The dying of Africa’s spirit

I’ve been trying to understand the factors behind the decay of the African spirit. All cultures have an inner and outer aspect, a world of beliefs, ideas, and values that inform the outer aspects of institutions, laws, government, and culture. But the African inner dimension on our present generation no longer has the significance or power to shape the outer world in which we live, despite the endless rhetoric about ubuntu.

Our ancestors groomed the inner qualities of their lives through communal virtue. Since the encroachment of Western civilisation, from the colonial era, we have been overwhelmed by modernity, an ascendant civilisation order with commercialised spirit as the centre of its activity. The African spirit was vanquished by the vitality of this order, with that it kind of lost its élan.

I don’t mean to appear as though blaming Western culture for the dying of an African spirit; Lord knows Africans have been active participant of the process. I see nothing wrong in adopting a progressive spirit that came to be known as Western civilisation.

The problem is that most Africans have never had a chance to internalise successfully the process of integrating Western civilisation to their own culture; indeed they were forcefully prevented by the coercive attitudes of colonisation. This led to a crisis of Africans being unable, especially in modern times, to chart their own path into contemporary life, the so-called modern or post-modern era. The consequences of all this was an eclipse of our spirit of ubuntu that  severed our connection to our roots.

The crises Africans face cannot be addressed solely by the political, social, or economic empowerment. Even sociological facts are insufficient to explain and excuse. Our problems first and foremost emanate from a lack of willpower. Following that it is a matter of morals and the need for ethical revival. Somehow we are just refusing to be architects of our own destiny, and are always waiting for some kind of rescue mission.

We exaggerate our victimhood and sense of haplessness into retarding ourselves, ready to get handouts from the government or foreign aid. Yet we are ever ready to pour our frustrations on to those weaker than us as paroxysms of sectarian, ethnic, xenophobic and racial violence ever present in our history tell. All this trumps the ideal of ubuntu and shames us as a nation of beggars and bullies.

We seem to be taking only the worst out the Western civilisation, such as withdrawing moral/religious virtue from our public arena. We are more fascinated by consumerism, instead of taking an interest in, say, the real problems facing humanity, such as environmental degradation, corruption in public life, and so on.

We are losing our Africaness. Electing leaders who promulgate fake and outdated African traditional values (such as polygamy) will not help — instead it is only assisting the axe.

And the fakery of appealing to consumerist religious organisation as a means of appealing for better morality will not help either. When I say our problems are moral, I don’t really mean religious. I’m one of those who believe a secularised, but not necessarily desacralised, world is a fertile ground for nurturing a maturing faith. Our problems are largely structural faults and a lack of integrity that comes with shallow characters, from our leaders down. There’s also a lack of sociological integrity.

The integrity of being African requires deep consummate empathy, a humanism that recognises the value of our interconnectedness. It is a delicate balance between an individual’s needs and the demands of the community as a whole. Instead we’ve fallen to bad habits, and try to blame our cruelty and lack of taking responsibility on past wrongs or lack of education. Well, goodness is not taught in schools.

It is almost as if a dual curse is upon us. Having endured all the difficulties of being treated like slaves, we poison our hearts with excessive greed and covetousness that sets aside the culture of God that carried our past generations to this point. Shame on us.