The very long and varied colonial history of Sudan has brought about multiple national schisms, along Muslim and Christian lines; African and Arab lines, and marked internal distinctions within/among them all.
In 2017, the new nation of South Sudan exists as a political entity, born in 2011, from the ancient nation called Nubia.
In 1985, when Molefi Kete Asante's and Kariamu Welsh Asante's book AFRICAN CULTURE THE RHYTHMS OF UNITY was first published, there was an existential hope, at least, for the peaceful reconciliation of the nation of Sudan's plethora of political, civil, religious, differences, and, by extension, of Africa's, more generally, from that rich continent's millennial infestations of foreign settler-colonies throughout the length and breadth of its four-hemispheres.
Any tree with so many grafts as is Africa's is bound to be chimerical, mercurial, unnatural.
This excerpt from an essay in their book fairly encapsulates the desperation of their vainly vapid hope, now vaporized!
"There would be cause for alarm indeed if we proposed definite and arbitrary cultural demarcations for the continent , in which one nation is entirely planted in one section or the other. While people may not be absolutely politically free, they are absolutely culturally free. The practical applications of this statement are easily demonstrated. There exists as we all know, a Union of Arab Writers. It held its tenth Congress at Algiers in February 1976, attended by delegates from Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Algeria , and other countries on the continent of Africa. The policies at present pursued by Sudan are such that we see no difficulty for a writer of that nation to belong to this union , or to choose not to belong, assuming of course that the Union of Arab Writers admit him into the fold; and here we envisage no difficulties since we on our part would welcome him into our newly formed Union of Black African Writers if he thus chose. Again, in interpreting Sudanese culture, it is obvious that any scholar worth his salt must distinguish between these two dominant cultures; its melange or synthesis will be manifested in many ways that will be uniquely Sudanese, but its components are only too clearly distinguishable. Sudan is therefore the working proof that the cultural map on this continent need not be the same as the political, and that the false attempt to align them creates the kind of foreboding which we have noted in the intervention of the Sudanese delegate. When we speak of a black African culture , therefore, we refer clearly both to the sum of its various parts, and to its underlying essence. Just as there are minorities in every political state so are there cultural minorities in any convenient cultural division ."
P.24, "Afrocentricity and Culture," by Molefi Kete Asante.
History has shown this Africentric aspiration to be absolutely wrong.
Sophistry is no whit less circuitous by reason of its elegant cultural jesuitry. That is to say that nature itself is the universal nurture of mankind, not well-nuanced (or not) rhetorical flourishes !
Therefore let us return to nature: to biology, astronomy, geometry, botany, mathematics, anatomy, chemistry, physics, proverbs, fables, of all nations for such unifying templates of universal application that subsume all differentiated humanities' religious, philosophical, subjectivity into basic convivial specificity, being well-known, easily confirmed, replicable proofs.
Monday, November 20, 2017
AFRICAN CULTURE, EXCERPT...
The very long and varied colonial history of Sudan has brought about multiple national schisms, along Muslim and Christian lines; African and Arab lines, and marked internal distinctions within/among them all.
In 2017, the new nation of South Sudan exists as a political entity, born in 2011, from the ancient nation called Nubia.
In 1985, when Molefi Kete Asante's and Kariamu Welsh Asante's book AFRICAN CULTURE THE RHYTHMS OF UNITY was first published, there was an existential hope, at least, for the peaceful reconciliation of the nation of Sudan's plethora of political, civil, religious, differences, and, by extension, of Africa's, more generally, from that rich continent's millennial infestations of foreign settler-colonies throughout the length and breadth of its four-hemispheres.
Any tree with so many grafts as is Africa's is bound to be chimerical, mercurial, unnatural.
This excerpt from an essay in their book fairly encapsulates the desperation of their vainly vapid hope, now vaporized!
"There would be cause for alarm indeed if we proposed definite and arbitrary cultural demarcations for the continent , in which one nation is entirely planted in one section or the other. While people may not be absolutely politically free, they are absolutely culturally free. The practical applications of this statement are easily demonstrated. There exists as we all know, a Union of Arab Writers. It held its tenth Congress at Algiers in February 1976, attended by delegates from Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Algeria , and other countries on the continent of Africa. The policies at present pursued by Sudan are such that we see no difficulty for a writer of that nation to belong to this union , or to choose not to belong, assuming of course that the Union of Arab Writers admit him into the fold; and here we envisage no difficulties since we on our part would welcome him into our newly formed Union of Black African Writers if he thus chose. Again, in interpreting Sudanese culture, it is obvious that any scholar worth his salt must distinguish between these two dominant cultures; its melange or synthesis will be manifested in many ways that will be uniquely Sudanese, but its components are only too clearly distinguishable. Sudan is therefore the working proof that the cultural map on this continent need not be the same as the political, and that the false attempt to align them creates the kind of foreboding which we have noted in the intervention of the Sudanese delegate. When we speak of a black African culture , therefore, we refer clearly both to the sum of its various parts, and to its underlying essence. Just as there are minorities in every political state so are there cultural minorities in any convenient cultural division ."
P.24, "Afrocentricity and Culture," by Molefi Kete Asante.
History has shown this Africentric aspiration to be absolutely wrong.
Sophistry is no whit less circuitous by reason of its elegant cultural jesuitry. That is to say that nature itself is the universal nurture of mankind, not well-nuanced (or not) rhetorical flourishes !
Therefore let us return to nature: to biology, astronomy, geometry, botany, mathematics, anatomy, chemistry, physics, proverbs, fables, of all nations for such unifying templates of universal application that subsume all differentiated humanities' religious, philosophical, subjectivity into basic convivial specificity, being well-known, easily confirmed, replicable proofs.