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Posted: Thursday October 13th, 2005 02:13 |
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Website of his materials
http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/results_author.pperl?authorid=16549
Here is a segment article from the book. The Africans
On December 8, 1978, two Zairean air force jets approached Kinshasa, the capital. The tower radioed the pilots, telling them they couldn’t land because of low visibility. The pilots, presented with this problem, ejected from their planes and parachuted to safety. The perfectly good — and very expensive--Mirage jets crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. Problem solved.
I’ve always thought this story was hilarious. It’s from David Lamb’s The Africans, a wonderful if somewhat depressing account of Africa’s plight. He recounts the story as one in a litany of examples of how Africans do not have the same concept of cause and effect as people in the West do. Take driving, for instance. Africa has comparatively few cars but incredibly high traffic-accident rates. Many Africans think nothing of driving at blistering speeds around hairpin turns.
My friend Tucker Carlson writes in the current issue of The Weekly Standard that such driving is a fact of life in Vietnam and Nicaragua. But while Tucker speculates that it’s a product of Communist dictatorships, I’m told this is a problem throughout the Third World, regardless of the political system. One reason offered by Lamb is that the typical uneducated African learns the wrong lessons from such things as near-misses. "If an oncoming car has to swerve off the road to avoid his vehicle, and there are no collisions or injuries," Lamb writes, "the African does not say, Next time I’d better not do that." Instead he will do it again because it worked for him the last time (I have a very similar attitude toward beer and DiGiorno rising-crust pizzas).
I bring this up because a lot of people have been asking me what I mean by Civilization. Last week, I wrote that America should in effect launch a crusade to save Africa from itself. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with most hard-bitten conservatives and even most military people — active-duty and veterans — saying "Where do I sign up?" But in the deluge of e-mail there was certainly no shortage of dissenters. And while their first question was not, what do you mean by civilization? I think it is the most pertinent.
When most people hear "Civilization" they think of big beautiful buildings or great books. Or, they think racism and all that know-nothing stuff a bunch of latte-drinking rich kids chant about on the quads of Berkeley and Harvard. I think all of these things — the books, the buildings, and the bozos — are products (epiphenomena, if you want to get fancy about it) of Civilization. But the real thing, the software of Civilization is a way of looking at the world. Civilization isn’t material; it’s an approach to material. Few people are aware that they are thinking in terms of "cause and effect"; they merely think in terms of cause and effect, and no quotation marks are necessary. If they come within a hair’s breath of hitting another car on the highway, they think "damn, that was close."
There are, of course, ingredients to civilization other than the rudimentary scientific assumptions of the Enlightenment. There are moral calculations too. In a way, those should be easier. Torturing people for pleasure, starving children for profit, mutilating people for politics, or murdering millions for no discernable reason whatsoever, are not debatably wrong, they are simply wrong.
I’m as romantic as the next guy about preserving traditional cultures and communities. But just as you’d have to be a tenured English professor at Duke to believe that the laws of cause and effect are culturally biased, you’d have to be a similar fool to believe that the most basic moral rules about right and wrong evaporate at the water’s edge.
To say that all views are equal, or to ask, "Who are we to judge what is civilized?" is not clever, it’s cowardly. Whether or not the horrors of Africa are "cultural expressions" is irrelevant, they are still horrors. I wonder whether some of my correspondents — liberal and conservative — have even the meager intellectual and moral confidence to say that wholesale atrocities, starvation, and murder are wrong. Are they so passively or actively racist as to believe that these Africans want to or deserve to live this way? Conservatives are supposed to be opposed to notions of collective and intergenerational guilt. Why then are they so willing to say, in effect, that millions of starving children deserve their fate?
Those who say violence and imperialism have never led to civilization, must have never read a book. The history of human progress is often a tale of conquest, invasions and counter-invasions, immigration, and the forced exchange and acceptance of new ideas. Indeed, one explanation, offered by Tom Sowell, for why Africa is so far behind is that even though Africa is twice the size of Europe it actually has less coastline. Look at any map and you will see that Africa’s coast is a smooth straight line with few harbors, while Europe’s curves like a jigsaw-puzzle piece. Moreover, Africa has almost no navigable rivers from the interior of the continent to the seas. Such geographically imposed isolation led to some vibrant, but static, cultures. The chaos in Africa today may be the result of the continent’s encounter with modernity, but the answer to its problems lies only with more exposure to it. Much of colonialism was evil, but conquests almost always are. Still, it can’t be denied that in many respects the average African was better off under British (though perhaps not Belgian) rule.
So, How Do We Do It?
Well, this was the most common question from advocates and dissenters alike. The short, humble answer is, "How the hell should I know?" I’m not enough of a strategist, armchair or otherwise, to pretend I have a master plan. But before all the knee-jerkers flip over their high chairs with kicking spasms of I-told-you-so’s and declarations of "Well, shut up then," give me a second.
Article directly from him sponsored by Harvard University
Autumn 1982
Endangered Species
By David Lamb
The independence era dawned over black Africa two decades ago, and in the flush of victory the new presidents promised their people many things: Constitutions, they said, would be respected; human rights would be observed; newspapers would remain free and competitive.
One by one those pillars of a free society were uprooted. Constitutions were abolished and replaced by one party mandates. Human rights were ignored, the victim of soldier-presidents who understood only the power of the gun. And the free press died, too, transformed almost overnight into an organ of propaganda for various governments run by self-appointed presidents-for-life.
Today the role of newspapers in black Africa has declined so dramatically that they have little significance in society. People no longer ask what the future of the press is in black Africa; they ask instead if it has any future at all. And regardless of what yardstick you use, it is difficult to find much room for optimism.
In the mid-1960's, according to the International Press Institute, there were 299 daily newspapers in Africa. That figure includes about 40 papers in the Arab states, mostly Egypt, and about 30 in the white-ruled areas of southern Africa. By the early 1980's, only 150 dailies were left on the continent, and the shrinkage had occurred almost exclusively in black Africa. Nine countries had no newspaper at all.
The combined daily circulation of the papers in Africa fell during that period from well over three million to two million. Thus, the circulation on a continent of 455 million people is only two-thirds of what a single London newspaper, the Daily Mirror, sells in a day.
There are several factors that help explain what is, for all practical purposes, the death of the African newspaper: an illiteracy rate that runs as high as 90 percent in some African countries; the emergence of radio as the most powerful communications medium on the continent; the high cost of importing newsprint from Europe, and the absence of daily or weekly newspapers in the rural areas, where the majority of people live. All this has made newspapers an amenity of the city elite.
But the most important factorand the most unsettling oneis simply that the vast majority of Africa's 50 governments consider any independent, questioning voice to be a potential threat. So the governments quickly took control of the media, eliminating opposition newspapers and using the sole official daily not to inform the people, but to manipulate, organize and control them. Here is how an official communiqué from the Republic of Somalia defines the role of the press: "It is the function of the nation's mass communications media to weld the entire community into a single entity, a people of the same mind and possessed of the same determination to safeguard the national interests."
For a Westerner, this is pretty scary, Orwellian stuff, but not so for Africans. Their newspapers are written and edited by civil servants, not independent reporters, and their contents are as unbiased as something a U.S. political party might publish during an election campaign. The news is all good: Windy speeches by various officials are printed with painstaking accuracy, and four or five photographs of the President may appear in the same edition. When Somalia invaded Ethiopia's Ogaden region in 1977, for instance, and moved unchecked through the crumbling Ethiopian defenses, readers of the Ethiopian Herald knew nothing about the advance; the Herald simply carried no stories on the subject. It was not until Ethiopia took the offensive that the paper started covering the war, but even then it made no mention of the fact that Russian advisers and Cuban troops were on the front lines leading the Ethiopiansa fact that was capturing page one headlines in Europe and the United States.
Except in Nigeriawhere the black press dates back to a paper called Iwe Irohnin, first printed in 1859the early newspapers on the continent were published by colonialists for colonialists. They bequeathed to Africa's young nations an independent, competitive press, which, at independence, was the first of the Western-style institutions to fall, for that was the one tool the new, insecure governments most needed to exploit the uneducated masses. Nigeria's first government needed only one year to forget its proud journalistic history in favor of a course that stifled critical comment.
In 1961 the High Court of Lagos found journalist Chike Obi, the "Thomas Paine of Nigeria," guilty of sedition as a result of a pamphlet he published entitled, "The People: Facts That You Must Know." The seditious section that resulted in Obi's imprisonment read:
"Down with the enemies of the people, the exploiters of the weak and the oppressors of the poor! The days of those who have enriched themselves at the expense of the poor are numbered. The common man in Nigeria can today no longer be fooled by sweet talk at election time only to be exploited and treated like dirt after the booty of office has been shared."
The story across the rest of Africa is not much different, even today. President Hastings Banda of Malawi jailed virtually the whole nongovernmental press corps in the mid-1970's. President Kenneth Kaunda appoints and fires newspaper editors in Zambia. In countries such as Uganda and Zaire journalists shuttle in and out of jail so regularly that their families don't even ask where they have been when they reappear after an absence of several days. In Equatorial Guinea, the late president, Macias Nguema Biyogo, went one step farther: By the time he was overthrown by his cousin and killed in 1979, all journalists in the country had been murdered or were in exile.
Are there any bright spots amid the gloom? A few, perhaps. Kenya and Nigeria each have competing newspapers that are largely untouched by government censors (though individual reporters are mindful of the need for self-censorship), and at least half a dozen countries have produced talented journalists who would have influential voices if they were working anywhere else but in Africa.
But just as the free press was the first institution in black Africa to fall, I'm afraid it will be the last to be resurrected. Before one can even contemplate a renewed role for newspapers, governments will have to become more secure, leaders more tolerant, the masses more educated. Only then will the African journalist have a chance to be a real journalist.
David Lamb, a 1981 Nieman Fellow, was Bureau Chief in Nairobi, Kenya, from 1976-80 for the Los Angeles Times and has been in Cairo, Egypt, since 1982. This article is adapted from his book, "The Africans," to be published by Random House.
Some quotes I dug up across the Internet.
http://www.gov.mb.ca/labour/immigrate/multiculturalism/2_1.html
black Africa is... no cultural upstart. The Noks were casting iron and producing terra-cotta sculpture before the birth of Christ. The northern cities of Kano and Katsina were cosmopolitan terminals on the trans-Sahara caravan routes when William the Conqueror ruled England. And when the first Europeans reached Benin in the fifteenth century – a good many years before Columbus set off for the Americas – they found a highly organized kingdom with a disciplined army, an elaborate ceremonial court, and artisans whose work in ivory, bronze, wood and brass is prized throughout the world today for its craftsmanship and beauty.9
http://www.seekgod.ca/bantu.htm - This link gave me some ideas and background such as almost all African leadership come from or are a product of missionary schools and are "Christian".
David Lamb wrote in his 1987 book, The Africans, that in Africa, “The largest denomination is Catholicism, which has upwards of 75 million followers and twelve cardinals in Africa…The Protestant Church has an estimated 50 million members. The majority of Ethiopia’s 31 million people are members of the Coptic Church. In many areas the Africans denomination depends solely on which missionaries got there first. In northwest Kenya, for example, almost everyone is a Quaker.� 1
Another article
THE CHRISTIAN REFORMATION OF AFRICAN CULTURE: RESPONDING TO
A CONTINENT CRYING OUT FOR HEALING
Gideon Strauss Dept. of Philosophy, University of the Orange Free State, Bloemfontein
THE AFRICAN WASTELAND
I want to begin this talk by quoting David Lamb (THE AFRICANS: ENCOUNTERS FROM THE SUDAN TO THE CAPE. London: The Bodley Head, 1985. p.5). He writes:
(Africa is) a continent where events have conspired against progress, where the future remains a hostage of the past... As setback followed setback and each modest step forward was no more effective than running in place, black Africa became uncertain of its own identity and purpose, divided by ideology and self—interests, perplexed by the demands of nationhood - and as dependent militarily and economically on foreign powers as it was during the colonial era …a continent in crisis, explosive and vulnerable, a continent where the romance of a revolution cannot hide the frustration and despair that tears at the fibre of African society.
Since the revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe, easing the way as it did for wholesale international disillusionment with socialism, and focusing the economic aid efforts of the West away from Africa, an international mood of "afropessimisrn" has set in. The general failure of modern development efforts in the continent, and the increasingly obvious malignant nature of her governing élites has led to formerly enthusiastic aid suppliers in Europe and North America to give up in despair. Today Africa is facing a crossroads: she can either continue on the path of decay, or she can turn around to different routes of development from those tried until now.
Africa possesses almost awesome potential prosperity in terms of material resources. "Like a closet millionaire, it hides the riches that future generations on distant continents will need to prosper, produce, even survive". The African continent contains 40 percent of the world’s potential hydroelectric power supply, the greater part of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 30 percent of the uranium outside the ex-Communist bloc; 50 percent of the world’s gold, 90 percent of its cobalt, 50 percent of its phosphates - relevant for fertilizer manufacture - 40 percent of its platinum, 7.5 percent of its coal, 8 percent of its known petroleum reserves, 12 percent of its natural gas, 3 percent of its iron ores and millions of acres of unused farmland (Lamb, 1987: 20).
"Africa could grow enough food for two or three times its population. It could have more wild protein, fish and livestock than it can eat or sell. And its people could be flourishing. Africa… was never a lush garden of food for the taking. Soils were mostly poor, and life was fraught with disease and danger. But there was great wealth and potential. In less than a century, at a steadily increasing pace, Eden has been squandered recklessly. Today, much of it teeters at the edge". (Mort Rosenblum and Doug Williamson, SQUANDERING EDEN: AFRICA AT THE EDGE. London: The Bodley Head, 1987. p.5-6).
Despite the riches enumerated, Africa is caught, for the greater part, in the grip of considerable poverty and tyranny. The average per capita income for the whole of Africa was US$365 a year in 1987. This was the lowest on the planet and has not fundamentally improved since - rather the opposite. In real terms that income - and the standard of living in Africa - is falling (Lamb, 1987: 21). Some of the blame for African poverty and famine can be laid at nature’s door, but for the greater part the deteriorating situation can be ascribed to human folly, ignorance, greed and malice.
A number of factors are customarily blamed for Africa’s problems. These include the alleged inferiority of the African races, a lack of natural resources, "overpopulation", and the consequences of colonialism. I reject all these as insubstantial and factually untenable.
Africa is faced nonetheless with demotivating statistics:
* The infant mortality rate in Africa (excluding South Africa) - 137 deaths per 1,000 live births - is the highest on the planet. In the United States the rate is 12 per 1,000.
* Europe has one doctor for every 580 persons. Kenya (one of Africa’s most developed countries) has one for every 25,600 persons.
* Of children eligible by age, only 11 percent are in school in Africa, compared to 35 percent in Asia and 45 percent in South America.
* In the 20-24 year old age group, 1.4 percent of Africans are studying at a university. In Asia the figure is 5.7 percent, in Latin America 6.7 percent and in the United States 48 percent.
* The literacy rate in Africa is about 25 percent (Lamb, 1987: 21). While literacy stagnates in Africa, Japan turns out 71,000 new engineers a year.
* As recently as 1975, Africa inexcusably spent as little as $1 per person annually on medical care (Lamb, 1987: 262).
Africa’s current destitution is aggravated by the consequences of irresponsible international aid. Africa has become an international welfare recipient. Even a cursory examination of the state of affairs in Africa makes it obvious that the bulk of international aid ends up in the avaricious paws of civilian and military kleptocrats, rather than in the starved bellies of the truly poor.
There is an enduring myth that Africans lack the ability or the will to improve their lot themselves. This is not true. The continent teems with economists and agronomists, entrepreneurs and investors, peasant farmers and laborers, brimming with eagerness to build prosperous economies. But most are blocked - by tyrants from above and by pagan jealousy from below - and their frustration is yet another African tragedy.
Despite the frightening problems facing Africa, its rulers spend little time facing their own poor conduct and unjust government, and a great deal looking for scapegoats. The emergence of post-colonial modern élites has greatly retarded the opening up of African societies. The former vice chancellor of Nairobi University, J.N. Karanja, has observed (in Lamb, 1987: 56):
If Africa is to develop, the elite must re-examine their consciences and understand and accept the unique history and circumstances of the African people. They must be honest and should realize that the African people did not fight for their independence so that they could become less free instead of freer, poorer instead of better off. It’s time that the African people had the right to choose.
As David Lamb, (1987: 58) pointed out, "The pity of contemporary Africa is that few presidents are secure enough to pursue policies or experiment with systems that might diminish their own power. And fewer still have displayed benevolence or wisdom in carrying out the affairs of state. The result is that many countries are run by men who are little more than clerks with guns."
In his Nobel speech, the writer Wole Soyinka denounced the Organization of African Unit as a private clubset up by leaders for their mutual protection (Rosenblum and Williamson 1987: 26).
Hilary Ng’weno wrote (quoted in Rosenblum and Williamson 1987: 289):
Many ‘(leaders) mismanaged economies, squandered national wealth and literally threw away the future of their people as they jostled with one another for personal power and gain. When it was not greed that moved them, it was folly and gullibility.
African leaders and outside experts have ignored Africa’s greatest asset: its people. Fantu Cheru (quoted in Rosenblum and Williamson 1987: 23, 25) grew up in Ethiopia, and teaches developmental economics at American University, in Washington, D.C. He maintains that outsiders speak to the wrong Africans, or to none at all:
There is a silent revolution in Africa, a mass defection of peasants who are dropping out of the system. They are holding states as hostages by depriving governments of resources. All the talk of new government attitudes is because of this... The wrong sort of aid simply helps leaders hold out. Western governments are sanctioning some of the worst gangsters of the century, one—man rule, kleptocracy and military dictatorship.
African leaders blame international economics, but poor countries elsewhere do far better. They demand drastic redistribution of global resources but do not share the wealth within their own national systems.
Africans will take care of themselves if they can get their leaders to listen to them. Governments must apply their own resources to agriculture and the forgotten peasantry — or collapse. I would make a case for no aid at all.
Despite the wasteland that the leaders of Africa have created, the courage and character of the African people still leaves room for hope. Djibril Diallo, a U.N. press officer born in southern Senegal says (Rosenblum and Williamson 1987: 22):
This could only happen in Africa. I am a first-generation literate. And I am a living embodiment of the fact that you don’t need generations... .You can’t sit in a cabinet meeting and give orders downwards. You have to go to the farmers, find out what they want. African leaders are realizing now that nobody can come and give them development. It is not something that comes from the outside. African governments know that they will not stay in power if large numbers of people are starving.
When you tie a bird to a palm tree, it will fly only as far as the rope, and then it stops. .Africa is in a situation of eternal beginning. We must cut that rope.
Africa has all the potential to experience a rapid improvement in all cultural fields, including the political
and economic. It has the natural resources, the people, and a growing Christian faith. It is currently in a state of flux and fervour for change. If these are mobilised, and overcome the forces of poverty and tyranny, Africa can be the envy of the Earth.
THE MODERN INTERRUPTION
The attempt to modernize Africa has failed abysmally. The interruption of Africa’s cultural opening up by Modernity - that is the anti-Christian worldview emanating from the West in recent centuries - has proven to be a tragic subversion of the inherent potential of African culture. The ravaged state of African societies - politically, economically, socially - can be traced directly to the destructive impact of the pagan and modern worldviews. Underdevelopment, at root, is the result of fundamental beliefs: faith and worldview. The way in which people understand reality directs their actions within it. If this understanding does not correlate with the actual states of affairs, it is unlikely that such activity will bear much beneficial fruit in any realm.
Africa suffers from worldviews untrue to reality, both of pagan and modern origin. These worldviews have lead, in the first case, to closed, undeveloped societies, in the latter case to grossly warped development, ultimately of little real value, especially to the poor, and especially to those still captive in a pagan way of believing. These are the ultimate causes of underdevelopment, and these must first be overcome before any real development, any real opening up of African cultures and societies can take place. No structural model, no economic or political technique or system can bring about any lasting and real change if it is not part of, or preceded by, a change in worldview. This is the foundation of the case for Christian reformation: neither African paganism nor any imported modernism can provide in the cultural and societal needs of Africa.
The further opening up of African culture requires a rejection of Modernity, and substantial healing of African society to counteract the consequences of this interruption. This does not imply a return to premodern paganism, but an invigorating turn to the Christian faith as the foundation of cultural activity.
Modernisation includes a restriction of traditional faith to those areas of life where it makes little public difference whether it is practised or not. It affects ideas, institutions and individuals, destroys community, offering in its place only the extremes of statism and individualism and attempts to engineer societal development in reductionistically technocratic and economic ways. Ultimately, it leads to a loss of the experience of meaning. This is the experience, not only of generations of Europeans and Americans, but increasingly, of urbanized Africans.
Recent events in Eastern Europe, and its consistent failure to bring justice, peace or prosperity to the people of Africa, has widely discredited Marxism as a vehicle for societal reformation and the idealism of youth. At the same time, an opening up of political culture is taking place in some parts of Africa. A wide range of programmes for the change of African society are being openly espoused and advocated.
It is an unfortunate fact that people still subject to antiquated ideologies are capturing the ultimate commitment of many young Africans. These include both people openly and actively opposed to the Christian faith and others who attempt, with honest if misguided intentions, to forge a synthesis of Christianity and anti-Christian dogmas.
By the grace of God, the African Christian church is experiencing phenomenal growth. Whether this growing church will have any real effect on Africa, however, depends on the degree to which it can overcome paganism, combat modernity and transform African culture and society. There is at present no substantial movement of African Christians who proclaim the Lordship of Christ over every sphere of life - including the political. It is not enough to present young people with a reduced gospel which provides inspiration only for what happens within the walls of church buildings, and seven quick minutes of Instant Quiet Time every day. Such a gospel would not only be too insipid to deserve acceptance, but would also defraud those few who do accept it, of their true heritage in Christ. Christianity presents the only cogent explanation of reality. ALL of reality: Creation, Fall, and Redemption. The full-blooded Gospel can, and will, bring about the redemption of multitudes, and the reformation of African society. Every revival has brought in its wake a societal reformation - the salvation of hearts and the renewing of minds in Christ cannot but overflow into the outpouring of his grace and dominion over the community of men.
It is vitally necessary to encourage and equip the current generation of young Christians with the spiritual and intellectual tools necessary for wide-ranging cultural activity from the foundation of a certain, comprehensive and compelling Christian faith. This contemporary educational mission is a responsibility of paramount importance for Christian institutions of learning in Africa.
The Christian mission, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is exciting and hopeful. Knowing that, while no earthly paradise is possible before the Return of Christ, substantial healing in obedience to God’s principles can be brought about. It is possible to work towards this reformation with vigour and wisdom. A good place to start would be to guide to its destination the African quest for identity, significance, dignity and distinctiveness.
K. Ejiwunmi ("SYNCRETISM - ITS CAUSE AND CURE", in the Pan African Christian Leadership Assembly’s FACING THE NEW CHALLENGES: THE MESSAGE OF PACLA, December 9-19, 1976 nairobi. Kisumu: Evangel Publishing House, 1978) has commented insightfully that
The basic ‘search in Africa today is for identity, significance, dignity and distinctiveness ... In a typically African fashion, the search is not individualistic or personal; it is communal.
African identity requires a secure foundation in a high view of man that can ensure human dignity. It requires a theory of culture that will allow for an understanding of the significance and distinctiveness of being African, while providing impetus for the project of cultural opening up.
Humanity in Africa has suffered from two distinct affronts to dignity, both of which enslaved Africans intellectually, even more, spiritually, to a low understanding of themselves: indigenous paganism and Western Modernity. The indigenous pagan views of man portray humanity as utterly under the sway of external, primarily natural powers, unable to overcome Fate. This has led to a discouraging fatalism and cultural lethargy. Modernity initially encompassed a high view of man. It would seem however that Africans were at an early stage implicitly or explicitly excluded from the human category by Modern Western thinkers, leading to the indignities - the atrocities - of slavery and colonialism. By the time Modernity became accessible to Africans in post-colonial times, it had suffered a profound reversal in its view of man, portraying humanity, again, as subject primarily to uncontrollable forces, whether of the psyche or of history. This low view of man is evident in the thought and life of contemporary Western civilization to an alarming degree. Witness, for instance, the Holocaust, the rule of terror by dictatorships of the right and left, and the current abomination of abortion on demand. There has been no base in Modernity for Africans from which to experience their genuine human dignity, or to understand the responsibilities and opportunities for cultural opening up.
As a result of the dehumanizing effect of paganism and Modernity, and the consequent retardation and warping of cultural opening up in Africa, a continental situation exists today where the environment is devastated, without any real benefit to the majority of even its human inhabitants, where politics is limited to tyranny and coups d’état, where public discourse is marked by the "culture of silence", where communication between and even within nations has virtually broken down, and where public service excels only in corruption and inefficiency. African societies are still closed to a greater degree than most others, with the possible exclusion of countries like Albania and Iran, where Stalinism and Islam have brought about an abrupt arrest of positive cultural opening up. The closed state of African societies is the direct result of the restrictive character of the worldviews held by the leaders and people of these countries. Only once the widely held Christianity of Africa has a guiding cultural impact, can African culture open up.
In order to envisage an open society it is first necessary to understand the nature of man as essentially responsible, and responsive to divine principle and providence. Our common human identity is to be found in the image of God, which is
"the creaturely manner of existence of the human person as a child of God in the dynamic religious relationship of dependence upon God (, and) in obedience to the central religious commandment of love in Christ" (my translation from J.H. Smit, ETOS EN ETIEK. Bloemfontein: Patmos, 1985. p.16).
This divinely founded identity must be set against the problems of identity which confront us in the particular context of Africa.
Christians must be encouraged and enabled to bring about cultural reformation. The cultural responsibility of Christians requires of us to extend God’s Kingdom over African culture in every sphere of human enterprise.
OPEN BUT NOT MODERN -
THE PATH FORWARD FOR AFRICAN SOCIETIES
Taking into account the states of affairs in underdeveloped countries, it is clear that Marxist analysis and socialist redistribution cannot provide true development. Instead they bring about tyranny and poverty. A prudent economy and just government restricted to their distinct normative realms are necessary if Africa is to advance. At the same time, a prudent economy and just government are not enough. If these tools of political economy are understood and implemented as mere and isolated parts of a process of capitalist modernization, or in the service of the modern worldview, they cannot eventually lead to cultural openness. They did not appear in the West as a part of modernity, and are not being well sustained by Western modernity in its contemporary (late) expression.
It is necessary in the struggle towards Christian reformation in Africa, to reject modernity as an anti- Christian faith. This does not mean that Africa cannot learn from the West, as modernity has been an aberration in the cultural history of the West. Western civilization has for the greater part of its existence been directed, and is likely in future again to be directed by the Classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. Whatever good has emerged in modern times - and good has indeed arisen - has been the result of the residual impact of these traditions, and of the understanding of reality they represent. Much evil, on the other hand, has been the consequence of modernity - a dearth of art and literature, poverty and tyranny as a result of the totalitarian ideologies of Right and Left, anarchist terror, and ultimately, a profound loss of any sense of meaning.
Africa must avoid these excesses, and can do so only if, in transcending paganism, it does not continue to fall for the modern temptation, but follows instead a path of Christian reformation, a path to a culture that is open, but not modern.
INTRODUCTORY RESOURCES
To conclude I want to point out a handful of books of which I believe we all should take note. I have used most of them in my studies into Africa over the past years, to gain an initial understanding of the actual state of affairs in our continent. Bear in mind their lack of Christian perspective, and read them critically:
Pieter Esterhuysen, AFRICA AT A GLANCE: 1992. Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 1992.
Byang H. Kato, BIBLICAL CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA: A COLLECTION
OF PAPERS AND ADDRESSES. (Theological Perspectives in Africa, no.2). Achimoto: Africa Christian Press, 1985.
David Lamb, THE AFRICANS: ENCOUNTERS FROM THE SUDAN TO THE CAPE. London: The Bodley Head, 1985.
Mort Rosenblum and Doug Williamson, SQUANDERING EDEN: AFRICA AT THE EDGE. London: The Bodley Head, 1987.
A book which I haven’t yet been able to read, but which looks valuable from the reviews I have seen, is:
Laurence Cockroft, AFRICA’S WAY: A JOURNEY FROM THE PAST. I.B. Taurus.
M2M Issue 2 October 1992 p.55
Let me summarize. This man went into the faces of many Africans to polish a book that is used by many positioned members of Western societies to marvel and glimpse at setting their own unique agendas for Africa. Its a good read if you want to understand Western approach to Africa. It should not be the sole source but a good start.
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Posted: Monday October 24th, 2005 04:13 |
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My mother went to Louisiana a few years ago and told me a story when she got back.
She said this young man had gotten a job and worked a couple of weeks and gotten his paycheck. He didn't go back to work the following monday. He didn't go back until he ran out of money. He then showed up expecting to do his job, but of course by then he had been fired.
I suppose that is not as bad as dumping a Mirage jet into the Atlantic but I presume it is a similar mind set. There is a serious problem with trying to run a technological society with people that think, or fail to think, in this way. An assembly line that requires ten people comes to a dead stop because one person is missing.
European culture tends to turn everybody into robots, but the opposite extreme gets very little done. We need some kind of balance.
umbrarchist
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Beware of Vulcans from the Dark Side
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