Rhkty. 2010. The Writing System of Medu Neter: The Institute of Kemetic Philology.

Amen, Rkhty. 2012. A Life Centered Life Living Maat.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. 2010. Remembering the Dismembered Continent. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. 2013. The Resolutionaries. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.

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Cabral, Amílcar. 1973. Return to the source; selected speeches. New York,: Monthly Review Press.

Carr, Greg Kimathi. 1997. “The African-Centered Philosophy of History: An Exploratory Essay on the Geneaology of Foundationalist Historical Thought and African Nationalist Identity Construction.” In The Preliminary Challenge, edited by Jacob H. Carruthers and Leon C. Harris, 285-320. Los Angeles: Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.

Carruthers, Jacob H. 1984. Essays in Ancient Egyptian studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press.

Carruthers, Jacob H. 1994. “Black Intellectuals and the Crisis in Black Education.” In Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox of Black Life In White Societies, edited by Mwalimu J. Shujaa, 37-55. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Carruthers, Jacob H. 1995. MDW NTR: Divine Speech. London: Karnak House.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1987. Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books.

“Ethic.” Merriam-Webster.com. Accessed October 5, 2017. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ethic.

Graduate Center, CUNY. 2013. INQ13 | Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Eve Tuck – “Decolonizing Methodologies”. The Graduate Center, CUNY. Date accessed: October 6, 2016. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIZXQC27tvg&t=126s.

Grubin, David. 2014. Language Matters with Bob Holman. Arlington, VA: PBS. DVD.

Kambon, Kobi K. K. 1998. African/Black Psychology in the American Context: An African-Centered Approach. Tallahassee: Nubian Nation Publications.

Kotey, Paul F.A., and Haig Der-Houssikian, eds. 1977. Language and Linguistic Problems in Africa. Columbia, South Carolina: Hornbeam Press, Incorporated.

Morehouse College. 2016. Global Conversations with Dr. Ayi Kwei Armah. Morehouse College. Date accessed: October 3, 2016. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpJD7UxSwPQ.

Mosádomo, Fëhìntọlá. 2012. Yorùbá Yé Mi: A Beginning Yorùbá Textbook. Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin Department of African and African Diaspora and the Warfiels Center for African and African-American Studies.

Mugane, John M. 2015. The Story of Swahili. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Mulokozi, M.M. 2000. Kiswahili as a National and International Language. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: University of Dar es Salaam Institute of Kiswahili Research, Tanzania.

Obenga, Theophile. 2004. African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period: 2780-330 BC. Popenguine, Senegal: Per Ankh.

Tayari, Simba. 1994. Lugha Yetu: Mwanzo Mpya. Chicago: Swahili Institute of Chicago.

Thompson, Anderson. 1997. “Developing an African Historiography.” In The Preliminary Challenge, edited by Jacob H. Carruthers and Leon C. Harris, 9-30. Los Angeles: Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations.

Thompson, Anderson. 1999. The African Principle Essay Series. Chicago: African World Community Press.

Woodson, Carter G. 1990. The Mis-Education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Healing as a community vocation

There are some deeply troubled people in our midst who have unfortunately sought healing in the toxic recesses of social media. Healing is a community vocation, Fu-Kiau reminds us of this. However our communities cannot fulfill this role if they are echo chambers that merely reinforces our isolation and deepens our alienation.

Functional communities are those that affirm the dignity of our humanity while acknowledging the reality of our suffering. These communities remind us that healing can be achieved and encourage us not to desperately cling to pain as some sort of anchor. It is true that pain can shape us, but when held too longingly, it can hurt us. It can warp our humanity. In his novel, The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah writes, “Pain too long absorbed dulls intelligence. Pain endured, channeled for energy, used for conscious work aimed at ending the source of pain, sharpens intelligence.” When we affirm the possibility of healing and loosen our grasp on pain, we open the door to healing’s actualization.

Healing then becomes our embracing the possibility of transcendence, and communities can support this work in numerous and constructive ways. Functional communities can remind us of, again, the dignity of our humanity, and that of those around us. Functional communities can remind us that our historical experience as Africans in America has been one of surviving unrelenting oppression. Healing communities can remind us that such oppression, does, as it is intended to do, warps humanity and engenders dysfunction. Communities remind us that healing is not merely a matter of healing the individual African person, but that it is, again, a community vocation. Critically conscious healing communities remind us that we must heal ourselves by eradicating the basis of our suffering–oppression.

What is meant here by critical consciousness is a degree of discernment which enables one to understand the social and historical factors which have been consequential in shaping the present. Critical consciousness demands that we consider the role of power in shaping society. The power dynamics that have animated our lives and the lives of everyone that we have ever known were firmly established during various stages of conquest and enslavement over the last five centuries. These were historical circumstances that reduced African people to objects of capital, charged with laboring to produce capital. And when that era came to an end, Africans continued to be objects of coercive control subject to debt peonage, voter suppression, containment, rape, and execution in varied forms including lynchings. This era transitioned into one where Africans exist, still as objects of coercive control and racialized containment, and who are socially constructed as a social malignancy–a violent disease, a plague for society, or in the view of some a source of terror within our own communities.

Critical consciousness demands that our analysis always consider the broader constructions of power, and central to this, the production of ideas which seeks to mask its operation in our lives. Thus, a critically conscious person must ask and seek to answer the question of whose interest are served by obscuring the source and causes of dysfunction as it exists in our community? When these sources are masked, we attack one another, rather than the real enemy. A critically conscious must ask how we might effectively address these problems in a manner that eradicates dysfunction by eliminating its structural causes–the system of oppression in which we live, the evolutionary descendant of the system of chattel slavery and colonialism that so malformed our ancestor’s humanity. A critically conscious would recognize that, among other things, we must create the social systems that enables us to be self-determining. That creating the institutions that enable us to feed, clothe, heal, house, educate, and defend ourselves are the most direct and logical response to our continued dependency upon an oppressive system. In fact, the very work of building these systems is the work of restoring community. Ultimately, we must remind ourselves that for all of the dysfunction of our communities, we are ultimately dealing with communities that are the legacy of terror, a legacy that is ever-present. Thus we are not dealing with or residing within self-determining communities, but communities that are, in many respects, the residue of colonialism.

In closing, healing is possible. It begins with us, is augmented by community, and must lead inexorably to reality transformation. For those wishing to journey further down this path Fu-Kiau’s Self-Healing, Power, and Therapy, Armah’s The Healers, and Ani’s Let the Circle Be Unbroken are good resources to consult. Each argues vociferously for the role of African culture and social structures as tools of healing, and within this, for the role of paradigmatic knowledge in healing’s conceptualization and actualization. Angel Kyodo Williams’s Being Black is also beneficial. So too is Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. These two texts discuss the mind as a site of healing, arguing that our perceptions of reality often exacerbates our suffering. That our own personal quest for greater clarity and awareness, is one that, in fact, augments everything that we do. I would also strongly recommend the deeply insightful Essential Warrior by Shaha Mfundishi Maasi as a potent discourse on healing. He argues that warriorhood and healing are entangled states of being, and that “The purpose of warriorship is to develop an enlightened being who is a human vortex of positive energy, having attained the core of perfect harmony”. He adds that to become a “true warrior one must become ‘nkwa ki moyo’ a vitalist, one who heals the ills of the people.”

Naming and re-Africanization: Being and becoming exemplars of our ancestral traditions

This essay emerges from at least two things. Recently, I watched a rather engaging talk by Dr. Ama Mazama of Temple University, on the importance of Africans rejecting European names. In her talk, she also highlighted the work of her organization, Afrocentricity International, in renaming African people. Dr. Mazama’s talk can be viewed here: Naming Yourself: The First Act of African Agency.

Also, a while back I read an article advocating that Africans in the U.S. should, en masse, abandon the names of their slave owners. Though the article failed to clarify this, this is an old notion. The Black Power era saw a flowering of this kind of thinking and is evident in the cultural nationalist formations like Us, the Congress of African People, and the Council of Independent Black Institutions. This sentiment was also visible among various parties within the New African Independence Movement and the Black Panther Party, particularly the New York chapter.

We would also do well to remember that certain African naming traditions survived for a time in the diaspora. It is not uncommon to discover 18th and 19th Century Africans with names that are derivatives of Kofi (such as Paul Cuffee) or Kwadwo (as in Kojo or Cudjoe), each of which emerged out of the tradition of the Akan peoples, who would name children based on the day of the week that they were born. In some instances, other African names from other cultures were retained, such as Mingo, Juba, and so forth (Stewart 1996).

The Black Power Movement represented the emergence an explicit discourse around re-Africanization, that is the paradigm and practice of African Americans seeking to reclaim aspects of their ancestral traditions that had been lost under the savage duress of enslavement. It also entailed, the exploration of African American cultural productivity as distinctly expressive of various Africanisms.

Early on, these naming practices drew upon the cultures of various groups such as the Swahili, Akan, Yoruba, and various West African ethnicities. Arabic names were often adopted as well, given both the extensive presence of Islam in Africa, in addition to the fact that Islam was a potent ideological force for those seeking to break with Western culture, including Christianity in the U.S. In the 1980s and 1990s, other cultures became prominently represented in these naming practices including Kemet, or ancient Egypt.

One particular tradition which emerged within the Black Power movement and its various formations, was the practice of names being given to members of organizations by elders to youth or other members of the community. For instance, in Chicago’s Shule ya Watoto and related formations founded or co-founded by Baba Hannibal Afrik, names would be bestowed upon youths and other community members who had demonstrated their commitment to African self-determination. This was a practice that persisted from the early 1970s until the 2000s. In fact, the author of this post was named by Baba Hannibal in the year 2000.

Baba Hannibal’s process consisted of consulting with family members and friends who were familiar with the would-be recipient, reflecting upon his own observations of the individual, and then searching for names that were both descriptive of the person’s character and nature, in addition to names that articulated aspirations that would both distinguish their character and express their potential impact on the family and community. He would draw upon names from throughout the continent, employing the type of Pan-African approach to naming that was typical from the Black Power era.

Baba Hannibal’s method demonstrated a core concern expressed by many people within this community of those engaged in re-emergent practice of African culture, what some have simply called a New African culture, which is that names should be bestowed within community by elders or persons of authority who can speak to the integrity and character of those named. The name was not meant to merely replace a European (or other non-African) name, but to express as clearly as possible the true nature of the person named, and to illuminate as best as possible the path to which they should aspire. In this way, these advocates of re-Africanization reflected the Swahili proverb which states, “Mpe mwana jina akue”, which translates to “Give the child a name to grow up to.”

I agree with this position. The process of re-Africanization emerged in the context of communities, more specifically within the context of formations committed to African self-determination. More than just a theoretical orientation, this was also conceived as a body of practice, one that cannot be fully actualized by isolated, atomized individuals, unmoored from collective values and obligations.

However, while I would consider the above necessary in the adoption of most names, there is at least one tradition that has relevance for those seeking to adopt a name and are not presently within the context of a community where such a desire might be supported.

Names as Moral Obligations

As stated, various peoples in West Africa have naming traditions wherein individuals are named, in part, based on the day or other circumstances of their birth. This is present among the Akan, Ewe (which has been borrowed from the Akan), and others. The Akan tradition is, however, most well-known. Other traditions, such as that among the Bambara, Hausa, or Swahili are quite notable.

In many respects, I have considered these names, especially the Akan names, given their popularity among African Americans, as names to which one is already entitled to utilize. Each of us was born on a day of the week, and in that way, each of us already has a kradin (literally “soul name”), should we choose to embrace it.

However, while I think that these names exist as resources that African people in the Americas can draw upon in their quest for re-Africanization, I maintain that these names carry with them moral obligations. That is, the name is not merely a signifier of the individual, it also represents a connection to a particular cultural tradition. This connection is not a one-way conduit, where one receives that which one desires without any reciprocal commitment. I maintain that this reciprocal commitment necessitates that one aspires to exemplify the highest ideals of culture. In the simplest terms possible, this means that one should not engage in behavior which is injurious to the community, reflective of bad character, or otherwise reflective of a lack of intellectual maturity. This is not to suggest that traditional African societies were moral utopias, places where no wrong was ever committed. We know that this was not true. However, we are also aware that the moral discourse of traditional African societies is one of the most compelling, rigorous, and communally-focused available to us. These attributes are especially notable given that these are also our ancestral traditions.

The Akan culture, like all other African culture, holds certain core values to be sacred. What I will offer below is a very succinct treatment of these concerns. For those wanting further guidance, consult Gyekye’s African Philosophical Thought.

One value of the Akan culture, which is perhaps most significant as a basic moral framework, is their ideal suban, which translates as character. Like many others, character is a central cultural element. The significance of this lies in that character and its refinement is firmly situated in the realm of the social, that is that one is ultimately judged or assessed by one’s community. Moreover, it is understood that one’s community would require that one exemplify the moral obligations considered necessary to the collective welfare, which can be easily synthesized by what Dr. Anderson Thompson calls the African principle, which is “The greatest good for the greatest number” (Thompson 1999). Therefore, one must query if one’s actions represents that which is best or optimal for the health and functioning of the community as a whole? Does it engender that which contributes to the community’s maintenance and advancement? Does it provide the proper template whereby others might emulate in the creation of a truly enlightened condition?

We can see the expression of the Akan people’s concern with character in two places—their didactic literature and their iconography. With regards to the former, there are two notable proverbs that juxtaposes suban (character) to beauty. One proverb states, “Ahoɔfɛ ntua ka, suban na ɛhia”, which translates as, “Beauty does not pay debts, good character is what is necessary.” Another states, “W’ahoɔfɛ de wo bɛkɔ, na wo suban de wo bɛba”, which translates as, “It is your beauty that takes you there, but your character that brings you back.” What both of these proverbs expresses is that while beauty is not without some merit, it is not the ultimate signifier of one’s value to the community. Beauty here refers to that which makes us appealing and attractive to others. Thus, beauty is something which often attracts others to us, and in this way, its value can be said to be external to the human being, that is something that is projected by society upon the individual. This contrasts with the nature of suban, as this is what the individual projects outwardly, it is the manifestation of their true nature, that which reveals who they truly are. Whereas superficial beauty may mask one’s inner nature, suban (character) is always revealing. This is why what matters most, according to the Akan tradition was character.

Sesa wo suban

Another example of this is the Adinkra symbol sesa wo suban, which literally translates as transform your character. This symbol reminds us of our capacity to perfect our character, to change it, and in so doing, to truly change ourselves. Sesa wo suban reminds us that we are, as ever, unfinished, still becoming. It compels us to strive to be that which we desire to be, knowing that the will to transform ourselves is potentially limitless.

I maintain that to take on an African name, is to also embrace the personal challenge to exemplify the loftiest ideals of African cultures. Here I have offered a brief treatment of one such culture, the Akan and their concept of suban, however Africa is replete with moral insight and knowledges which hold the promise and potential to inform our ways of being in the world if only they are applied.

Day Names

Next, I offer a brief list of African naming traditions based on days of the week. These are detailed in the tables below. The first lists female and male Akan day names, along with the attributes associated with the person born on each of these days. The second lists other female day names. The third lists other male names. All of these names come from the Akan, Ewe, Swahili, and Hausa peoples. Also, there are variations with the spelling of the names listed below. The spellings and pronunciations of all of the Akan and Ewe, and some of the Hausa names can be found in Julia Stewart’s 1,001 African Names. Other Hausa names were obtained from Ibro Chekaraou’s Mù Zântā Dà Harshèn Hausa.

Akan day names

DayFemale namesMale namesAttributes
SundayAkosua, AkosiaKwasi, KwesiThe born leader
MondayAdwowa, AjuaKwadwo, KojoThe peacemaker
TuesdayAbena, AblaKwabena, KobinaThe risk taker
WednesdayAkua, AkuKweku, KwakuThe sweet messenger
ThursdayYaa, Yawa, AbaYao, KwaoThe pathfinder
FridayAfua, AfiaKofiThe dreamer, the wanderer
SaturdayAma, AmmaKwameThe sage, the wise one

The attributes of the Akan day names affirm the basic goodness and essentiality of each of us to the community. Whether this is in the leadership of the Sunday born, the boldness of the Tuesday born, the wisdom of the Saturday born, and so forth–each of us are valued and valuable in terms of the good that we potentially represent to those around us. Thus, Akan kradin (as with African names in a very general sense) evidences a complex web of social obligations, which seek to maximize the growth, development, and capacity of both the individual and the society.

 

Other female names

DayEweHausa
SundayAkosibaLadi, Ladidi, Ladiyyo
MondayAdzowaTine, Tine, Tani, Atine, Altine
TuesdayAbraTalata, Tatu, Talatu, Tanno, Talle, Talai
WednesdayAkuwaLarai
ThursdayYawaLami
FridayAfibaJummai, Jumma, Juma, Yar Juma
SaturdayAmaAsabe

Other male names

DayEweHausaSwahili
SundayKosiDanladi, Ladiyyo, LahadiJumapili
MondayKodzoTanimu, Danliti, Altine, DantaniJumatatu
TuesdayKomlaDantala, Tatu, Talata, DantalleJumanne
WednesdayAku, Koku, KowuDanbala, BalaJumatano
ThursdayYawoDanlamiKhamisi
FridayKofiDanjumaJuma
SaturdayKomlaDanasabeJumamosi

Names for Times of the Day

Finally, I offer several names that are based on the circumstances of one’s birth, such as the time of day that one is born. These names were derived from Chekaraou (2008) and Kiswahili Lugha Yetu: Mwanzo Mpya from the Simba Tayari and the Swahili Institute of Chicago.

Hausa names

FemaleMaleExplanation
HantsiloNahantsi/HantsiloBorn during late morning
Tarana/RanauNaranaBorn at midday
Tadare/DareNadare/MaidareBorn at night

Swahili names

NameMale or FemaleExplanation
LaylaFemaleBorn at night
NuruFemale/MaleBorn at daylight

In closing, while it is commendable for Africans in America to want to divest themselves of the culture of their oppressors, it should also be recognized that such a process is on-going. Decolonzing one’s consciousness means more than simply adopting an African name or wearing African attire. It also means seeking and operating from an African worldview—a way of seeing and being in the world consanguine with the values, norms, ethics, and knowledge of African societies as they existed from classical antiquity and prior to their cultural penetration by the emissaries of Eurasian empires. Moreover, such a mission is not something that can be separate from reality transformation. We must accept that our minds cannot be free, as long as our bodies remain oppressed. Jacob H. Carruthers has addressed this quite clearly:

The process of Africanization and transformation cannot be separated neatly into two stages-they overlap. To transform the world according to an African-centered worldview means establishing a new African culture and a new African world civilization. We have to restore the African value system. Rather than continually struggling to make European-centered value systems more humane, we have to replace those value systems with one that is African-centered. We have been dealing with the alligators, we must now face the possibility that the solution to our problems may require that the swamp be drained. Too few of us have prepared ourselves to deal with this possibility. (Carruthers 1994)

References

Carruthers, Jacob H. 1994. “Black Intellectuals and the Crisis in Black Education.” In Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox of Black Life In White Societies, edited by Mwalimu J. Shujaa, 37-55. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Chekaraou, Ibro. 2008. Mù Zântā Dà Harshèn Hausa. Madison, WI: NALRC Press.

Gyekye, Kwame. 1995. African Philosophical Thought. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Stewart, Julia. 1996. 1,001 African Names. New York, NY: Citadel Press.

Thompson, Anderson. 1999. The African Principle Essay Series. Chicago: African World Community Press.

Tayari, Simba. 1994. Lugha Yetu: Mwanzo Mpya. Chicago: Swahili Institute of Chicago.

This essay was updated on June 9, 2018.

The enlightened society: The fruits of struggle

Of course culture has been a core concern of a number of African intellectuals in this country. This has been more than something born of an an undue preoccupation with questions of identity, but has been centrally concerned with questions of epistemology and ideation.

Who are we? What sources inform this knowing? What special contribution might our cultural distinctiveness offer in our efforts to both envision and reshape the world in which we live? How does our degree of cultural grounding facilitate our ability to be discerning, that is critically engaged with the universalist creep of ideas ideas that are not only alien to our ancestors’ cultures, but also potentially corrosive to that which we seek to (re)establish. I fear that in our fervor to embrace increasingly shallow notions of progress, we are constantly stripping ourselves of the potential to know and move from a cultural center of our own, one requiring no sanction or approval from others.

I think of this, not only in relation to, but occasionally because of the spectacles of confusion that abound in our communities. The almost daily sight of young men walking about, pants sagging, shouting expletives in unison with the sounds streaming through their headphones, walking through the L-train selling marijuana, and seemingly bereft of an evaluative criteria of manhood outside of the empty and chronologically-determined manhood of this society is troubling. Of course this is nothing new, our confusion that is. This society has been devised to perpetuate it, to render it normal, desirable, and inescapable.

However I do not despair in the face of these things. This is not because I believe in some grand destiny where we will inevitably transform our condition, but because I see some of us, many of us doing this work using tools such as Capoeira, rites-of-passage, study groups, agriculture, language instruction, meditation, and so forth. It reminds me that processes of transformation do not necessarily begin on a scale that is grand equal to their aims. Their beginnings might be quite humble, their progress slow but inexorable. We too know this. We know that “Aendaye polepole hana budi afikile”, that is that “the person who walks with calm and care will arrive without fail”. We will arrive, at that place to which we desire to be, one wherein the reclamation of our culture and the restoration of our sovereignty are ends, and from there to even greater works which lay beyond. Works animated by the vision of sp tpy and whm mswt, that is the actualization of the cosmological and sociological ideal of a truly enlightened society.

Reconstituting ourselves

I would assert that the cultural crisis that we face as a people is born of our subordinate political, economic, and cultural power.

Political power is the instrument via which a group’s will is affected upon society. It is manifest in a people’s capacity to establish rules and protocols, that all members of a given society are answerable to.

Economic power is the system that a group utilizes to propagate, sustain, and refine their worldview via the material and non-material expressions thereof. Systems of resource exchange, extraction, processing, and distribution, in addition to the provisioning of vital services fall under this domain.

Cultural power is the tool which a group utilizes to institutionalize its ethos, demarcate its bodies of practices, conceptions of historical knowledge, and worldview from competing forces, and the intergenerational transmission of such to subsequent generations.

The superordinate position of Europe and America vis-a-vis the African world community not only accounts for our subordinate state in the present, but our difficulty to reconstitute ourselves culturally in the wake of the withering legacies of slavery and colonialism. Thus, while culture is the domain that should inform a protracted struggle for self-determination informed by a “grand theory of the future” (to quote Dr. Anderson Thompson), we are largely bereft of economic and political power, thus making such a cultural vision fragile due to its lack of a powerful institutional basis to support and sustain it over time. Thus those few individuals, who due to their own constitutions, some inexplicable serendipity, or the circumstance of living in such a situation as this take up such work we are often limited in our output, to say nothing of our capacity to scale up such work. Even for those that do take on this struggle, sustainability, vision, and conceptual clarity remain as daunting challenges.