By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Of late, there have been strident calls by certain scholars for the jettisoning of what they consider to be foreign culture in favor of our own unique African culture. It is the initial hypothesis of this writer that there is no animal known as African culture or Ghanaian culture for that matter…..
The Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines culture as the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time. It is a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place, or the social forms and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group. However, this is a rather parochial definition. Without reference to time, space or group, culture could be universally seen as the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially through education, or the enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training. Simply put, culture is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that should positively impact ethics and character or proper human behavior and conduct.
In its scope and breadth, culture encompasses every aspect of life, and its definitional nomenclature impacts the family, groups, countries and the world. This makes the term too nebulous, fugitive and unwieldy to be properly discussed within this limited space. But at least we can work with simplistic temporal, spatial or social elements of culture such as language, religious beliefs, customs (namely rites of passage: naming rites, puberty rites, marriage rites, death rites), and political systems as the tools for the analyses as to whether there is any animal called African, or even Ghanaian culture.
Africans, and for that matter Ghanaians are territorial in guarding their languages which they wrongly use to define their ethnic origins. None of the language groups will therefore cede grounds for others to use their language as either the Ghanaian or African language. I am an Asante. I can speak and write my language very well, but I do not take any pride in these skills as making me any different from any Ghanaian or any human being for that matter. Besides, I am not enthused about the preservation of my mother tongue for any purpose, or as a marker of my identity. However, for this simple attitude, many in my language group will consider me a traitor. The same could be said of others of different languages who happen to care less about the fate of their mother tongue. Thus in the small area of language choice, Africans vehemently disagree as to which one should be selected to represent Africa or Ghana.
As for religious beliefs, Christianity has already gained grounds against African animist religions, and the call for a return to the latter forms of worship is akin to a call for a return to cave life. Rather, most Africans, even the most intellectually advanced, prefer to live the dual life of western religious adherence together with the preservation of whatever smidgen of culture they choose to keep. Even if you use traditional religion as a platform to identify African culture, there will not be any agreement as to which one to choose as its representation since the denominations are legion, and the experiences are different. Thus there is no common agreement as to what constitutes an Afrocentric religious philosophy.
If you come to customs of the people, like naming ceremony, puberty rites, marriage rites, death rites etc., every small society in Africa has its own, which may comprise female/male circumcision, half-naked breast display dances, obnoxious bride price (ranging from western drinks to herds of cattle), storage of dead bodies for days in search of human heads to bury them with and so on…..What is more, there is in most African societies a benign merger of local traditional forms with western and European traditions. Thus even in these old societies, the presence of radical western cultures is fiercely competing with pure traditional forms.
When we talk of our political systems, they are now a mirror reflection of western democratic systems, or at least a gradual gravitation towards these forms. Most traditional African political formations begin with the king who is an absolute monarch, supported by the chief priest whose religious philosophy, like in all religions, is founded not on science but pure magic and superstition. Within the king’s court is the Okyeame, the king’s spokesperson who tells the king whatever he wants to hear and acts as his chief cheerleader.
The foregoing reflect the political arrangements of primitive and agonistic societies which must evolve into more modern acceptable forms in which more people have a say in their governments and leadership. African societies within which the ancient systems persist are often rejected or disregarded as unprogressive since there is a general human predilection for the democratic dispensation.
So what does the call by so-called Afrocentric philosophers for a return to the African political arrangements mean when construed within the context of the democratic dispensation? Is it a call for something akin to the traditional monarchical system or that of Nkrumah’s or Mugabe’s dictatorial systems of governance?
The point of all the forgoing is that there is nothing like African culture or Ghanaian culture. Indeed, the reference to Afrocentric culture and tradition may create the hypocritical impression that we have one monolithic culture; or that we have common agreement of what constitute African values and epistemology. We do not. However, there is a legion of cultures unique to the communities and societies of Africa. Some of these are good and some are simply stupid, and most of them are merely anthropological, signifying a predictable evolution from cultural primitivity to more sophisticated status in knowledge and advancement.
But we can, if we are so inclined, synthesize the best values in these cultures into a syncretic national or African one, only if we can agree as to which ones to select. There is not yet agreement as to our common humanity and ethnic equality. Our so-called African area scholars who are supposed to be the custodians of our cultural heritage are championing ethnic attrition as their daily stock in trade. How then can we agree on what constitutes a common African value, let alone culture? Thus the call for the return to Afrocentric culture is an exercise in futile abstraction, and the ululation of African epistemology is a rallying cry done in pursuit of a holy grail.
The way forward for us is to regard the world’s cultural corpus as the universal property of all the world’s citizens to be appropriated for our benefit without being concerned about its origins. This is because cultural norms as we know them today are the eclectic creation of all humankind, not only of the Asian or Western or European world; they are actually the distillation, not the obnubilation or abnegation, of history’s norms and mores, and a conservation in human knowledge in which the societies of the world are joint creators and shareholders. Thus they belong in usufruct to all humanity, and the separatists should not hold sway over its appropriation or control its direction and focus.
After all, if properly defined without reference to time, space or group, culture could be universally seen as the act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially through education, or the enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training. It is the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that should impact ethics, character and proper human behavior and conduct .…… And it must be progressive, scientific and evolutionary, not a static, verbal or exhibitionist affirmation of archaic behavior and inexplicable conduct unique to Ghanaians or Africans.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Doctor of Law, is a general legal practitioner in Austin, Texas. You can email him at [email protected]