Page 36 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 28

Community

or from the intellectual leadership of the working- tradition as a filter for receiving Western concepts

class by individuals from professional or business and ideas into African reality.
classes. (Lenin, Isaac Deautcher, Mao).
Are we saying that there are no ideas of universal We must understand the peculiar African problem,
validity? No, we agree that there are ideas of here. When a European gets educated, he/she
universal validity. But the problem does not end remains culturally a European; when a Chinese
with the recognition of that fact. The assimilation in China gets educated, he/she remains culturally
of foreign ideas, by a particular culture, must be a Chinese; when a Hindu gets educated, he/she

preceded by the naturalization of those ideas by remains culturally a Hindu; when a Muslim gets
intellectuals of that particular group or community, educated, he/she remains culturally a Muslim; but
through the medium of the culture and traditions of due to the peculiar dynamics of European conquest
that particular class, community, or society. Ideas and domination of Africa, when an African got
from outside must be filtered into the consciousness educated, he/she became culturally Europeanized.
of that community, class, or society, and the filter Educated Africans were educated as part of
is the culture and the historical tradition of the Western civilization, but unlike their Western
particular people receiving those ideas. counterparts, they were placed in a suffocating
In that sense, we can speak of the naturalization status of not being able to engage themselves

of a Western product, Marxism, into Russian in developing a civilization of which they felt a
society, which was accomplished by Plekhanov, part. Educated Africans in Europe cannot develop
Lenin, and, later, by the Stalinists; so, also, can European civilization; just as African-Americans
we speak of the naturalization of Marxism into in American society cannot develop American
China, accomplished by Mao Tse Tung. That is civilization. Because of how they were produced
also why Christianity took the colour and shape by European civilization within Africa, African
it did, as it became the Greek Orthodox Church, educated people have not been able to develop

the Russian Orthodox Church, the Africanist African civilization. [When we speak of China,
Churches of the colonized Africans in South India, Europe, or the USA, as a civilization, what
Africa, and the Africanist Churches of the former do we have in mind? We have in mind a complex
slaves from Africa in the United States of America. of culture, language or languages, religion, a
Christianity, too, originally was not a product of world-view, a pattern of historical experience,
the Western experience. It arose and developed, a certain technology and manner of using that
initially, in the Middle East and Africa, and was technology, an identifiable pattern in architecture,
subsequently brought to the West, and later had art, music, poetry, literature and dance, a certain
to be filtered (naturalized) through the cultures body of knowledge, science, medicine, and values,

of Western regions -hence Medieval Christianity, a certain cuisine and manner of dress and general
quite radically different from original Christianity. habits, etc.
One of the biggest sources of error in the cultural A civilization is generally so massive and of such
development of Africa, and in the cultural power that it acts like a magnet, drawing outsiders
development of the West, is the failure of African to it, influencing others and being influenced by
intellectuals, so far, to naturalize the Western others; in addition, the massiveness and power of
intellectual experience, and Western concepts, into a civilization inevitably tend to push its influence

Africa, i. e., to use African culture and historical beyond its territorial borders, either peacefully or

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