Introduction

The Swahili wisdom embodied in the proverb “kikulacho ki nguoni mwako”—“that which eats you is inside your clothing”—serves as a poignant lens through which to examine Africa’s contemporary struggles. While narratives surrounding the continent’s hardships often attribute them to external forces and historical foreign exploitation, a closer inspection reveals a painful reality: the deepest wounds are frequently inflicted by Africa’s own sons and daughters. This two-part article confronts this sobering truth, arguing that corruption remains the single greatest impediment to the continent’s progress and collective dignity.

At its core, corruption is a fundamental failure of reason. A corrupt individual operates under a profound irrationality, ultimately undermining their own long-term interests while betraying the very communities they are entrusted to serve and elevate. In Part I of this series, an illustrative allegory is presented to mirror the tragic mechanics of self-sabotage inherent in corrupt behavior. Part II builds upon this framework to explore how this systemic internal betrayal has crippled African institutions and nations, inviting worldwide mockery and reducing a region rich in potential to a tragic caution in global affairs.

PART I

A. The Roundabout

The extraterrestrial arrived without warning.

Its craft did not descend in fire or thunder. It appeared silently above the city, a polished sphere that reflected everything and revealed nothing. It had crossed distances no human mind could measure and had come to observe a civilization said to possess intelligence, cooperation, and systems of governance.

The being emerged and drifted above the city unnoticed. It had no name in human language. It absorbed information directly—movement, sound, intention, emotion.

Soon it encountered what seemed to be a significant ritual.

A great roundabout.

Vehicles stretched in every direction. Engines growled. Horns blared. Drivers leaned forward as though willing movement through force of desire alone.

The being hovered overhead and observed.

From the north came a doctor.

He had received an urgent call. A patient was in critical condition. Minutes mattered. He switched lanes where he could, checked his watch repeatedly, and pressed his horn—not in anger but desperation.

From the east came a politician.

He was due at the airport. A plane waited. In Washington he was expected to sign an agreement said to bring investment, jobs, and prestige to the country. Missing the flight meant losing the opportunity.

From the south came a contractor.

Months of preparation rested on a presentation for a major national contract. Winning it could transform his company and employ hundreds.

From the west came a priest.

He had been invited to concelebrate a solemn Mass presided over by the Cardinal Archbishop of the archdiocese. The church was full. The occasion mattered to clergy and faithful alike.

Yet around them were thousands of others.

Every driver believed their journey mattered.

Every passenger believed their delay was unjust.

Everyone pushed.

Nobody yielded.

Cars entered the roundabout inch by inch, noses pressing into impossible spaces. Drivers blocked exits so they would not lose advantage. Vehicles entering prevented vehicles leaving; vehicles leaving prevented vehicles entering.

Soon movement stopped entirely.

The doctor stared helplessly at unmoving taillights.

The politician watched departure times change on his phone.

The contractor rehearsed his presentation until words became meaningless.

The priest prayed.

The extra-terrestrial watched.

Hours passed.

Eventually messages arrived.

The patient died before the doctor reached the hospital.

The politician missed the flight.

The contractor arrived after the bidding had closed.

The priest entered the cathedral after the procession had ended.

Around the roundabout, people complained.

They blamed the roads.

They blamed the government.

They blamed traffic.

They blamed bad luck.

No one admitted: I blocked the car ahead because I believed my urgency mattered more than everyone else’s.

The extra-terrestrial made a note.

Advanced beings can cross galaxies. Primitive societies can still stand still.

But its observations were not complete.

It stayed.

B: The Country

The extra-terrestrial turned its attention away from roads.

It began observing decisions.

A businessman from overseas arrived with a local partner. Together they planned a manufacturing venture—factories, employment, training, exports.

They filled forms.

Applications moved from one office to another.

Then came the whispers.

There were “facilitation fees.”

There were files that could move faster.

There were signatures that required appreciation.

The businessman hesitated.

Then he withdrew.

Months later the factory opened in another country.

People discussed unemployment.

Nobody mentioned the missing signatures.

The being recorded another note.

Then came an Arab investor.

He proposed something audacious: a toll road crossing the entire country, connecting regions, reducing travel time, opening trade.

Meetings were held.

Presentations applauded.

Then the minister requested a private arrangement.

A percentage.

An understanding.

The investor smiled politely, cancelled meetings, and departed.

Years later, citizens complained about roads and transport costs.

Again, the being took note.

Then an NGO appeared.

It intended to equip county hospitals with diagnostic machines, emergency devices, and critical care equipment.

Negotiations progressed.

Then county officials hinted that generosity should not end with hospitals. The governor’s office expected consideration.

The NGO paused.

Reviewed.

Withdrew.

Hospitals remained understaffed and under-equipped.

Patients travelled farther.

Waiting lists lengthened.

Deaths became statistics.

The being watched.

Next came the university.

A search committee worked carefully and honestly. It identified an exceptional scholar to become the next chancellor.

He had integrity.

Experience.

Vision.

Then someone quietly explained that ceremonial approvals required encouragement.

The scholar declined.

He accepted another appointment abroad.

A less qualified replacement emerged.

Standards slipped.

Appointments became political.

Research faded.

Graduates became less prepared.

The university weakened.

The country noticed years later.

The extraterrestrial looked again.

Factories absent.

Roads unfinished.

Hospitals strained.

Universities declining.

Not because resources did not exist.

Not because talent did not exist.

Not because opportunity did not exist.

But because every gate had become a roundabout.

Everyone entering demanded advantage.

Everyone exiting was blocked.

Movement slowed.

Investment slowed.

Trust slowed.

Hope slowed.

Until the whole nation resembled the traffic circle.

Engines running.

Fuel burning.

People impatient.

Nothing moving.

The extra-terrestrial returned to its silent craft.

Its final report contained a puzzle:

“Their greatest congestion is not on their roads. It is in their choices. At least the majority seem to be hellbent on the ‘selfish’ pursuit of their own good. Yet didn’t one of them write ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’… that the ‘selfish’ pursuit of one’s own good could serve a social purpose? Can’t they see that the answer to the puzzle lies in the exact determination of the content of ‘one’s own good’… the individual just (fair) good? Are they not able to see that the rule of law would provide an outlet? Alas! Their police and the judiciary are beyond remedy.

But they’ll soon figure something out…

PART II

The allegory above argues that Africa’s greatest gridlock is not found on its roads but in its choices. Congested highways are merely symptoms of a deeper congestion—the paralysis of human agency. Nations move, prosper, or decline according to the quality of the choices made by their citizens and, above all, by their leaders.

Traffic is therefore more than a convenient metaphor. It reveals a profound truth about human action. The orderly movement of vehicles mirrors the orderly exercise of human agency, while traffic jams reflect the consequences of disordered choices. To understand why Africa remains trapped in recurring cycles of poverty, corruption, and underdevelopment, we must first understand how both traffic and human action are meant to flow.

Subscribe now

A. The Logic of Flow

Physics provides an illuminating analogy. In fluid mechanics, the most efficient movement of a liquid is known as streamline or laminar flow. In such a flow, every particle follows precisely the path taken by the particle before it. The movement is smooth, predictable, and highly efficient.

Three characteristics define streamline flow.

First, every particle follows a fixed path. The particles move in parallel layers without crossing or mixing. Second, the velocity remains constant. At any given point, every passing particle moves at the same speed and in the same direction over time. Third, there is no turbulence. The flow is calm and free from eddies, swirls, and chaotic disturbances.

However, this order has a limit. Once a fluid exceeds its critical velocity, the orderly pattern collapses into turbulence. The system becomes chaotic, unpredictable, and inefficient.

Analogies generally oversimplify. They strip away core complexities —here implied in the nature of free action—and technical truths to make a concept easy to grasp. Yet traffic behaves in remarkably similar ways. Lane discipline corresponds to fixed paths. Design speed corresponds to critical velocity. When drivers ignore lanes, exceed safe operating conditions, or disregard established rules, turbulence inevitably follows. The result is congestion—gridlock.

Human societies operate according to the same principle. Orderly choices generate orderly outcomes. Disordered choices create social turbulence.

B. Practical Rationality and the Anatomy of Choice

But what exactly is a human choice? To diagnose a disordered society, one must first deconstruct the mechanics of a single human choice.

Unlike speculative reasoning, which seeks truth, practical reasoning seeks action. Yet both follow a remarkably similar logical structure. Practical reasoning begins with a major premise: the long-term goal considered worthy of pursuit. It then proceeds to a minor premise: the concrete means chosen to achieve that goal. Finally comes the conclusion—not an intellectual proposition but an action.

In a very real sense, the end is already present within the means, just as the mighty oak already exists, in potential, within the acorn. One cannot consistently pursue noble ends through corrupt means, because means shape outcomes.

The virtue responsible for selecting the appropriate means is prudence. Prudence is not timidity or excessive caution. Rather, it is the intellectual virtue that discerns the right means for achieving the right end.

Yet prudence itself presupposes something even deeper: intention. Before asking what a person chooses, we must ask what they truly desire. The million-dollar question therefore becomes:

“What do you really want?”

The answer reveals an individual’s true preference. Economists speak of revealed preference—our actions disclose our real priorities more honestly than our words ever can.

This question also exposes the deepest divide in political life: are leaders pursuing the common good, or merely their own private interests? But perhaps this contrast is itself misleading. Must self-interest necessarily oppose the common good?

C. Adam Smith Was Right—But Only Partly

To a significant extent, Adam Smith answered this question correctly.

Modern prosperity owes much to individuals pursuing their own interests. Markets function because millions of people voluntarily produce goods and services, motivated largely by the desire to improve their own condition. As Smith famously observed in The Wealth of Nations:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Far from being capitalism’s fatal flaw, self-interest appears to be one of its greatest strengths.

Yet this observation immediately raises another question. If self-interest has generated unprecedented prosperity in much of the developed world, why has the greed of so many African political elites failed to produce similar development? Why do corruption, rent-seeking, and personal enrichment coexist with collapsing infrastructure, failing institutions, and persistent poverty? Why does the flow of goods, services, and opportunities remain gridlocked?

The answer lies in understanding what self-interest truly means.

D. Greed Is Not Self-Interest

In everyday language, “self-interest” has become almost synonymous with selfishness, self-centredness, and greed.

This understanding sits uneasily within Africa’s traditional philosophical heritage. The African worldview, shaped by concepts such as Ubuntu and Harambee, emphasises solidarity over individualism. “I am because we are”; “Let us pull together.” A person’s humanity is inseparable from the humanity of others. Individual flourishing cannot be detached from communal flourishing. A human person is self-effusive; he is inherently outward bound. Self-effusion, this going out of oneself, is what most characterises a person. He feels compelled to draw from within him in order to give. But the gift calls for someone ready to receive it. The “I” stands in need of a “thou” in an exchange of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. And this forms part of the good of the person.

This intuition is profoundly correct. The challenge is to explain it philosophically rather than merely emotionally.

Properly understood, self-interest does not mean pursuing whatever one happens to desire. It means pursuing one’s true good. The distinction is crucial. A person’s true good includes moral excellence, integrity, responsibility, justice, and the cultivation of virtue. Material prosperity forms part of this good but does not exhaust it.

Adam Smith’s principal limitation was not his defence of self-interest but his reduction of human flourishing largely to material advancement. In doing so, he unintentionally encouraged two reductions. First, true self-interest became conflated with disordered self-interest—greed. Second, greed became identified almost exclusively with material acquisition.

This double reduction impoverished economic thought. Development came to be measured primarily by GDP per capita rather than by the quality of persons and institutions.

Yet greed is not rational self-interest. Greed is a vice—a disordered desire for immediate personal acquisition at any cost. True self-interest seeks the flourishing of the whole person. Because human beings are inherently social, genuine personal flourishing necessarily contributes to the flourishing of others.

E. The Individual and the Common Good

This principle applies equally to families, businesses, and nations. A firm exists because individuals freely cooperate in pursuit of a common objective while simultaneously advancing their own legitimate aspirations. Employees seek meaningful work and income. Entrepreneurs seek profit. Customers seek value. None of these goals is inherently opposed to the others. Indeed, they reinforce one another.

The same principle applies to the state. The common good is not the enemy of individual good; it is the social condition that makes individual flourishing possible. Likewise, authentic individual flourishing strengthens the common good.

The relationship is reciprocal rather than antagonistic. Where leaders pursue their true good, institutions become trustworthy. Where institutions become trustworthy, investment increases. Where investment increases, productivity grows. Where productivity grows, prosperity follows. Orderly choices generate orderly outcomes.

F. Unlocking Africa’s Gridlock

Africa’s crisis is therefore neither primarily economic nor technological. It is moral. It is intellectual. It is a crisis of practical rationality.

The continent possesses abundant natural resources, youthful populations, entrepreneurial energy, and remarkable resilience. Yet these assets repeatedly collide with disordered incentives, weak institutions, and leadership detached from the common good. No amount of infrastructure spending, foreign aid, constitutional reform, or economic planning can permanently resolve this contradiction unless the underlying logic of choice changes. Just as smooth traffic depends on disciplined drivers following well-designed lanes, prosperous societies depend upon citizens and leaders choosing means consistent with worthy ends.

The deepest congestion in Africa is therefore not on its highways. It is in the habits of decision-making that shape Africa’s politics, economics, and public life.

Until the continent recovers a richer understanding of true self-interest—one in which personal flourishing and the common good reinforce rather than oppose one another—its immense potential will remain trapped in perpetual gridlock.

The question, then, is no longer whether Africa can be unlocked. The real question is whether Africa is willing to choose differently.

A crucifix by an artist from the Kingdom of Kongo, 16th-17th century AD

So far in our reflections, we have seen how the term Anamnesis is far more than just “remembering” a past event as past. Anamnesis is a calling to mind in the present of a past event. It is a reliving of the past as if it is happening “here and now”. The Platonists and the Stoics taught that the deepest truths of our human nature are already present in us at birth, not as clear concepts that can be easily articulated but as vague memories that whisper in the depths of the subconscious. Thanks to this “voice” that whispers in the depths of every human psyche, every human being, regardless of culture, creed, or race, carries within himself a living and active “original memory” of The Good and The True.

The Double Memory of Universal History

In his work On the Trinity,1 St. Augustine delved even deeper into the above-mentioned Greek notion of Anamnesis. Augustine chose to ground their nebulous notion of Anamnesis on a Christian root, namely, the story of mankind’s common ancestry as revealed in the book of Genesis. He “grafted it” onto the story of man’s original state of innocence before The Fall. Over and above the Creation Narrative that deeply informed his thoughts and nourished his imagination, Augustine’s memory was also informed by the parallel story of humanity’s recovery from their primordial Fall—what we will here onwards refer to as the Anamnesis of Redemption. If the Anamnesis of Creation reminded him that something went wrong, the Anamnesis of Redemption reminded him how it was fixed. After the tragedy of The Fall, Augustine asserted, the former memory became insufficient to explain human history; it henceforth needed reinforcement from the latter.

As a hermeneutical tool, Augustine’s “Double Memory Thesis” can help people from diverse backgrounds reclaim a meaningful sense of their history. According to this thesis, when a people’s cry for interior renewal is met by the acceptance of the long-awaited salvific Word—by the proclamation of the Redemption Narrative—that encounter is experienced as a convincing answer and not as an imposition from the outside. Augustine himself, a late convert to Christianity, experienced such an encounter. It so overwhelmed him that he was beside himself with joy. Something of the ecstasy that accompanied his discovery can be sensed in the very beautiful words he penned down in Book X of his autobiography, The Confessions:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

In our previous article on the Memory of Paradise, we outlined how, in the modern era, the West lost both the Anamnesis of Creation and the Anamnesis of Redemption. In “killing the Creator”, they ceased to see creation as a gift; in rejecting the atonement story offered in the Redemption Narrative, they lost the Anamnesis of Redemption as well. They had heard the story, and for centuries it had animated them interiorly and motivated them towards great exploits, engendering heroes and saints worthy of eternal memorialization. However, by the time their explorers and evangelizers sailed into the shores of pre-Christian sub-Saharan Africa, they (the adventurers) were strictly speaking, already culturally Post-Christian. The bright flame of their glory days had faded. They were surviving on the fumes of a fire that was already dead.

Key rejection-of-Kairos-moments in Western European History

According to Augustine’s metaphysics of history, the identity of a people is not only formed through memory and historical consciousness but also by their capacity for self-possession and self-giving in communion with others and with God. Basing ourselves on this interpretation of history, we can argue that the West lost its Christian identity through a long and slow process of interior erosion. We have already mentioned the metaphysical rift brought about by the Cartesian dualism of the 17^th Century. We would now like to comment briefly on the effects of the radical Rationalism that ensued in the Enlightenment era, culminating in the French Revolution of 1789.

The French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution that followed it in Russia were arguably two of the most notable Kairos moments that ravaged the philosophical-theological vineyards of both Eastern and Western Europe, injecting a deadly poison into their collective memories; a poison that will remain in their cultural psyches for a long time to come.

It can be said without fear of exaggeration that by the time of the Great War, the Christian spirit that had previously held Europe together as a culture and civilization had decidedly disintegrated. They had become a people without hope and without God in the world—no fraternal communion amongst themselves, no pride in their monotheistic religions, no lineage of priests to offer sacrifices, no rituals of atonement. In rejecting what we could call “Augustine’s Ontology and Phenomenology of the Spirit” (i.e., the adventure of “Spirit-filled” men and women working towards building the City of God in the midst of the city of man and redeeming history in the process), they had wittingly or unwittingly abandoned the Theo-Drama that had previously held them together.2

In dreaming up and implementing their godless Eutopias (their man-made paradises), they honestly thought they had within themselves the wherewithal to pry open the “curtain of time”. Unfortunately, the harder they tried to peer into the future, the more that portal closed until it became a thick, impenetrable “Iron Curtain”, separating them from each other and from other men in the world—and ultimately from their self-made paradises. It became evident that their desire to master the future was but a mask of their short-sighted desire to redeem themselves in the “here and now”, without God and against God. It took them two World Wars to realize that these desires were but empty dreams, selfish projections of their hubristic selves. Slowly but surely, they became empty and hollow like winnowed chaff, driven further and further away by the wind from the True Memory of the True Paradise.

Unlike the French “Illuminati,” who at least only pushed religion to the private sphere, the Bolsheviks actively “preached” that religion was the chief vehicle of man’s self-alienation. For Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his disciples, only “the poor and depraved” subscribe to religion. The economically wealthy have no need of it:

Marx’s great proposal — a great and terrifying proposal — was that history is not driven by reason, i.e. by the ‘man’ in Plato’s system, but by the ‘monster’! And Marx is deeply influenced by Feuerbach and Feuerbach’s critique of religion as the projection of our own humanity and that religion is not the arena in which spirituality is working itself out! Religion is the projective distortion that distracts us from how we are the authors of spirituality in history; it is a vehicle of self-alienation. So Marx takes the Feuerbachian critique and he rejects the theistic resonances within Hegel – the idealistic – and he says, “No, the dialectic is not a dialectic of ideas that’s playing itself out religiously. It is a dialectic of economic forces that is playing itself out politically.”3

It is to be noted that philosophical reflections of the kind adumbrated above are rarely, if ever, brought up by those “Pan-Africanists” who perpetually propose Marxist solutions to African problems. Marx detested Capitalism as a system for wealth creation and unceasingly critiqued its underlying principles (exploitation of the working class, private ownership, the profit incentive, etc.) to no end. To be fair, his insight that capital is not the ultimate source of wealth can help explain why Africa, though the richest continent in terms of natural resources, is still the poorest economically. Marx taught that the true source of wealth is human labour or work—and in this, he was right. Still, the hatred of the colonial project by the above-mentioned “Africanists” may ally them with Marx, but it blinds them from the violence often orchestrated by Marx’s “monster,” who thinks he can manipulate and remold history like clay in his tyrannical hands.

Paul Ricœur (1913-2005), the French philosopher known for bridging phenomenology with hermeneutics, provided a good diagnosis of Marx and other modernist “influencers” who were infected by what he called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Ricœur mentioned Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud as the main anti-protagonists of the story of the West. Nietzsche killed God. Marx replaced Eschatology with Eutopia. Freud repositioned guilt as a “complex” or a psychological malfunction. These, for Ricœur, were the “diabolic” men who directly or indirectly sealed the fate of the West. They did violence to human nature and led multitudes to distrust man’s capacity to attain “The True” and “The Good”. Such men need to be deconstructed before any attempt at recovering Augustine’s Anamnesis of Redemption is rendered possible.

Perhaps Augustine’s “Double Memory Thesis” can also help to explain why the contemporary world is so paralyzed by guilt and hung up on alternatives to the Redemption Narrative, such as the Holocaust narrative. What metaphysical or psychological mechanisms for processing guilt are left for those whose main interpretive lens is secular rationalism? How do godless people repair the “cosmic debt” of sin? What recourse do people who have willfully turned away from, nay, “killed” God, have when all their chips are down?

The colonial era as an inescapable Kairos event in Africa’s history4

In 1969, J. S. Mbiti wrote:5

When foreigners, especially from Europe and America see people sitting down somewhere without evidently doing anything, they often remark, “These Africans waste their time by just sitting down idle!” Another common cry is, “Oh, Africans are always late!” It is easy to jump to such judgements based on ignorance of what time means to African peoples. Those who are seen sitting down are actually not wasting time, but either waiting for time or in the process of producing time.

I would like to offer a possible interpretation, based on our reflections so far on the significance of Kairos time, of Mbiti’s use of the expression “waiting for time”. As a people, we have indeed been waiting for the longest time, for that “critical moment” when that “critical someone” would come to hire us to work in his vineyard. To some extent, it can be said that we have indeed been anticipating the arrival of the Lord of the Vineyard with the anxiety and restlessness of an Augustine of Hippo. The time we have been waiting for is Kairos time, not Chronos time. Time, as we have seen, is more than mere change; it is also opportunity. Chronos time needs to encounter Kairos time for both to be inserted meaningfully into the wide stream of universal history. Time doesn’t only have a form or a “what” dimension (“formal cause” to use Aristotle’s lingo); it also needs a purpose or a “where to” dimension (a “final cause” to fall back on Aristotelian language).

Having made those clarifications, I would now like to underscore the historico-metaphysical significance of the colonial era for the African pilgrim of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Firstly, the colonial era opened us up to an awareness of “the stranger”—the consciousness of an “other” who is different from me and yet inhabits the world with me, whether I like it or not. Secondly, this “other” reminded us that we are not the only nor the most important inhabitants of this world and that—whether we like it or not—we do share with them a common history. Their arrival introduced into our isolated tribal psyches, and subsequently into our collective memories, the notion of a shared human story. Most importantly, (and in line with our reflections thus far on the redemption of time), these “strange and violent people” brought with them—and largely despite themselves—the much-anticipated Word. Admittedly, by this time, they seemed not to see the Word except in a diluted, truncated, and even distorted form. Still, at its core, it retained within itself the essential seed for a recovery of the aforementioned Anamnesis of Redemption—the much-awaited antidote that has the power to free us from the Zamani mindset in which we had been epistemologically imprisoned.

God’s redeeming love embraces the whole of humanity, every race, tribe and nation: thus it also embraces all the peoples of Africa. Divine Providence willed that Africa should be present during the Passion of Christ in the person of Simon of Cyrene, forced by the Roman soldiers to help the Lord to carry the Cross (cf. Mk 15:21).

John Paul II, Ecclesia in Africa, para. 27

What an interesting perspective this brief historical consideration provides. The violence that brought Simon of Cyrene (Cyrene was an ancient Greek and later Roman city located in modern-day Libya) to share in the lot of the Man of Sorrows may have been external, but his acceptance of his fate as an unwitting sharer in those sorrows was interior; in carrying thus the burden imposed upon him, he managed to secure for himself and for his children a unique place within the Redemption Narrative.

It is in this apparently contradictory sense that I wish to make the claim that the era of colonialism (and the third wave of evangelization that accompanied it) was a veritable Kairos moment for the peoples of Africa. That encounter may not have been pleasant, but it bestowed its grace—albeit weakly. The face or “facet” of the Word that we experienced when our appointed time came was without external beauty; without splendor … but it made those who endured it into unwitting protagonists of the Theo-Drama.

In short, an encounter needn’t be sweet and rosy for it to be meaningful and impactful for future generations; it is sufficient that it be accepted by those who have ears to hear it, even if the acceptance is half-hearted. For a people for whom death was the definitive end, any mention of a possibility of resurrection from that death and with it, reparation for past injustices, constituted Good News. For a people for whom the possibility of an indefinite opening into future time had never been proposed, any firm Word on the certainty of an afterlife constituted a veritable light that shines in the midst of the darkness of death. When this ray of certainty was offered to them, hope was born, and with it, a convincing answer to the riddles of time, of death, and of existence.

The urgent need for a (re)discovery of the “Grammar of Atonement”

Let us restate our main arguments so far. In losing the story that sustained and gave their history meaning and direction, contemporary Europeans lost the key they had for processing meaning. Africans, on the other hand, though in tune with the Anamnesis of Creation, are still searching for the Anamnesis of Redemption that will help them make sense of their history lest they get eternally stuck in the prison of Zamani. Both of us are “frozen” in time, as it were. Both of us are at a crossroads. Both of us are—each in our own way—thirsting for redemption.

The West needs to make reparations not only for betraying their heritage but also for spreading their Eutopian heresies throughout the world. They have looted and plundered the natural resources of the other continents. They have built their present civilizations on the backs of slaves. For cosmic order to be restored, they must return what they have stolen. Meta-historical problems cannot be definitively resolved by partial sciences like politics, psychology, or law. When evil has embedded itself into the very fabric of a people’s way of life, it must be expunged through cosmic and metaphysical means.

Most, if not all, pre-Christian civilizations were very aware of the need for atonement. They knew in their blood and in their bones that every evil deed, whether done in private or in public, cries out to the heavens for redress. Contrariwise, post-Christian man has so lost the metaphysical perspective on life that he has become blind to the trans-empirical implications of his actions. He finds himself explaining away his offenses against justice with politics, rhetoric, and/or therapy. To conflate therapy with atonement or rhetoric with political change is to have a very superficial understanding of the power of words in general and of the notion of the Word (the Logos) in particular. It is to think, with Freud, that merely vocalizing the past suffices to remove guilt, to cleanse the conscience.

As modernity’s patterns of thought keep on crumbling, the need for the contemporary world to recover a “Grammar of Atonement” becomes more and more evident—both for the “Pre-Christian” (those yet to come to terms with the Anamnesis of Redemption) and the “Post-Christian” (those who have heard and embraced it but for one reason or another, have despaired of it).

Without atonement, we become either moralistic (judging others to hide our guilt) or nihilistic (denying altogether the existence of guilt). Only the “language of sacrifice” allows us to be human again.

Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, Forgiving the Unforgivable

By grammar, we are referring here not to any one particular language as to an underlying ethos and logos of communication—a way of relating with “the other” as other. By atonement, we mean an “ontological language of sacrifice” that enables us to vicariously make up for the injustices or trespasses of others, living or dead. Cultivating the Grammar of Atonement in our present relationships may not immediately undo past crimes, but it can, as a starting point, at least put an end to the cycles of violence and bloodshed, which are still so entrenched in our cultures.

Atonement is the transformation of a heavy, dark past into a light, open future. But this transformation cannot be done by the self; it requires a ritual ‘bridge’ that the culture provides.

Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (ibid.)

Traces of the above-mentioned Grammar can already be gleaned in many of our communal structures of reconciliation and purification. A few noteworthy mentions include the gacaca courts in Rwanda, the cleansing from thahu (Guthahura) of the Agikuyu in Kenya, the ritual washing (ukuhlamba) using running water or herbs among the Zulu of South Africa, and the propitiation rites (Etutu) done to appease the ancestors among the Yoruba of Nigeria.

The argument we are making here is that these “traces” or “echoes” of atonement need to be subsumed into the Word that has the power to literally call the dead back into life. On their own, they are incapable of atoning for the past. A trace is a mere shadow. It merely reminds; it lacks agency. Many of our ancestors, with all their atonement rites of purification, never really found a way to escape their fratricidal cycles of violence. When, however, they heard the Good News of a spiritual, metaphysical, trans-empirical power capable of overcoming hatred of one’s enemies by taking in their violence and suffering through it with them, they accepted it as a convincing answer to the hatred that would have otherwise consumed them.

The story of the Uganda martyrs is an excellent case in point. The seed of the Word that had been sown in them by the missionaries took root and gave them the power to speak and face death without fear or hatred. Suffering, death, and time took on meanings that they had hitherto not thought of or experienced. With time, the Word they had received transcended the influence of the foreign missionaries, so much so that when “the time of reckoning” came, they literally “spoke” with their own blood. The story of their willful acceptance of death reached the ears of other Africans nations and served to prove to them that Christianity was no longer just a white man’s religion, but a source of inner strength and cultural renewal for all peoples. Their sacrifice led to an explosion of conversions across Uganda and the surrounding regions in the years that followed. They became, in fact, the first sub-Saharan African martyrs to be declared saints.

It is such actors on the world’s stage who reveal the urgent need for a discovery of the Grammar of Atonement. Atonement possesses within itself such a heavy metaphysical component that it works regardless of our flimsy whims and weak wills. It is the inescapable law that sustains moral creatures and restores cosmic balance. We participate in it whether we know or not and whether we feel it or not. Still, given that we are rational creatures, it is always preferable to act as conscious and willing protagonists of such historical events.

Something similar can be said of the history of the European continent. The people who best understood the aforementioned Grammar of Atonement and Language of Sacrifice were none other than the saints—and especially the martyrs. It is the saints who have taught us, in no uncertain terms, that the once lost Paradise can still make its presence felt on earth today, whenever “Spirit-filled” men and women persevere in corresponding to the call of Kairos. Whenever such men and women corresponded to the promptings of the Spirit, civilizations prospered. It is they above all who have retained in themselves (despite and on behalf of the rest of humanity) the authentic Memory of Paradise. This is, in fact, the fundamental importance of the saints in history and for history. It is they who bring the eschaton into the now. It is they who purify and renew the past so as to open it up to a hope-filled future. It is they who remind us that the desire for the eschaton is not a vague, illusory dream like the Eutopia of the Marxists, but a very concrete and achievable goal. They teach us, especially today, that Paradise is not so much a geographical garden or a fertile field as it is men and women who let themselves be energized by the Spirit. Human history progresses when the renewed “I’s of such energized men and women connect with and surf on the Wave of Time. Their experiences and memory renew time and represent for all of us what, in history, is greatest and most real.

For a while now, a number of post-modern scholars have been proclaiming that there is no one culture with a monopoly on history (e.g., Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard) … and in this, they are essentially right. No one human person, no culture, no race, no civilization qualifies as “the universal subject” or interpreter of history. If every people or lineage has its own “truth” and its own “gods” but none of us have a common ground upon which to build a universal morality, are we not all but rivulets without a river, branches without a trunk or common root? Don’t we all then need a primordial ancestor, a root, an Adam, a common source, a Logos … a point where all the lines converge? This is precisely the common foundation that Augustine’s Anamnesis of Creation attempts to provide. But this, too, is insufficient because the same Memory informs us that we are insufficient unto ourselves … that we are fallen and in need of redemption; that we all need a “rescue operation”.

The kind of historical subject capable of bearing the cosmic and metaphysical weight of the sum total of past human injustices cannot be one more fallen human… a mere part of the whole. It must be one who transcends both space and time. It must be one who has power over death and fragmentation; one who has mastered the Grammar of Atonement and is eloquent in the Language of Sacrifice because he knows how to enter the stream of historical violence so as to overcome that violence from within, with peace; one who can subsume the fragmented and finite human “I”s into the infinite and all-encompassing divine “I”.

The Word so humbles himself that he adopts a man’s will as his own and addresses the Father with the “I” of this human being; he transfers his own divine “I” to this man and thus transforms human speech into the eternal Word, into his blessed “Yes, Father”. By imparting his own “I”, his identity, to this human being, he liberates him, redeems him, makes him God. Now we can take the real meaning of “God has become man” in both hands, as it were.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Behold the Pierced One

To say that “the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us” is to precisely declare that the “Divine-Word-whence-the-entire-universe-derives-meaning became an actor on the world’s stage. The absence of any one human subject of history does not preclude the presence of a superhuman subject of history. To realize that no one culture should judge universal history is not to conclude that there is no one divine subject who transcends both space and time and who is therefore capable of renewing all space and time. Herein lies the Redemption Narrative in a nutshell. By uttering his firm reconciliatory Yes! —against all odds, i.e., despite death—the Word, the Divine Logos opened up for all men of all times, a new and everlasting relationship with the perennial “I AM” that grounds all time within eternity—a pathway to a future that will henceforth always remain open.

Let us sum up the conclusions we have arrived at thus far in simpler language:

1. We cannot make genuine progress in the present without repairing past injustices.

2. The Grammar of Atonement is a “portal” that enables us to make up for past injustices. It is a mode of being that cuts across time because it transcends language.

3. Our relationships with our forebearers and the numerous cultural practices of propitiation still performed by so many African tribes are indicators that we still appreciate the moral weight of sin and what it takes to make up for past injustices. They reveal, in short, that we are open to the Grammar of Atonement.

4. Atonement requires a willingness to suffer with and for “the other”. Acts of atonement go deeper than therapy and rhetoric. The saints—and especially the martyrs—are living witnesses of the efficacy of such acts.

5. Man’s interior purification is a prerequisite for the genuine transformation of the world. Ethical development should always have priority over technical progress. Without ethics, human freedom is directionless. Progress in science and technology, if not matched by equivalent growth in spiritual and moral formation, becomes a threat to man and to the world.

6. For our personal and communal acts of atonement to enter into the “stream of universal history”, our fragmented experiences need to be “gathered up into” the unifying freedom of an agent who transcends space, time, and human fallenness; hence the perennial significance for all cultures of (re)assimilating the Anamnesis of Redemption.

From the Symbolic to the Diabolic … and Back Again

Let us finish with the consideration we began with at the very beginning of this four-part Series. World history is a struggle between two kinds of love: self-love to the point of hatred of God, and love of God to the point of self-renunciation. The latter love – the one that builds the City of God is the only one capable of bringing about the redemption of the world and of the self.

St. Augustine reflected on the history of time before contemporary historians like René Girard (1923-2015) were able to elaborate on it. Girard did a longitudinal analysis of literature from all kinds of world civilizations. In his study, he noted how Scapegoating Violence was, in fact, the default “operating system” of the fallen world. In his Magnum Opus (published in 1978), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (In the original French: Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde), Girard showed how, as soon as the Logic of the Atonement-Sacrifice of the Lamb becomes normalized in a civilization, the sacrifice of “the other” for the preservation of self ceases. Assimilation of this grammar, Girard noted, creates civilization and grants power to substitute the logic of sacrificing “the other” with the language of sacrificing “the self”.

Is the living and active memory of this sacrifice powerful enough to motivate me to overcome myself for the sake of my neighbour? Do I have the interior strength to sacrifice myself for you, or would I rather sacrifice you for me? These are the crucial questions that all of us, whether African or European, “pre-Christian” or “post-Christian”, are being called to answer, even today. Whichever direction our answer takes, as Girard observed, there can be no peace without sacrifice. Sacrifice is inevitable. Girard, writing from a secular-historical perspective yet harmonizing almost seamlessly with Augustine’s insights, explained how by internalizing the logic of the propitiatory sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross, the otherwise predominant scapegoating mechanism of fallen humanity can everywhere be overturned. Without directly calling us by name, Girard was also saying that if we, as contemporary Africans, manage to tap into the symbology of the Lamb, we can indeed overcome our diabolic cycles of Scapegoating Violence.

If Augustine gave us a symbolic account of history, Girard gave us a diabolic one. “Sym-bolic” here meaning having to do with signs and symbols (etymologically “that which is thrown or cast (ballein) + together (syn)”; “dia-bolic” on the other hand means to throw across” (from dia, ‘across’ + ballein, ‘to throw’). A diabolic agent is literally one who divides or scatters by throwing across, accusing, or slandering. Augustine’s account of history could be said to describe the dynamics of the City of God, whereas Girard’s describes the mechanics of the city of man. In the Augustinian account, the original paradise was so united and harmonious that everything in it served as an external sign that pointed beyond itself. Every material thing transcended the “here and now”. Everything in the original paradise revealed, re-present-ed (made perennially present) something sacred, spiritual, and otherworldly. In the Girardian account of history (in the recounting of a history of the world bereft of grace), our common history is fraught with patterns of mimetic violence. We are divided within ourselves and against each other. The city of man, be it domiciled in Europe or in Africa, will perennially be consumed by that divisive, diabolic spirit of accusation and polarization that eventually leads to scapegoating violence. The city of man always yields a short-lived type of peace—a mockery of true peace.

After the Atonement Sacrifice of the God-Man on the Cross, it is no longer the sacrifice of the (scape)goat that brings about peace, but the Sacrifice of the Lamb. The Logic of the Lamb’s Sacrifice brings about a reversal and subversion of the hidden patterns of mimetic violence inherent in the logic of the city of man. The peace that (for instance) Rome brought to the ancient world after defeating all its enemies (the Pax Romana) collapsed around the time of Augustine’s death. It was the temporary peace typical of the city of man; a “this-worldly” peace based on the politics of compromise and grounded on violence—the accusation and murder of one brother (Remus) by another (Romulus).

Fast forward to the contemporary world. The victory of the Allies over the Axis powers. The Second World War established a new, secular world order based on the rejection of strict hierarchies, liberalism, and materialist equality. The precarious peace it brought about was, like that of Rome, also based on a diabolic compromise. One group (The Americans) literally cast (ref. ballein) an atomic bomb on another group (the Japanese population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The kind of temporary peace it yielded—based again on scapegoating violence—is coming to an end… and if so, could there be a more propitious time to be talking about the renewal of the history of the contemporary world than now? More specifically, could there be a better time to be discussing the role of Africa in universal history?

In order to break away from our stifling cycles of underdevelopment, must we not now learn how to plug into that ultimate power that restores genuine peace to the world—a power that is decidedly neither the ancient Pax Romana nor the modern Pax Americana, but the perennial Pax Christi? Is this not the truest way to regain that Memory of Paradise that we already possess “in embryo” but that we are also in urgent need of cultivating today?

In the liturgies of both the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, the term Anamnesis refers above all to the objective remembrance and actualization (in the here and now) of the Paschal Mystery—the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Lamb who takes away the world’s sins. In the belief systems of these ancient churches of the East and the West, it became (to use Girardian terms) the ontological foundation for the reversal of the mechanism of scapegoating violence, for all men of all times. It rescued their actions from definitive disintegration and grounded them firmly in history.

Perhaps there is still hope for Europe. Perhaps they will remember their former glory and repent. And … perhaps it has already begun with the numerous reported cases of conversions of their young people. Time will tell.

As Memoria, liturgical Anamnesis refers in general to the remembrance of the series of saving events that brought about the renewal of history, but in a very particular way, it refers to the re-enactment of the Institution of the Last Supper.

Active and intelligent participation in Liturgical Anamnesis can serve as a common cure for both the famished African and the prideful European. As a communal people, starving for meaning and seeking an outlet for their rich sacramental imagination, Africans can find, in participating in such a cosmic and salvific event, a remedy for their uncertainty and an anchor for their restless souls. It serves not only as the long-awaited medicine that can redeem our “Zamani mindset” from fossilization, but it also contains within itself the spiritual energy needed to break the curse of fraternal violence. The unmoored European needs the Eucharist to overcome his massive forgetfulness. One of the main tenets of the modernist movement is precisely to methodically eliminate the past in order to start from scratch—hence the word “modern”, which is literally derived from the Latin word “modo”, meaning “now” (understood as the present moment). The modern European needs to be reminded that what ultimately grounds our humanity is our givenness – that the passivity of our “being created” precedes the activity of our acts of creation. Modern man needs to be reminded that we do not give ourselves to ourselves. We receive ourselves as a gift from “others” (our parents, grandparents, and … ancestors) and ultimately from “The Wholly Other”.

We all need to be reinserted into that living stream that grounds history as such. We all need to participate in that memorial event that is available to us daily, in the present, as a memento of the past, and as an anticipation of the future celebration of a life-without-end that will only be fully actualized in the definitive Heavenly City.

***

Epilogue

A nation cannot develop without being rooted in the “living memory” of its ancestors. Without immersion into the depths of this Living Memory, we become proud and thereby short-circuit our capacity to attain the heights of truth. In the modern context in particular, without deep roots, we lose the requisite stability to withstand the tyrannical winds of a “techno-ideological” form of colonization.

Insights into memory from intellectual giants like Augustine of Hippo constitute a rich mine for the exploration of the concept of time and development. If tapped, they could serve as a much-needed hermeneutic for judging authentic human development.

The underlying argument that has informed all the articles in this series on the Memory of Paradise has been that Africa’s underdevelopment is linked not so much to a detachment from its ancestral “memoria” (recall Mbiti’s Zamani – we have that in abundance) but to its detachment from a deeper and more universal Memoria – a hidden and more primordial living “stream” – that undergirds the movement of human time as such.

This Memoria that had been hidden from us since time immemorial was revealed (given as a gift) to us when the “I” of the perennial Word united itself to the “I” of a man. From the moment that the Incarnational event took place, the “reset button of time” was pressed. The reversal of cosmic entropy (of the world’s decay) began. The ontological foundation for the reversal of the scapegoating violence typical of our fallen world was laid. The world’s movement away from chaos/fragmentation and towards meaning began in earnest.

Detachment or estrangement from the dynamics of such an event is sufficient to account for a people’s warped interpretation of time and the movement of history as such. Renewal of cosmic time on such a grand scale (the human being’s conscious participation in such a cosmic change) calls for a “system overhaul” – a reconfiguration of their usual mode of operation. It calls for a reconfiguration that will necessarily rewire the very “nerves and sinews” that make up the warp and woof of their fallen psyches.

If time always implies a certain “flow”, then plunging headlong into the above-mentioned primordial, salutary stream would ultimately involve the process of “grafting” the ever fragmenting “I”s of the human creature into the stable “I” of his Creator. The “I” is the locus whence the conscious human person views reality as a whole. The human “I”, precisely because it is fallen, needs assistance from without (we have Augustine to thank for this insight). It needs redemption (to borrow a term from the Church’s theological tradition). Otherwise, it is perennially besieged by the logic of violence—scapegoating violence being a shortcut or cheat code to the arduous process required for the ontological reparation of the fallen egos.

The logic of reparation dictates that the past, however distant or broken it may be, can be opened up to the present and thereby to the future. Repairing the ontological damages caused by our large-scale existential fallenness requires far-ranging, cosmic restructurings. For instance, historical injustices that have spanned generations require the personal and collective acts of atonement of those who live in the present. Africans already have a trace of this Grammar of Atonement in their numerous acts of ritual atonement, but their awareness of its completion in the Redemption Narrative was rendered ineffective by the manner in which it was proclaimed to them. The narrative that would have helped them “make up for lost time” failed to speak the language of redemption to them. Those who proclaimed the Word to them in their definitive Kairos moment failed to communicate redemption, only oppression and violence. If anything, it sank them even deeper into underdevelopment by exacerbating the pagan cycles of violence they were already caught up in.

True historical progress is brought about when the human psyche is reenergized—this reenergization requires the collaboration of both the human and the divine will. Only when the human will is buoyed up by grace from on high can it transform the world around it. Human labour is, in fact, precisely that: diligent and intelligent application of redeemed human energy into the transformation of creation. Human labor thus elevated becomes co-creation and, in a fallen world, co-redemption: collaboration between the human and the divine.

The perennial reenactment of the one cosmic event that redeemed human action from definitive disintegration is so important that it needs a perpetual sign or symbol in the present lest it be forgotten.

Subscribe now

Introduction

Njoki Karu, Kenyan singer-songwriter and music therapist, released her debut album in February 2025: Mwīhoko: Ûtheri wa Ngoro (Hope: A Light for the Heart). The 11-track album—both musically rich and technically refined—combines influences that include R&B, Afro-pop, and traditional Kenyan rhythms, melodies, and songs. And even more interesting than the artist’s weaving of Kikuyu and Luhya sounds and words together with Western harmonies and instrumentation into a complex tapestry are the album’s themes. The experiences that Njoki gently lays bare in her compositions seem to invite dialogue, which is what the present article hopes to engage in.

Our songwriter’s work follows a simple thematic trajectory. The path that the poetic persona will follow is announced in the very first track, a rendition of one of her grandmother’s favorite hymns, Panapo Pendo (“Where There Is Love”)—a homely extolling of the sweetness of “love”.1 The next two songs, Dance and Fall, describe, on the one hand, immersion into the giddy emotional experience of romantic love and, on the other, the brokenness that follows the conflict and rejection that always seem to hide in romance’s shadow. Anchor portrays the residue left afterwards: actions of “love” that are felt to be pretenses, acted out because of marital vows made before God. And yet, at the very end of the song, there is a rising awareness that even these “pretenses” are only enacted because love is still somehow present, and this inspires hope:

I know in time
love will fix
the intentions all our wisdom broke …

And I know my heart
it’s been lifted
It’s the reason I
I want to
pretend to
‘Cause I love you still.

The remaining songs on the album explore this hope, born always from a deep trust in God:2 (1) a trusting hope that God will heal them both and unite them in a love that He planned from before their birth (Heaven);3 (2) a hope in the strength of God, unhindered by any circumstance, to grant her prayer (Hinya);4 (3) echoing a Kikuyu hymn that splits the album in two (Interlude),5 a hope that will fill the darkness of the pain suffered by the persona, with light—that will erase the meaninglessness of suffering with joy and love, or “turn sorrows to gold”—and restore the joyful freedom hinted at earlier, in Dance (God Only Knows).6 As we will see later, each of these themes is deepened in the climactic final track, Hope.

Njoki’s portrait of hope is enlightening in many ways. One significant aspect of her vision, and the symbolic clarity with which she enables us to see it, is that it reveals a profound problem with this hope that seems so typically Kenyan—and, indeed, typical of the Pentecostal Christianity sweeping across the continent.7

As the artist intuits in Dance and Fall, if we immerse ourselves in a self-interested joy, even the consolation of feeling one’s wounds to be healed, it seems that we will end up empty and hollow. If we focus, for instance, on getting the feeling of having our wounds healed, we turn away from what actually heals them. It is possible to stop loving someone and, instead, to fall in love with the feeling of being in love. In response to this problem, Njoki seems to endorse trusting in God to remove the oppressive emptiness; insofar as one hopes in God to do this, one already, in a sens,e possesses “fullness”—in this case, mutual love (God Only Knows).

However, this “emptiness” is depicted in two problematic ways.

(1) As an oppression by “the evil one”, whom God must conquer and thereby bring about joy and meaning. But if this is so, is fullness simply a return to the previous state that brought about emptiness? Is self-interested joy itself the meaning of our lives, needing only to be secured by God from extrinsic attacks? Or a fairer and deeper critique, which also captures African Pentecostalism more accurately: is suffering purely extrinsic in origin, such that to be “on God’s side” is also to be free from suffering?8 Looking at a crucifix—really looking at one—seems enough to disabuse us of this notion.

(2) As a nebulous, interior experience of meaninglessness. In this case, suffering happens interiorly, but its origin, its root, remains unknown. On such grounds, there is no discernible path out—at least, none that is discernible to us. Simple freedom from suffering, insisted on by Pentecostalism, seems insufficient. God must somehow fill us with meaning without removing suffering. Insofar as we hope in Him to do this, then we already somehow possess meaning, or “light”—hence the title of the album: “Hope: A Light for the Heart”. However, suffering seems to be an experience of darkness, of meaninglessness. Therefore, suffering and meaning seem to be mutually exclusive. So, one might ask: Can God in fact conquer suffering, if even its removal is insufficient?

In the sections that follow, we outline how this dilemma unfolds in the album as Njoki portrays suffering as interior and implies that it also has a historical dimension. Inspired by Leonardo Polo, we will go deeper into the question of suffering and meaning and, on that basis, offer a brief sketch of what it really means for God to overcome suffering. Lastly, we will examine how the finale of the album, Hope, precisely because of its insistence on light, expresses an openness not only to the Pentecostalist view, but also to the second, more fully Christian vision of overcoming suffering, a vision whose historical dimension comes more clearly to light against the background of Njoki Karu’s album.

I. Exploring suffering

a. Dance and Fall: interior brokenness, interior openness

Our singer-songwriter develops the themes outlined in the introduction in four phases. The first of these has two parts: Dance and Fall.

Dance begins with the woman introducing herself as one bearing wounds from a long time ago—possibly from childhood—that time has not healed. It is unclear precisely what these wounds are or where they come from. Nevertheless, the desires that seem to stem from these wounds are vividly described.

On one hand, the wounds seem to be something interior: a “bleeding heart”, or a “tender soul” in which “your loving burns like fire”. There is a longing for an interior experience of a deep love, a love that penetrates into the intimacy of her soul. On the other hand, these wounds seem to have a stark bodily dimension, so that she yearns to be “held close”, “pulled in”, and to dance. She longs to be taken, to be accepted in her body and affirmed as good, desirable, lovable. The two dimensions of these wounds are not at all separate. In fact, it is through this bodily acceptance that she feels her interior, intimate wounds being soothed: “I feel your fragrance soak into my broken skin”; or elsewhere, “Soft and gentle whispers in my bones you speak…”. If the soul and the body are so united that we need the senses to form concepts, then we see here an instance of a close union between physical intimacy on the one hand, and the intimate reaches of the soul—in a word, the “heart”—on the other.

It should be noted, though, that the persona’s focus is almost entirely on her wounds and the feeling of having them soothed. She exults not in being loved, but in feeling “unashamed”. She rejoices not in her lover’s gift of love, but in feeling herself to be “beautiful” and “bold”. And when she “dances”, she does not delight in the freedom or adventure or grace of her partner, but in her own newfound freedom to be as she wishes, to be comfortable in her own skin, “unrestricted, unrestrained”. One soon sees how fleeting any relationship must be if it is based exclusively on these experiences. If what she looks for in the presence of her lover is solely the soothing of her pain, then (1) the desire to be with him ceases as her pain disappears; (2) she is in a poor condition to pay attention to his needs and wounds—her “love” ends up being consumptive, taking and taking and giving nothing in return; (3) he would tend to withdraw his love from her—it is difficult to keep loving when there is no response, to keep giving oneself when that gift is not accepted and one is instead used; (4) she may reject him in anger or he himself may decide to leave her; and (5) because it was his love that alleviated her pain, her wounds would resurface, and she would long to be with him so as to be soothed once again.

This cycle is precisely what we see in the next track on the album, Fall. They are no longer together—it is unclear who left the other, but it happens after a fight between them. But her desire to be with him seems unrelenting, unabated by their separation: “See, even distance can’t stop me from falling…” And just as inexorable as her desire is the brokenness that follows it: “If I fall, when I fall / Let me lay broken…”

Fall also reveals an additional important element of this suffering. Not only is it interior and bodily, but we could say that it also has an intellectual dimension: it is an experience of meaninglessness. The woman prays for “a light that shines” like her absent lover; she is in the dark. She does not know who she is for in a bodily sense: she longs for “those hands that know [her] skin”, for the one who sees and knows not just her body, but her in her bodiliness, and accepts her, desires to be with her. She does not even know what she should long for anymore: the dream that her lover “spoke for her” is lost, beyond retrieval. And still she longs, somewhat, to have him close to her, even by force—a mysterious kind of force, a conjuration, that would compel him to return.

However, Fall is significant for another reason, too: the woman realizes that the cycle must be broken.

If I fall, when I fall
Baby don’t catch me …
If I fall, when I fall
Let me lay broken
And leave me wide open (emphasis added)

She glimpses something in her brokenness, some deeper kind of love: “I guess love is when we learn how to lose a fight…” It is a love that does not compel the other but, instead, allows him to be free. Lifting her gaze from her own wounds, she finds that she can see her beloved. Precisely upon accepting her brokenness rather than attempting to remove it, she discovers that she is able to see him. She describes this as being “wide open”, all laid bare. It is as if she recognizes that her gaze has its seat in a place that was closed up before, a place somehow deeper than her wounds and her desire for healing. The next phase of the album begins with an exploration of this newfound love.

b. Anchor and Heaven: a vulnerable freedom to love

The titular “anchor” of the first of these two songs is ambivalent, continuing the insight described at the end of Fall.

The “anchor” refers to the wedding vows taken by husband and wife, symbolized by the wedding rings around their fingers:

The anchor round my fingers
is the reason I
I pretend to
to want you still

These vows are portrayed ambiguously. First, they are depicted as shackles, albeit shackles that are freely put on:

The vow I vowed
before God
is the reason I
I will hold on
against my will

The pain I see
in your eyes
when you pretend
that you want me
to be free…

They are promises that now demand that the spouses go against the grain. The wife and her husband must both choose to act as they did before, to give each other the attention, time, closeness, and benevolence that they gave each other before, when they felt interiorly moved to do so. This choosing, this freedom, carries with it the suffering and brokenness from before—it does not erase them. She must hold on “against [her] will”; he must “hold [her] tightly” though his own pain is evident. But these wounds were interior and, more than that, they pertain to the heart, so to speak, to the intimate reaches of the soul. They seem to be more than mere passions, superficial psychic-somatic movements having no discernible object. They are not on the level of the blind irritability that can afflict someone because he just “woke up that way”, or the lethargy of someone who has had a heavy meal. Therefore, the freedom that takes up these wounds, that accepts them and chooses to love while bearing them, must have its seat deeper in the human being than those wounds.

This is the second face of the vows: a freedom uncoerced—un-enslaved!—by this suffering and can bear it and still carry out the external motions of love. It is a freedom to love; indeed, it is love. The last words of Anchor confirm this:

I know my heart,
it’s been lifted
It’s the reason I
I want to
pretend to
‘Cause I love you still

Nevertheless, as we see in Heaven, this freedom is not invulnerable. This freer love can also fail, and this provokes an even more profound loneliness, restlessness, and bewilderment. We may say that now, the woman does not just ask: “Who am I for? Is there anyone who is to be mine?” The question cuts deeper: “This loneliness I find myself with, does it have any meaning? Is this what all my years have been leading up to?” And even: “Is this meaninglessness what my birth was leading up to?” Her concern lies on this level, a concern that her freedom seems incapable of resolving. The absurdity she confronts in her incomprehensible loneliness ultimately calls her Origin, her Creator, into question:

I wish heaven would find me
as I battle to keep on breathing
How do I hold my head up high
when you won’t look me in the eye?
Through a rope or a bottle
oh, let me knock on His door and ask why
Let me beg God to take me in…

But it is precisely in this confrontation with her Creator that hope appears. She seems to see something that makes her trust firmly in her Creator, to trust that she is meant for someone, that her present loneliness is not the final word during her lifetime, and that it will be lifted. Speaking to her husband, the persona of Njoki’s album sings:

I know heaven will find me
in a place where your heart will be mine
We’ll be a little less toxic
and we won’t choose to be absent
Here’s my ode to surrender
Here’s my final sigh
I’ll be fine
I know the sun will find me
I know the sun was made to be mine (emphasis added)

The third phase of the album lays out a more detailed vision of the “content”, so to speak, both of this trust and of suffering.

c. Interlude, Njoki’s Prayer, and Hinya: the historical dimension of suffering

The Interlude is, in fact, a recording of Njoki’s mother and her mother’s friends singing a traditional Kikuyu Christian hymn, Mwathani wakwa njakanĩria tawa (My Lord, Light a Lamp for Me).9 Njoki takes up this kigooco song into her own experience.

Suffering is portrayed in the Interlude as (1) darkness:

Mwathani wakwa njakanĩria tawa (My Lord, light a lamp for me)
Nyumĩthwo thutha nĩ nduma nene (I am pursued from behind by a great darkness)
Mbere ciĩruru ihana mahiga (Ahead are shadows like stones)
Kũrĩa thũ cĩakwa injetereire (Where my enemies are waiting for me)

…

In this sense, as in Heaven before, suffering is portrayed as meaninglessness. The sufferer is oppressed by a bewildering obscurity, one that they cannot understand. Even what appears stable and solid (stones) is illusory, impenetrable to their sight, to their understanding (shadows). More importantly, though, this darkness is active: it pursues. Most fundamentally, suffering is portrayed as (2) the will of the evil one opposed to the will of God:

Korũo ũndũ ũcio no ũtuĩke nduma (If that situation should turn into darkness)
Nĩ njũĩ wega ũcio ti wendo waku (I know well that is not Your desire)
Ucio nĩ wendo wa ũrĩa mũrũ. (That is the will of the evil one.)

Thus understood, to suffer is to be subject to “the evil one”, that is, to be physically (or situationally) or morally oppressed by the devil.

In accordance with the above, freedom from suffering is understood as (1) light, whence the title of the song and, even more, its final verse:

Rũgendo rũrũ rwakinya mũthia (When this journey reaches its end)
Nĩnjũĩ wega ngekana mũno (I know well I will rejoice greatly)
Maitho makwa nĩmakerorera (My eyes will look upon)
Ũrĩa nderirwo nĩ ngeyonera (What I was told; I will see it for myself)
Irĩkanĩro ciothe nĩikahinga (All promises will be fulfilled)
Cia andũ arĩa athingu mature na thayũ (For the righteous people to live in peace)
Ngoro-inĩ ciao ĩhurũkĩte. (Their hearts being at rest.)

and more fundamentally, as (2) the power of God who has conquered the evil one, and on whose side one stands by obeying His will:

Ndokĩre gwaku ũkĩnyonia mũhaka (I came to Your place and You showed me the boundary)
Urĩa ũrigĩcĩirie gwaku mũciĩ (That surrounds Your homestead)
Na ũgĩcoka ũkĩnyonia watho (And then You showed me the law/commandment)
Urĩa ũtũraga nyũmba-inĩ yaku (That dwells in Your house)
Nĩguo ndikae kũnyita kaũrũ (So that I may not take up anything evil)
Tondũ woigire mwĩki ũru wothe (Because You said everyone who does evil)
Ucio nĩ mwana wa ũrĩa mũru. (That one is a child of the evil one.)

Freedom from suffering, then, is primarily the removal of an extrinsic oppressive force. While we certainly see an awareness of the relationship between one’s sin and one’s subjection to the devil, it is as if this relationship is not a necessary one. After all, even the one who knows the will of God and trusts in Him may find himself in a situation that “turns into darkness”. Sin seems to be almost accidental and, perhaps, seen only in its external aspect—concrete actions—rather than their deep spiritual reality: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, and slander. These are what defile a man…” (cf. Mt 15:19-20) So, whereas suffering can be interiorly experienced, as we see in the previous songs on the album, this suffering is seen fundamentally as the action of an extrinsic oppressive force: the will of the devil. It is only as such that suffering is darkness, and that freedom from this suffering is “light”, the meaning of one’s life, the destiny one’s whole existence was leading up to: the fulfillment of the “promises” made by the Creator-Redeemer God.

This hymn sinks its roots deep in local history and culture, stemming as it does from Pentecostal movements of confrontation between Christianity and African culture across the continent and, in this case, in Kenya since the 1900s, which sought (and still seek) an African expression of Christianity. In the next two tracks on the album, Njoki seems to unite her experience to this search that long preceded her, thereby outlining a vital dimension of suffering: it is historical.

Njoki’s Prayer expresses this even in its very title. The track is an unpolished recording of a spontaneous prayer in Kikuyu by the artist’s grandmother, Beth Njoki Wamuiga, for her granddaughter, complete with a bodaboda buzzing faintly in the background.10 The artist’s own name is taken from this woman: both are Njoki. And the very next song, Hinya, is a prayer by the younger Njoki, a prayer that expresses the same trust in God, also in Kikuyu:11

Ona kwĩ mbura, ona kwĩ riũa (Whether there is rain, or whether there is sun
Wĩ hinya (You are mighty)
Ona kwĩ nduma, ona kwĩ riũa (Whether there is darkness, or whether there is sun)
Wĩ hinya (You are mighty)

…

And as you soar back to your mighty throne on high
Don’t forget these very humble words of mine…

It is as if Njoki Karu’s own beseeching of the Conqueror-God for aid is a continuation of the desires of her forebears, such that the removal of this suffering/darkness would constitute a certain redemption not just for the artist herself, but also for her forebears, for the promises made to the older would be fulfilled in the younger. And the union between the two is precisely that between ascendant and descendant, parent and child: paternity/maternity and filiation. Because, from the moment that their child is begotten, the parent is constitutively a parent of one who is “flesh of her flesh”, the redemption of the child somehow reaches their own flesh. Because the child could not exist without the father, the redemption of the child is also a revelation of the destiny that the parents’ existence was always already meant for. Likewise, meaninglessness suffered by the child is also an obscurity that afflicts his or her parents. Moreover, we might add that the suffering experienced by a parent, even before he becomes a parent, resounds also in the life of the child, insofar as it is present in the one who is, in a certain (and very real) sense, his origin.

Now, these three tracks contain crucial insights. However, a vital problem remains: is the removal of suffering sufficient? At first glance, it seems to be. But if we consider the matter a bit more pausedly, a question arises regarding the justice and omnipotence of God, precisely the two attributes emphasized in these three tracks—that is, the question of theodicy: if God is all-loving and all-powerful, then why permit suffering to happen in the first place? For if suffering is meaninglessness, then how could it come from an all-loving God who destines me for eternal peace and “great rejoicing”, and whose will cannot fail?

Attempting to address this question would lead us far afield. For the time being, what we must highlight is that the response given to suffering thus far is inadequate. As long as suffering is experienced and indeed (because of its historicity), as long as suffering has ever been experienced, its mere present removal does not suffice to explain it, to fill its darkness with light, to make it meaningful. It is precisely this that must occur if man is to be redeemed: his very suffering must become charged with radiant meaning. Moreover, this must somehow occur not just with respect to present suffering, but also concerning all the suffering that has ever been experienced by human beings. Because of its historical dimension, all of history must be filled with meaning for man to be redeemed. Man’s redemption must somehow include the redemption of history.

The remaining three tracks on the album strain towards such redemption, dimly glimpsed by the one who hopes in God.

II. Exploring hope: God Only Knows (Reprise), and Hope

a. God Only Knows

With God Only Knows, we return to the story left off at Heaven and interrupted by the Interlude.12 The song expresses a firm certainty that, in the future, the husband and wife will reconcile. Rather than focusing on how things might appear to either of them at the moment, the woman seems to take God’s own knowledge alone as trustworthy—the God in whom she has already expressed a solid trust:

We won’t say goodbye, we’ll say hello
‘coz maybe the next time, I won’t have to go and
you will be grown, and I will be old
Oh baby the next time
God only knows…

The artist implies that to know God is to already possess a certainty of the future, even here on earth. While this recalls what we said before regarding the futility of merely removing suffering, we should pay attention to another aspect of the song’s lyrics: knowing God is the basis of hope. Hope is based on knowing the will of the One who destines all things; hope is already a certain possession of the light, the meaning behind all things and events: the love of God. This insight is pushed a little further in the next verse:

We’ll sing and play, take joy in the day and
we’ll laugh and hold, turn sorrows to gold
We’ll climb up trees, get stung by the bees
Oh baby the next time
God only knows… (emphasis added)

It’s unclear where the inspiration for this phrase came from. In a world so globalized (and considering that Njoki was studying at Berklee from 2014-2018), it could have come from the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, a word whose popularity increased sharply in the year 2013 and has continued rising gradually ever since. Nevertheless, what we should highlight here is that not only is hope a possession of “light”, but also that what is hoped for is light. The one who hopes has a certain knowledge that their sorrows—their suffering—will, in the end, either be replaced by joy and beauty or actually become beautiful, radiant with meaning; in a word, she hopes that she will also herself possess the radiant knowledge of God:

…
We’ll be learning to fly
Like birds in the sky
Learning to glow, like old crystal souls

We’ll be following dreams
While riding the wind
Coz baby the next time
We’ll also know
Oh we’ll also know
And we’ll also know
God only knows
God only knows (emphasis added)

Though the second interpretation (suffering itself being filled with meaning) seems unlikely based on what we have seen in the album so far, the final track on the album seems to hint at a glimpse of something like it. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that it is here that we hear the first and last mention of Jesus Christ, who is spoken of as “Light”.

b. Hope

This masterpiece of a finale brings together all the themes explored in the rest of the album. It opens with a two-part electric guitar riff very reminiscent of kigooco music: the major pentatonic scale, the call-and-response pattern, the melodic structure echoing the natural rise and fall of spoken Kikuyu, lively and percussive guitar-playing… From the very beginning, this motif, present in most of the song, sets the unfolding of the song’s theme in its historicity: the one who hopes does so as a son or daughter; that which is hoped for fulfills all that their whole history, which they bear in themselves—in their flesh, received from mother and father—had been directed towards. Then, we see a three-part articulation of the object of the persona’s hope.

The first verse goes like this:

Maybe one day when I’m grown and older
I’ll know what it’s like to live again
Young and free, I’ll breathe a little bolder
Wild with color, I’ll be me again

I hope…

This hope is a hope for freedom, in a bodily sense. It is a hope for a renewal of the body which, when already old, becomes “young” again, “lives” again, and moves more freely. And thus, filled with life and vigor, the woman will no longer be ashamed of being seen as she is, no longer be ashamed of herself in her body, but, instead, will be “bold”. The wounds we saw in Dance will at last be healed, and she will be restored to a former innocence: “I’ll be me again”. This association of life and boldness implies, by opposition, an association of shame with death, vulnerability in the etymological sense: susceptibility to being wounded (vulnerari), to being subjected as a slave to external forces, or to the body itself. Against this, her hope seems to reach towards a mastery of the body, its being filled with an inner life that is radiant and “wild with color”—in a word, toward the undoing of the curse of Eve. However, the question remains: does this healing reach even unto suffering’s deepest roots? Does meaninglessness itself become meaningful?

The next verse looks at the interior dimension of the object of hope:

Maybe one day when I’m tall and wiser
(Eh nikirefuka, erevuka) (When I grow taller, when I become wiser)
See, I’ll reach up into the stars and find
all the questions to the answers barely remembered
and the answers to the questions never asked

I hope

We can already guess that the object of hope is meaning. But this “meaning” is expanded on here: it is both unsuspected and radically familiar. In both cases, it corresponds to questions, which are always an expression of an intellect seeking the truth; therefore, this “meaning” inwardly fills the intellect with the light that it sought, such that the intellect becomes more light—meaning is both new and radically familiar. Moreover, “meaning” is light, knowledge, that is found “in the stars”, in the heavens: it is the light of God Himself. In addition, this light both brings one’s entire personal history back into view and illuminates it with new meaning: “questions to the answers barely remembered”. Njoki portrays the historical depth of the object of hope: meaning reminds us of the past—makes it intimate to us as a question in search of meaning—and illuminates it. And insofar as one hopes, one already in a certain sense possesses this meaning. But again, we must ask, is this “meaning” restricted to the removal of suffering?

The third verse gives voice to an aspect of the object of hope that appears now for the first time, with Fadhilee Itulya responding to Njoki in Kiswahili:

Maybe one day when I’m strong and louder
(Nikipata nguvu, nitawasha nuru) (When I get stronger, I will ignite a light)
I’ll be heard across the seven skies
(Nitasikika, nitaeleweka) (I’ll be heard, I’ll be understood)
With bones like embers and dreams in gold and silver
(Oh, ndoto zangu) (Oh, my dreams)
Ah, one day in this little heart of mine
(Nitawasha taa iliyo ndani yangu!) (I’ll ignite the light that is inside of me!)

Oh there’ll be
Hope…

Hope does not just yearn for meaning; it longs to speak this meaning. Hope does not just yearn to see light, but to become it and thereby show others the meaning of their lives as well, for hope desires not just to be heard or seen, but to be understood. This is meant to happen even in the present life: insofar as the one who hopes in a certain sense already possesses the object of his hope, he is a light that teaches others hope as well, that illumines others with the light of hope.

At this point, Fadhilee leads a chorus in an exultant outburst in Kiluhya (Fadhilee’s own mother tongue) and Kiswahili:

Itaa yanje, Yesu itaa yanje (My light, Jesus is my light!)
Itaa yanje, Yesu itaa yanje (” ”)
Itaa yanje, Yesu itaa yanje (” ”)
Yesu mwana wa Nyasaye itaa yanje (Jesus the Son of God [is] my light!)

…

Yu mwema, Yesu yu mwema (He is good, Jesus is good!)
Yu mwema, Yesu yu mwema (” ”)
Yesu mwana wake Mungu yu mwema (Jesus the Son of God is good!)

Jesus Christ Himself is proclaimed to be the light of hope, a theme that, lamentably, receives no further development. And yet, it seems that it is precisely here that the solution to the difficulty we have been grappling with all along lies: the meaninglessness of suffering itself becoming meaningful. For what else can it mean that the Son of God, the Word, suffers? Because Jesus is true God and true man, a true union of the two, then in Jesus, suffering itself becomes “Expression of the Father”. This is the irruption of a Meaning so profound that it makes even darkness become luminous.13

Nevertheless, though Njoki seems neither to see nor to develop this theme, her vital insights offers a path deeper into it, and into its meaning for sub-Saharan Africa and the world: (1) redemption is both interior and bodily; (2) because it is bodily, redemption is also historical, a redemption of history; (3) this redemption includes each person’s remembrance of the history he bears in his flesh, and the radical illumination of that history.

Share

In the Greek language, there are two distinct but related words for the concept of time: Chronos and Kairos. Both terms derive their meanings from Greek mythology and cosmogony. Chronos was a primordial, serpentine deity—the personification of time itself. He is not to be confused with the Titan Cronus, although they were often confused in ancient times and later conflated in art (this, for example, led to the image of “Father Time” with a scythe, which originally belonged to Cronus). Chronos was the eternal, unending flow of time, an unstoppable and all-devouring force. Kairos, on the other hand, was the son of Zeus and a minor god of opportunity. He was often depicted as a young man with a lock of hair on his forehead and a bald head behind, the explanation behind this imagery being that, as he approaches, you can seize him by his forelock, but once he has passed, you cannot catch him from behind. This visual metaphor perfectly captures the fleeting nature of opportunity.

In our previous articles on the Memory of Paradise, we have attempted to explore both the cosmic and psychic dimensions of time. We have attempted to dialogue with the thoughts of philosophers of history like Dawson, Augustine, and Heidegger. So far, we have arrived at a number of insightful conclusions:

1. The connection between Memoria, Anamnesis, and Zamani: In our first instalment, we started by comparing and contrasting Augustine’s Memoria with the Platonic notion of Anamnesis and with Mbiti’s concept of Zamani. We saw how an Augustinian interpretation of Plato’s concept of Anamnesis is capable of giving us a holistic vision of a “now” in time that can hold together the chronological past, the actual present, and the possible future in one continuous stream of consciousness. We concluded in that first instalment of our series that Anamnesis thus understood (as an original memory that serves as the ontological ground of our being and a portal to the distant future) can actually liberate the African who still feels trapped in the graveyard of Mbiti’s Zamani.

2. Heidegger’s Dasein and the constraining effects of a technocratic mindset: In our second instalment, we paid tribute to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein as one of the best attempts by a contemporary philosopher to return to a more metaphysical appreciation of history and time. Heidegger understood Dasein to be a temporal mode of existing that is particular to the human subject. For him, Dasein was, above all else, an ontic phenomenon and not a merely psychic one. We subsequently drew on Heidegger’s insights into Dasein to offer a brief commentary on his critique of modern technology. We touched on the negative effects that a technocratic mindset might have on a proper understanding of Dasein in particular and Sein in general. We saw how we (as modern Africans), who are arguably still more rooted in physis (nature) than in techne (technology), may retain that more primordial appreciation of being as a “given” or—at the very least—as a “handed-down” reality. We still treasure “deep memory” in our traditional stories and native languages as well as in our “memorials-of-time” and “monuments-of-place”. We concluded that, thanks to our Zamani mindset (which, despite its positive features, is nevertheless still in need of redemption), we Africans may still have a greater chance at accessing an authentic Memory of Paradise than any sophisticated technocratic modern would ever dream of.

3. Modernity’s amnesia and the fragmentation crisis: Finally, attempting to unite these complex notions, we saw how a proper appreciation of the notions of Anamnesis, Zamani, and Dasein might be the solution to help break contemporary man out of his existential emptiness, an emptiness that leads to a collapse of meaning and to ever deeper states of inner fragmentation. We saw how (if properly assimilated and embodied), these notions may also possess within themselves, the potential of salvaging arrogant, self-made, technocratic, modern man from his cosmic and psychic flight from this world—a world which despite its evident deficiencies, is still the only planet “given” to all of us to inhabit as a home … as a paradise.

In this second-to-last instalment, we would like to push even further the conclusions we’ve arrived at so far. In particular, we would like to go deeper into the notion of psychic time and attempt to bring out its qualitative connection to Kairos time. We would like to make the case that, much as individual persons have certain opportune moments wherein they “come of age”; so too do peoples, nations, and civilizations have certain ordained Kairos times when they, too, are invited to “come of age”. We argue that the mere openness of the present to the past and to the future does not suffice to help us fully appreciate the nature of time. A “Kairotic” appreciation of time is also necessary. In short, there is a qualitative, or “carpe diem” dimension to time that can only be revealed to us if we incorporate the key ingredient of man’s free will. It is, in fact, these so-called “Kairotic [MOU3] appropriations” of the moments of grace offered to us that open up a people to its ultimate destiny—to its fulfilling itself in history. Whenever we, as free and rational beings, fail to discern and act upon said Kairotic moments, time as such eludes us. We are left—as in the myth of Kairos—in the paradoxical position of someone who tries (in vain) to catch Kairos from behind.

Kairos events as revelatory moments of grace

From the above reflections, an important insight is already emerging. It seems that Kairos time is the reason why Chronos time exists in the first place. Kairos time enables Chronos time to somehow transcend itself. Chronos, as the mere passage of time, remains barren if she is not impregnated by the seed of a Kairos event. It is slowly emerging that as an ontological event, psychic time is somehow only ever justified and fulfilled (i.e. fully-filled) when the seed planted inside the womb of Chronos, produces lasting fruit.

The notion of Kairos time is not completely foreign to our secular, modernist mindsets. A basketball player might have ten seconds left on the clock (Chronos), but the perfect moment (Kairos) to take the game-winning shot is when they have an open lane and the defenders are out of position. A skilled orator knows that it’s not just what you say, but when you say it. A sudden shift in the audience’s mood or an unexpected event can create a Kairos—the perfect moment to deliver a specific message for maximum impact. Julius Caesar’s decision to cross the Rubicon at the time when he crossed it and in the precise circumstances that confronted him was a Kairos event. Another example: the enduring works of art created by those artists who—to our shortsighted eyes—are acting upon fleeting impulses yet end up producing cultural treasures worthy of immortalization. If those artists hadn’t acted when and as they acted, would our cultural spaces still whisper their names? Would their works remind us of who we are had they not communed with Kairos, the son of Zeus and the god of opportunity?

In the Christian worldview, Kairos moments have traditionally been interpreted as critical moments when the all-powerful, all-present God reveals his Will more evidently and deliberately. During such revelatory moments of grace, profound spiritual awakenings are experienced by the protagonists—by those who freely choose to accept and act deliberately on said moments of grace. One of the most common tropes in the Old Testament narratives is that of the divine Will manifesting itself again and again; and time and time again, its being met by rejection. In the Old Testament, we encounter a people in anticipation of a moment, a time, an event, a Messiah, yet tragically incapable of seizing those moments when they arrive.

In the New Testament, a new trope emerges. It is the idea that the moment, the time, the key event HAS arrived; not just for the chosen people—the Jews—but for ALL men. The word Kairos and its cognates appear around 90 times in the New Testament. Perhaps the most important and well-known Kairotic moment in the New Testament is the one mentioned in St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians 4:4:

“But when the set time [kairos] had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law”.

For the New Testament authors, this moment wasn’t just a point on a chronological timeline (chronos), but a qualitative, decisive moment of eternal significance. In the prologue to his Gospel, John—the other linguistically sensitive and philosophically-minded theologian of the New Testament—makes it explicit that only those who accept that single critical Kairos moment mentioned above get to receive illumination on their historical path. Those who reject it remain in [existential] darkness. The idea of a God acting at a decisive, perfect time for the salvation of men permeates the entire narrative of John’s Gospel. It is full of Jesus’ repeated references to what we have referred to above as Kairotic moments, e.g., “My hour has not yet come” or “the hour (the appointed time) has come”.

The metaphysical basis of time in the doctrine of creation Ex Nihilo

About 1300 years after the New Testament’s introduction of the Kairos-related concepts mentioned above, such as the “appointed time” and the “fullness of time”, and about 800 years after Augustine had written the City of God, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) articulated one of the most metaphysically coherent and wholesome concepts of time known to Christendom. Aquinas alludes to a philosophy of time when expounding on the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (See S. Th. III, Q3. A3). For Aquinas, the act of creation is not a mere change or transformation because, in normal changes, there is a “something” before and a “new something” after. In the act of creation ex nihilo, there was “nothing” (there wasn’t anything) before, and after the act of creation, there is “a completely new something”. Creation, says Aquinas, is neither in time nor in space. As a unique act of God, creation is in God. God is somehow continually creating that which is receiving the act of creation. As a continual act, it is He who necessarily holds a thing’s be-ing in space and time. Were He to stop holding it in existence, even for a split second, it would not merely die or fragment or decay; its whole being would instantaneously revert to the nothingness (nihilo) from whence it came, i.e., it would be an-nihil-ated.

God—the only being who exists necessarily and autonomously (the Ipsum Esse Subsistens in Latin)—is therefore the deepest ground of every creature’s ontological identity. From this perspective, for a creature who is necessarily sustained in being by the Ipsum Esse, time has to be reinterpreted to mean “endurance in God’s being”. Hence, created things are not and cannot be autonomous. Creation is necessarily a kind of relationship of the creature with the Creator—a relationship infused with a continual freshness of being.1

Neither are created things to be considered as “part” of God. His being is essentially different from that of His creatures, and yet His otherness remains utterly congruent with His closeness to His creatures. God’s being is, as it were, being poured into them in ever-fresh ways; but they do not become God because they exist within limited essences or finite structures of existence… as would happen in the case of a container that is always being filled with water but does not thereby become that water.

If then all created things are continually receiving their being from the One Who Is TO BE ITSELF, this also implies that these things are simultaneously continually revealing or shining forth something of “That One Ineffable Being” that holds them in existence—and always through the prism of their finite essences.

This capacity that things have to reveal something of “That One Being” without being able to exhaust “This Being” in the process, is—in my humble opinion—what Heidegger was trying to get at with his notion of Dasein. The way Being (Sein in German) is revealed in the case of the human subject differs greatly from the way being is revealed in the case of, say, a cat, a dog, or a rock. Every human subject reveals something of This Being in new and ever-fresh ways, through the prism of their free and rational natures. While Heidegger saw time as a mode of being-in-the-world and rejected a purely “chronometric” view, he (in my opinion at least) overemphasized man’s finitude and his isolated confrontation with mortality. He did not sufficiently insist on the fact that human existence is above all, a gift—a “received being”—that places us in the world, and that it is in the state of continual transition from one moment to another. Heidegger’s focus on finitude restricted the ontological question. It did not, as was the case for Aquinas, enlarge the borders of human finitude to include the possibility of an eternal horizon.

The relationship between creation Ex Nihilo’s relationship and Chronos and Kairos time

Recall that Aristotle believed the world to be coeternal with God, meaning that it was not created in time. Guided by Christian revelation, however, Aquinas asserted that only the Word (the Logos) was “in the beginning with God,” thereby establishing the creation of the world in time and correcting Aristotle’s view of an uncreated, coeternal world.

Chronos time relates more to the essential structure of the cosmos and how it relates continually to the ground of its being. Kairos time, on the other hand, seems to relate more to the cosmos as an entity that is continually being willed into existence. Human history may be founded on order and reason, but what fundamentally drives it towards its ultimate end is will. G. K. Chesterton brings out this idea quite masterfully and delightfully in his book, Orthodoxy. He argues that the regularity of the universe (e.g., the sun rising every morning) should not be seen as a mere mechanical law of “inevitable recurrence,” as a materialist would, but rather as a repeated, deliberate act of will by a Creator. Each sunrise is a fresh, voluntary “encore” requested by God, much like a child who delights in a game being played over and over again. Such an outlook, Chesterton argues, has the potential of transforming ordinary everyday stuff into a continuous series of miracles.

Chronos time can explain how a sovereign God can orchestrate all events and how everything can take place with the regularity and rigidity of a ticking clock, but it cannot explain how such a sovereign could allow for human free will to periodically interfere with His unchangeable, pristine plans. Scholastic Theologians explained this “two-will problem” away by appealing to the concepts of God’s direct (or decretive) will and His indirect (or permissive) will. God’s direct will is his sovereign, overarching, and unchangeable plan that encompasses everything that happens. It is the will by which God actively causes or decrees something to happen, and it is impossible for it not to come to pass. God’s indirect will, on the other hand, refers to what He allows to happen, even if it goes against His perfect, moral commands. It is the means by which He accommodates human free will, whilst allowing it to simultaneously remain subject to His direct will. Being all-powerful, God can permit evil without ever directly causing or approving of it.

To summarize. It can be loosely said that Chronos events fall neatly under God’s decretive will, whereas Kairos events, despite being chronos-logical (sic), can be said to fall neatly under the radar of God’s permissive will. God can permit certain acts precisely because they have the potential of serving His perfect and ultimate will. Both Chronos (time as flux) and Kairos (time as opportune) dovetail seamlessly with Aquinas’ doctrine of creation ex nihilo. In the Gospel narratives of the New Testament, the crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate example of this two-wills concept. The rebellious acts of Judas, the Pharisees, and the Roman soldiers were part of God’s permissive will, but the overall event was absolutely part of His decretive, saving plan.

Reconciling the “Kairos time-split” between freedom and fate after the Fall

After man’s fall from grace, death entered the world. The earth did not fall back into nothingness; it endured instead as a desert wasteland. The glory it formerly had as a garden of delight only endured as a vague memory—as a Memory of a Lost Paradise. Time (and by extension, space) became barren. It lost its potential for bearing fruit—for going beyond itself. The Chronos element of time was retained, but its Kairos component was compromised. A rift was introduced between heaven and earth.

Recall that for Aquinas, grace was an undeserved and free help from God that empowers the human will to act in accordance with His plan. Grace does not destroy a person’s freedom; rather, it enables the will to do what it was meant to do—to choose well and ultimately to achieve transcendence … salvation.

Recall too the medieval dictum, “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver”, which implies that our state of mind influences how we interpret and understand new information. In short, we receive things not as they are, but as we are. This principle can help explain why grace is so often rejected. The shedding of the light of grace into a world that has no memory of paradise can appear terrifying and grotesque, like the shadows on Plato’s cave. Oftentimes, this tension between the human and the divine takes the form of a violent interaction. In such instances, the imperfect human will experiences the final resolution as a painful incursion of grace that shatters its false sense of freedom, forcing it to confront the reality of a Will greater than its own.

After the fall from grace of our first parents, any notable historical development of a nation or a people could only take place in protagonists who willingly submitted themselves to the power of this greater force. The more men lived in this “fear of the Lord”, the more concretely and clearly effective their Anamnesis of the Creator became. Wherever this Anamnesis—this original memory of good and evil—became corrupted or sullied, authentic human development waned or stopped completely. A very quick glance at the dispositions of some well-known historical characters would suffice to illustrate this point: the steadfastness to truth of a Socrates in Athens heeding the voice of his daimon; a Cyrus the Great in Persia liberating the Jews from Babylon; the devotion to the liturgy of the hours of a Benedict in 6^th-century Italy; the eagerness of a Charlemagne in 8^th-century France to spread knowledge; the nonviolent resistance of a Gandhi in India;, the resilience of a Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama; the commitment to reconciliation of a Mandela in South Africa, etc. All these were willful agents of grace who altered the course of history because they struggled to maintain the moral integrity of their wills. They are all men who refused to stifle the ontological foundation of their being, despite the pressures of social and cultural conformity. The Anamnesis (deep memory) of the Creator was never for them an isolated or random act; it was a habitus of a Charlemagne in 8^th-century Francea lasting ontic quality.

Similarly, ever since the expulsion of our first parents from the Garden, there was in all peoples an anticipation of a renewal of the Divine Plan. And as has been mentioned above, when the anticipated time (Kairos) eventually came, divine fate finally found a human will in which it could rest secure… or as scripture prefers to phrase it—“mercy and truth met; justice and peace [finally] embraced” (See Ps. 85:10). The Good News of the New Testament was (and still is) precisely that in the person of Jesus Christ, we have been offered a lasting reconciliation between the human and the divine will. Through Him and in Him, our fragile human wills can now move (or limp) towards a future salvation that is already present in our current lives.

The anticipated restoration between God and man did not take place in fact (in re), but in hope (in spe). The reunification of freedom and fate wasn’t given as an automatic, one-size-fits-all formula. History had to run its course; freedom cannot be forced:

… unlike technological and material progress, which can be accumulated, progress in the ethical and moral sphere is not automatic. Each person and each generation must make their own fundamental decisions for the good anew. They can build on the knowledge of those who came before them, but are also free to reject it. This inherent human freedom means that a perfect, definitive “kingdom of the good” can never be established solely through external structures or human effort in this world; it requires the continuous, free commitment of each generation.2

Even though the “door of death” had finally been opened to all men of good will, each of them had to choose to enter it freely. Freedom, by definition, cannot be forced.

Even though the certainty of a future that goes beyond death and emptiness had been offered, history still had to run its course for each people. Each nation and each generation must make its own fundamental decisions.

The full plan of renewal for all men of all times will only be seen when chronological time comes to an end—i.e., in the Eschaton.

Augustine’s insights on Kairos-time

Augustine was no stranger to the concept of Kairos. It was not without reason that he was given the honorific title—Doctor Gratiae—Doctor of Grace. He pondered at length on the mysteries of free will and grace and left us some very important insights. From his own personal experience, he noted that though our wills are free, they are corrupted by sin and can only be freed by God’s grace. Grace was, for Augustine, a sine qua non for salvation. Unlike the ancient Greeks (Socrates in particular), he understood that the human will is free and not free at the same time and that, therefore, it cannot simply do what the intellect recommends to it. Rather, he observed that the will is embedded in our emotions and sentiments—in the unconscious or preconscious decisions of our life. His controversy with the heresy of Pelagius is well-known. He vehemently condemned the Pelagian idea that human free will could achieve salvation on its own terms.

At some point before his conversion, it dawned on him that because he was so distracted by worldly matters, he might fail to recognize or respond to the presence and call of Jesus Christ when the opportunity arose. This was one of his key Kairos moments. In one of his later homilies (See Sermon 88), he recounted this incident:

“I fear Christ will pass by me and I will not notice”. (In the original Latin: Timeo Dominum transeuntem).

Later on, in his De Trinitate (On the Trinity), he developed a psychological analogy for the Trinity within the human mind, where he famously assigned the Intellect to the Son (as the Father’s Wisdom or Word), the Will to the Holy Spirit (as the Love or Gift that proceeds from the Father and the Son) and Memory (understood in the sense we have been describing above so far) to the Father. For Augustine, fatherhood was primarily distinguished by the notion of an original ontological precedence—a fount of creation that is literally timeless. The Son was the restorer of the Father’s prototypical plan of creation. The taking on of flesh by the Father’s Wisdom implied that he was the restorer of all flesh—of material creation as such. The Spirit was the Father’s freedom—as unpredictable as the wind and as fierce as fire—intervening as and when He wills.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who lived some 300 years before Augustine, had also attempted to map the actions of the Trinity onto the logic of human history. One might be tempted to assume that for these early Patristics, the natural trajectory of history would be an ascent from Father to Son and then to liberation, to the Spirit. As history has it, the order of Persons is exactly the reverse. The Spirit has his place at the beginning as the scarcely perceptible guide and the leader of mankind; he leads us to the Son and through the Son to the Father—the timeless fount of all things visible and invisible.

Conclusion

Chronos is quantitative, chronological time, whereas Kairos is qualitative, opportune time. Kairos time brings meaning and fulfilment to Chronos time.

The word Kairos is used extensively in the New Testament of the Bible to designate fulfillment of time. According to the Scriptures, the key Kairos event of history is the critical moment in time when the divine meaning of the entire cosmos—the Logos—took flesh and became man. When this Kairos event “invaded” history, the existence of a future with a timeless God “spilled over” into the present. It changed the mindset of those who assimilated this new worldview and helped them rebuild a new world. It opened up time into a future that is no longer exposed to death.

Aquinas interprets time as a creature’s endurance in the Creator’s autonomous existence. The Anamnesis of creation is a creature’s continual attachment to and recollection of this ground of its being. Anamnesis is a deep memory of the Creator in the creature—an ontic habit that is present in all men of good will—those who have refused to stifle the voice of being that echoes in their hearts; those who, to borrow a biblical phrase, “fear the Lord”. Such men happen to be the real protagonists of history because they are properly rooted in and attuned to Being as such. For as long as men remain open to this Anamnesis of the creation, time also remains open to fulfilment and, with it, to genuine development.

Mbiti’s Zamani is a degenerate form of the Anamnesis of creation. The African communities that subscribe to it are connected to a semblance of deep memory; however, this memory is not sufficiently primordial because it does not go all the way back to the primordial Creator. The ancestors are mediators between us and the Creator—they are not the absolute beginning. Zamani is the enduring memory of the great father-figures of our African communities. Zamani may be a deep past that affects the present, but it does not go much further. This, in fact, is where the connection between Mbiti’s Zamani and Augustine’s Anamnesis ends. Since our forefathers are all dead, and since in dying they remained in death, they have not managed to chart a path out of the realm of the dead for us. Also, since our memory of them is so vague and it has not been explicitly revealed to us whether they mean well or ill for us, we live in veneration of them, but even more in fear. Mbiti’s Zamani implies we are stuck in the past; historically, psychologically, philosophically, and spiritually.

When, in his 1837 work, The Philosophy of History, Hegel said that Africa is “no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit …”, he did not mean that Africa has no experience of Chronos time—all peoples endure that kind of time. He was referring to time understood as Kairos… the implication being that, when it comes to the revelation or unfolding of the Spirit (Geist in German) in history, we have not really experienced our Kairos moment; or that, by 1837, compared to Eastern and Western Europe, we had not been exposed to our Kairos moment(s). We shall develop this theme further in the next (and last) installment of Memory of Paradise.

For the longest time, Europe’s historical development was sustained by the Anamnesis of creation. Philosophically, Europeans would interpret everything from the standpoint of Esse (autonomous existence), with God as the ultimate Ens Subsistens (Self-Sufficient Being) and the necessary ground of all created beings (ens non subsistens). A paradigm shift—a veritable philosophical “Copernican Revolution” took place in modern thought that shifted the European’s ontological lens from understanding reality in terms of Esse (existence) and the Ens Subsistens to prioritizing the human subject; a shift largely attributable to the philosophy of René Descartes. Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum) implied that the ens cogitans (the thinking being) or the knowing human subject now had preeminence over the Ens Subsistens.

It was this new approach, which focused on human consciousness and subjectivity rather than objective existence as the primary reality, that led to various modern ideologies and an erroneous philosophical anthropology that lost touch with the true meaning of the human person and their place in the order of things. The True Hope that had hitherto sustained the genuine human progress in Europe was slowly being replaced by the dream of a man-made Utopia. Modernity really did try to substitute Hope with Utopia—a paradisiacal “perfect” society, made on their own terms. The Anamnesis of creation had died in their hearts. Soon enough, the utopian dream became a dystopian nightmare and for the next four or five centuries, this spirit of rebellion spread in the world like a wild fire scattered by a hurricane … in Napoleon’s France, in Hitler’s Germany, in Stalin’s Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, in Mao’s China, in the 1^st and 2^nd World Wars, in Auschwitz and Dachau, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the gulags and genocides ….

Europe was reaping what it had sown—the cost of hubristically separating themselves from the ultimate source of Being. And it was this rebellious vision of history and metaphysics that they brought with them when they came to Africa.

Subscribe now

(Long post ahead.)

In the first part of this article, we responded to the first of Robert Odero’s reflections on “The Memory of Paradise”, deepening the “vision of the future”, the hope in the afterlife, that he proposed as a necessary counterpoint to a certain African fixation on the past.

More specifically, we proposed adding what we could call a “third dimension” to his notion of hope and the future: rather than hope being a desire for a future that has not yet occurred (an image of the future), hope is, instead, the very beginning or “possession” of that future. Basing ourselves on Leonardo Polo’s notion of “transcendental freedom”, we saw, inter alia, that insofar as we hope, the future is already present in us as future, that is, as an active or effusive openness towards the Transcendent God, an openness that, when elevated by grace, is a participation in Him. In a sense, this “natural”, creaturely hope is not a yearning for future salvation but, instead, the very beginning of salvation, a certain commencement of an ever-increasing and ever-deepening union with God. In the words of Tertullian nearly two millennia ago, “Anima naturaliter Christiana” – the soul is Christian by nature.1 And when this hope is elevated by grace, it becomes the supernatural hope of which St. Paul says: “For in hope we were saved”.2 Such hope, whether creaturely or elevated by grace, is not fundamentally an action; instead, it is a hope that we radically are.

Against this background, we suggested that the African post-colonial crisis, the “breaking of the past”, is in fact

an opportunity to turn towards the future – or instead, to become the turning-towards-the-Transcendent that is future; in other words, to hope. … The breaking of the tribe confounds the word that was transmitted from generation to generation [and is] a stark revelation that [that word] lacks the vigor to make sense of the world. For that reason, the breaking compels us to seek a deeper meaning, a deeper light – and ultimately, a deeper Word.

Yet, in this light, it would seem that any desire to recover our origins is, at best, a waste of time. It would appear not only that the past is broken, but also that there exists a path towards fulfilment, meaning, and identity that has no use for it. What are we to make, then, of the “strong desire to cling to the living memory of our forefathers” of which Odero speaks? Do our cultures have a place in the modern world, or in the Church? In the poignant words of Francis Nyatundo: is it possible to be both truly African and truly Christian? Indeed, is it possible to be truly African today? Or must the African instead abandon his “Africanness” and either seek to be Christian, adopt a totalizing vision of Islam,3 or fall into the pit of modern secularism, so that even in the rejection of Christianity, his African identity is obsolete? Can the African only approach the Christian faith and the modern world as an orphan without lineage?

In this second part of our response, we focus our attention on the second of Odero’s reflections, which probes the question of the contemporary significance of African memory or, if you will, African nostalgia.

Of course, Odero is not the first to address this question (though his response to it presents a crucial step forward). Of those who have, one figure stands out: Léopold Sédar Senghor. In fact, reading this Senegalese statesman-poet, one gets the impression that, above all, it is with the thought of this intellectual giant that Odero dialogues in all his writings. Accordingly, in what follows, we first lay out Senghor’s “African memory”, that is, his reflections on African identity, or négritude. As we will see, his négritude is intimately tied to a certain reductionist materialism that undercuts his otherwise incisive affirmations. Next, we outline Odero’s response: a notion of “memory” that unites “psychic time and cosmic time” – in other words, an attempt to both firmly assert the interiority of the human person and ground it ontologically, an aim that he sees hinted at in Heidegger’s Being and Time (regardless of whether Heidegger actually achieves this aim). However, while Odero points in the right direction, his characterization of memory is ultimately incapable of attaining the ontological grounding that he seeks. To resolve this problem, we draw on the transcendental anthropology of Leonardo Polo to develop a notion of memory that engages the human being in his most intimate depths: the personal act of being. On this basis, we arrive at a surprising conclusion regarding the profound and perennial significance of Africa’s past.

Senghor’s négritude: radiant blackness, tainted

Perhaps no other writer has captured the concept of Senghor’s négritude better than Sylvia Washington Bâ. Senghor himself would probably be the first to agree with this claim. In the preface to Bâ’s famous book published in 1973, The Concept of Négritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese intellectual writes with his characteristic lyricism:

It is a curious sensation for a writer, especially a poet, to feel that he has been understood yet, at the same time, exposed and laid bare. He has been understood and he does not know whether to rejoice or to despair. It is an even stranger feeling to have someone show you in your own work thoughts you did not know you had had, feelings you did not know you had felt. And that was the jolt I had when I read Sylvia Washington Ba’s dissertation, revised and transformed into this book.

Accordingly, we rely on her work for our understanding of négritude in all that follows.

Senghor was born in 1906 in colonial Senegal. His keen mind obtained him a scholarship to study in Paris in 1928. However, at 25 years of age, after finishing his literary studies, the Senegalese poet found himself in a crisis. On the one hand, the French ostensibly operated under the policy of “assimilation” with respect to the subjects of the French Empire. Assimilation was based on the rationalist legalism that characterized revolutionary France:4 by education in French culture and, above all, subjection to her laws – universally valid expressions of universal reason – these subjects would adopt and be inducted into the French republican project and thereby become “French citizens”, sharers in the French national identity, without losing their own distinct, private beliefs and practices (or at least, that was the stated intention).5 However, on the other hand, Senghor would soon note discrepancies between theory and practice in the French political and social policy of the era. And though these discrepancies consisted of an inequality of treatment in material and institutional terms, these were just symptoms of a deeper problem: a profound contempt, on the part of the French, for the black man.6 This, in turn, meant for the black man (be he West Indian, American, or African) an alienation from his identity in social and political life, where he would be treated not as “another man” but, instead, as a “less-than-man”, as fundamentally inferior.7 In later years, Senghor would describe that experience in poignant words:

Black and colonized, black and naked, in the “shock of being seen” by the corrosive eye of the white man. . . . They had no patrimony: they had thought nothing, built nothing, sung nothing. They were nothingness itself, in the depths of the abyss, in the absoluteness of despair.

It was Senghor’s reflection on this experience and on “black identity” that birthed his concept of négritude, an idea that he would later develop through assiduous study and continued refinement. For this statesman-poet, négritude is, quite simply, the way of being of the black man, which is ultimately an “African way of being” – even for the African-American, the African-Caribbean, and other “peoples of African descent”. According to Senghor, this way of being is characterized by the primacy of a kind of “physical intuition” in one’s perception of the universe. In contrast to analytical reason, or even the “intellection” of essences, Senghor claims that, for the black African, primacy is instead accorded to a sensuous participation in the Other, a participation in the Other’s vitality:

In contrast to the classic European, the Negro African does not draw a line between himself and the object; he does not hold it at a distance, nor does he merely look at it and analyze it. After holding it in a distance, he takes it vibrant in his hands, careful not to kill it or fix it. He touches it, feels it, smells it. … He lives a common life with the Other; he lives in a symbiosis. Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am”. The Negro African could say, “I feel, I dance the Other; I am.”8

Senghor also holds that this mode of perception is itself rooted in an ontology: a notion or vision of being as life or vitality. The fact that life is received from one’s parents lies at the heart of, and finds expression in, cultural elements common to the “black African”,9 including: (i) a monotheistic belief in a (distant) Creator God, ultimate source of life, often portrayed in “black African” myths as the Creator of the first man and the first woman, progenitors of humankind; (ii) the belief in (created) spirits (the fount or depository of the vitality of certain natural phenomena – being is seen as alive); (iii) the veneration of the ancestors who, because of their priority of existence, are nearer to God, the supreme source of life; (iv) the revolving of one’s existence around manifestation and transmission of life or vitality; (v) a high esteem for the woman-mother, succinctly expressed in a proverb of the Serer, the people of Senghor himself: “It is the womb that ennobles”; (vi) a primacy of rhythm in his music, a fact to which musicologists attest; and (vii) an emphasis on the “bodily” dimension of the spoken word as itself a bearer of meaning, and on the bodily form of its referent as sharing in – incarnating – an underlying, vital reality. 10

Now, it is evident that “vitality” is not exclusively biological. It is pervaded by interiority – perception, veneration, fraternal and communal bonds, etc. Nevertheless, for Senghor, the biological dimension has a certain primacy: man is real insofar as he is bodily alive; all else is secondary (perhaps even an “alienation”, to use that Marxist term with which Senghor was well acquainted). Even the ancestors seem somehow to live on in the memory and ceremonial dances of the living. Of course, the poetry of Senghor is filled with a vivid, embodied interiority that unites sensuous perception with a keen vision into reality. However, in his theoretical works, Senghor fails to coherently express the union of sensuous perception with interiority that elevates the former rather than diminishing the latter. Perhaps it was the influence of a love for a Marxist acknowledgement, by the revolutionary West Indians he encountered in France, of the realities of the situation of black Africans under French assimilation, inequalities ignored under the formal “equality before the law” that the French legal order declared, that led him to cling so strongly to this reductionist primacy of the biological, the material. Still, the poet within him dared to shun resentment and violence, yearned for a peaceful brotherhood between Europeans and Africans, and penetrated deeply into the Other whom he regarded. Thus, Senghor, who might otherwise have been a resentful and violent revolutionary, was instead a statesman who championed a vision that continues being a grand contribution to resolving the African post-colonial crisis, even though his vision needs to be purified. And to the extent that négritude expresses a real worldview of African peoples, then the cultures of these peoples, too, require purification.

Odero’s memory: the union of “psychic time and cosmic time”

Turning to Odero, just as Senghor’s engagement with Marx was less interested in the questions that concerned the German firebrand than in the relationship of some of his ideas to the topic of African identity, so Odero’s reflections on memory may be profitably understood not only – and perhaps not even primarily – as an engagement with the core problem that Heidegger addresses but, instead, as referring one of Heidegger’s ideas to the same question that preoccupied Senghor. Moreover, Odero’s thought, in general, evinces a lively dialogue with the concept of négritude.11 For this reason, it is profitable to examine Odero’s reflections against the conception of négritude we have laid out thus far: a radiant notion that requires purification from a certain materialism that would situate reality primarily in the body. Viewed in this light, Odero seems to insist on both the realness of human interiority and its “ontological” grounding which, for him, always additionally means embodiment, incarnation.

Nevertheless, Odero’s proposal of an ontological grounding of human interiority, or the human “subject”, the “I”, is inspired by an idea of Heidegger that responds to a central problem in Kantian, Hegelian and post-Hegelian thought: the transcendental subject. So, let’s briefly examine this idea.

The “transcendental subject” and the rejection of truth

The “transcendental subject”12 is a topic that originates with Immanuel Kant. This idea responds to two positions:

(1) Réné Descartes’s methodic doubt, that is, his refusal to accept anything as true if it is possible to doubt it, so as to attain certainty.

This is ultimately a rejection of objective truth (i.e., of the truth of mental objects that appear in our consciousness) and its replacement with the criterion of subjective certainty. This “certainty” is not a quality of the mental object itself but, instead, of the will. For “certainty” has to do with our adhesion to a mental object, our acceptance of it as true – it has to do with an act of the subject, a voluntary act. “Certainty”, then, is a criterion that lies not in the mental object but, instead, in our attitude towards it. Therefore, the proper criterion for assenting to a mental object should lie in that object, if the adhesion of the will is to be justified. Establishing the adhesion of the will itself as the criterion for assent seems to be an unjustified mistrust of consciousness, a fear of diminishing a posited supremacy of the human will.

In any case, it is because of this attitude that Descartes espouses a certain intuitionism, that is, the primacy of “simple and pure intuition”, of unmediated knowledge that seems to need no subsequent act of adhesion. Hence his rationalist notion of “innate ideas” that would form the basis of all knowledge – his rationalism is, first and foremost, a voluntarism.

(2) David Hume’s empirical skepticism, that is, a rejection of such innate ideas as the basis of knowledge, and a reduction of all ideas, or mental objects, to sense impressions. Instead of innate ideas, Hume would insist that (sense) experience is the standard of proof or disproof of rational judgments. This, of course, implies the rejection of all universal notions and their ultimate reduction to discrete, immediate sense apprehensions of particular cases. Consequently, there is no “self”, for instance. For the self is not any sense impression, nor any derivation from sense impressions, but instead the subject to which these impressions and their derivations are supposed to have a reference. Nor is there causality, because the relationship between a “cause” and its supposed effect would be, at best, probable.

However, the “particular case” is not, in fact, the direct result of an immediate sense apprehension. Instead, it is the application, or intentional referral, of a general idea to a mental object (something like a “particular” form abstracted from the sense impressions left by the thing that affects our senses). For instance, the individual case, “this wall”, is the application to the mental object (the lowest, most immediate mental “image” of the wall being looked at) of a general idea (that is, the idea of “that kind of thing”, already distinct from all particularities of the individual wall being looked at – an idea that eventually corresponds to a name, “wall”). To speak of the case as a mental “impression” seems to be the result of a confusion of general ideas with mental objects.

But more radical in Hume’s thought is his reduction of experience to exclude all generalities – even if this exclusion is inadvertently attenuated by a confusion of general ideas and mental objects. Thus, Hume’s skepticism rests on the same attitude that underlies the Cartesian methodic doubt: the rejection of the truth value of mental objects, the mistrust of consciousness, a diminution of the real value of essences, and the assertion of the supremacy of the human will.

The transcendental subject is born of Kant’s engagement with Hume’s thought. First, limiting “experience” to sensation alone seems not to account for certain knowledge that we have that seems to go beyond immediate experience, like universal scientific laws (causality!) or necessary mathematical truths. Objective knowledge seems to occur. However, Kant would agree that sense experience is, in fact, the standard of proof or disproof of rational judgments. So, then, that knowledge which goes beyond immediate, direct experience must actually stem from the underlying structure of experience, which transcends experience, i.e., lies deeper within us than experience does. In a word, it must stem from reason itself. Therefore, experience is composed not only of sense impressions (representations), but also of structures internal to reason (categories) that order these representations. Since the mental object is understood as a composite of representations and categories, the “thing-in-itself” (the noumenon), which would lie beyond representations, is unknowable. Additionally, there must be a higher instance that makes possible the union between the representations proper to sense experience (phenomena) and the internal structure of the experiencing mind (the categories). That instance is the “I”, the transcendental subject.

However, contra Kant, the union of the phenomenon and the categories is not in fact equivalent to the mental object. For the mental object is not merely a mental image but, instead, is, and is experienced as, intentional (from the Latin “in + tendere”, meaning “stretching towards”). The mental object points us to something beyond itself, outside itself. So, not only in Descartes and Hume, but in Kant, too, we find ourselves confronted with the same fundamental departure point: a rejection of the intentionality of the mental object, a rejection that is arbitrarily posited.

Hegel’s critique of Kant, however, does not break with this starting point. Instead, conscious experience is absolutized. For Hegel, the very act of positing an “unknowable” thing-in-itself implies some conceptual grasp of it: the thing-in-itself already lies within experience. The noumenon is a limit that we have already, in some sense, transcended, precisely because we can conceive it. And if the thing-in-itself is devoid of all categories, since these are imposed by our mind, then it is an empty abstraction, a pure “nothing”. There is no distinction between the noumenon and the phenomenon; all is experience. All is the transcendental subject.

But the transcendental subject so conceived cannot be static, for it is not identical to any singular content of experience: every idea contains within itself its contradictory, its negation. Every A implies a NOT-A. Consequently, the subject must not cease to think; the subject must continually realize itself, and must do so precisely by thinking oppositions – the dialectical method. For Hegel, then, the subject, then, is processual. The subject does not just exist; it becomes. It is thought-thinking-itself. The content of experience is not distinct from the subject but, instead, is the very realization of the subject: the subject is the dynamic mental presence. The subject realizes itself by the thinking that is itself; the subject is a “pretension to Itself”.

And so, at last, we arrive at Heidegger. Contrary to what we have seen in Kant and Hegel, Heidegger asserts that the content of experience is not the same as our own being. Self-consciousness is not the conscious self; the “I” contained within my experience, my idea of the “I”, still lies within consciousness and does not reach the transcendental subject, the “being-in-the-world”, the Dasein. Leonardo Polo expresses this idea with the concise formula: “The thought ‘I’ does not think” (el yo pensado no piensa). It would seem that the transcendental subject cannot be known directly, nor can it be known by recourse to ideas, to the “content” of consciousness that would presume to contain the subject. Instead, we must the know the transcendental subject as knowing itself, empty of all content.

As a path to the Dasein, Heidegger proposes sentiment, the “encounter with oneself”. This is explicable, because sentiment is something like a notification of the existent that is not distinct from it, that is, a certain resonance of the transcendental subject within our consciousness. However, the sentiment that would reveal the transcendental subject must not refer the subject to any specific content – otherwise, the Dasein would not be known as it is. Instead, we must have recourse to a sentiment that refers the Dasein to nothingness, to the very negation of the subject itself, to death. That sentiment is anguish.

This path to the Dasein seems to result from the rejection of the truth value of intentionality: the intentionality of the mental object, the immediacy of appearance, as already being “consciousness isolated from reality”. And yet, this does not match the “phenomenon”, for lack of a better word, of the mental object itself, which involves an interior reference beyond itself. Incidentally, the transcendental anthropology of Leonardo Polo can be said to take up the distinction between the “subject” and the content of consciousness, and to elevate it via the acceptance of that experience that is the intentionality of the mental object. Understood along these lines, it is hopefully clearer than it might have been in Part I of this article that the human being knows being, and is radically a knowing of being. The human being, then, does not just exist; he co-exists, “exists with”. Likewise, the notion of the future (“not yet”) is not itself the future; the future is instead the “tension forwards” that the human being radically is: we could describe the future as the “will-be” that we are.

That said, we can now turn back to Odero’s reference to the Dasein, in which he sees a hint at a union of “psychic time” and “cosmic time”.

The psychic and the cosmic: consciousness and the transcendental subject

Before we begin our examination of Odero’s thought, an important clarification is necessary: Odero does not seem to directly engage with the question that preoccupies Heidegger – nor is that his intention.

Odero is more concerned with the glimmer of ontological reality that he intuits (and not without at least apparent vagueness) in Heidegger’s Dasein. He then relates this to a “psychological and interior dimension of time” that he understands to be expressed in words of St. Augustine of Hippo – we amply addressed his interpretation (and translation) of these words in Part 1 – and the history of creation, sin, and redemption, or “cosmic time”. Original sin, for Odero, is a disintegration of the “self”, a disintegration that has all the ontological depth of the creature who shuns his Creator, source of all being. The Spirit of God, sent after the Paschal Mystery, brings about an ontological re-integration not only of man, but also of man with and in the whole of creation.

Understood in this sense, Odero describes African memory as “[instead of a mere ‘storage device’], something much closer to within the innermost core of one’s being, to what precedes one”. African memory, our “sense of the Zamani”, would then be ontological in depth, just as the Dasein is a subject of conscious experience who is “there”, “thrown into history” – in a word, real. Thus, it would seem that the psychic and the cosmic, consciousness and ontological depth, are united. Moreover, Odero thus goes beyond Senghor’s disregard for consciousness in the latter’s inordinate emphasis on sensuous, vital perception. At the same time, Odero portrays the union of the psychic and the ontological as the relationship of the creature with the One who precedes him, of the present with the past, so that “memory” in fact begins with the very veneration of the ancestors and cherishing of received vitality that was so dear to the Senegalese giant.

However, thus conceived, the psychic and the ontological are only apparently united. Odero speaks of memory as the mental presence of the past – the presence of the past in our minds, as what was. But, insofar as the past is contained in our minds in this way, looking at it “ontologically”, it is not past but, instead, mental presence. It is a mental object. Now, just as the notion of “self” is not identical to the conscious self, and the content of experience is not identical to the self that is experiencing, the notion of God the Creator is not, in fact, God the Creator Himself. Memory, understood as recalling the past – even the “ontological” past, that is, God as ontologically precedent to us, His creatures – is simply not ontological in depth. Considered on its own, it is not an opening to what precedes us, “within the innermost core of one’s being”. Granted, Odero does not simply equate memory with this ontological openness. Instead, he says that memory is something “much closer to” such openness than a mere permanence of detached mental representations. Yet, while the mental object is more than an empty mental image, a hollow “copy” of reality, that object is evidently not identical to the reality to which it intentionally refers; and the same is true of our general ideas, including the idea of God Himself.

Nevertheless, while he does not manage to resolve the problem of a relationship between the lived experience of “African identity” on the one hand and Being on the other, Odero does at least point us in an interesting direction. Something like memory does seem to hold pride of place in the “black African” psyche, as Senghor characterizes it. If we are to begin to see what this “something” is, we must first consider a deeper, more radical notion of the past, of precedence, and consequently, of our radical openness to this radical precedence. In short, we must examine the notion of “precedence” in the light of the personal act of being.

Share

Radical precedence, “past”, and “memory”

Before beginning, a brief note: the thoughts laid out in this section should be considered as a preliminary sketch, a first approach to that “something” that seems characteristic of the one whom Senghor calls the “black African”, and whom I call – loosely speaking – the descendant of Niger-Congo-speaking peoples.

First, I will explain what it means to describe the Creator God as radically precedent. Then, I offer some considerations about human precedence, or the human past, and its relationship to this radical precedence. I propose that it is the primacy of this human precedence that is the keystone of “African identity”. On that basis, I lay out some tentative connections between this keystone and some of the cultural elements of “black Africa” laid out by Senghor, as well as the “human past” globally considered, in the light of Africa as the birthplace of humanity. Finally, I propose that Africa’s redemption, and perennial mission to the world, lies in accepting human precedence, but from within a primacy of radical precedence – a radical precedence elevated in the redemptive work of Christ, so that we are not just creatures, but sons of God. Moreover, the nature of anthropological precedence means that such a shift is, in fact, an elevation of all creation, “all flesh”. Africa’s redemption seems to be encapsulated in a particular way in these words: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

The radical precedence of God

To understand what it means to describe God as “radically precedent”, let us revisit a dimension, so to speak, of Polo’s “transcendental freedom” that I simply mentioned towards the end of Part I of this article:

[Union with God] is not [a union] of knowing alone. Even more radically, the union desired is one of love – of God’s accepting of the effusive giving that we are and are called to be, a giving that opens upwards and inwards in the Spirit, into the Son, and towards the Father. This “reaching upwards and inwards” is Polo’s “transcendental freedom”.

Let’s focus on the words in bold: “the effusive giving that we are”. Why does Polo speak of the human person not just as a “knowing”, but also as a “giving”? This has to do with the Thomistic notion we introduced in Part I: the real distinction between the “nominal” sense of being (what a thing is) and the “verbal” sense of being (that a thing is), or between the act of being (or esse) and essence. More concretely, it has to do with the human will, the seat of desire.

When we want something, we want the real thing, and not just an idea of it. A thirsty man doesn’t want to think water; he wants to drink it. Now, this might seem obvious – and it is. But “obvious” is quite distinct from “superficial”. When we consider the phenomenon more closely, it begins to look more complicated: if we only know “what” a reality is (in this case, that it is in some sense “good”), because the reality is not contained in our minds when we know it, then how can we want the real thing, and not just the mental object? That is, if our only possible reference to the real thing is a mental object rather than the reality itself (even if that object is “intentional”, i.e., even if it intrinsically points to or “intimates” reality), then how exactly do we want that which we do not know?

Now, recall that, precisely because we can somehow “notice” that a thing is, and not just know what it is, then there is a cognizant instance in us that corresponds to the esse of the thing and not just its essence. Recall also that this instance must also be as radical as esse, so that it is, in fact, the esse of the person. Thus, the human person is a knowing.

Something along the same lines can be said not just of the cognizant dimension of the human being, but also of his tendential dimension. In other words, since we desire reality itself, and not just the mental object that corresponds to it, then desire is better understood not as a tension towards that which we lack, but instead as an effusive affirmation of reality13 – in short, as an act of love. Indeed, using the word “love” sets the idea into relief: if we “desired” other people only so that they could fulfill some need that we have, then we are not truly desiring – loving – them, but only ourselves. This effusive affirmation of reality is, likewise, real, because it tends towards the real (and not the intentional) good. Such effusion, then, must stem from the act of being: the human person is radically an effusing, a giving.

However, that’s not the end of it. “Giving” seeks to be accepted, with an acceptance as radical as that giving is. But no rock or cloud or star can accept our giving; nor can any plant or animal radically accept our giving. And, while other human persons can give radical – personal – acceptance, that acceptance can never be complete, because, like we ourselves, they do not completely know the “who” that each person is. So, who can accept the giving that each of us is? Well, where does that “giving” come from? Certainly not from our parents, venerable though they may be: the non-material cannot emerge from the material. The giving that we are, then, both comes from and, ultimately, refers itself – constitutively – to God. God radically precedes us.

To be a person is to be a created giving that is both given, and destined to be accepted by, the Creator. But precisely because we are created by God, then God, too, must be Personal. Creation, then, is an effusive, generous act – an act of giving. Therefore, we are given to ourselves; not only are we radically a giving, but we are also (and, indeed, primarily) an accepting of ourselves from God. We radically, or constitutively, accept our being from the One who is our Origin. These considerations lay the groundwork for a more adequate understanding of the notions of “past” and “memory”.

The “past”: truncated gifts

One consideration that follows from what we have just said is this: if every one of us is radically a giving, then so are our ascendants – our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. However, to actually give to another, we must do so through our wills (concrete “effusions”, affirmations of the other), our intelligence, and, ultimately, through our bodies (e.g., words, movements) and through things (e.g., tools, flowers, rocks, etc.).14

Now then, our wills and intelligences, being non-material, are created “directly” by God. And since they are distinct from the personal act of being, then they pertain to the human essence. However, the human body is a different matter. The human body has its origins in two living cells: the sperm and the ovum. These cells, considered on their own, possess the same kind of life proper to the living cells of any animal. While the human sperm and the human ovum come from a human being, when we consider these cells in their existence outside the human body, we see that they have a life that is not the “life” of the human essence – otherwise, they could not exist outside of the human being. As a result, it is more accurate to say that, upon conception, the zygote is “taken up into”, and “invigorated by”, the human essence, which is itself constitutively dependent for its being on the personal act of being.15 For this reason, Polo refers to bodily life as “received life”.16 Received from whom? From our parents, evidently. And because, by its “essentialization”, the human body is to some extent “taken up” into the giving that the human person is, then our bodies are constitutively given, and constitutively accepted. This is so regardless of the intentions of the parties to the sexual act, and even in the absence of a sexual act: by virtue of its “essentialization”, the human body is a manifestation of the personal act of being, of personal giving; it is constitutively a gift. To use a phrase of the theologian of the body, St. John Paul II, the human body, as such, can only be properly understood when interpreted according to “the hermeneutics of gift”.17

Consequently, through our bodies, we are inducted into a second kind of precedence, one that has its roots in radical precedence: an anthropological precedence.

Now, because it is “essentialized”, the human body is distinct from all other material things. And to the extent that we induct external things into our giving through acts of will and the actions of our body, those things, too, are in some measure “essentialized”. No longer do they belong solely to the necessary unfolding of the ancient cosmos. They have become “of man”. They have become historical. They have become part of the human past. Here, we begin to see the full scope of anthropological precedence: it includes all the traces that man has left behind. And, qua essentialized, all these are gift, waiting to be accepted. Moreover, it is precisely in and through the body that we even have a past, that we are historical beings.

However, one final consideration is needed to round out our reflections thus far: mortality. There is something of a rift, a wound between the essence and the body – a wound left by the original sin to which Odero refers. At least in its present state, the human body is doomed to die. It is not completely essentialized. It does not completely share in the giving that the person is. Primarily for this reason, upon death, all the traces that we have left behind cease to be backed by the giving that we are. They remain ungrounded, neither identical to the bare stuff of the cosmos nor enlivened by real, effusive, verbal human be-ing. They are, in short, truncated gifts. As gifts, they are meant for acceptance, an acceptance that our very being demands to give, for we are an accepting; but, as truncated, they must be “taken up” once more into human persons. In a word, the past demands that we remember it.

“Memory”: towards the redemption of the past

We have already said that it is in and through the body that we even have a past. Now, we must add, it is because of the body that there can exist that kind of gift that the past is, that kind of gift that we, in turn, are meant to accept – that we must accept, unless we refuse to be the accepting that we are. Naturally, then, in a culture where life or vitality is cherished, as exists at least among the descendants of Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, and possibly some descendants of Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples, there will be a tendency to look back upon the past as a gift to be received. In other words, there will be an emphasis on memory. This is an important insight, seen partly in Senghor, and partly in John Mbiti, to whose thought Odero explicitly refers in Part I of “A Memory of Paradise”. In addition, precisely because the body inducts us into the past insofar as it is essentialized, then memory, while only possible because of the body, most properly refers to the interiority of man insofar as it is manifested in what is corporeal or material. This is why Odero’s correction of Senghor is so opportune.

The scope of this “African genius” is far greater than it might appear. To see why, consider that, in biological terms, all humans are members of the species Homo sapiens. Consider also that, as far as we can tell, Homo sapiens comes into being in 68,000 BC in the Horn of Africa. And finally, consider that Homo sapiens dwelt longest on African soil, and also that most early Homo sapiens remained on the African continent, rather than migrating to other lands – it is because of this, for instance, that Africa exhibits the highest genetic diversity. These facts point to the following: not only does Africa seem to be home to cultures that emphasize memory because they emphasize vitality, but Africa is also the ultimate focal point for all memory, for all acceptance of the past that would be integral – that would be true to itself. In other words, if every person is bound to remember the past so as to take it up once more, then Africa is the site where human history achieves totality. To use the felicitous phrasing that the Latin gerundive form permits, Africa is prima memorianda, “the first [or earliest] one meant to be remembered”. In addition, insofar as her cultures bear, in the flesh, the marks of most Homo sapiens, then they are the living continuation of most of the human past, its living body developing and unfolding with the passage of time. Therefore, Africa not just is prima memorianda, but she always will be. And this is true not just of “Africa past”, but also of Africa present.

Thus, we draw closer to the true depth of the African genius that Odero has pointed us towards. But we are yet to arrive. We are yet to resolve the relationship between “memory” as an action, and an acceptance of radical precedence, or of anthropological precedence. To do so, it is opportune to dwell once more on the nature of the past, as “truncated gift”.

Insofar as the past is gift, it stemmed from the giving that concrete persons are – at this point, that much is clear. However, because the past is truncated, it is not actively “backed by human giving”, so that we cannot accept it as gift. Therefore, knowing the past is not the same as the profound memory we are referring to. “Memory as an act of the intelligence”, tout court, does not have ontological depth, pace Odero. And while we can accept our own past, including the wounds and griefs that others inflict on us, because our body is backed by a personal act of being, that is not the same as accepting that which preceded us.

So, can the past be remembered? Is Africa’s emphasis on memory futile? Not so! Recall that the giving that each person is, refers itself to God for His acceptance. The true meaning of the past, and the gift of the past, then, is hidden in God. For us to fully receive the past as the gift that it is, God Himself must accept it. This is what happened about two millennia ago in the Incarnation at Bethlehem, and it is what continues to happen in man’s relationship with God. And, indeed, so profound is God’s acceptance that all that it touches becomes gift. Then do we see not only all that happened to us, but also all that preceded us, as gift. “Felix culpa! O happy fault!”, the Church dares to proclaim of the sin of Adam. Or recall St. Josephine Bakhita, whom we recalled in Part I:

If I met the slave-merchants who kidnapped and tortured me, I would kneel down and kiss their hands. If what happened to me had never taken place, how could I become a Christian and a religious?

For this saint, the cruel Arab slave traders have become a blessing – their very hands are venerable. Yes, Africa is prima memorianda, but Bethlehem, Israel, the Jews, are, in their flesh, a certain memoria Redemptoris, memory of the Redeemer. And more importantly, the Church, the “Body of Christ”, sprung from His wounded side, is Memoria Redemptoris, with a capital “M”. She is the fulfilment of the Jews. She is the ultimate destiny of human history, which, to be gathered up before passing through Her gates, must continually pass by way of Africa.

But how is the act of memory related to this profound, radical acceptance? If the accepting that we are can only give rise to acceptance in the human essence and body, if “radical memory” can only occur as an action in the act of memory, then what do our considerations thus far add? Apart from making clearer the relationship between this act and “ontological memory”, a connection that Odero hinted at but (in our view) did not explain, we also see this: the act of memory of the past, to be what it is meant to be, must recall that it is ultimately from God that we receive the full meaning of the past, its full reality. Only standing in God (in Christ, in the Spirit), and trustingly accepting this gift from Him, will the past be a gift to us rather than a dead collection of details, or a somewhat intelligible story. Of course, for this to happen, we must, in fact, exercise acts of memory: we must investigate the past, piece it together, recall it, and transmit it. But this is not the consummation of memory. Memory is instead consummated in the redemption of history.

Thus, we catch a glimpse of what the “African genius” is called to be: as prima memorianda, it is through Africa’s memory – and the remembering of Africa – that the entirety of history is gathered up to face the Light that rises from among the Jews, the Son of Man. It is in and through Africa that the entire human race, past and present, becomes in a sense the Bride, awaiting the Bridegroom. Perhaps it would not be going too far to say that Africa’s enduring mission is expressed in these words of Scripture: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Lk 3:6)

Subscribe now

In recent months, Robert Odero has graced The AfroDiscourse with two profound reflections on Africa’s path to redemption. In the first of his reflections, Odero spoke about what he sees as (black) Africa’s fixation on the past, on history, on the graveyard of time – and he lamented that this fixation seems to be a remembrance unaccompanied by a gaze towards the future. It is, in short, a memory without hope. To remedy this situation, based on a reflection on St. Augustine’s thoughts on time in his Confessions, Odero insists on recovering (or simply obtaining?) the hope in the afterlife that animates the Christian faith and that long served as an inspiring and renewing impetus for the energies of Western civilization.

However, while Odero’s suggestion is undoubtedly cogent, his interpretation of “hope” and “future” leaves room for doubt. Even as he argues that Africans are fixated on memory – an image of the past – he proposes that the African unite his memory to a fixation on expectation – and this is an image of the future. And yet, it is clear that an image is not the reality it represents. To put it bluntly, the image of a cow does not give milk. To put it less bluntly (but more sharply), the image of being is not Being. And more sharply still, the mere image of future salvation is the same as a myth that lacks power to save. Yes, Odero hits the mark when he argues that the fixation on the past must be conquered by hope and the future. But this hope and future must be more than mere images.

Before examining Odero’s arguments in more detail and developing the theme of “a hope beyond mere image”, I would like to clarify some things. First, what follows does not include an analysis of the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo. Instead, it responds to Odero’s interpretation of Augustine – one which, besides, is based on a translation that diverges significantly from St. Augustine’s actual words in his Confessions. Second, the present article does not reinterpret John Mbiti’s thoughts on the African’s sense of time either. In particular, the revindication of the African’s relation to the past, which Odero attempts in the second of his reflections, is left for the second part of this response. Indeed, in that second half and partly inspired by Odero’s reflections on the African past, I hope to show how the arguments in this present article make a case for an “African genius”, a vein of genuinely novel and truly African insights to be mined for the benefit of Africa and the world.

In this part, though, we will respond to Odero’s main arguments in his first reflection and point out how the confusion of the future with an image of it undermines the remedy he proposes to the African “fixation on the past”. Following that, we propose a notion of future and hope based on Leonardo Polo’s “transcendental freedom” and explain how it implies a hope that really does lead us into a future beyond mere images and, based on this, reframe Odero’s representation of “the African problem”.

All that said, let’s dive into Odero’s arguments.

Odero’s first argument: time as continuum in St. Augustine of Hippo?

Odero bases his reflections on a quote from book XI of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which, curiously, he translates as follows:

[Time is] present to us as past in memory, as present in attention, and as future in expectation.

Immediately afterwards, Odero rephrases these words:

In other words, the past is nothing but the human mind as it remembers, the present is nothing but the human mind as it considers the here and now, and the future is nothing but the human mind in expectation. […] Time is precisely “the flow of the ever-present now” – a flow held in place by our mental attention or by the consciousness of the present moment.

Odero thus seems to interpret time as fundamentally a continuum, a flow that we capture with our mental attention. Past, present, and future would all represent different points along the continuum, different moments in the flow. The past would represent “points that have passed, that have been”; the future would represent “points that will come to be, but are not yet”.

Clearly, the future to which Odero refers as future is in fact present to the mind. We can only speak of “the future” if we are referring to a reality that we are currently thinking of and expressing through our words. But if, in reality, the future is not the present, that is, if the future simply is not (yet), then this “future” to which we refer with our words, these “future” moments in the flow of time, are not really “the future”, because we are speaking of them as if they were present. In other words, the idea of the future is not in fact the future. To speak of the future in this way, we must first reduce reality to an idea – an image – that is all present, all at once: the continuum or, in Odero’s words, “the flow of the ever-present now”. In short, the future to which Odero seems to refer is not, in fact, the future, but only its pale image, an idea that appears to lack symbolic reference to what it would express. This idea does not lead us beyond our present state but, instead, mires us more deeply within it. However, contra Odero, our hopes do not belong to such a future reduced to idea. For hope reaches beyond the present – and therefore, beyond the image.

But this is not to say that we find this problematic notion of time as continuum in Augustine. I will not pronounce myself one way or the other on the matter. Instead, I limit myself to pointing out that Odero’s translation of the words of the bishop of Hippo differs quite significantly from the original text. For Augustine, there is not “one time” but, in fact, “three times”, as we see in this more accurate translation of the original Latin by Edward Bouverie Pusey. The relevant text is in italics; the rest is relevant context:

What now is clear and plain is that neither things to come nor past are. Nor is it properly said, "there be three times, past, present, and to come": yet perchance it might be properly said, “there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.” For these three do exist in some sort, in the soul, but otherwhere do I not see them; present of things past, memory; present of things present, sight; present of things future, expectation.

As we will see later, the distinction between past, present, and future as present in the soul in distinct ways is at least reconcilable with Leonardo Polo’s understanding of hope and transcendental freedom. For now, though, having indicated a crucial problem in Odero’s perspective on the future, we should examine how this affects his understanding of hope.

Odero’s second argument: a non-eternal eternity, pale image of the future

After speaking of time as a continuum along which past, present, and future are different points, Odero argues that “memory” in Augustine is connected to the anamnesis of the Neoplatonists, and that Augustine then relates it to a future climactic fulfillment. For Odero, this anamnesis refers not to a set of remembered ideas but, instead, to

an inner ontological tendency within all men that directs them towards the divine … [and opens] up all men to the prelapsarian origins of time.

In Augustine (as Odero interprets him), however, the divine is not just “before time”, but is instead also “after time”. God is eternal, containing time within Himself rather than being contained within time, so that He is both before and after, past and future. Eternity contains the continuum within itself and, therefore, is outside the continuum. But in Jesus Christ, God has entered time itself. For that reason, the past and the future all meet in the present, because that which contains the entire continuum has entered it, bridging the gap between all moments; consequently, as Odero expresses it in a particularly poetic phrase, “[our] earthly activities could echo into eternity just as God’s divine activity had reverberated in time.” This echoing of the present in eternity, in the eternity that is after (and before) time, justifies hope, because we are certain that the present is directed towards the future world and that, therefore, it has an overall meaning and direction. Or so runs Odero’s argument.

Odero’s position here contains an estimable effort to relate the present to eternity. Nevertheless, the argument requires rescuing, for, as it stands, it is radically undermined by the notion of time as a continuum, and the consequent distortion of eternity. As we have already said, to conceive the past or the future as points along the temporal continuum is to think of them as present – albeit in the mode of “has been” and “not yet” respectively. Thus, they are not seen as what they are: past and future. Instead, they are seen as pale images nearly devoid of substance. To think of the future as “not yet” is to imagine it as a present, but one that is not – in other words, it is to imagine it as a nothingness, and then to join the idea of nothingness to that real experience that is “will-be”. Clearly, nothingness does not exist outside the mind. Whatever content there is in the idea of “future” belongs to that experience of “will-be” – and it is in this sense that the future is present.

To grasp this idea better, we may refer to the Aristotelian notion of being: ens. Ens is the present participle1 of the Latin verb esse, meaning “to be”. We can understand this notion as a noun – “the thing that is”, “id quod est”. This is the nominal sense of the term “ens”. Thus, we can speak of such disparate realities as a chair or dog or man as each being an “ens”. But the experience of “will-be” does not refer to the nominal sense of ens. Instead, it refers to the verbal sense – to “be-ing” as a verb, rather than “being” as a noun. The nominal sense of ens corresponds to ideas of things; on the other hand, the verbal sense expresses their reality, which our ideas do not contain: they are be-ing. This real distinction between the nominal and verbal senses of ens, affirmed by Thomas Aquinas,2 can be expressed in much simpler terms: the idea of a cow does not give milk, nor does the idea of a lion roar, nor does the idea of a man think.3 Now then, the future as “will-be” corresponds precisely to this verbal sense of ens – a be-ing that “will be”, which only makes sense precisely because it is verbal. This is how the future is present – and this, incidentally, would be a non-problematic way of understanding the phrase Augustine did use to explain the future: “the present of things future, expectation [exspectatio – literally, “looking outwards”].”4

As for eternity, it becomes clear that to understand it as “beyond the continuum” or “containing the continuum”, as Odero seems to do, is to falsify it, because time is not a continuum. Hope is not immured in the present moment that is then transmuted into coinciding with “the future”, that is, with a not-yet-existent point on the graph of time – for the “not-yet” is not the future, and time is not a graph. Reality is not its mental image; instead, the image points to reality. Only insofar as it points to the reality is the image of the continuum true.

Thus, we pave the way for a recovery of the golden kernel of Odero’s second argument, a recovery I briefly sketch here before going into more detail below: to say that Eternity is beyond time, with regard to the future, is to say that Eternity transcends the “will-be” that presently is be-ing; to say that the Eternal has entered time is to say that the Transcendent has somehow addressed Himself to the “will-be” that is be-ing; and to speak of hope is to speak of man’s always-ongoing response (respond-ing) to the eternal Word, Jesus of Nazareth.

Odero’s third argument: Africa’s need for a forward-looking gaze

Odero ends his argument by considering John Mbiti’s “African concept of time”. While there is much that we could say about this – and much more that Odero does say in his second reflection, which the second part of this response will address – we limit ourselves here to the conclusion that Odero draws:

From Mbiti’s perspective, the African’s concept of time is not linear and forward-looking; rather, it moves forward by spiraling backward, so to speak. […] If we dared to be brutally honest with ourselves, we would also admit that we are still trapped in a cyclical, backward-looking, vision of time. […] There is a glaring deficiency in our vision of time and life. And where there is no vision, there is no future, no development worthy of the name. Let us say it more clearly and in religious language. Our time-consciousness stands in need of redemption. […] Africa’s development is tied to her vision of the future and her management of time.

Now, it is certainly true that a fixation on the past suffers from a “glaring deficiency” of a hopeful gaze towards the future. The connection that Odero makes here is valuable. And yet, with due respect, I must add that his insight, too, needs a certain redemption – redemption from a notion of time as fundamentally a continuum, by understanding the future from within a vision of the verbal sense of being: be-ing. Just such an understanding, together with the Transcendent addressing Himself to man in Jesus of Nazareth, the Incarnate Word, form the foundation for the hope that (as we will see) reveals the true nobility that Africa’s “fixation on the past” is called to be.

Leonardo Polo’s transcendental freedom and a hope beyond mere images

In summary, while Odero’s theses definitely contain laudable elements, they are undermined by a fundamental flaw. In my view, the root of the problem is the reductive notion of the future that seems to lurk behind his words: to conceive the future as a point along an imagined continuum is to reduce it to an image present in the mind as an object of thought. The future is thus reduced to a bare “id quod”, apart from the “est” – a noun without the reality of actual be-ing as a verb. In short, this reductive notion of the future de-futurizes the future, as Polo puts it.5

The hopeful vision of life that Odero argues Africa needs requires another kind of “presence of the future”, to use the Augustinian phrase, a presence of the future that does not de-futurize it. This is where Polo’s notion of transcendental freedom comes in – for he describes “transcendental freedom”, the freedom that the human person is, as “possession of the future that does not de-futurize it”.6 This description speaks of precisely what we are seeking: a presence of the future that does not de-futurize it, but that also means that the future is truly present.

Before exploring transcendental freedom more thoroughly, two other instances of this notion come to mind and may help to make it more intelligible. The first is one that Polo himself refers to in a later work: St. Gregory of Nyssa’s notion of epectasy (epéktasis), a term that this Greek Father of the Church uses to describe the soul’s eternal movement into God’s infinite being – the ever-growing character of the soul’s tension towards God.7 The second appears at the end of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, the last book of The Chronicles of Narnia. In the final chapter, tellingly titled “Farewell to Shadow-Lands”, the characters find themselves in the Narnia of the afterlife, Lewis’s image of Heaven. The protagonists go deeper and higher into that Narnia (“Further up and further in!”), and each time discover a new Narnia:

“I see,” she said at last, thoughtfully. “I see now. This garden is like the Stable. It is far bigger inside than it was outside.”

“Of course, Daughter of Eve,” said the Faun. “The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets. The inside is larger than the outside.”

Lucy looked hard at the garden and saw that it was not really a garden at all but a whole world, with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains. But they were not strange: she knew them all.

“I see,” she said. “This is still Narnia, and more real and more beautiful than the Narnia down below, just as it was more real and more beautiful than the Narnia outside the Stable door! I see ... world within world, Narnia within Narnia....”

“Yes,” said Mr. Tumnus, “like an onion: except that as you continue to go in and in, each circle is larger than the last.”

Having set the stage, we now dive into transcendental freedom. First, we explain the irreducibility of the vision of being to the “mental object” – what I have loosely been referring to as an “image in the mind”. Next, we show that this vision of being is more radically an openness inward, an intimate openness, to the Transcendent. From this perspective, we can at last come to a fuller notion of the future and, more relevant for our analysis, a deeper understanding of hope. Finally, we reframe the African crisis as not just the lack of a vision of the future, but also the breaking of the past, before proceeding to offer a brief sketch of why transcendental freedom is the root of all novelty and, hence, goes beyond any fixation on the past. (In Part II, we will instead explain how transcendental freedom elevates the past rather than abandoning it, and indeed, why the elevation of the past is a certain perfection of transcendental freedom, so that hope always has a radically redemptive aspect regarding history.)

Truth and intellection, the vision of be-ing

Let us return briefly to the distinction between the nominal and verbal senses of being – “being” (ens) and “be-ing”. As Polo explains, this distinction comes up in Aquinas’s treatise De veritate (On truth). Specifically, Aquinas articulates his view on the distinction when addressing the very first question of the treatise: “What is truth?”8

Before Aquinas, Augustine had answered the question thus: “truth is that which is” – verum est id quod est. Now, as we have already noted, this expression is complex: it expresses the real being in a nominal sense and a verbal sense. However, Aristotle and Aquinas would adopt different positions regarding whether these two senses of “being” or ens are really inseparable or, instead, only conceptually distinct. The Stagirite would assert that they are conceptually distinct, but in reality, inseparable. Aristotle affirms that we cannot say “is” without an implicit “that which”; we cannot speak the verb as referring to some reality without an implicit subject. Otherwise, we would have an existing that is pure existing, without formal content, which would be intelligible.

Aquinas would take a divergent stance on the matter, though. He would hold that they are, in fact, really separable – and like Aristotle, he would refer to experience as a basis for his claim. Clearly, to speak of “that which is”, or ens, we must refer to ens insofar as it is contained within our reason. But our reason is itself ens. Consequently, ens is not in the reason according to its real being. Instead, it is there in the mind according to its nominal sense, and not its verbal sense. Therefore, the nominal sense and the verbal sense of ens are really separable, that is, distinguishable in reality; and “truth” is the same as “that which is” insofar as it thereby refers to the nominal sense, and not the verbal sense, of being. As we can see, this also addresses Aristotle’s objection: we cannot speak the verb “is” as referring to some reality without an implicit subject or content, a “that which”, insofar as the verb expresses an idea of reason, which must needs address itself to the nominal sense of being.

However, we have a difficulty here. If that notion of being that corresponds to the verbal sense is not known by the mind, then what we know is not the being as such but, instead, only the being as conceived. Yet, this does not accurately express our experience of knowledge as pointing towards a reality beyond itself. Our mind sees the being as such.9 But we cannot say that the mind, therefore, contains being; nor can we hold that the mind is simply reduced to being as a part – they are distinct. The only solution, then, is to hold that knowing and being are not reduced to each other, but instead, “coincide” or “touch”: knowing “touches”, or co-exists with, the real. But of course, the knowledge we are speaking of here is not the knowledge of reason – it is not the knowledge of what being is, i.e., in the nominal sense. Instead, as Polo continues,10 it is pure intellection, a knowing deeper than the knowledge of reason, a knowing to which corresponds what we might take the liberty of calling the vision of being – of be-ing. As such, intellection is not a “knowing”, but a “know-ing” – it is likewise verbal, so to speak, and corresponds to the personal act of being, gazing upon extramental acts of being.11

Now then, returning to the broader theme of the article, such a gazing does not contain esse. Instead, it is likewise verbal. Consequently, it is a gazing upon being that can “touch” being as be-ing, as “will-be”. In short, it can gaze upon the future without de-futurizing it, without reducing it to the static presence of a continuum, because this gazing itself is “will-be”.

Regardless of whether Augustine meant the word in this way, the notion of this gazing as “will-be” does seem to find resonance in that word exspectatio, looking outwards. That said, though, this gazing is also, and more radically, a looking inwards.

“Further in and further up!”

The next step is somewhat difficult to explain, though it is most profitably understood as a description that the reader should “follow along” like a musician follows a music score as he interprets it: the reader should look inwards to see within himself what is being described. Here goes.

The outward gaze is something we become aware of. We gaze upon being, and we are somehow internally open to our gaze. This does not mean we look upon this gaze. Instead, we gaze outwards, and we perceive the proceeding outwards of our gaze – that perception is the interior openness I refer to. Moreover, we recognize that this gaze is a light that illumines, even as we likewise perceive that its content or nature is not exhausted in mere illumining: that is not all it is meant for. Otherwise, we could not focus on the light, as we would be inexorably locked into looking outwards upon be-ing. Instead, that light- this gazing, which Polo refers to as the personal intellect or personal knowing- is also inwardly open to a Transcendence that we cannot perceive, a Light that transcends it. This Light, this Knowing, has been revealed to us as the Logos, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity; and the personal intellect seeks to become ever more knowing from Knowing, light from Light – but in a way that is verbal rather than nominal, future rather than a static continuum. Here is the gaze that seeks to see the face of the Lord, so that it may know Him as more intimate to it than to itself. This is true even for the non-Christian, for he is intrinsically and radically an opening to the Transcendent who, whether he knows it or not, has come in search of us.

Thus, the personal knowing – the knowing that each of us radically is – reaches “further in and further up, " recalling C.S.Lewis's words that echo St. Gregory of Nyssa’s epéktasis. However, we now understand that these words refer not only to the afterlife but also to our earthly life in search of God, and an ever more intimate union with Him. This is the vision possesses the future without de-futurizing it,; it is the vision that is “will-be”, that will be more intensely light, more intensely meaning, more intensely knowing. This is the effulgent light from which all philosophy, all science, all symbol comes. This is the source of the marveling of the child, the yearning of the artist, the playful quest of the experimenter, and the pre-Christian’s straining towards an unknown God. This is vocation and mission. This is the word that every person is and is called to be in ever-increasing measure: an irreducibly unique seeking of the God who, whether we realize it or not, has come in search of us in Jesus of Nazareth. This is the knowledge proper to a hope that transcends mere images. Yet, as might be evident, the union sought is not one of knowing alone. Even more radically, the union desired is one of love – of God’s accepting of the effusive giving that we are and are called to be, a giving that opens upwards and inwards in the Spirit, into the Son, and towards the Father.12 This reaching upwards and inwards is Polo’s “transcendental freedom”.

Having cast hope and the future in more appropriate terms, we can now turn to the third element: reframing the African post-colonial crisis and its relationship to hope.

Reframing the African post-colonial crisis: growing beyond the breaking of a futureless past

If Odero is to be believed, the African crisis is one of a fixation on the past and a lack of a future-oriented gaze. Of course, it would be foolish to interpret his argument in absolutist terms: it is most certainly not the case that there is no future-oriented gaze, nor that all are fixated on the past – nor do I in any way assert that this is what Odero argues. However, after examining the notion of “future”, it seems that the problem is not so much the fixation on the past as the lack of a future-oriented gaze – at least, at first.

Without presuming to have engaged in a survey of the history of the various strands of tradition within sub-Saharan Africa,13 we can say that a vital strand running through her contemporary experience is the colonial encounter, 35 years after the last African country achieved independence from colonization. A post-colonial search for identity pervades her literature, as even a cursory search reveals – think of Chinua Achebe’s famous trilogy. This problem is not just the lack of a future-oriented gaze. Instead, it is this lack, but situated in a context where the recapitulation of the past seems impossible, or at least impracticable: the organization of territory has changed with the establishment of the State-based political model, an order of private property, and a centralization of economic development in a few areas that promotes rural-urban migration and the mixing of peoples. In such circumstances, the clan and the tribe tend to be reduced to a language group, to diminish as politically effective structures, precisely in the urban centers that are the seat of governance – and we observe a bifurcation, as if two worlds exist in each country.14 This bifurcation is simultaneously a dilemma: it seems that we cannot go back to what we once were, for that would be to reject the growth that we have experienced in education and numerous other sectors. However, we cannot leave the past behind either, because we are just not provinces of France or England. They have their past, their narrative, their meaning, and we have ours.

Precisely here is Polo’s rich notion of the future so valuable: the breaking of the past is an opportunity to turn towards the future – or instead, to become the turning-towards-the-Transcendent that is future; in other words, to hope. It seems to me no coincidence that the breaking of the tribe occurred simultaneously with what was the first evangelization for most of sub-Saharan Africa. Nor is it to be overlooked that so many missionary efforts set education as one of their priorities. The breaking of the tribe confounds the word that was transmitted from generation to generation, a stark revelation that it lacks the vigor to make sense of the world. For that reason, the breaking compels us to seek a deeper meaning, a deeper light – and ultimately, a deeper Word.

That said, we must point out two things before closing this article. The first is that the notion of the future adopted does not imply that we must jettison the past – as we will see in the second part of this response. Indeed, because the ultimate source of meaning is Transcendent Light, the hope that seeks Him also seeks (and continually finds) a redemption of the past. To the extent that she hopes, in that measure must Sub-Saharan Africa remember her past so as to take it up once more; her present sons must not only have their eyes filled with light, but must also turn their eyes once more upon their forefathers and, with filial reverence, point them to the light. One vital consequence is that African philosophizing (which, to be truly so, must be open to theological truth without being fideistic) must be accompanied by a lively and increasing knowledge of Africa’s history.

The second observation is that the evangelization of sub-Saharan Africa was not free from error. Accounts of this abound and can be found elsewhere. I limit myself to pointing out the following: in a certain measure, the colonizers stand, in a certain limited respect, as fathers to we who people the dark continent, with their own history of glory and misery that seeks redemption. I am not qualified to justify this claim. Indeed, I only repeat the words of a woman who both suffered the darkness and tasted the light: St. Josephine Bakhita. This Sudanese woman, abducted by Arab slavers at the age of 7 in 1877, sold and tortured, and later bought by an Italian consul in Khartoum and, eventually, taken to Italy where she discovered the faith, was asked by an Italian student of Bologna what she would do were she to come across her kidnappers by pure chance. Without hesitation, she responded:

If I met the slave-merchants who kidnapped and tortured me, I would kneel down and kiss their hands. If what happened to me had never taken place, how could I become a Christian and a religious?

Yes, error and, in some cases, wickedness plagued the colonial enterprise. But hope is stronger than its legacy, so strong that it can redeem it, just as it can – and indeed, must – redeem our own past, as we will see in the second part of this article.

Share

(Click here to read Part I.)

The Memory of Paradise is not a mere nostalgia for the “Good Old Days”. Paradise is not a fantasy of days gone by. It is as real as our deepest memories, and as those memories elusive. Regarding space, glimmers of paradise are preserved in some places more than in others. Signs and images of paradise can be glimpsed here and there (as William Blake reminded us in his poem Auguries of Innocence) in particulars like Wild Flowers and Grains of Sand. Memories are to images what time is to space.

One way of interpreting the notion of paradise could be to see it as an inner, centripetal force that pulls a person back “home” whenever he finds himself drifting away from his center into the peripheries of his existence. The Memory of Paradise is a real power, ever calling us back to the purity of our origins. While calling us from the past, it simultaneously projects us into the future. It is simultaneously memory and destiny. Anamnesis is the name we gave (in Part 1 of this series) to this rootedness in the past that serves as an anchorage for the present and launchpad for the future.

Although modern man prides himself in living in and for the moment, an ominous emptiness surrounds his relationship with the present. The more he tries to escape from the past, the more it reasserts itself. As a pilgrim of time, he cannot help but have a sense of a “before” and an “after”. We can glean a hint of his inescapable attachment to the past from the ecological movement’s conflicting desires for a better, future world that man may never inhabit. In fighting for such an uncertain future, these homeless “climate warriors” unnecessarily detach present action from future fulfillment. They fail to acknowledge that their inexplicable longing for such a future can only make sense if they were also to appreciate their present longing as a simultaneous “retrogressive” call from the past to restore the original paradise. Whether these “ecological pilgrims” are aware of it or not, they are hopelessly incapable of resisting the call of Eden. In short, for a temporal being, the continuum between the past, the present, and the future is inescapable.

Martin Heidegger, modern technology and the desire for alternative paradises

There are some in the modern world who (though they may not be willing to admit it to themselves) have chosen an alternative route to that of our abovementioned ecological pilgrims. Rather than choosing the route of restoring our Common Home, they have instead chosen the more “modern route” of recreating an altogether new home for mankind—an alternative paradise remade in their image and likeness.

Could the desires of modernist scientists like Elon Musk to transplant humanity onto a new planet be considered a suitable case study of an attempt to replace the “old transcendence” with a “new transhumanism” —a longing to recreate a future on our own (post)modernist terms?

You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.1

These words from the homepage of SpaceX bring us back to the question we posed in Part 1 of this series on the Memory of Paradise: the question about the trajectory of the universe as a whole. What is time (and space, for that matter) and what is the point of history? Can man still be man if he is transplanted from the Earth onto another planet? Is the destiny of humanity tied to this planet and this planet alone—much like a particular plant can only flourish in a particular kind of soil—or will any planet out there do? Could the literal “flight” from Earth to Mars (the desire “to be” among the stars) be interpreted as one of the proofs of modern man’s despair of his current state, a desire to be liberated from the past so that he can finally be free to restart humanity afresh?

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is one of the few 20^th-century philosophers who wrestled with the question of Being and its relation to Time.2 In his 1971 essay, Poetry, Language and Thought, the German philosopher spoke about the terrifying destruction it would mean to Being Human if we left behind the Earth and, therefore, the world.

For Heidegger, the world is, first and foremost, a place “to be” in and, therefore, “to act” within. In other words, he places ontology before epistemology: unlike so many modern philosophers who have interpreted the world and the things that make up the world as, first of all, a place to be known, Heidegger denied that our primary relationship with the world is that of “knower-known” Instead, he said that we are “engaged” in the world as participants acting in an agent-arena relationship.

As for his thoughts on technology, they are perhaps more relevant today than they were at his time.3 Heidegger saw technology as not just a tool but instead a way of thinking and understanding the world. Technology, he observed, shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Heidegger coined the phrase, “technology enframes being” to mean that technology shapes our worldview (often unconsciously) in such a manner as to reduce reality to a resource to be exploited. Heidegger questioned the ultimate benefits of technology, suggesting that our view of the world as an “infinitely malleable resource” arose from the disastrous Cartesian split between the mind and the body. A technocratic relationship with existence can easily dull us into a kind of unconsciousness that makes us imagine ourselves to be demigods, capable of bending reality to our whims, rather than as always already standing within the world, always already “engaged” in it as participants, as agents in an arena, “thrown into history” in Heidegger’s words. Such hubris can easily end up alienating us from an authentic sense of ourselves, which consists in embracing finitude, mortality, and responsibility for our existence. From the perspective of his notion of Dasein4, it is no longer clear to modern man what “the self” means.

Augustine Revisited

The contemporary world is averse to using the word “sin”. We have tried our best to suppress, cancel, and bury it but this “monstrous word” simply refuses to die. The more we try to decapitate this “beast of chaos”, the more its manifestations multiply—like the multiple heads of that primeval dragon of Greek mythology—Hydra5. Sin is indeed mysterious and monstrous, but that is no reason to hide from it. Naming our fears is the first step to overcoming them. Thanks to modern psychology’s multiple attempts at totally removing the notion of sin from our psyche, it has resurged with a vengeance, with multiple Hydra-heads: psychosis, neurosis, guilt, dissonance, schizophrenia…6 And yet, in an age more concerned with notions of self-consciousness and self-esteem, it might be logical that sin is characterized as personal disintegration, inner fragmentation, or the sense of the loss of self.

Original sin is not merely a theological doctrine. It is a fact of history. It is a thing rooted in our origins. Whatever else men have believed, they have believed that there is something wrong with mankind. It was G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) who pointed out that original sin is an observable fact that one can “see in the street.”

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. (…) But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street.7

In Augustine’s account of man’s fall from grace, it was precisely original sin (humanity’s primordial loss of self) that shattered the original unity of mankind into many individual shards at odds with one another. Sin came about as a result of man’s choice. It was not part of the original plan. In his City of God, St. Augustine reminded us of the paradisiac state of humanity, i.e., man’s state before he was expelled from paradise or “thrown into history” (to use a Heideggerian expression). The original plan was for all men to be one people in a peaceful relationship with one another through the Spirit of God. Unfortunately, the Earthly City became the estate of sinful humanity without God’s Spirit. Not only did sin disrupt the relationship between the Earthly City and God, but the absence of the Spirit in the Earthly City made the godly relationship between the Earthly citizens and the Godly citizens impossible.

Augustine identified this “Spirit” as the principle bringing together the multiple shattered shards of fallen humanity. Spirit is that which brings about unity not only in man (the microcosm), but also in the whole (the macrocosm). It was, in fact, the Spirit or Breath (Ruah in Hebrew) of God, breathed into inanimate dust, that transformed dead dust into a living being. Dust symbolizes primordial disintegration—this is why a living thing reverts to dust when it dies. Man was made from the fusion of dust and spirit, two principles that did not originally belong together; the former signifies disintegration, and the latter, unity. The more materialistic his desires, the more he would descend into death; the more spiritual, the more he would ascend into life.

In this vein, St. Augustine summed up the forces that determine the movement of human history into the struggle between two cities—an Earthly City and a Godly City—as they pursue their desires, one for earthly pleasure and peace, the other for peace and righteousness through Jesus Christ. These differing desires—for self or God—oppose one another and create strife within humanity.

And thus it has come to pass, that though there are very many and great nations all over the earth…yet there are no more than two kinds of human society, which we may justly call two cities…The one consists of those who wish to live after the flesh, the other to those who wish to live after the spirit; and when they severally achieve what they wish, they live in peace, each after their kind.” (City of God, Book XIV, 1)

According to St. Augustine, then, history ultimately consists of these two strains or tensions that will persist in all of us until the end of time—in both our individual and communal states. These disparate forces unleashed into the world from the time of the Fall will battle for superiority within every one of us until the end of the world. According to this model of history, progress is not inevitable because of our real capacity to freely choose our destiny. Human history is not fixed or fully determined—it is open to the vicissitudes of human freedom, called to life and unity, pulled downwards towards death and disintegration. The side of history any person or collective chooses will be a function of which aspect of reality they choose to pay attention to.

Modernity and the fragmentation of attention

In Part 1 of our Memory of Paradise series, we mentioned that, insofar as it can be considered a mode of being-in-time, the present moment is “held together” by what any particular human being chooses to direct his attention towards. Augustine synthesized this idea in his Confessions:

Time is present to us as past in memory, as present in attention, and as future in expectation.

There is, for Augustine, a psychological and interior dimension of time that governs man in his here-and-now, according to which that section of reality that he grasps as present (the “now”) is determined not solely by the calendar or by the movement of heavenly bodies, but primarily by mental attention. Mental attention is the capacity to “hold” that ever-elusive “now” as it flows between the “before” and the “after”—like a surfer skillfully maintaining his balance on a surfboard as it titters on the crest of a moving wave.

In many ways, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein balances Augustine’s notion of psychic time and the ancient world’s notion of cosmic time. As beings moving in time, we can, to some extent, manipulate the flow of time according to our interior inclinations—but only up to a certain extent. Psychic time must coexist with cosmic time lest both devolve into the empty randomness typical of modernity.

Fractured by so much inner tension and assaulted by so many competing forces, modern man can no longer hold the present moment together. The so-called multi-tasking has frayed our capacity to pay attention. The ancient Greeks called man’s incapacity for attention “acedia”.8 We can describe acedia as a type of mental malaise characterized by divided attention, listlessness, boredom, apathy, despondency, tedium, ennui... It is the state of mind we frequently see nowadays among our young people, “killing time” as they doom scroll, zombie-like, from one TikTok to another, day in, day out—completely numbed from the actual “tick-tock” of nature’s clock. In his Summa, St. Thomas described acedia as “a sort of heavy sadness . . . that presses down on a man’s mind in such a way that no activity pleases him.” Blaise Pascal might have been referring to this malaise in his Pensées when he wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The Bible describes acedia as “the pestilence that stalks in darkness, or the destruction that wastes at noonday” (see Psalm 91:6). Modern psychologists might have been grappling with this notion when they came up with the expression, “Attention Deficit Disorder”.

With so many examples of our metaphysical hollowness, is it any wonder so many of our young people have sunk into a leaden emptiness of a lusterless and selfish existence? Is it any wonder they are struggling with clinical depression and suicidal thoughts? To lose a sense of the present is to lose the ability to hold oneself in being. It is to lose one’s story and, with it, a sense of the importance of history. Such utter inner disintegration of the self is, in and of itself, a veritable death—a death worse than physical death because it involves the death of meaning itself. Sin and death are ontological equivalents.

The meaninglessness that results from this kind of disintegration is at the heart of the modern world’s full-frontal assault on the ancient stories that used to give us a sense of identity. All modern heroes are mere deconstructions of ancient heroes. All our movies and series have become case studies of criticizing the foibles of classic heroes to destroy them as role models. Not satisfied with dismantling our native stories and heroes, these postmodernist iconoclasts have embarked on a new project of deconstruction: altering the very meanings of the words we use in our everyday languages. These destroyers of meaning will not rest until they have dismantled every trace of The Logos in the world.

This “grammar of fragmentation” has also found multiple expressions in our digital ecosystems. How else should we interpret hate speech, cancel culture, and the mimetic patterns of accusation we witness daily on Twitter/X and the comment sections of our YouTube videos, if not as tangible manifestations of our already disintegrated interiors?

Africa’s Anamnesis as an antidote to Modernity’s Amnesia

… the memory is that wherein we take thoughts and images into ourselves and incorporate them so that they co-constitute our very identity, our selfhood. 9

Owing to our long sense of Zamani, it can be argued that African societies have something that the modern world has lost and desperately needs: a deep anchorage to the past. This strong desire to cling to the living memory of our forefathers could be exactly what Western culture currently needs to “rescue their father from the underworld”, in the words of Jordan B Peterson, a phrase which has gained considerable popularity in the contemporary West.

Our sense of the Zamani is, I would wish to argue, the ontological basis of our Ubuntu, our sense of togetherness. Zamani is more primordial to us than Ubuntu. Whereas Zamani is our historical connection to our forefathers, Ubuntu is our present connection to our brethren. The extensive and intensive sense of the past sustains our present and acts as our defense against and counterweight to modernity’s fragmentation. We are, of course, not free from the contagion of fragmentation. After all, we, too, are children of this age; the backwaters of the world we dwell in stain us, too.

The memory devices we are so fond of may “enframe” us into perceiving memory as a purely external phenomenon—like a pen drive that can be plugged and unplugged into a computer’s Central Processing Unit, with no serious detriment to the machine’s overall working. But we should not allow the distortion engendered by such an epistemology to endanger our relationship with our fundamental connection to memory:

There is a properly human way of retaining experience and ideas, which differs from the merely mechanical repetition of data. This way involves the recognition that what we hold onto, what we take into the center of our being, gives us life, connects us to others, opens us to the transcendent order—that is, to God. The lived experiences of the transcendent truth take flesh in us, and then we pass them on to others in an incarnate way. Thus, the “memorials” that bind us to God (…) at the very same time bind us to each other.10

Thus interpreted, memory is not seen as a mere “storage device,” circumscribed within the confines of our individual beings. It is, instead, something much closer to an opening—within the innermost core of one’s being—to what precedes one, what is already there, what is given:

The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path. In this regard, we can speak of a massive amnesia in our contemporary world.11

This is, in fact, one of the most fundamental truths of our being pilgrims in time. It is one of the main facets of human identity that modern individualism is insistently trying to suppress. To these kinds of underhand assaults, we need to reply insistently and forcefully: “We do not and cannot make ourselves. No one ‘is’ just themselves, no one is autonomous.” Neither language games nor reinterpretations of the grand narratives can change these facts of our nature without serious detriment to our identity.

Without the others to ‘fall back’ on, the present moment loses its vitality, the hope of the future evaporates, and human identity disappears altogether. Humans need community to subsist and communities need memories—enshrined in common traditions, customs, and monuments—to thrive. Our historical actions leave marks on our geographical locations. Our ancestors erected monuments in places where their actions transcended the moment. Monuments and pilgrimage sites make visible, almost tangible, the moments when our forefathers encountered the Living God. They serve as proof that He has not withdrawn from the world but is always present to us so that we, too, can encounter Him in the present moment. We cannot flee from those who have gone before us—neither in space nor in time—and hope to remain human.

As part of its identity, Africa is open to transcendence, to adoration, and to the glory of God. The African peoples respect life, but they look beyond it by seeking eternity. The soul of Africa is always open toward God. Unlike a large part of the West, this continent has a fundamentally theocentric vision. Material concerns are always secondary. In this life, the African knows that he is only a sojourner.12

Who would have imagined that the Western world’s flight from God would eventually lead them into a literal flight from this world? Who would have foreseen how the loss of the sense of divinity would lead not only to the loss of the sense of humanity but also to the loss of the sense of the earth itself?

Have we in Africa lost sight of the Memory of Paradise? No! … Or at least not yet. We have not lost contact with Heidegger’s Dasein—with “Being” understood first and foremost as the lived experience of existence. Neither have we lost sight of our fallenness from grace (à la Augustine) and our thrownness into history (à la Heidegger). We are still on the side of Augustine’s Godly City. We are not perfect, but we are yet to reach a “crisis state”—we can still offer the decaying modern world new ways of living and fresh models of life to make the contemporary world a place of true humanity.

To continue preserving this Fundamental Memory of Being, one of the key actions we could adopt here and now is to commit ourselves to pay more attention to the following concrete realities—which already belong to our genius as a people: To remain open to transcendence and religion. To treat Being with reverence and to especially revere the Being that is human from his natural beginning to his natural end. To abhor abortion and respect the elderly. To preserve our communal identities in our communal languages, stories, and monuments. To subordinate technical prowess to moral and spiritual energy. To cooperate with creation instead of destroying it—or as Heidegger would put it, not to allow the use of techne (technology) to replace physis (nature)).

Holding on tightly to such concrete realities could be the key to preserving ourselves and unveiling the Memory of Paradise for our despairing contemporaries.

Leave a comment

We at The AfroDiscourse are starting a new phase on HostedinAfrica (HiA), a social network hosted in Africa, by Africans, for Africa.

The platform offers much more opportunity for exclusive engagement with you and between you: webinars, forums, long-form comment sections, etc. We look forward to this new phase of community!

That’s why we’d like to invite you to join The AfroDiscourse’s HiA community. You can get started by joining HiA, here, then join the HiA community here.

The HiA community is currently on a free trial phase - you can check it out for the next couple of months, until mid-November, when we’ll have our first webinar. After the November webinar, members will be required to donate a minimum of KES 50 to fund the operations of The AfroDiscourse. (Of course, larger donations will be more than welcome).

Now, without further ado, here is this week’s post from the archives, by Robert Odero.

(Reading time: 10 minutes)

What is a family? Is it a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

Barack Obama

Dreams from My Father

A Story of Race and Inheritance

In this article, I would like to attempt to answer the questions posed in the preamble by Mr. Obama. My point of departure is that Africans are a people of and for life, with "life" understood broadly and simply as fullness or totality, as that which IS. I would like to present the case that, for the African, life is unified, integrated, and multifaceted. We cannot separate life from work from art from music from literature from culture from philosophy from religion. They interpenetrate and weave into each other like a colorful African tapestry. Africa as a continent and Africans as a people have always been and should therefore endeavor to always remain on the side of life. 

Our preference for big and extended families that welcome life as a gift, as well our devotion to our fore-bearers are all pointers towards this ‘Yes’ to Life. The specific facet of life I would like to explore is an aspect of African culture that has been referred to as the “Cult of the Ancestors”. By "cult" here I mean - as the etymology of the word suggests - that which we have cult-ivated over time and has therefore become valuable to us, identified with us, and consequently, proper to our way of being. By the expression “Cult of the Ancestors”, I mean that attitude of reverence that we reserve for our elders, be they close or distant, familiar or foreign. By cult, in short, I mean that which we honor, cherish, and yes, ultimately even what we worship.

Of all the entities that we value, I repeat, the first and most primordial is life. This we are aware of even before we can define it – if it can be defined. We have a strong feeling, an intuition, for instance, that even though the village sage may fade away from our memories, he never really does die. He does not shrink back into nothingness. We know that the dead stay upon the earth: they are on the other shore…. the only difference is that the other shore cannot be seen with the naked eye. From within the afterlife, we feel strongly that the deceased continue to protect and support the community. Even death, then, is captured within the ambit of life; it is part of it, not antagonistic to it. It serves to provide contrast; to make life shine even brighter. It is precisely this love for life that leads Africans to give such great importance to the veneration of their ancestors. We believe intuitively that the “dead” continue to live and remain in communion with us. Honoring the memory of our ancestors or the living-dead is a trickle-down effect of the value we attach to life.

If wealth and value are correlative, then we affirm here that this value constitutes, par excellence, our wealth. Not only the value we attach to life but more concretely, the value we attach to that specific facet of life that we have called above the “Cult of the Ancestors”. The ancestors are an extension of village life and a priceless part of it, for which reason we “look up” to them. It is ironic how, no matter how much of the physical world has been discovered and no matter how numerous our acquaintances may be, the most fitting phrase that has been used to describe the modern world, to my mind, is that of a “global village”. The explorer has gone full circle, traversing the length and breadth of the globe in search of wealth and of himself only to come back home to the reality that the African has known all along – that we are the more interiorly rich, the more we are part of a tightly-knit community. This is our heritage and our contribution to history – and we ought to cling to it with the same tenacity and scrupulosity with which we are told Robinson Crusoe clung on to the remnants of his shipwreck.

Why, then, have we let ourselves get dragged into that disease of the modern world which consists of the depraving and enslaving pursuit of money? Since when did the wealth of African nations consist in making money? Why do we let ourselves get side-tracked by the allure of the sirens? Does our odyssey have to follow that of other civilizations? If the details of our history vary from theirs, should not our specific mission also within this history vary from theirs? True, we share the same life, but life is at the same time, multifaceted. 

Our notion of wealth does not consist of material accumulation but of interior richness. We are as rich as the sum total of the people who have preceded us. Do we not say of the child who has inherited material possessions from his parents that he is rich? Are we any poorer for the values we have inherited from our ancestors? Aren’t we, on the contrary, so much richer? In African societies, the true pauper is the individual without descendants. [1] Chinua Achebe reiterates this idea when he says that “We do not pray to have more money but to have more kinsmen.” If we look at life from this point of view, so much will change. We will realize that we were born rich, that our wealth is received, not self-made; that it is natural not artificial.

The gold mined from the bowels of the earth is no more ours than is the golden sun we behold in the sky. A simple child who delights in be-holding the silver moon in the sky at night is much richer than a tight-fisted miser who takes solace in holding a silver coin in his dark pocket. A lavish tycoon with millions of coins in his bank vault is not as rich as an African elder who numbers descendants like the stars of the night sky. Even the most commonplace understanding of the word "rich" suggests that it is a term applied to the person who can better multiply the natural gifts he has received with the aid of his intelligence or the one who can distribute them with a generous will. Correspondingly, don’t we esteem the richest men in the world due to some noble cause they have given themselves to? Mind and heart - these spiritual powers are, and always will be, the source of genuine wealth in man.

Our wealth, then, is found concretely in ourselves and, by extrapolation, in other people, living or “dead”. We revere life, the living community, and relationship; that dynamic connection that comes when we group ourselves around some value(s) we hold dear. These values are the source of community, is a compound word derived from “common unity”. The first and most natural community is, of course, the family. The family is the first place where we are grounded in otherness, in relationship; it is the first place where human warmth, affection… love is engendered.

With the help of the foregoing considerations, we can now furnish some rudimentary answers to Mr. Obama’s ruminations. What is the family? Is it a genetic chain? Yes, part of the definition of a family lies in the fact that we are part of a family tree - we belong to a long chain of descendants from whom we inherit the genes of our forefathers. Is it a social construct? If by social construct we mean what the social contract theorists (Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacques Rousseau…) or the eugenicists (Friedrich Nietzsche, Adolf Hitler…) meant by social construct, then NO! Families are not “constructed” by man nor are they mere economic units; they descend from a given seed or root; much like a stream descends from a mountain peak. A man can no more construct a family than a child can make itself a face. In short, families are natural, not artificial. If, however by social construct (and I doubt this is the meaning implied by the author) we mean, that man is a social being who needs to discover culture-specific laws to govern his community, then yes, the family is a socio-economic structure - a natural, not an artificial one. Is the family an ambit of love? Definitely! This seems to be the most fitting definition of a family since it breaks down, without eliminating them, barriers of race and tribe and because it thereby fosters both unity and diversity. Finally, is a family a reach across the void? Hopefully, yes. If “the void” is to be understood here as that breach or veil of uncertainty that separates the realm of the living from that of the “dead”, then this is a question best to be answered precisely by those who have given themselves to the “cult of the ancestors”. Furthermore, if it is true that the life and the love that was engendered in the family is ever present and genuine and, in addition, if it is true that love is that one primordial value that takes on multiple facets when viewed from diverse cultural lenses, then, yes, the strength of love is precisely that power that also extends across the void, preserving our relations and experiences, linking us, via the thin thread of memory, to our ancestors.

This worldview has far-reaching consequences. One that comes out clearly at this juncture is that, since there is no break in the continuum of life, it is inconceivable in the mind of anyone who is born and is immersed in such a cultural mindset, that life can be destroyed. Note that, the question here is not whether life ought or ought not to be destroyed. It is about whether it can or cannot be destroyed. It is a question of the intellect, not of the will; a matter of knowledge, not volition; of reality, not possibility. This distinction is of utmost importance. If we are born into a worldview wherein the notion is absorbed into our very fiber that life is that which is, of necessity, ever-present; that life is received, that it is something into which we are born, something that cannot not be, then, unless the idea is suggested or imposed by an external influence, the question of whether life ought or ought not to be destroyed does not even enter the mind. If it dares enter the consciousness, it is rebuffed with abhorrence. This is why the people of Africa not only keep elderly parents and relatives within the family, but they also respect life from the moment it is conceived in the womb until its natural end.

The question of wife inheritance is another natural corollary of this worldview. If belonging to a tightly-knit community is what gives meaning to an individual’s existence, and if it is true that through a woman, life is perpetuated, then it follows that a widow must be put in a place and in a position where she can find meaning and where she can continue nurturing life. Admittedly, this is a compromise solution but a person must belong somewhere otherwise they are suspended in a void and the idea of a void is, as we have seen, inconceivable. A few words from Sobonfu Somé can help illuminate this point:

Without the community, the individual is left without a place where he can contribute. The community is that grounding place where people come and share their gifts and receive them from others. [2]

Still on Sobonfu Somé, and as a way of rounding up the consequences that spring from the comprehensive worldview outlined above, is the following idea that elaborates why and how a tightly-knit community is not synonymous with a small family:

[The] family in Africa is always extended. You would never refer to your cousin as “cousin,” because that would be an insult. So your cousins are your sisters and brothers. Your nieces are your children. Your uncles are your fathers. Your aunts are your mothers. Children are also encouraged to call other people outside the family mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.

To conclude, we repeat and in this way affirm once more our fundamental principles. The first is that the sons and daughters of Africa love life. Consequent to this is that we revere the living community. Faced with an increasingly globalized world, the upshot is that on one hand, we can benefit tremendously from the reciprocal encounter and cross-fertilization of cultures, but on the other hand, we should be wary of elements that are foreign to our genius. The Trojan horse must not be allowed into the African village. We all know how that story ended.

If we cling tenaciously to this genius, we shall offer to the modern world, new ways of living, models of life that can make the world a place of true humanity as opposed to the wasteland of technological existence that it is becoming.

I conclude, borrowing again from, or rather calling upon, one more icon in that broad “network” of African thinkers who form, as it were, a living web, an ensemble of men and women, living and “dead”, kindred spirits who have accompanied me and with whom I feel a deep connaturality:

Vertically, the (black) African personality is rooted in the family and in the primordial Ancestor, if not in God. Horizontally, it has links with the group, with the society, and with the cosmos. This personality is enriched and blossoms through the bonds of reciprocity, which it actively maintains. [3]

Leave a comment

[1] Jean-Marc Éla

[2] Sobonfu Somé

[3] Alassane Ndaw

Quoted authors:

1. Allasane Ndaw is a Senegalese philosopher, dean of the Faculty of Letters at Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar.

2. Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian novelist and poet born in 1930. He is the co-founder of a new style of African literature that draws its main inspiration from oral tradition and the rapid social changes at work in contemporary society. He is regarded as one of Nigeria’s greatest novelists.

3. Jean-Marc Éla has published many books. He has long taught at the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon, and has been a visiting professor at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. He was born in 1936.

4. Sobonfu Somé belongs to the Dagara people of West Africa. She was brought up traditionally and taught by elders. She is a bearer of Africa’s message, one of great richness and sensitivity. 

Photo by Nick Moore on Unsplash

We moderns ordinarily think of time as the passage of calendar days – days that can be reduced to the constant tick-tock of a clock or the digital pulses of our smartwatches. Time seems to have lost its former contact with the harmonious rhythms of the wider cosmos. In most primal societies, time was conceived of as a cosmic reality. It was determined by the movement of the heavenly bodies – the rising and setting of the sun or the waxing and waning of the moon. One could argue that ancient peoples were more in touch with the language of creation and the voice of their creator. Catholics and Muslims still use such cycles to determine major liturgical seasons in their religious calendars – Lent, Easter, Ramadhan, and Eid al-Fitr being the most prominent.

Psychic Time vs Physical Time

English historian and Christian humanist Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) once stated that St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was the first philosopher to truly understand time. Born in North Africa in Thagaste (located in present-day Algeria), Augustine achieved a unique synthesis of the Greco-Roman culture with Christian wisdom. He lived at the pivotal intersection of two historic epochs – classical antiquity and medieval Christianity – and witnessed the death throes of the former and the birth pangs of the latter.

Dawson noted several times in his writings that no one before Augustine, in the ancient or medieval Western worlds (or elsewhere, for that matter), considered history as progressive. Instead, most who thought about history at all—East and West—thought of it as cyclical: A thing began, it aged, it died, and the cycle started all over again.

Before Augustine, Aristotle had defined time as numerus motus secundum prius et posterius: the measure of motion according to a before and an after. Augustine, who died when his native North Africa was being besieged by Vandals, believed that history, far from being cyclical, was instead a particular manifestation of God’s will. Dawson, following Augustine, taught that history was:

… moving towards a great consummation, the revelation of the power and glory of Yahweh through his servant Israel.

We find St. Augustine’s rather complex expositions on the nature of time (prompted, no doubt, by the events of his time) in the 10^th and 11^th Chapters of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Confessions, and his epic work, The City of God. Augustine understood time as a phenomenon of human consciousness. He claimed that neither the past, present, or future exists. In his Confessions, he says:

Time is present to us as past in memory, as present in attention, and as future in expectation.

In other words, the past is nothing but the human mind as it remembers; the present is nothing but the human mind as it considers the “here and now”; and the future is nothing but the human mind in expectation.

There is, for Augustine, a psychological and interior dimension to the time that governs man in particular, according to which that section of reality that man grasps as present (the “now”) is determined not solely by the calendar or by the movement of heavenly bodies, but primarily by mental attention. Time is precisely “the flow of the ever-present now” – a flow held in place by our mental attention or by the consciousness of the present moment.

Augustine referred to the flow of this “now” using the Latin term memoria. However, the English rendering of this term by the similar-sounding word “memory” is inaccurate. The memoria Augustine was talking about is not a recollection of the past as past. Instead, it is a past that makes itself felt in the present and points toward the future. It links what we nowadays distinguish into three distinct time portions (past, present, and future) into one cohesive reality that fundamentally relies on the springboard of a past so wholesome that it encapsulates and inspires both the present and the future.

To the “Augustinian now” belong our hopes and fears, i.e., what is chronologically future, as well as our fidelity and gratitude, i.e., what is chronologically past. Therefore, this “now” is not just “the present”; it is that peculiar trait of our stream of consciousness that unites the chronological past, the actual present, and the possible future into a singular elusive yet flowing moment.

In our more perceptive moments, each of us can get a glimpse into what Augustine meant by the term memoria. We glimpse it, for instance, whenever we hear certain people (especially old people) talking about the “Good Old Days”. Such expressions contain a certain vivid nostalgia for the past that can inspire the present so that we do not lose track of the future. We can also sense the psychological intensity of memoria as a present moment whenever we get sucked into what some of our contemporaries have called “the zone”. Such moments of concentrated activity normally involve a precarious balance between a heightened sense of present-ness while engaging oneself in an activity that relies on having mastered habits based on the distant past.

In summary, for Augustine, time is more of a human phenomenon than a cosmic event. As humans inhabiting the cosmos, we are located more where our spirit is than where our body is located. As free beings with desires and motivations, we are where our hearts or greatest loves are “located”. In temporal-spatial terms, we can say that a human being is not only located where his feet are but where his heart is. This last idea is simply another way of restating the Ubi Thesaurus Cor principle, which we can translate as: “A person’s treasure is found where his heart dwells.”

Memoria as Anamnesis

The Greeks in the Platonic tradition used a linguistically clear and philosophically deep term – anamnesis – to refer to humanity’s original memory of the true and the good. They spoke of it as an inherent capacity to recall, an inner sense present in each of us from the moment of our conception. Augustine picked up on this Platonic insight in his reflections:

We could never judge that one thing is better than another if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us. (De Trinitate VIII, 3 (4), PL 42, 949)

The Greeks understood that, from his origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. For the Greeks, this anamnesis of the origin is not a conceptually articulated knowing – a store of retrievable concepts. Rather, it is an inner ontological tendency within all men that directs them towards the divine. It is the ground of man’s existence – a deep subterranean memory that ran as a substratum in the subconscious stream of all men. Augustine must have had at the back of his mind just such a deep notion of memory when referring to what he later translated into Latin as memoria.

It is easy to imagine Augustine looking at the aimless and bloody chaos of the world around him and projecting his reflections on history toward the world of eternal realities from whence the world of sense derives all its significance. With Augustine, human time found its apogee –Eternity. Now, anamnesis not only opened up all men to the prelapsarian origins of time, as it had done for the Platonists; it also opened man up to his climactic fulfillment – the God whose very nature it is To Be.

Reflecting on the nature of this infinite God who, according to his Christian faith, condescended to dwell among finite men, Augustine got a glimpse of a hermeneutical key that would enable him to bridge the gap between time and eternity. If the eternal had truly entered time, it meant that the things of the future could spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future. This key enabled him to conceive of any present time touched by such a future presence as a continuous relationship or dialogue between the finite and the infinite – between the temporal and the eternal. Our earthly activities could echo into eternity just as God’s divine activity had reverberated in time.

Plato’s dualism was no longer sufficient to explain the relationship between the material world and the world of forms. The monolithic god of Aristotle was no longer adequate to make sense of movement and change. An “Unmoved Mover” could not afford to relate with finite activity lest such activity compromise his pristine and pure actuality. The Greek Fates, the elemental spirits, and the tyrannical cosmic forces of the universe were no longer in charge of our destinies. They had been deposed by a personal God who had overturned the worldview of that time. It was not the laws of matter or mathematics or evolution that had the final say, but reason, will, love – a Person. Time could finally be conceived of as an entity fundamentally shaped neither by despair nor presumption but by Hope.

To give a brief recap, Augustine’s new vision of time was built on the Platonic concept of Anamnesis but went beyond it. With the advent of Christianity, a new light was shed on the nature and trajectory of the cosmos and man. Nihilism was no longer an option. The world had a clear beginning and a clear end – an end which, though not present as an actuality (i.e., as an event that has already taken place in an “alternate universe”) was nevertheless truly present as hope – as a seed planted in the soil of time. In a crumbling world, this new virtue became a new mode of temporal existence because it granted men sure knowledge of a future world – a world potentially present in time as an oak tree is potentially present in an acorn. Each human action had significance, and collective human history had an overall meaning and direction. The providential umbrella of the Christian God covered all time – past, present, and future.

An African concept of time and the meaning of development

We have all come across the concept of “African time”. Foreigners, especially those from Europe and America, often accuse Africans of tardiness and a total disregard for schedules and programs—our reputation as “terrible time-keepers” precedes us.

Does the African place any value on time? Is there a peculiarly African concept of time? Is time, in any way, seen by Africans as a retrospective tool to reflect on the past so as to improve on the present and plan for the future? What is the general thought pattern of Africans about time?

John Samuel Mbiti (1931-2019), a professor of African Philosophy and Religion, discussed the African concept of time in the context of the religious thought system of Africans. According to Mbiti, time (especially in the traditional African setting) is a two-dimensional phenomenon, with a very long past, a present, and virtually no future. This notion runs contrary to the linear time concept in Western thought, which also has a long past, a present, and an indefinite future.

Mbiti is one of the few African philosophers who has taken the trouble to elaborate on the concept of time vis-à-vis the morphology of language. Proficient in at least seven languages (English, German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Kamba, and Swahili), Mbiti noticed that, in general, African languages had no adequate verb tenses to refer to the distant future. Focusing his research on two particular tribes in East Africa—the Akamba and Gikuyu of Kenya—but also drawing insights from peoples elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, Mbiti concluded that, by and large, Africans had no time consideration of the future. Mbiti taught that the African’s concept of time might help explain beliefs, attitudes, practices, and the general way of life of African people, not only in the traditional setup but also in the modern situation (whether political, economic, educational, or religious life).

Mbiti called “Sasa” the time that covers the “now” period (the one imbued with a sense of immediacy and nearness). The Sasa period covers the recently experienced, that which is about to occur, or the almost realizable. Since it also has to do with the already experienced, it means that everyone has his own Sasa, and the older a person gets, the more profound his Sasa. As a measure of that which is about to occur, Sasa is also a term that covers an extremely brief future. Mbiti’s experience with local languages made him claim that if a future event was beyond, say, two years, it could not be conceived and spoken of since it had no place in the African’s consciousness.

The connection between the past and the present in Mbiti reflects the importance of the nexus between a similar past and present that Heidegger spoke of in his magnum opus, Being and Time. In the Heideggerian expression (vergagenheitsvergessenheit), if the present suffers this “forgetfulness of the past”, there would be the death of sein (present being) as well, for its life is inseparable from its past, and the forgetfulness-of-the-past leads to the decay of the present. Such an extension of the past into the present would help to explain why, when it comes to offering sacrifices in Africa, the eldest person with the longest Sasa period is usually charged with the task of offering sacrifices on behalf of the community since he remembers the ancestors to whom the sacrifice is offered more than others.

Besides the Sasa, there is also the “Zamani”, which Mbiti calls the “Macro-Time”. He declares that Zamani is the graveyard of time, the period of termination, the dimension in which everything finds its halting point. Zamani is the final storehouse of all phenomena and events, “the ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before”. From Mbiti’s perspective, the African’s concept of time is not linear and forward-looking; rather, it moves forward by spiraling backward, so to speak.

Admittedly, though such a concept of time does not place Africa in an advantageous position for development (given that little or no surplus can be produced for investment and expansion within such a worldview), it is undeniable that Mbiti was on to something. Nor is he not the only African thinker who has made such observations: Maurier1, Nyasami,2 and Mbeki3 (former South African President) have all made similar claims. While we may disagree with them, our nonchalant attitude towards time is indeed one of the main reasons for the continuing underdevelopment of our continent.

If we dared to be brutally honest with ourselves, we would also admit that we are still trapped in a cyclical, backward-looking, vision of time. Even a cursory glance at African myths reveals this. The myths of African peoples say nothing about the future but much about the past. Aren’t we often more concerned with the history that has passed than with a future that is full of opportunities? Could this be why Africans rarely undertake medium and long-term developments based on future economic projections? Don’t we still perceive the passage of time as the cycle of days, months, and seasons that are just enough to cover our basic subsistence needs? Do we have a futuristic theology or ideology that flows into an eternal future, as is the case with, say, Heidegger, or Teilhard de Chardin, or Western Christianity in general – a theology or eschatology that talks about a future or where there will be judgment, retribution, heaven, and hell?

Here are some honest questions we could ask ourselves: Do we have a concept of time that incorporates development? Did we ever have a futuristic vision of time before the colonialists came into the picture? Do we have one now? Just as there is a coming-of-age phase when a child matures and stops blaming his failures on his progenitors or his poor upbringing, there is an expiry date for blaming the Europeans and Americans for our chronic underdevelopment. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that underdevelopment in our continent is not fundamentally attributable to the effects of colonization. It is, first and foremost, a function of our vision of time and our corresponding inability to escape from a retrospective cycle of time.

A final valuable insight into the African’s concept of time comes from American theologian Brian Abshire:

"The problems facing modern Africa are due to the effects of paganism. Africa has a thin layer of Western materialism covering millennia of pagan philosophy. The endemic poverty, sickness, tribal warfare, etc., can be attributed to the paganism which continues to operate. The problem is not race but religion. The main difference between white Europeans and black Africans is not skin color but the influence of 2000 years of the Christian religion. ... Africa will continue to experience its cycles of poverty, warfare, and famine until this pagan orientation has been overcome by the Gospel.”

What Abshire is arguing here is particularly relevant to those Africans who are fond of blaming all the woes of the continent on the colonialists. Such Africans are almost always more concerned with how Europe underdeveloped Africa than with how they are themselves destroying the future of Africa through corruption, violence, laziness, and poor leadership – as if “the others” are the full-blown sinners whereas we were conceived immaculate.

Let us admit it. There is a glaring deficiency in our vision of time and life. And where there is no vision, there is no future, no development worthy of the name. Let us say it more clearly and in religious language. Our time-consciousness stands in need of redemption. We need a vision of time that does not lock us inside the prison of the past. We need mechanisms that will help us overcome guilt and hatred. We need a hopeful notion of the afterlife that will help us rectify past injustices. We need a vision of time that frees us from sliding into the abyss of death and despair. We need, to use the words of Mbiti, to be rescued from drowning inside that bottomless “ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before”.

If Africa must be like other civilizations that have taken advantage of temporal conditions to build artifacts that have stood the test of time and the vicissitudes of human history, she must change her mentality towards time. Africa’s development is tied to her vision of the future and her management of time. And if we are bent on dwelling on the past, perhaps the Saint from North Africa could provide us with some clues to help jump-start our journey of development.

Share The AfroDiscourse

References

• Abshire, Brian (1997, December). Paganism and Modem Africa. Chalcedon Report. Reprinted in The Christian Digest (1998, November).

• Aristotle (1941). The Physics. In R. Mckeon (Ed.). The basic works of Aristotle (pp. 292-293). New York: Random House. (Original work written in the 4th century BC.)

• Augustine, St. (1963). The Confessions of St Augustine. R. Warner (trans.) NewYork: Mentor. (Original work published in 426 AD.)

• Christianity and European Culture: Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson edited by Gerald J. Russello. Reissued by the Catholic University of America Press (1998).

• Heidegger, M. (1983). Being and Time. London: Basil Blackwell. (Original work published in 1927.)

• Malan, J.S., “The cosmological factor in development programmes“, South Africa Journal of Ethnology 11(2), 1999.

• Maurier, H. (1984). Philosophie de L’Afrique Noire. St Augustine Anthropos Institute.

• Mbiti, J. S. (1969). African Religions and Philosophy. Kenya: Sunlitho.

• Nyasami, J. M. (2010). Philosophy of development: An African perspective: Reflections on why Africa may never develop on the Western model. Kenya: Consolata Institute of Philosophy.

• Scarborough, D. (1999, May/June). Speech on Thabo Mbeki's African Renaissance: African Spiritual Powers versus God's Word.

In Part III of this series, we pointed out the fundamental distrust present in capitalism: a trust in things and a profound distrust of persons. The Smithian “common man”, the homo oeconomicus, the Smithian baker motivated primarily by individual interest, is a notion of man that sees his freedom as directed towards things and not persons. If this freedom regards persons at all, it does so only as a function of things. It is not responsible to other persons, nor does it place any trust in them. This distrust of other persons goes hand in hand with the supremacy of desire and the primacy of wealth accumulation.

In this final part of the series on dataism and capitalism, we draw a rough and inexhaustive outline of an economy properly animated by trust.

Trust, Inseparable from Responsibility

Let me begin by pointing out that it is no easy thing to “trust in persons over things”. The “epistemic trust” discussed in Part IV-A of this series, the tenacious acceptance of the reality of the world, of its truth, and of truth as the standard that should determine one’s life, is a necessary beginning—and even this can be incredibly difficult to accept, precisely because of the nature of the trust and distrust that we have been speaking about in this series. For the trust we speak of is no mere passive attitude, no reckless, childish abandon to the whims of the world and the cunning plots of the astute. The trust we speak of instead means a committed acceptance of the reality of things and persons as they are, because of a fundamental belief that they are valuable, that they are worthwhile, even with their imperfections and their failings and their mistakes, and even their malice. Trust always implies the risk and vulnerability entailed in accepting the truth of the world as it is, the truth of persons as they are, and responding to that truth.

Therefore, trust is inseparable from responsibility. But this responsibility avoids the pitfall of being generated solely from within, with no reference to what lies outside ourselves, like sparks from the cogs of a futile machine. This responsibility is no mere “duty for duty’s sake”, or “duty for manhood’s sake”, with manhood considered apart from the person of the brother, the sister, the father, the mother, the bride, the child. Such “responsibility” cannot, in fact, be “responsible”, because it has nothing to respond to. Nor can there be such a thing as a responsibility that does not go out into the world, a responsibility that does not delve into the depths and into the concrete reality of things with one’s heart and one’s mind and one’s actions—for the one who responds must respond with his or her whole being. This is the responsibility manifested in the one whose contemplation bears fruit in action, and whose actions are rooted in and lead to contemplation, a contemplation that presupposes nothing other than trust.1

Nevertheless, while trust is not childish, it is childlike. The man or the woman who trusts is the fulfillment of what was only imaged in the filial trust of the little child. The one who trusts receives reality as a gift, a gift from Someone, a gift imaged above all in the relationship of parenthood and filiation. Moreover, the one who trusts receives themselves as a gift, because he accepts his situation as a being among beings that preceded him, a being among gifts destined for him. The one who trusts receives his responsibility, also, as a gift—for he, too, is one who precedes others. And this responsibility, being a response to what is most fundamentally a gift, takes the fundamental form of gratitude to the Creator and, in the Creator, to other created beings, a gratitude that involves his whole being.2 Trust is the necessary foundation of responsibility. Gift is the necessary foundation of self-gift. Man’s freedom, then, is fundamentally received from the Creator, a fact that he becomes aware of also through the mediation of other creatures; and his freedom finds its fulfilment when he gives himself in gratitude to the Creator and to other created beings, in the manner proper to each. To take a silly example, we get to know grass by studying it, and we get to know persons by conversing with them. We like grass (perhaps because it is beautiful, or because it is soft and nice to sit on), and we respond to the gift of grass, so to speak, by placing it appropriately in our dwellings and public places. But we respond to the being of other persons in a much deeper way, because there is much more depth to respond to.

In all these ways, trust rightly conceived reverses the hierarchy of what we might call the capitalist pattern of trust. Trust rightly conceived regards persons over things, and when it regards things, it does so relative to the Creator and to other persons. This affects the notions of wealth and poverty and of economic value, the hierarchy between the two functions of money, and finally, the orientation of the economic activities of production, exchange, and possession. We now consider each of these briefly, in outline.

Trust and the Radical Redefinition of Wealth

The one who trusts, in the sense that I have tried to explain, relates with things as they are, in all their depth. For this reason, he is capable of interacting with things deeply. His world, so to speak, has more density of being than the world of the person who reduces things solely to the dimension of profitability, for he relates with the things and persons in the world around him as a being among beings, a creature among creatures, a son among other sons and daughters of the Creator. For this reason, his world is richer. He is wealthier. This leads us to a redefinition of wealth: wealth, in its deepest and most proper meaning, signifies being in relation. Therefore, poverty, in its deepest and most proper meaning, signifies not being in relation.

But the one who trusts is wealthy for a different reason as well. I mentioned earlier that the one who trusts responds to the reality of the world with his whole being, including his mind. Here, we can now add that this includes not only a contemplative gaze upon the world in its personal dimension (though this is certainly fundamental) but also, and precisely because of the movement that generates contemplation, an ever deeper and more extensive knowledge of the nature of things, of what they are and what they can be. This is an important part of what is often referred to as “human capital”: the knowledge that “liberates” the value of things, that reveals their potential and opens it up for actualization. Yet we now see that this knowledge that forms part of “human capital” must be based on this contemplative gaze of the world, if we are to act on and interact with the material world in a way that is consonant with a responsibility that engages the entire person.

Unfortunately, the value of knowing what things are seems to be valued only little in many places in Africa, with education being reduced to a matter of grades and certificates that aren’t necessarily connected with knowledge, accompanied by the belief that these grades and certificates will lead to employment, to a livelihood, to a future of relative abundance.3 In this attitude, we see that there is a trust in things over persons, however well-motivated it might be by a fear, not at all groundless, of failing to enter the job market. However, this trust in things over persons, this seeking of security in things apart from their personal dimension, works against its own objectives. More importantly, it prioritizes a limited security in a world of reduced horizons over the risk entailed in responding to the world as it is, of letting oneself be encountered by the Creator in and through the world and other persons, and over the responsibility of each person to live a life of self-giving.

In what we have just said about “the knowledge that ‘liberates’ the value of things”, we also uncover a connection between trust and abundance. On the one hand, the cognitive dimension of trust explained above makes it possible to use things for the production of more and more things, and of more and more economic value. It makes abundance possible—and this is one of the criteria that leads many proponents of capitalism to vouch for it. For instance, they argue, it is the primacy of the motivation of profitable self-interest that has drastically reduced poverty—understood as the lack of possessions. On the other hand, however, as we have also seen, the personal dimension of trust qualifies the true meaning of wealth and, therefore, of abundance. Abundance is not merely the quantitative abounding of things but is primarily the qualitative depth of things, a qualitative depth that then may be expressed in a certain kind of quantitative abounding. But this quantitative dimension is always determined by the qualitative dimension. The fundamental question is not just “How much is there?” Production is not the primary economic metric. Rather, the fundamental question is this: What sort of abundance is both necessary and truly enhancing of man’s dignity as an embodied person, relative to his here-and-now creaturely call to love and glorify God, to love others, and to value the world itself intrinsically in relation to God? This second kind of abundance will at times clash with the first kind of abundance and its consequent notion of “productivity”. In fact, although the second kind of abundance sometimes means extravagance (as in the abundance of a meal that a mother prepares for her family on a day of celebration), at other times this second kind of abundance will tend in the direction of “poverty” as conceived by the paradigm of the first kind of abundance.

Trust and a Novel Meaning of Money

In Part II and Part III of this series, we saw that money, when considered exclusively or primarily as a store of value, tends to encourage the accumulation of things (limitless, in principle) and then to reduce the reality of the world to the quantifiable dimension of things—after all, we know whether we are accumulating things by counting them. In short, money so conceived encourages us to abstract the personal dimension of the world, other persons, and ourselves. “Value” has little to do with “being in relation”. Rather, it has to do with the number of things that we have—even if only in the abstract, symbolized mode of money.

Thinking of “wealth” as “being in relation”, however, calls for a radical change. What is primary is not the reduced possession of reduced things implied in all that comes with the contemporary primacy on the function of money as a store of value, but rather a deep relationship with the world that transforms the very meaning of value and implies that money itself receives its proper meaning in the context of interpersonal relations. In other words, money becomes primarily a means of exchange: a symbol of the world understood as being, first and foremost, created, and that thereby elevates the world and brings it into the realm of relations between persons understood, first and foremost, as sons and daughters of their Creator and brothers and sisters of each other. What is primary, then, is not a logic of accumulation, but rather a logic of gift and responsibility.

Though it merits deeper study, I will say in passing that the logic of gift poses a radical challenge to the political culture of many African countries. Both governors and governed often perceive political leadership as an opportunity for self-enrichment. In fact, accumulation of resources is often both the end of and a fundamental prerequisite for holding political office.

Trust and the Transformation of Economic Life

Finally, trust radically transforms the main activities of economic life: producing, exchanging, and possessing.

Trust radically transforms production by transforming the meaning of things, the meaning of the working person, and the nature of the relationship between them established in labor. Labor animated primarily by self-interest reduces the process of working, the product of work, and the worker himself, to realities-primarily-for-profit. We can take the example of the famous Smithian baker to illustrate the difference. The best possible situation for the baker motivated primarily by self-interest is that he finds a way to reduce his costs in a way which, however much it might entail reducing the qualities proper to good bread-making, would see to it that both the bread and bread-making nevertheless remain effectively the same. The differences introduced by the responsibility we have spoken about are overlooked: the time a baker puts in when he is working for people who matter to him, the care he takes to ensure that everything in the environment in which he works is appropriate to the making of bread befitting the dignity of these people, and indeed the way he invests himself in the process of making the bread, a process that is meaningful not only because of whom he is giving himself to in his work, but also because of the intrinsic value of the realities involved—the feel of the flour, the strength he has to exert to knead the dough, the smell of the dough as it rises, the pains of fatigue, etc.

Both the process of production itself and the artifact itself produced are of higher quality when formed in the logic of gift and indeed as gift, than when they are formed primarily in profitable self-interest. Moreover, the person of the self is enhanced more fully and truly in the former case than in the latter. And because of this, because the process and product of work are a gift, then the one who comes to possess these things receives them as a gift from another, a gift that demands a fitting response even in the very manner of possession: savoring the bread and responding with gratitude.

This gratitude has implications for the act of exchange. Exchange would not primarily be an attempt to reduce one’s costs as much as possible, even at the expense of the other. Rather, the value placed on things in the act of exchange would depend on the dignity of the other as well as on one’s own personal responsibilities, and the “personal” value of the artifact involved, all ultimately regarded from the perspective of one’s relationship with the Creator.

Share The AfroDiscourse

Asked why he wrote Things Fall Apart, in an interview on the 50^th anniversary of the novel, Chinua Achebe answered that he was responding to what he felt was a gap on the bookshelf. Having been acquainted with the classics of Western literature, he felt that some important, and perhaps great, stories remained untold.

Achebe made his motivation bare in an essay titled, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1977). In it he criticized the so-called Eurocentrism that he found in Joseph Conrad’s fiction about Africa, Heart of Darkness. For Achebe, "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant beastiality [sic]".1 Civilization belonged to Europe; elsewhere – Africa, for example - savagery reined. Achebe accuses Conrad of dehumanizing the African people, their culture and their religion. Heart of Darkness may be considered a classic, but it is a grave insult on the culture of a people who form part of the human race.

Things Fall Apart aimed to overcome the dominating Eurocentrist view, by telling an African story - from ‘within’. Before his work, successful fiction on Africa had been written by non-Africans, such as the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad, who viewed the African reality in too condescending a manner and perhaps judged too harshly. Achebe’s debut novel, which was praised as “opening the magic casements of African fiction”, aimed to put forth a more complex story. Achebe felt his task to be that of retelling a story that had been dismissed, rushed over, or simply ignored. Things Fall Apart is considered the African classic novel, having sold over 20 million copies in 57 translations world over.

Things Fall Apart unveils the rich Igbo culture. But it is a critical unveiling. Achebe does not hide the weaknesses, the dark elements, of his people’s culture and religion. Nor does he shy away from letting the bright spots speak for themselves. The village of Umuofia enjoys political stability through various structures of tribal life such as the council of elders that adjudicated disputes timely and effectively. Scholars have admired Umuofia’s democratic air for example, when everyone assembles to discuss at the market square when existential crises beckon. Achebe does not cut out the male chauvinism, black magic, and inhuman rituals that formed part of the Igbo culture.

The novel is a tragedy by genre. The title, taken from W. B. Yeat’s poem Second Coming, foreshadows such an end. ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…’. Achebe wants to redeem, to rediscover to the world, the nuanced heritage of the Igbo - and he succeeds. But there is something of loss in his work. That beautiful heritage has in the end fallen apart - it has been destroyed irreparably. The cause of such a tragedy is clear enough for everyone to see. It is the white man and his religion.

The White man’s religion

Post-colonial African writers are wont to refer to Christianity as the “White man’s religion”. Indeed, it is white missionaries, who first brought the faith to African lands often with the complicity and support of colonial authorities. Used in the context of ‘decolonisation’, the term “White man’s religion” is revealing as important conclusions are drawn.

Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) has offered interesting reflections on a related issue. Ratzinger recalls in his memoirs, Milestones 1927-1977, how the Nazi regime attempted to revive the old German religion of the Maypole. The great Aryan race, the Nazis saw, could only be fully restored if it cast aside Christianity in order to embrace its ‘roots’. In other words, Christianity was considered a foreign religion. Needless to say, the Maypole god did not attract a goodly following. Ratzinger also notes that similar arguments (or are they cries?) are often heard elsewhere. In a 1993 lecture, Ratzinger remarked that, “doubts have arisen today about the universality of Christian faith. Many no longer see the history of worldwide mission as the history of the diffusion of liberating truth and love, but as a history of alienation and violation.”2

The Christian faith, specifically its absolute and universal claim, has come to be included into the critique of Eurocentrism. The white man’s religion is just that: an imposition by the white man. Are not all religions equal? What right has anyone to claim that his God is the true God, and that other gods are mere carven images? The “dictatorship of relativism” – to use a Ratzingerian phrase – has emboldened the critique of Christianity’s “arrogance”.

Culture and religion

The Igbo social fabric collapses, falls apart, at the hands the Christian mission and colonial conquest.

"As for me, I have only a short while to live, and so have Uchendu and Unachukwu and Emefo. But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you, I fear for the clan. "(Things Fall Apart, 50^th Anniversary Edition, page 70)

As far as the Igbo elders are concerned, it was not just the white man’s political oppression that was at issue. The Christian influence was felt to be the more insidious because of how it damaged the spiritual fabric, the very soul of the clan. This excerpt gets to the heart of the matter:

"Does the white man understand our custom about land?" "How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad, and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart." (Things Fall Apart, 50^th Anniversary Edition, page 73)

The brilliance of Achebe’s storytelling comes forth. His story confirms the finding of much scholarship on religion. “In all known historical cultures, religion is the essential element of culture, indeed it is its determining core,” Ratzinger notes.3 The historian Christopher Dawson has also argued, convincingly, of religion’s central role in the development of any culture and civilization.4

If this is the case, Ratzinger continues, “it is difficult to see how a culture, living and breathing the religion with which it is interwoven, can be transplanted into another religion without both of them going to ruin. If you remove from a culture its own religion which begets it, then you rob it of its heart. Should you implant in it a new heart, the Christian heart, it seems inescapable that the organism which is not ordered to it will reject the foreign body.”5 If this reasoning is correct, we can conclude that indeed Christianity is the destroyer of cultures and that “inculturation” is only a euphemism. Such a conclusion would seem to fly in the face of what is meant by Christian universalism. Then it would be true that the “century of Christian endeavour” in Africa has been a tale of isolation and alienation.

The meeting of cultures - “interculturality”

In the above quoted lecture (available here), Ratzinger proceeds to make the case for Christian universalism. The ground for its justification, he argues, has to be the universality of cultures. A universality that is possible because “the same human nature is at work”. “The operation [inculturation] can only have sense if Christian faith and the other religion, together with the culture which lives from it, do not stand in utter difference to each other. It only makes sense if they are interiorly open to one another, or to put it differently, if they naturally tend to draw near and unite.” Christian evangelisation of cultures is not an isolation, a destruction, only if cultures are ordered “to a common truth of the human condition”. So that, “no injustice is done to a culture when, due to the universal human disposition toward the truth, it is opened up and further developed by a new cultural power.” In other words, the light of Christ has come to enable cultures to come fully into their own; shedding their evils, embracing the true good of man, amplifying what good they already had. We might give Western civilization itself as an example. The Western ideal is characterised by some as the fruitful fusion of the best of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and Judaeo-Christianity.6 Now, this Western ideal was accomplished chiefly because of Catholicism. From the chaos that the Roman empire had been reduced to, the Christian faith engendered what is no doubt one of the greatest civilizations that will be known to man.7 While one might not subscribe to it, one will give credit to Scholasticism as a formidable development of the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical genius. And the gems of Roman law survive in Western law, enriched by Christian wisdom—such as the understanding of the person as having of infinite dignity.

For Ratzinger, this reasoning should lead us to speak of the ‘meeting of cultures’ or interculturality (a term he coins in the lecture) rather than inculturation. Not everyone will agree with Ratzinger’s verdict. His reasoning is based on certain fundamental presuppositions, both metaphysical8 and revelational/theological.9 While an elucidation and defence of these presuppositions would lie beyond the scope of the present article, this does not detract from the value of putting forward his argument for the sake of dialogue.

Have things fallen apart?

“Okonkwo was deeply grieved. And it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women” (Things Fall Apart, 50^th Anniversary Edition, page 76). For Okonkwo, it had all fallen apart. The story’s protagonist comes to an end reminiscent of that of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

If Okonkwo had resurrected to see the present day, would he think differently? Would he agree that “only appearing to die, the culture(s) actually rises, coming fully into its own for the first time” on account of Christian influence, as Ratzinger posits?

Simple conclusions will not do. Multiple cultural powers are at work. Besides Christianity, there is first-world secularism, which may be indeed the real destroyer of cultures. Islam has been present in Africa for at least as long as Christianity, with the few exceptions of Ethiopia and Northern Africa. Africa’s soul continues to be shaped. Thus we cannot simply answer the question whether things have fallen apart. But we can ask after the impact Christianity has had on African tribal life so far.

Christian missionaries did not endeavour to uproot African culture completely and indiscriminately. Rather they took care to only condemn what had to be condemned. They let those customs that respect human dignity live on. This is not to say that excesses and defects were absent. But if a wholesale discrediting of African culture was the mission, it is hard to see how Africans would have embraced the new religion. The first motivation for spreading the Gospel message goes back to early Christianity; it was the “certainty of having received the saving knowledge and redeeming love which all men had a claim to and were yearning for in the inmost recesses of their beings”.10

Post-modernist thinking will say that the real motivation was the drive for power. Indeed, all endeavour is driven by a desire to impose upon and so oppress. There is a truth in the post-modernist critique. The Eurocentrist critique is legitimate. The error is to apply that single truth to the whole reality absolutely so that one commits a reductionism.

Today we see an Africa that has embraced Christianity as something of its own. For most African Christians it simply never occurs to them to think that Christianity is just the “white man’s religion”.  It is African intellectuals of the post-modernist mould who still speak of the “white man’s religion” (and, of course, hard-line African traditionalists). As some had prophesied, the days have come in which Africa evangelises the secular West. For example, the shortage of Catholic clergy in the United States is regularly eased by African priests. In France, African clergy officially ministering to Catholic faithful make up a fifth of the country’s Catholic clergy. John Allen Jr has termed Africa clergy the ‘new Irish’.

The picture is not perfect, however. The Church in Africa has its weaknesses. Here we could point out, for example, the lack of doctrinal formation that plagues great parts of the Christian flock. A telling phenomenon is the fact that many Christian couples, young and old, live in un-solemnized unions. Perhaps too much value is still placed on traditional marriage rites at the expense of Church weddings. Theologians tell us that these weaknesses are only to be expected if the Church is something akin to a ‘field hospital’. There is much to hope for.

If we speak about the wider Christianity, there are more signs to worry about. The foremost is, I think, the sensational rise of the prosperity Gospel. There is something of a return to paganism  in it - one might quip that paganism never really left in the first place - when crowds of believers are gripped by swindlers who promise them financial well-being if they give generous offerings to the ministry. We know we have left the authentic Gospel when the salvation of Christ is reduced to ‘economic salvation’. New ‘prosperity churches’ are coming up every day to meet the insatiable demand for hope for economic salvation. If this prosperity gospel is inauthentic, can we expect it to really vivify African culture? My guess is no.

But where does this leave us? Are things falling apart? Maybe they are. But there are signs of hope as Christianity flourishes in Africa. If Ratzinger is right, then we can hope that African culture will come into its own on account of its Christianity.

Share The AfroDiscourse

Visit Francis's Substack

Foto de Random Institute en Unsplash

Introduction

In Part I of this short series, we suggested that the connection between capitalism and dataism is a factor common to both money and data: the reduction of things and people to measurable, manipulable quantities. We explained how data does this by prescinding the quantities of things from their natures, negating contemplation, ignoring the intrinsic order of people and things. Finally, we suggested that, in the economic realm, dataism is but a technological extension of capitalism, understood as an economic system in which the accumulation of wealth by individuals is the motor of the economy. Throughout this article, we insist, this is what we refer to when we use the term “capitalism”.

In Part II, we focused on money and its inner logic. Money functions as a store of value, a symbol capable of representing all things in terms of their utility, which makes it appealing to our desires, so that it strongly (but never irresistibly) encourages us to set our hearts on accumulating the mere appearance of wealth, on accumulating money considered primarily as a store of value, as “utility”. In this last, we see the relationship between money and the manipulability of data.

In Part III, we examined both capitalism and dataism and identified their common root as a profound distrust: in other persons, in oneself, and in God. In modern economics, what is primary is not persons, but things, and it is to these last that man’s freedom is directed. It is in things that man places his trust. And the man who does so also denies that in himself which can perceive what is higher and deeper than his own bodily frame. Such a stance is echoed in dataism’s distrust of the experience of the real, its overweening emphasis on human measurement as both source and guarantee of (a limited, pragmatist) truth.

In this last part of the series on dataism and capitalism, we briefly outline the nature of the trust that can serve as a basis for both economic exchange and knowledge, the trust that Africans must foster within themselves in their ongoing encounter with Western modernity.

This first half of Part IV looks at trust as the basis of knowledge.

Dataism as a Culmination of Western Modernity

Dataism represents a certain culmination of two apparently contradictory movements of Western modernity: the radical Enlightenment (beginning in the 16^th century) on the one hand, and Romanticism (beginning in the 18^th century) on the other.1

The radical Enlightenment tends to represent nature as raw, passive material for technological manipulation, with man as both subject and object of the enterprise (once man is thought of as being part of nature). This tendency is easily visible in contemporary debates and trends, such as the exaltation by some of attempts to technologically “augment” the human person, or the notion and practice of “sex change surgery.” Romanticism, on the contrary, tends to depict nature as an “organic and divine vitality” to which man must reunite himself, and of which man must become the interpreter and spokesman by being immersed and getting lost in it. This we see, for example, in the pantheistic notion of “the Universe” as a quasi-divine agent of which we also form a part, an agent that passes judgment (referred to via the Indian term “karma”), that weighs people in the scales and finds them wanting. In short, as Marco Stango puts it, we are dealing with, on the one hand, a “naturalization” of the spiritual (i.e., of what lies beyond the tangible) and on the other hand, a “spiritualization” of the natural.2

Common to both movements is a negation of man’s openness to transcendence, to “that which lies beyond.” The radical Enlightenment attempted to demonstrate that man is part of nature (understood—at least at first—in mechanistic terms) and that, therefore, man needs to pursue happiness within a purely natural frame, determined by causes lying outside (and beneath) himself. As for Romanticism, this urged man to awaken to the “divinity” of the world, of nature and history, and to immerse himself in it and let himself be determined by that natural movement of events. To illustrate, we could say that on the one hand, man is urged to abandon himself to the motions of the blind chemicals3 that he is. Anything that suggests that this is not the ultimate horizon—reason, intuition, etc.—is itself but a product of determinate physical movement. And on the other hand, man is exhorted to realize that he is, in fact, inescapably determined by the mysterious motions of “the Universe,” Impersonal Nature, all-influencing, omnipresent, inevitable, and thus to become a quasi-divine avatar of the Universe. In both cases, the subjective experience of knowledge and freedom are nothing but a product of the inscrutable movement of indeterminate nature.

Both movements are discernible in dataism. No longer is the mind thought to touch the being of things, their essences. Rather, the appearance of things is a mere symbol for the things-in-themselves, a symbol beyond which the mind cannot penetrate. Having no certainty that there in fact is something like a “thing-in-itself,” fearing that we are all in fact “living in the Matrix,” dataism reduces the entire world to the subjective experience of the appearance of things. This subjective experience is reduced into measurable quantities, “bits” or information than can be transferred from one agent to another, unlike richer aspects of the subjective experience, aspects that, in fact, would refer to a “thing-in-itself”—aspects that are closer to the essence of a thing, including its qualities. The natural is spiritualized.

At the same time, everything in the world is reduced to information, because everything we can possibly know of it, all our knowledge, is subjectivized and reduced into quantity. Because we cannot go beyond the appearances of things, then, for all intents and purposes, these appearances are the world. The entire universe, then, is conceived of as information. And the more we perceive of the universe, the more we can “informatize” it for our own purposes, attempting to make more, and more deeply, transcendent realities part of our grand collective interface, thus immersing ourselves in—connecting ourselves to—the information that the entire universe already is. In this way, dataism represents “the spiritualization of the natural”. And in both movements, dataism represents a negation of man’s openness to transcendence. It is precisely as negation that dataism may also be characterized as distrust.

Dataism and Trust: Affirming the Reality of the World

To affirm that man can know the essences4 of things is not an affirmation that can be proven. In response to the question, “How does one know?”, one can propose an explanation of the process of knowledge. But an entirely different question is this: How do I know that I know? How do I know that what I perceive is real? Why should I trust my senses? Why should I trust my knowing? Why should I trust that experience is real? None of these questions has an answer. Or, better put, to ask the question is already to answer it. Either we accept our knowing and the question becomes unnecessary and meaningless, or we doubt our knowing by asking the unanswerable question.

When I speak of “knowing” here, I am not referring to conclusions deduced from premises. Such conclusions are justified by the premises that ground them and the relationship between these premises. Therefore, if one were to ask, “Why should I trust these conclusions?”, one could answer in response, “Because they logically follow from true premises.” It is also true that many premises are also, in fact, conclusions derivable from other premises. But ultimately, we must arrive at pieces of knowledge that are “first premises”, underived, but simply accepted—for example, the reality of the world around us (also known, loosely speaking, as the metaphysical principle of identity).5 Now, as we have seen, dataism implies a denial of or, at least, an indifference to, the reality of the world, of “things-in-themselves”. In this way, dataism is fundamentally distrust.

So, what is the trust that is opposed to dataism? It is this: to trust that what we see as real is real, and to actively open ourselves to the reality of the world. Trust is inseparable from knowledge, from truth. Even more, trust is a condition for knowledge. Trust is epistemically basic. And if we must actively open ourselves to the world, then we must entrust ourselves to it, surrender ourselves to the truth of it, to its nature and its “laws”. In obedience to truth, we must live the truth.6

And yet, this characterization of the relationship to the world as one of “trust” invites the question: Trust in whom? For to tenaciously accept the reality of the world, to recognize oneself as a being-among-beings, is also to accept that the world existed before we did, that the world is a “given”. Moreover, it is to affirm that the fundamental truth of the world is goodness, despite all appearances. It is to affirm that, when they are inevitable, the devastating power of the tsunami and the debilitating pain of a cancerous tumor are really and truly good.7 And it is to begin to sense, “behind” the contingent world,8 behind the fragrant flower and the fragile leaf, the shifting cloud and the star austere, One from Whom all its goodness flows. To attempt to divorce trust in truth from trust in a Creator is to attempt to divorce trust in truth from the trustworthiness of truth, the goodness of truth, the meaningfulness of truth. In a word, it is to attempt to make trust absurd. Trust in truth is necessarily an incipient trust in God.9 And as an acknowledgement of the goodness of the world and of oneself as a being among beings, trust in truth is an incipient affirmation that the world is a gift, and that one’s own self is a gift. It is an incipient acceptance of the gift of the world and the gift of oneself from the hands of God.

This, then, is the trust demanded of us Africans as dataism spreads: trust in truth, trust in God. We must actively open ourselves to the world beyond our screens, to the glories and shadows of the people that lie behind the flickering faces, the joys and rhythms and difficulties of the earth and the skies and the seas. We must seek to know ever more deeply what things are, not primarily to use them, but rather to contemplate them. Indeed, our very action must become contemplative, aware of the transcendent value of the things and persons that we interact with, that surround us. None of this is possible without practicing exterior and interior silence, that we may remain open to the real, and to the One from Whom it flows.

Share The AfroDiscourse

(reading time: about 30 minutes)

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe (currently 82 years old) is one of the few living African scholars who has written extensively and philosophically about contemporary African themes. Born on December 8, 1941, in Jadotville, a town now known as Likasi in the Katanga province of Congo, Mudimbe has authored numerous poems and novels, as well as books and articles on African culture and intellectual history, several of which address themes specific to postcolonial Africa.

Among his numerous scholarly works, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge has earned him particular acclaim. In this work, which could be called his magnum opus, Prof. Mudimbe makes the case that what we (as Africans) know about Africa, is in fact a product of Western or European thinking made possible by colonial domination. Mudimbe goes to great lengths to prove this thesis by analyzing all sorts of philosophical, historical, anthropological, sociological, and cultural-artistic works. He is devastating in his harsh critiques of other African Philosophers and their attempts to outline a philosophy that can be called “African”.

For Mudimbe, there is no such thing as an African philosophy. Rather than focusing on a “Philosophy of Africa”, he argues that what we should be concerned about is a gnosis or an epistemology of knowledge – epistemology understood here as the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek words epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”). In the history of philosophy, epistemology has almost always been concerned not with knowledge per se, but rather with the way knowledge is acquired.

Given his hyper-focus on epistemology, it would make sense to ask which particular epistemological lens Mudimbe himself used in his work. One thing is clear: of all the Western philosophers he quotes and comments on in his book, Mudimbe falls back (almost obsessively) on Michel Foucault (1926-1984). Mudimbe relies heavily on Foucault’s so-called “archeology of knowledge”. He venerates—one might even say that he ‘worships’—Foucault and his hypothesis that knowledge is ultimately dictated by power”. Throughout his dense philosophical work (about 200 pages in all), Mudimbe quotes Foucault an average of 90 times.

In short, only someone aware of Michel Foucault and his contributions to contemporary philosophy as a whole can fully appreciate Mudimbe’s overall message in The Invention of Africa. The Foucauldian epistemological lens is, in fact, the key to understanding much of what masquerades as post-modern philosophy – from cultural Marxism to critical race theory to gender theory to intersectionality to all the “woke” ideologies that are slowly infiltrating our African cultures.

Nevertheless, there is much we could learn from Mudimbe and his focus on the epistemological. We need not throw away his baby with Foucault’s bathwater. What follows is a selection of some pertinent lessons we can draw from his philosophical output, for contemporary Africa.

The crucial role of Epistemology in the philosophical endeavor

Epistemology is an indispensable item in the toolbox of philosophy. In this, Mudimbe is dead right. To say that method is inseparable from content is just another way of saying that there is no metaphysics without epistemology. For far too long, Western philosophy has held the view that pure speculative thought trumps culture or that pure knowledge can be separated from history. Mudimbe reminds us that there is no knowledge of reality without a consideration of the knower of reality, or, to put it in terms relevant to our present purpose, there is no philosophy without culture.

Culture is what conditions every single individual in the universe – be they black or white, African or European, male or female, young or old. There is no human soul without a corresponding concrete body that serves as a lens or a prism through which reality is perceived. The human body in particular, and human community in general, is the physical soil into which metaphysical seeds are planted and nurtured.

In other words, those who have made it their business to accuse Africans of having no purely speculative philosophy of their own are entertaining an illusion. They are assuming that they themselves are positioned on a universal plane devoid of cultural assumptions. What Mudimbe (and Foucault his progenitor) assert is that such a position is untenable It is an illusion and a fallacy to think that we are free from cultural conditioning. This kind of philosophical position is becoming clearer in the contemporary world – and this stance constitutes the heart and soul of postmodern philosophy. There is no “pure caste” of untouchable Europeans who should oversee and therefore rightfully colonize a lower class of African “ethno-philosophers”, supposedly inferior because they cannot attain to the high level of pure abstraction of the Europeans. To some extent, all philosophers are necessarily and unavoidably ethno-philosophers.

In chapter one of his book, Discourse of Power and Knowledge, Mudimbe rightfully points out how at the height of the colonial period, the Western world’s sense of superiority was driven primarily by what he calls their “epistemological ethnocentricism” – identifying in this apt phrase, the relationship between epistemology and ethnology, i.e. the connection between philosophy and culture:

In the name of both scientific power and knowledge, it reveals in a marvelous way what I shall define in the following chapter as an epistemological ethnocentrism; namely, the belief that scientifically there is nothing to be learned from “them” unless it is already “ours” or comes from us.

Mudimbe adds:

Since Africans could produce nothing of value; the technique of Yoruba statuary must have come from Egyptians; Benin art must be a Portuguese creation; the architectural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab technicians; and Hausa and Buganda statecraft were inventions of white invaders (Davidson, 1959; Lugard, 1905; Randall-MacIver, 1906; Sanders, 1969; Mallows, 1984)

Furthermore, in chapter one, Africans’ historical lagging behind in terms of (industrial) development is attributed not so much to contact with the European as such, as to the particular breed of Europeans who made contact with the Africans in question. Quoting Aimé Cesaire, Mudimbe notes:

A. Césaire thinks that the great historical tragedy of Africa has been not so much that it was too late in making contact with the rest of the world, as the manner in which that contact was brought about; that Europe began to propagate at a time when it had fallen into the hands of the most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry. (Césaire, 1972, 23)

The “breed of Europeans” we are referring to here is the modernist – the offspring of René Descartes – the pure rationalist who has no place for tradition, culture, ethnicity, or anything that cannot be proven through the method of empirical science. Culture, for such Europeans, is an impurity, a blemish on pure speculative thought.

I agree with Césaire that underdevelopment in Africa was, to a large extent, propagated by colonization. Africa was already underdeveloped (from an industrial and scientific point of view) but colonization (driven by cultural arrogance or what Mudimbe calls epistemological ethnocentricism) worsened it. Mudimbe again:

At the economic level, for example, if the relatively low productivity of traditional processes of production (formerly adapted to the then-existing markets and range of trade and exchanges) has been disrupted by a new division of labor which depends upon international markets, then transformation has meant a progressive destruction of traditional realms of agriculture and crafts (Meillassoux, 1975: 115).

And also:

Finally, if at the cultural and religious levels, through schools, churches, press, and audio-visual media, the colonializing enterprise diffused new attitudes which were contradictory and richly complex models in terms of culture, spiritual values, and their transmission, it also broke the culturally unified and religiously integrated schema of most African traditions (Bimwenyi, 1981a).

I believe that (to quote Mudimbe), [the] “strong tension between a modernity that often is an illusion of development, and a tradition that sometimes reflects a poor image of a mythical past”, precipitated the postmodern movement that Foucault stood for and that Mudimbe, following in his footsteps, embraced lock, stock, and barrel. Mudimbe found in Foucault an ally in the fight against the culture-less European colonizer of yesteryears.

On the gradual disappearance of the human subject and the re-emergence of our humane traditions

The second element Africans can learn from Mudimbe’s philosophical corpus is the importance of being protagonists of one’s own story and the need to sustain a culture’s oral story-telling traditions.

Chapter Two of Invention of Africa, titled “Questions of Method”, dives deeper into the impossibility of a metaphysical philosophy that lacks a concrete (cultural) foundation. In the previous point (No. 1 above), we noted how the world that Mudimbe (and before him Michel Foucault) was criticizing was really the modern scientific West. Mudimbe notes how towards the end of the 19^th century, the narrative of the superior West was already beginning to crumble:

Some thinkers, such as Lévi-Strauss, thought that studying a diversity of cultures reduced the weight of ideology and allowed anthropologists to fight such falsehoods as those about the natural superiority of some races and traditions over others. From this ethical point of view, some scholars have wondered whether it was possible to think of an anthropological science without ethnocentrism (e.g., Leclerc, 1972-).

Unbeknownst to itself, what was beginning to dawn on the “modern” world was that there was no one human person (or culture for that matter) who could qualify as “the universal subject” or interpreter of history. The shift in European philosophy itself (e.g. from a Newtonian mechanistic worldview to a Hegelian (dialectic) historical worldview) contributed to giving more credence to this new notion. The first paragraph of Chapter Two reminds us:

In the European Classical Age, the center of knowledge was, according to Foucault's archaeology (1973), the principle of order. The means of organizing this knowledge is the discourse, the table, and the exchange. One can observe in this epistemological landscape three major systems:

(a) General grammar, “the study of verbal order in its relation to the simultaneity that it is its task to represent.” It has, as its object, the discourse in which the name dominates: “the task of Classical ‘discourse’ is to ascribe a name to things and in that name, to name their being.”

(b) Natural history, or a theory of nature understood as the characterization, ordering, and naming of the visible. Its project is “to establish a general and complete table of species, genera and classes.”

(c) A theory of wealth, rather than a political economy, analyzing “value in terms of the exchange of objects of need,” or “in terms of the formation and origin of objects whose exchange will later define their value in terms of nature's prolixity” (Foucault, 1973:79-211) (emphasis added)

It could be argued that a shift was slowly but surely taking place from Cosmology to Anthropology. The human person was beginning to take the center stage of history and the (objective) world of nature was receding into the background.

And the African as a protagonist of world history was also beginning to emerge:

[Paulin] Hountondji emphasizes the uniqueness of the European scientific tradition and, at the same time, describes the new subject of thinking, the African Philosopher, as “a human being among human beings, an intellectual among his colleagues and a member of a given social class” (Hountondji, 1977:70).

A glance back at the literature of 1940-1960 shows the originality of the present-day spirit. Then, as G. Balandier wrote in his Afrique Ambiguë, the African was challenging “the weaknesses” of the West, trying “to gain recognition as a subject of history,” and, paradoxically, demanding “the attention of a world that has become more curious about his destiny.” This period was for him a moment of an aggressive “self-expression,” “after having long been an object of exchange or an instrument in the hands of foreigners.” (Mudimbe, 1988).

Unfortunately, after succeeding in telling us that culture is integral to philosophy, Mudimbe, following Foucault’s deconstructionist methods, is here trying to convince us that since there is no universal subject of history, it now follows that no one culture should have a monopoly of interpretation of reality. In other words, no one culture has the authority to lord it over the rest. All we can claim to be is cultural storytellers – not philosophers. There is in other words, no such thing as a universal philosophy or wisdom that applies to all men indiscriminately.

Whereas this might be a great solution to the cultural hegemony of one group against another, the question remains: who then is the interpreter of history? Is there any such thing as World History? Does objective knowledge exist? To answer these valid questions, Mudimbe once again dips into his Foucauldian cauldron and provides us with the following principles:

These are:

-       Reversal; in order to “recognize the negative activity of the cutting-out of discourse”;

-       Discontinuity; in order to understand discourse as “a discontinuous activity”;

-       Specificity, in order to “conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we impose upon them”; and,

-       Exteriority; in order to look for “the external conditions of existence” of the discourse (Foucault, 1982:229).

These principles, along with the notions that they bring, contribute to a new understanding of the Western experience, and at the same time clearly indicate its capacity to join knowledge and power.

How reversal, discontinuity, and exteriority can be good news to a continent keen on making progress, maintaining tradition, and fostering interiority strikes one as countercultural if not downright un-African. Here, if I may have the effrontery to criticize an intellectual giant such as Mudimbe, I feel compelled to say that he has gone too far. In my humble opinion, he not only provides an answer that (unfortunately) on one hand serves the interests of the already powerful. He is also admitting on the other hand that the already oppressed African has no choice but to join the power play of his Western oppressor. In short, he is (wittingly or unwittingly) admitting that knowledge as a reality (and philosophy in general) essentially functions as a form of power. Knowledge is ultimately a tool of politics.

Furthermore, to suggest (with Foucault) that violence is the way to gain this power is to negate the evidence of the very evolutionary history he is appealing to. The waves of violence, military takeovers, mutinies, and civil wars in ancient and modern Africa have brought nothing but misery to its peoples. He goes on to quote his “spiritual godfather” Foucault:

In order to clarify the meaning of this violence, let us note that, since Descartes, philosophy in the West has been, in a special way, concerned with the relationship between knowledge and truth: “to be a philosopher was to be concerned with the question, what is the truth? What is knowledge?” (Foucault, 1980:82).

With Nietzsche, the question was modified and became: “what is the best way, the surest path to truth?” Accordingly, in his work on The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl was dealing, in actuality, with Nietzsche's promulgation. Foucault considers himself to represent a third moment, from which, looking backward, he can ask: “What is the history of this will to truth? What are its effects? How is all this in relation to power?” (1980)

There is a power in being true to oneself – a power in being authentic. True. This is the power I wish Mudimbe had quoted in his defense of true knowledge. It is not an external, technical, or military power but an internal, cultural, and spiritual power. This is the power that holds a people together. Africans already have this power in their oral narratives, multiple languages, and traditional religions. The current crisis of the contemporary West is already showing us the limits of relying on such short-lived external, “technological” power.

Furthermore, the absence of a human subject of history does not preclude the presence of a supernatural subject of history. To realize that no one culture should judge universal history is not to conclude that there is no one person who transcends space and time and who is, at the same time, a human subject. This is precisely what Christians claim of Jesus Christ as the subject of history. If that claim is true (and that is a big “if”), it is simultaneously – we argue – a declaration that there can be a universal subject of history. To say it can be a solution is not to say it is the solution. It is merely to say, at the very least, that we are not limited to the suffocating solutions Foucault is offering us. If anything, such a solution spares us the violence (which we are so tired of in Africa) that Foucault suggests as the only way out of oppression.

To his credit, Mudimbe tangentially touches on such a claim when he notes that most, if not all African philosophers of repute have had some Christian backing in their human and intellectual formation:

Among others, the following can be considered representative of this spirit: W. E. Abraham (Ghana), O. Bimwenyi (Zaire), H. Djait (Tunisia), E Eboussi-Boulaga (Cameroon), A. P E. Elungu (Zaire), P J. Hountondji (Benin), E. Mveng (Cameroon), A. M. Ngindu (Zaire), T Obenga (Congo). T. Okere (Nigeria), J. O. Sodipo (Nigeria), I. Sow (Guinea), M. Towa (Cameroon), and K. Wiredu (Ghana). They are all members of the same generation: the oldest, Mveng, was born in 1930; the youngest, Hountondji, in 1942. They all published their major works between 1960 and 1970. Two external characteristics give to this group a relative homogeneity: the spiritual context of their youth and their formal training. Most of them were born into Christian families, which constitute the second or the third generation of African Christians. Thus, they were or still are profoundly marked by Christian principles and values. A number of them (Bimwenyi, Eboussi-Boulaga, Mveng, Okere, and Ngindu) are Roman Catholic priests, and others (Elungu and Towa, for example) at one time in their lives thought about becoming priests. The second external unifying characteristic is the type of training that these persons received. To illustrate, let us note that they were educated at some of the most respected schools and universities in Europe.

Is it a coincidence that this is the case? Is it a historical accident that Christianity has managed to give, to such a diverse mix of African Philosophers, such homogeneity? Is it a coincidence that those who have made some of the most piercing critiques of Western hegemony have also had encounters with a non-antagonistic version or facet of “Western” philosophy? These are the kind of questions that any serious African Philosopher cannot afford to ignore.

Mudimbe himself had his fair share of Christian influence in his formation. As a young man, he joined a monastery but left it in 1962 to study the forces that shaped African history. He did his graduate work in France, studying applied linguistics at the University of Besançon and earning his doctorate in philosophy, with high honors, at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne) in 1970 – this must be where he came into contact with the deconstructionist philosophies of Foucault and Derrida. Mudimbe then returned to Africa to accept a teaching post at Lovanium University (Congo), where he stayed until 1980. In 1981 he moved to the United States to become a professor at Haverford College, and in 1989 he joined the faculty of Duke University.

To be a Christian is not equivalent to being European or Western. To be Christian is not to belong to any one culture. It is, on the contrary, to enter into a universal stream of consciousness that transcends both space and time – but that is simultaneously rooted in space and time.

The Power of Speech

Africa is not only culturally and linguistically rich. In the course of its long history, Africa has also fostered the “ideology” of ‘otherness’, a doctrine that has come to be referred to as the philosophy of Ubuntu – the philosophy of I am because we are.

In Chapter Three, Mudimbe chooses to approach language, not from the point of view of “Ubuntu-togetherness”, but from the point of view of power – i.e. the perception of missionary work in Africa and the use of language as a necessary tool for dominion.

As we have observed so far from Mudimbe’s reflections, both approaches (language as a channel of togetherness and language as a channel for dominion) can be validated by the epistemology one espouses. If it is true that knowledge is essentially a form of power and a tool of politics, then language (which is a form of knowledge) is one more tool that can be used to dominate the other. But if knowledge and, by extension, language, are first and foremost socio-historic realities, then brotherhood (read Ubuntu) prevails over and above Hegel’s and Marx’s master-slave dialectical relationship.

Mamadou Dia, Alioune Diop, Birago Diop, Jacques Rabemananjara, and Senghor are rather critical of communism, even when, as in the case of Senghor, they are socialists. For them, communism is merely (as Sartre defined it) a traveling companion. They question the overemphasis on the fate of the international proletariat and wish to determine a strategy for promoting the individuality of African culture. As opposed to Marx's rigid interpretation of the relations between values and peoples’ aspirations in society, they look for ways of reinventing a sociohistorical foundation for independent African societies (see Senghor, 1962).

Again, if Christianity is seen as one more culture among others, then the Christian missionary’s language must violently replace the languages of native Africans in order for Christianity to flourish. However, if Christianity transcends all cultures, there should ideally be no competition between it and the cultures it encounters – as was the case between the Christian faith and the Greco-Roman world. If Christianity were a rival culture that was necessarily disruptive and violent, the Greek and Roman languages would be dead by now, but the contrary is the case – they are still alive and well. If anything, they are the two ancient languages that single out the “cultured” from the “uncultured” in liberal arts colleges in particular and in “high society” in general.

If the arguments made thus far in Nos. 1 and 2 above are anything to go by – i.e. if:

-       Epistemology is a necessary lens through which we perceive our philosophy &

-       Culture is a necessary foundation for thought &

-       The “who” of knowledge does not contradict the “what” of knowledge &

-       The subjective is not in competition with the objective … then,

In each of the pairs above, the latter entity relates with the former as a genus relates to a species. They are not antagonistic. On the contrary, one encapsulates the other in a non-dialectic, non-violent, non-intrusive way. Why then would it come as a surprise to anyone if we state that Christianity is not in competition with cultural groupings because it relates to them as a genus relates to a species … as a mother relates to its child?

Mudimbe, however, owing to his Foucauldian epistemology, which sees forces in history in a necessarily Hegelian, Marxist, and Sartrian way, supports the proposition that Christianity must also be one culture among many others and must, therefore, continuously clash with other cultures for dominance.

One might consider that missionary speech is always predetermined, pre-regulated, let us say colonized. It depends upon a normative discourse already given, definitely fixed, clearly meant in “a vital connection between Christianity and Western culture as a whole” (Dickson, 1984:33). Missionary orthodox speech, even when imaginative or fanciful, evolved within the framework of what, from now on, I shall call the authority of the truth. This is God's desire for the conversion of the world in terms of cultural and sociopolitical regeneration, economic progress and spiritual salvation. This means, at least, that the missionary does not enter into dialogue with pagans and “savages” but must impose the law of God that he incarnates.

The point I am trying to make in this last section is not to argue for one position over the others. My point is simply to show that there is a middle ground and that as far as language is concerned, Africans should be aware of both the divisive and unitive possibilities of the power of speech. Negative ethnicity (or fear of ‘the other’ as stranger) is not a peculiarly African problem – it is a problem of the human race. The envy among brothers that degenerates into bloody wars is as old as the story of Cain and Abel and as modern as the homo homini lupus of Thomas Hobbes.

In 20^th Century Africa, this choice between unity and division, between brotherhood and power politics was observed in the historical decisions and paths of two famous African presidents: Julius Nyerere (1922-1999) and Kwame Nkurumah (1909-1972) – both acclaimed Socialists. Nyerere insisted on the fact that “the people” are the main agents and ultimate beneficiaries of socialist development. He believed in his people, their inherent rights, their education, human equality, and “the good” in humanity – hence his populism. Man was not a mere process for him; man was supreme. He is renowned for his promotion of the Kiswahili language, which helped forge the different tribes of Tanzania into one people. Nkurumah on the other hand, was ready to pit one man against another in the name of the inevitable Hegelian dialectic explanation of history.

The human tongue (which is a concrete expression of his mind) can be used to make enemies or to foster brotherhood, to kill or to heal. Both paths have been taken in human history. The choice of which path to take is ours to make as contemporary Africans.

Share The AfroDiscourse

To our subscribers:

The final installment of the series “Dataism and Capitalism” will be published at the end of June.

Main References

• Mudimbe, Y. V.: The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Indiana University Press, 1988.

• Foucault, Michel: The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Introduction

In Part I of this short series, we suggested that the connection between capitalism and dataism is a factor common to both money and data: the reduction of things and people to measurable, manipulable quantities. We explained how data does this by prescinding the quantities of things from their natures, negating contemplation, ignoring the intrinsic order of people and things. Finally, we suggested that, in the economic realm, dataism is but a technological extension of capitalism, understood as an economic system in which the accumulation of wealth by individuals is the motor of the economy. Throughout this article, we insist, this is what we refer to when we use the term “capitalism”.

In Part II, we focused on money and its inner logic. Money functions as a store of value, a symbol capable of representing all things in terms of their utility, which makes it appealing to our desires, so that it strongly (but never irresistibly) encourages us to set our hearts on accumulating the mere appearance of wealth, on accumulating money considered primarily as a store of value, as “utility”. In this last, we see the relationship between money and the manipulability of data.

Having examined how both data and money reduce things and people to manipulable quantities, we can now turn, in this third part of the series on dataism and capitalism, to the common root of both: a lack of trust.

Subscribe now

Capitalism and Distrust

As we mentioned in Part II, our desires for the pleasurable want to be satisfied immediately. The supremacy of these desires in individuals leads to the drive to accumulate wealth, to locate all the pleasurable things of the earth (to the extent possible) in a single, easy-to-reach place—these days, that place is our smartphones, where our money is. We noted that ravenous desire tends to accumulate things because of the immediacy to which desire aspires, as well as the limitations of desire. Being corporeal, our desires for the pleasurable are subject to the limits of space and, more importantly, time.

The temporality of material things is an expression of their radical contingency, the radical impermanence of their existence. By this, I do not mean mere material impermanence. I do not refer to the durability or the lack thereof that we observe in a flower, or a cliff, or a radioactive isotope. I refer rather to the fact that, once these things disappear, they cease utterly to exist. Like all these things, man, too, receives his being from God. Man, too, is radically dependent on God—this condition is common to every creature. But when man dies, his spirit lives on. This, in fact, is a consequence of the radical depth of God’s gift of man to himself. We might say that man receives his being so fully that he receives even the capacity to possess himself, the capacity to be, to a certain extent,1 the ground of his own existence.2 However, nature, as well as man in his corporeality, are doomed to wither and fade.

Man’s impermanence means that his plans for the future are always fraught with risk. There are few things of which he can be certain. And more to the point, he has no basis for a certainty of enjoying the fruits of the earth tomorrow, in an hour’s time, or even a few seconds from now. This presents a problem when we attempt to accumulate wealth. Either we accumulate actual things and run the risk of not enjoying them (contrary to the immediacy to which desire tends), or we accumulate them in potency, in appearance, in symbol (i.e., money), and we have the security of possessing them all at once, but only in the abstract and, therefore, in a mode that we cannot enjoy. In short, the effort to accumulate wealth seems to be an effort to negate risk, to maximize security. However, since we cannot enjoy anything without the risk entailed in dealing with real things, it seems that, as we accumulate wealth, we must instead content ourselves with a balance between security and risk. Furthermore, the more we immerse ourselves in the real, the more risk we incur, and the more precarious our enterprise of accumulating wealth becomes.3

The reason for this lies in a profound distrust at the roots of capitalism.

Rafael Alvira offers an intriguing analysis of this distrust,4 locating its origins in Adam Smith. This Scottish thinker intended to develop a science of economics, and of man’s economic action, that had universal value. But a science of man can only have universal value if there is a “common man” who represents everyone. The Smithian common man is never a “hero” (which could lead to loving risk over security) nor a “perverse egoist” (who seeks security amidst a general war of clashing interests). Rather, he is disposed to minimal risk, as long as some minimal security is guaranteed. By respecting certain rules and institutions of the economic and political system—the free market, some rules, and a State that enforces them—this man has the security to take on a certain amount of risk. What guides him in this pursuit of risk is his individual interest.

Alvira notes that the fact that man’s freedom is, in effect, reduced to individual interest means that man’s freedom is directed towards things, not persons. If it regards persons, it regards them as a function of things. The Smithian common man responds to the incentives of things like a dog subject to a Pavlovian conditioned reflex. The freedom of the Smithian common man and of modern economics is directed to things (thanks to things, thanks to wealth, I can do what I want) and away from persons (the absence of firm bonds and obligations). To offer just one illustrative example, in economic transactions, what is primary is the things being exchanged and not the interpersonal relation between the persons involved in the transaction. The identity of the buyer and the seller, considered in themselves, are inessential to the transaction. And, therefore, the primary function of money is not a medium of exchange, but a store of value, because what is primary is not persons, but things.

Therefore, modern economics is founded on a profound distrust of other persons. This distrust goes hand in hand with the supremacy of desire and the primacy of wealth accumulation, and the ill-fated quest for security in the ephemeral things of the earth. To this, we can add that modern economics is also rooted in a profound distrust of oneself and of God. The man who never casts his gaze to what is at once higher and deeper in reality also refuses to look with those eyes within himself that are higher and deeper than his bodily frame. He does not accept the profound gift of God that he himself is. Shying away from his own heart, he shuns interpersonal bonds, and out of fear, he never comes to taste the austere joy, sweeter and richer than honey, of living the truth.

Here, we arrive at the common root of both dataism and capitalism: the distrust of man who refuses to contemplate reality in its depth, and to respond with his being to the truth that he sees, because he does not adequately receive from God the gift of himself.

Dataism and Distrust

Yes, dataism, too, is distrust. In his genealogy of dataism, or as he calls it, the “metaphysics of information”, Marco Stango makes a compelling argument that dataism is a culmination of Western modernity’s rejection of the divine, of transcendence, and of man’s own openness to transcendence.5 We encounter the essences of things as preceding us, as always already having been there. Moreover, the essence of a thing is a simple whole. In Stango’s words, “[the essence or “form” of a thing] is the wellspring from which all the features and intelligible aspects of a thing come and in which they are always already rooted and gathered together as in their generous, originating unity.” Data, on the other hand, does not precede us, but rather comes into being with our own quantitative measurement. And data is fundamentally fragmented into bits, bits that have no intrinsic purpose, but on which we may instead impose our own purposes, which we may instead manipulate with reckless abandon. Here again, we may quote Stango’s poignant words:

[One] might say that the new metaphysics of information has “transubstantiated” the world: it still looks the same, with its accidents and qualities—trees still look like trees, rivers look like rivers, birds look like birds, and human beings look like human beings—but thanks to the notion of information, we now think that their substance is quite different: trees, rivers, birds, human beings alike are, at bottom, complex forms of information, sophisticated algorithms that can be digitally measured and intervened upon. The world has become an “infosphere” or a digital globe.

The essences of things are replaced with digit-al—quantitative—reconstructions. Our minds are reduced to hollow, complex computers. And like money, and like the Smithian common man, what is a computer for if not to be used for one’s own interest?

What, then, is the proper response to this distrust? What is the proper basis of both economic exchange and of knowledge? What attitudes ought we Africans foster within ourselves in our ongoing encounter with and adoption of Western modernity? Where ought we place our trust? We shall address these questions in the fourth and final part of this series on dataism and capitalism.

Share The AfroDiscourse

(reading time: 7 minutes)

In Part I of this series (see here), we suggested that the connection between capitalism and dataism is a factor common to both money and data: the reduction of things and people to measurable, manipulable quantities. Having explained in Part I how data does this, we now take up once again two central ideas mentioned earlier: the inner logic of money, and the logic of accumulation.

The Logic of Accumulation

Towards the end of Plato’s Republic, Socrates proceeds to compare the pleasure enjoyed in lives founded on different objects of desire or kinds of love. There are three basic orders of life, based on the three main “parts” of the soul in Plato’s standard anthropology: the highest (for him) is the “reasoning” part that loves wisdom, and the second is the “spirited” part that loves honor and victory. Of the third and lowest part, he says:

as for the third, because of its many forms, we had no peculiar name to call it by, but we named it by what was biggest and strongest in it. For we called it the desiring part on account of the intensity of the desires, concerned with eating, drinking, sex, and all their followers; and so, we also called it the money-loving part, because such desires are most fulfilled by means of money.

In this lowest part of the soul, unlike in the other parts of the soul, what seems to matter most is not the object of desire or the object of pleasure, but desire and pleasure themselves. What seems to matter most is not the actual reality desired and enjoyed, but their effect on the desiring part of the soul. What matters for these appetites, if they are considered in isolation from all else that is in man, is not ontological goodness, but experienced pleasure; not being, but only appearance.1

Of course, these appetites are natural and have a natural limit, and the actual enjoyment of their objects is limited. We can only eat so much before we become nauseous. We can only drink so much before we keel over, unconscious. It is the higher parts, so to speak, of the soul that recognize and affirm the limitations of our desires. But if these desires or appetites attain supremacy in us, then they long, in a manner of speaking, to burst their bonds, to break free from their own intrinsic limitations. They want to dine at the highest table, to leave no wine untasted. The infamous orgiasts of ancient Rome would deliberately cause themselves to vomit so that they could gorge themselves more and more in a futile attempt to immortalize the pleasure of the palate.2

Another thing to note about desire before we move on is its inclination towards immediacy. Our appetites want to be satisfied in the present. They pine for an immediate experience of the pleasurable. For that reason, then, they will tend to reduce any temporal barriers that lie between us and the object of desire. But temporal “distance” is due to the limitation of corporeal beings. One thing cannot occupy the same location as another, whence distance and a host of other limitations; whereas, in the immaterial realm, we see that things can occupy the same “space.” For instance, you, the reader of this article, have a vast number of ideas about all kinds of things, ranging from what you ate for breakfast to your opinions about climate change, all in one single mind. Therefore, our appetites will tend to strive to overcome all corporeal limitations, seeking to make all pleasurable things present to themselves simultaneously. In other words, they will tend to accumulate the pleasurable. Thus, we have described what we earlier referred to as the logic of accumulation.

Subscribe now

Accumulation, the Inner Logic of Money, and Capitalism

As can be seen, we cannot simply accumulate everything in one, easy-to-reach location. And the more things you have, the larger the space they occupy, so that beyond a certain extent, further accumulation of things simply doesn’t break any barriers of distance and, therefore, time. The reason for this is that the “things” we are dealing with are still too real, too solid. To accumulate every pleasurable thing in a single location, we would need to immaterialize them (because of the inevitable limits of corporeality—think about the space you would need for a sizeable herd of cattle, for example). We would need to reduce the things in question to something tangible or perceptible, but that is small enough in size to be indefinitely replicable in a single place.  In short, we would need a symbol to represent the things in question. Moreover, we would need to reduce all the wide variety of “stuff”—bread and bottles, whisky and dresses, cars and curtains, guitars and concrete—to some abstract common denominator that can be represented by a single symbol. We would need to reduce all the specific qualities of all these things to one single factor: their capacity to give us some kind of pleasure—in economic terms, “utility”. And we would need some means to represent utility, and to represent it in terms of “less” or “more”, given that our purpose is to accumulate as much utility as possible. And this is what money does. This is the function that money serves when we refer to money as a “store of value.” However, to arrive at money as a “store of value,” we have had to abstract from actual things—from bread and bottles and whisky and dresses, etc.—so that what is left to us in money is not the pleasure-producing things, but the mere potential to enjoy these things. Money permits us to have not everything, but only the ghost of everything; not things, but their appearance. Money promises universal goodness in the abstract and, therefore, not in actuality. And by falsely promising universal goodness to wayward desires, it usurps the throne of God, who is the Good, who is the Life so faintly imaged by sumptuous meals and fine clothing.

It is vital to see that the inner logic of money considered exclusively as a store of value is not only a function of the logic of accumulation, but also encourages the emergence of this accumulative logic. If we set our hearts not on real things, but instead on money, then we set our hearts on this abstract appearance of goodness, on the false promise of everlasting fulfillment, on the logic of accumulation.

Turning to capitalism, we may quote the words of D.C. Schindler once more: “If capitalism means that capital, i.e., stored money, or money that has been, so to speak, removed from circulation and thereby abstracted from the actuality of concrete exchange, is the principle of the economy, then [such capitalism is incompatible with true freedom].” If the motor of the economy is the accumulation of money, then such an economy is deeply problematic. And, indeed, this often seems to be the case: the primacy of the “bottom line” for businesses, the increasing tendency to value stocks over commodities as an economy “develops” and to disparage commodities because they generate less money, and so on and so forth.

At this point, we are equipped to revisit the commonality between dataism and capitalism. As we saw in Part I of this short series, dataism reduces the world to measurable, manipulable quantities. And as we have seen now, capitalism, at least in the sense in which we have described it above, does the same, reducing the world to monetary numbers to facilitate the accumulation of wealth, in a limited and merely potential sense. But what exactly is the alliance between dataism and capitalism? And what is the proper place of money? There have been deliberate hints that such a place exists, that money does not only serve the function of a store of value (which should be evident to most). These questions will be addressed in the next parts of this series.

Share The AfroDiscourse

We’re back! And we’re now also on HostedinAfrica (link here)!

HostedinAfrica is a social network where you can connect with businesses and experts across Global Africa for meaningful sharing and exchange.

We invite you to join the group of The AfroDiscourse on HostedinAfrica (HiA) (click here) for access to forums, discussions, and HiA-exclusive content.

Now, let’s dive into the article.

(Reading time: about 13 minutes)

Dataism: A Reduction of Truth to Quantities

Entering a matatu in Nairobi is a somewhat risky business. Young or old, with or without child, as soon as both your feet (and what really matters: your money-laden pockets) are planted on the bare and rusted floor of the vehicle, it jolts forward. Though not without some exaggeration, you could say that people are transported in a manner even less personal than the transport of animals. When transporting animals, we don’t count pockets, but “heads” of cattle, for instance. True, there is a degree of trust that the conductor and the driver place in the passengers to successfully keep their balance and wind their way to a seat in the rattling vehicle, similar to what we might charitably call the “blind trust” some of them seem to place in pedestrians and other road-users to intuit the intent behind their haphazard movements and get out of the way. But the line between “trust” and appalling indifference to persons in such cases is often imaginary. It frequently seems that passengers are reduced to their fare, and pedestrians and other drivers become mere obstacles to achieving maximum speed, a maximum number of trips per day, and a maximum daily income. And the passengers are not guiltless either. I ask you what I sometimes ask myself: How many times have you been in a matatu that is shamelessly overlapping and felt a surge of delight at how much sooner you’ll get where you’re going?

This reductive view of the person, unfortunately common in commercial contexts, is intensified by the dataist mindset, which Yuval Noah Harari describes as follows: “Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.” In short, dataism tends to reduce the world and everything (and everyone) in it to data points. It tends to reduce all truth to empty representation, to simulacrum. Moreover, it tends to reduce the world to measurable and processible (i.e., manipulable) quantities. For example, people are reduced to IP addresses, the number of clicks on a link, or the vectors of cursors on a webpage. More radically, their bodies themselves are reduced to information. In an incisive genealogy of dataism, the philosopher Marco Stango quotes the following words written by James Gleick in 2011:

“Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing…. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out…. The body itself is just an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell…. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not a warm breath, not a ‘spark of life’,” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. ‘It is information, words, instructions…. If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.’”

This reduction of truth to measurable quantity is not without motive.

Why Dataism?

In Aristotelian and Thomistic terms, truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, and not in an imitative way, but rather in a connatural way. To understand what this means, it is helpful to revisit the notion of “essences” or “universals,” a notion that is by no means as esoteric as it might sound. Indeed, at least every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb that we utter presupposes the notion. In our words, we can discern the distinction between particulars and universals—between this tree and trees in general, between that man and men in general (just yesterday, for instance, a colleague of mine said, half-joking, “Men are liars.” Another colleague, a man, made the rejoinder: “I can accept that about him (and he pointed to the man on my left), but all men?”). Now, universal concepts do not refer directly to particulars, with all their quirks and peculiarities. The concept “tree” does not refer to that tree with the purple flowers and the gnarled bark and the crudely scrawled words, “Jamo was here”. It refers, instead, to something that all trees have in common simply by the fact of being trees. In fact, it refers to the “treeness” of a tree,1 or the “humanity” of a man—the essence of the tree or the man. This essence transcends all the individual features of any particular tree or man—including the matter, the material, the stuff, that makes them be individual.2 The essence is not made of matter. It is immaterial. And yet, because we see it in particulars, it is real! Moreover, in the same way that to know the sensible features of things is to contain them, in a sense, within ourselves (the “particles” that correspond to the sense of smell, the light that they reflect because of their nature, etc.), to know their immaterial essence is to contain it within ourselves. We become what we know insofar as we receive it within ourselves. Our minds truly touch the being of things, and are conformed to their essences—again, not in an imitative way, but in the sense that the essences of things mold our minds in their shape, so to speak.

The reduction of truth understood in this way to mere measurable quantity ends up reducing knowledge from the profound encounter described above to an imitative containment of representative symbols. We no longer know things; we only know things about things. And while the final step of knowing truth is that the mind rests in what it knows, that the mind contemplates reality, the final step of the knowledge of measurable quantity abstracted from truth is a nothingness in which the mind cannot rest, a nothingness which the mind must attempt to fill with its own emptiness—in short, a blank slate for the mind to manipulate for its own purposes. Here is the motive of the dataist mindset.3 The dataist mindset does not discover the purpose of man in the world without, but attempts to impose its own purpose on the world. What is primary in the dataist mindset is not objects of desire of objects of love, but desire itself. The dataist mindset tends to reduce the world to quantities for manipulation.

Admittedly, in an African context, the scientific dimension of dataism described by James Gleick is rarely encountered—and this fact tends to modify the manifestations of other dimensions of dataism.4 What we do encounter, however, is its economic dimension—and increasingly so. For better or worse (probably both), there are powerful incentives to amplify the integration of artificial intelligence into all kinds of activities on the continent, including, for example, an estimated $136 billion worth of benefits by 2030 for Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa if businesses in these four countries begin using more AI tools. If the design and purpose of digital technologies is informed by a dataist mindset (as they often seem to be),5 then the closer digital technologies get to ubiquity, the more dataism becomes the prevailing worldview, simply because we will interact with the world and with each other predominantly in a dataist manner.

Dataism in the African Context: Capitalism

Now, the economic dimension of dataism reveals that, in the economic sphere, dataism is but the technological extension of capitalism, which is, essentially, institutionalized avarice. For, in its design, capitalism an economic system that gives primacy not to wealth, but to its accumulation; and avarice consists in a desire not for good things, but a desire for money, because money represents the potential of having all things. D.C. Schindler makes an even more radical claim : there is something about “the nature, the inner logic, of money, that inclines it to usurp the divine throne….”

After reading such sweeping claims, you might be scoffing in disbelief, if not ridicule, contempt, and barely-restrained anger. A common retort to the claims made so far: “Spend a week without money, and I’ll be the first to believe everything you say.” But this retort misses the point. The point is not that money should be abolished, but that the desire for money should never occupy a primary place, and that something about the nature of money and our own nature tends to shunt money upwards in our hierarchy of values. The point is not that there are no just people or economic transactions in a capitalist economy, but rather that the inner logic of a capitalist economy places the desire for money at the apex, and that people in a capitalist economy have to fight harder against the avarice that the institutions of capitalism encourage.

“But,” you might add, “isn’t capitalism responsible for undeniable progress? Isn’t capitalism responsible for the drastic and unprecedented reduction of poverty in the past five decades? Isn’t capitalism responsible for the computer you yourself use to read about capitalism and to write this article denouncing it? And let’s not mention the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the transport system that gets you from home to work….” Again, these objections miss the point. The point is not that capitalism does not lead to economic growth, loosely speaking. After all, if the accumulation of things is primary, it seems inescapable that more things will be produced. The point is, rather, that in a system where the accumulation of things is primary, then it is the logic of accumulation that will tend to define the nature and purposes of the things produced, and the purposes to which they are put—and these purposes will be problematic in a manner similar to the dataist reduction of truth to mere measurable quantity.

The most economically “successful”6 products of a capitalist economy will tend to be animated by the inner logic of subordinating people and the world, all reality, to the accumulation of wealth—and truly beneficial outcomes achieved through those products will tend to be achieved despite those products’ inner logic. For instance, genuine connections will be made through social media platforms despite their addictive and divisive design; profound education, in which the student discovers in the teacher a guide in and into the journey of life, will occur despite the model of the educational institution being one of conveying abstract information about things (and especially about how to manipulate things and people—i.e., skills; the potential for education rather than education itself)7 for a fee; justice will be achieved by lawyers despite the high incentive to place a premium not on justice, but on securing maximum benefits for one’s clients; offering quality service that is truly disinterested and, therefore, truly service will happen despite the tendency to reduce “service” to a mere instrument to generate good feelings in clients and ensure their loyalty to the brand for profit’s sake, or the tendency to skimp on the costs that a good job requires and thereby save a few (or more than a few) coins.

What’s more, in all these cases, the extra money we are incentivized to earn will enable us to pay the interest on our compound-interest loans and mortgages, and our insurance premiums (tied to risk levels calculated to maximize the profit of insurance companies); or to purchase land or shares or other securities and (hopefully) watch them appreciate even further, until (or unless) we put a limit to the process of passive accumulation of wealth because of boundaries that lie beyond the logic of accumulation (e.g., a certain level of comfort for oneself and one’s family and no further, despite the incessant encouragement on all kinds of screens to indulge in all kinds of luxuries).

Examples abound.

What we’ve seen so far suggests that the connection between capitalism and dataism is a factor that seems common to both money and data, when they are made primary: the reduction of things and people to measurable, manipulable quantities. We’ve already explained how data reduces the world to quantity. As for money, this is a good point to return to that radical claim of D.C. Schindler, namely, that the inner logic of money inclines it to supplant God Himself in man’s hierarchy of values—and that will be the subject of the next article in this series on dataism and capitalism.

Share The AfroDiscourse

(reading time: about 10 minutes)

“Heavenly Father, we thank You for the gift of life.”

When called to pray before a gathering, in public or in private, many (Protestant Christian) Kenyans will often begin with these ten words. Some do so out of habit; some do so because they have seen others do so; and others do so because they are grateful to be alive, because they experience life as a fragile, fleeting, beautiful thing that could easily have ended the previous night. They experience life as a gift.

And yet, as the years pass, it seems that it is decreasingly obvious to an increasing number of Kenyans that life is, indeed, a gift. Substance abuse and suicide rates can often serve as a rough proxy for “despair”: substance abuse, like suicide, is often an escape from reality (as in the phrase “drowning one’s sorrows” in alcohol). A 2017 study by the National Authority for the Campaign Against Alcohol and Drug Abuse (NACADA) seems to show a slight reduction in substance abuse over the previous five years, but suicide rates, while relatively low, are rising. (“Relatively” here means “in comparison with Europe and the Americas”.) The rate of induced abortion is “relatively” very low, and the great majority of Kenyans opine that abortion on demand is wrong and should be illegal. But alarmingly, over half of all married women in the country use modern contraceptives, and the fertility rate is declining steadily—United Nations projections expect it to drop below three children per couple in just five years. Among those with a university education, it is more frequently true that, as an older acquaintance of mine, a woman, said recently, “I’ve learned that, these days, I should stop assuming that young women aspire to have children.” And fewer and fewer young professionals see marriage, let along child-rearing, as desirable—at least, not in the near future.

Though these trends are, on the whole, not dramatic, they are indicators that a view of life as a gift is slowly dwindling. For what else could it mean when children are desired less—when the beauty and wonder of a newborn child, a new creation (!), is less and less recognized? What else could it mean when more and more men and women no longer yearn to love a new life into existence? As the value of children comes ever more into question, it becomes urgent to ask what seems like a revolutionary question: is life a gift?

The Revolutionary Question is a Question of Revolution

At first sight, asking this question may seem to be a self-defeating exercise. First, those who most need to hear the answer to the question often fill their senses and their minds so much with the noise of constant stimulation—incessant and frenetic music, endless series, and idle chatter in between—that they do not let themselves hear the question. They often do ask the question, deep in their hearts. As a friend of mine once confided after downing one too many bottles, beneath the unceasing exterior activity and hollow laughter, “I don’t know if happiness is possible.” But they do not confront the question. Of course, the question does merit a healthy fear, if its implications are properly understood—even though it is a fear worth confronting. The one who asks, “Is life a gift?”, if he does not see the answer, may very well be afraid that the answer will turn out to be, “No. Life is not a gift, but an emptiness.” The deepest truth of reality would be, then, not benevolence, but indifference. And if he is consistent with himself, he will arrive at the following conclusion: “I am a curse. I should not exist. No one can truly know me, as I am, and delight in my existence.” Indeed, something like this lies behind the desperate sadness or anger of many suicidal men and women.

But the question may also appear self-defeating for a different and more profound reason. “Yes, life is definitely a gift!” we may say. But why? Why is life a gift? Perhaps we would then point to reasons for gratitude: you woke up this morning, you have a bed to wake up in, you have a roof over your head, you have food on your table, you have a job, so and so is your friend, etc. However, as we have already seen, many people look at all these and many other reasons for gratitude and conclude, nevertheless, that life is not a gift, but a burden. Faced with each of these reasons, one may ask, “Why is that a gift?” Confronted with what seems to be the dark and terrible burden of a lonely existence, one may ask, “Why is it a gift that I exist?” Ultimately, it seems that there is something that they just do not see, something that they just cannot perceive about life. To put it differently, the question seems unanswerable unless one already knows the answer. The affirmative “Yes” to the question can only be perceived to be true by the one who has already accepted it as an answer. In the face of life, with all its lights and shadows, one either trusts in life, or doubts it. One either trusts or doubts in being. Not that this is always, or even often, an explicit choice—not at all. But as more and more people doubt that life is worth trusting, the fundamental nature of trust is revealed. Therefore, we may rephrase the question, “Is life a gift?” as “Why should one choose to trust in life? Why should one trust in being? And why should one trust in Being, with a capital ‘B’, in God or a god or gods?”

This is, perhaps, the most primary question of the modern Western civilization—and, therefore, a question that we should not be surprised to hear during Africa’s continuing encounter with Western modernity. It was the question of Descartes, that revolutionary philosopher who sought to make philosophy a field of inquiry as clear-cut and certain as mathematics and the physical sciences, when he chose not to trust that what his senses perceived was truly real. It was the question of Hume and his spiritual sons in the English school of analytic philosophy whose notion of logic has powered the “digital revolution”, those men and women who say that general ideas like “man” or “woman” or “law” or “cow” or “tree” do not tell us anything about the world, who look only at how our ideas relate to one another and whether these relations enable us to produce effects outside ourselves (like the “1’s” and “0’s” of a computer), and no longer believe that it is worthwhile to seek to know what things are. It was the question of revolutionaries who turned away from any figure of authority, be it in the area of knowledge, politics, or religion, because they trusted not in any thing or person beyond themselves, but only in themselves and in their own reason. It is the question of today’s revolutionaries, longing for a utopia free from all notions of the past, a utopia that is the fruit of their hands and their minds and their hearts, a utopia in which they can create even their own bodies. It is the question that the Pontius Pilate within us asks: “What is truth?” In a word, it is the question of revolution.

This is why the question is self-defeating. As soon as one profoundly asks whether we can trust in being, or that what we see is even real, he is looking to justify trust by reason. He is seeking to reduce the transcendent object of trust to an immanent being of reason, to cram the world into the narrow confines of his cranium. To ask the question is already to answer it. Trust is just, but not justifiable. Trust makes sense, trust is reasonable, but it is not grounded on reasons.

Revolution and Trust on the African Continent

At this point, we can return to what we saw just a few paragraphs above. To trust in being (and in Being) is to say that, at its heart, the world is a gift, or even a giving—even with all the suffering that it entails. And not to trust in being is to say that the world has no meaning in itself, because its meaning can only come from the turning of the gears of our minds. Not to trust in being is to hold that the meaning of the world can only come from ourselves. And since we would have no meaning in ourselves, neither would the world. Neither past nor present has any meaning, and the only thing that resembles meaning is the future that we are creating. “What is truth?” we would scoff with Pontius Pilate. We would live for revolution alone.

At the basis of every encounter with truth lies trust. Trust is the fundamental response to truth. Trust is the horizon within which live sense perception, the apprehension or “vision” of the natures and reality of things, and logical deductions. For we must trust that what our hands touch is real, that what presents itself to us as real is real, that it is indeed possible for us to arrive at truth. And if we are to live according to the truth, we must trust in the truth. Indeed, to live according to the truth is to trust in the truth—as Socrates did, willing to be executed rather than deny the truth that he perceived and the spirit (the “daimon”, in Greek) that urged him to seek the truth, serving as a model that would be raised to an infinitely higher degree in the Christian martyrs of all ages, from the Rome-persecuted martyrs to the martyrs of Uganda under Kabaka Mwanga II, from martyred missionaries among the Goths to the martyrs of Auschwitz and the Middle East, who were willing to die rather than deny the love of their lives, the One who is the Truth.

Here, we begin to approach a response to the observations with which this essay began. To be truthful, to incarnate the truth in our thoughts and words and deeds, is to trust in the truth. To be truthful is to be faithful. And our own fidelity is founded not on our own decision to be faithful—that would only be a form of not-trusting in the truth—but, rather, on the trustworthiness of being, and ultimately, the faithfulness of Truth Himself. Thus did God reveal Himself to the Israelites, as a Father who keeps His promises, a Bridegroom who does not renounce his unfaithful Bride, and as One who gives good news to the poor.

In this respect, Achille Mbembe makes an interesting observation. In the introduction to his book, Brutalism, he looks at the economic and political systems of the world and suggests that Africa (in general), now as before, experiences more than others the rough side of the machinations that ensue at the tables of the mighty when they presume to shape the entire world for their personal profit. Those who seem to believe that power is the primary force of history [that we should trust in ourselves and not in truth] tend to strive to make the world ever more manipulable, in an ever more profound way, and across ever greater breadths of space. While this state of affairs is extending across the globe, it has long been the case in sub-Saharan Africa, and to a greater extent than other geographical loci. For this reason, he says (and I paraphrase), the question of trust is and will be posed in a particular way on the African continent—it is on the African continent that the most profound conquest of truth, of trust, of faith, must occur. Where suffering abounds, there must Truth conquer even suffering, that it may be seen that Truth has the final word—is the ultimate Word—and that Truth alone gives meaning to history.

Sons and daughters of Africa, do not be deceived by glittering lights! Do not let your hearts grow faint in the heat of the desert! Listen to the faithful “Fiat! Let it be done!” of the Blessed Virgin!

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is in the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of the drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”

Leave a comment

(In case you missed it, here’s a link to Part I of this article.)

Native Language and the Soul of African Peoples

Every clearly defined community is held together by its language, history and way of life. The profound experiences that shape meaning in living communities, e.g. the experience of God, of love and sorrow, or birth and death, of communion with nature, etc. tend to be expressed not only in language but above all in poetry and song. This would help to explain why some of the most sophisticated cultures in human history have enshrined their fundamental truths and visions in poetry which was nearly always sung. Thus Homer gave us his Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil (in imitation of his Greek forerunner) gave us his Aeneid. That tradition was carried on in the Christian era as well with The Divine Comedy of Italy, the Chanson de Roland of France, the El Cid of Spain, and Beowulf of England.

Each language houses the soul of a people; and just like each person has a unique, unrepeatable soul, so does each language. Each language can say something that another cannot say, a nuance that another cannot express. The soul of a society is that society’s container of meaning or, as Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) so succinctly put it in his Letter on Humanism in 1946, “language is the house of being.” Those who share the same language (or tribe), share the same continuity of consciousness, the same collective memory and, therefore, the same identity.

The soul is not some ignis fatuus or a will-o-the-wisp floating in the ether; it is a being’s radical openness to others. The soul is a relational or dynamic entity, not a “stand-alone” or static one. In a word, it is dialogical. Souls do not subsist in bodies; they subsist in relationships. We get a glimpse of this subtle truth from Aristotle, for example, when he tells us in his Nicomachean Ethics that “a friend is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Strictly speaking, then, it is more appropriate to say that it is the body that dwells in the soul and not the soul that dwells in the body. Nothing prevents bodies that are spatially distinct from being united by a separate overarching principle of unity. And this is precisely how communities subsist. They are constituted by persons who are simultaneously constituted in communities; and as we have said, the soul of a people, of a community, is “housed” in its language.

What then can be said of individuals who can speak more than one language as is the case of almost every African alive today? A typical modern-day African knows at least three languages—his mother tongue, the official local language of the country he lives in, and English (or French or, much less often, Portuguese). If a language houses a soul, do we modern-day Africans have several souls? Are we more prone to identity crises? Are we doomed to a type of communal schizophrenia?

The main argument advanced here is that, for all of us, the language that really counts is the first one we ever speak—the one we assimilate from the first community we are immersed in. If this process of assimilation of the first language is done successfully, an individual can then go on to acquire other foreign languages—and other thought systems in the process—without fear of losing his sense of self.

One tends to forget, perhaps because of the rapid adaptability of Africans, that only barely one hundred years ago, this continent was in the early Iron Age. Within this short period, we have had to adopt systems of thought and governance that others have had hundreds or even thousands of years to experiment with. What’s more, we have had to do it in their languages. We have thereby gained and lost at the same time. In having no choice but to learn and be facile in other languages we have had the great benefit of looking into the minds of their great thinkers and have greatly benefited. But often these others have felt no great need to learn our languages and thus be in a position to look into our souls to truly understand why we laugh when we laugh and why we weep when we weep. This is diminishing, for in every language is coded generation upon generation of human aspiration and endeavour. No wonder some great attempts to assist have floundered.

Margaret Ogola, The Teachings of Josemaría Escriva in an African Context, 2002

On the one hand, inhabiting multiple thought systems can enrich an individual’s humanity; on the other hand, it may irreparably damage his sense of self. The constitution of the self is a delicate process that requires time, patience, and personal attention.

Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), a Russian child development psychologist, had a profound insight into the intimate relationship between an individual’s first community, his first spoken language, and the evolution of thinking that takes place within tight-knit communities. Vygotsky observed that thought and language are initially separate systems from the beginning of life, merging at around three years of age in a developing child. He distinguished between three forms of speech:

• Social speech—external communication that is used to talk to others in the child’s immediate circle

• Private speech—that stage in a child’s development where language and thought unite to constitute verbal thinking and,

• Inner speech—that stage wherein silent, internal dialogue leads to cognitive development.

Vygotsky was the first psychologist to document the importance of inner speech.

Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech—it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.

Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1962

In Vygotsky’s view, private speech is more similar (in form and function) to inner speech than social speech. Private speech becomes inner speech at about the age of seven—an age generally referred to as the age of reason. A child becomes capable of independent thinking when they become capable of thinking in terms of meaning, i.e., logos.

Such considerations clarify the connection between the meanings hidden in our human words and The Logos that gives ultimate meaning to history: language is the most basic form of Logos and meaning-making in community life. If we push these reflections to their ultimate conclusions, we as Africans will be forced to realize the folly of jettisoning our native languages in favour of modern European ones. To fail to learn our native languages is to fail to understand ourselves. It is to lose our souls.

For each one of us, meaning-making begins when speech gets assimilated into independent thinking at around the age of seven. This was Vygotsky’s ingenious discovery: the inception of independent thinking in an individual thanks to the speech patterns he absorbs from his first community. The foundational thoughts through which we shape our sense of selfhood are hidden in our native languages, not in the languages we acquire later—however rich these may be in themselves. Despising or entirely casting away our indigenous languages will not help advance the “cause of the Logos” and its development in individual and collective histories. And this is not only because language is the “house of being”, but also because of Africans’ preference for oral tradition over written tradition.

Oral Tradition and the Negro’s Encounter with The Living Word

Letters are artificial symbols; they are twice removed from reality. Words, on the other hand, are natural sacraments; they are immediately in touch with reality. All words are the incarnation of an idea. Words are natural signs; they are not simply contrived or made-up sounds. There is something primordial and essential about them that cannot be reduced to empty utterances as the Nominalists of old used to teach.

Every linguist worth his salt knows how much the pronunciation and articulation of words affect the positioning of the tongue, lips and teeth as well as the muscles that house our nasal and buccal cavities. We can go so far as to say that the structures of our faces are a function of the languages we can comfortably speak. We cannot say the same of the written word.

A culture built around the spoken word is more open to the Logos in which its people understand themselves. A culture built about the written word (understood in a certain way) is dangerous and means a certain closed-ness to the Word and the world. Something about the African people’s preference for oral tradition over written tradition renders them more amenable to the workings of The Word. Cultures steeped in oral traditions can more easily associate human words with The Living Word than literate cultures. They intuitively understand that words are first and foremost meant to be spoken, not written; that language is much more than literature and that tradition is caught, not taught. This might actually be one of the few instances where we as Africans can boast of our illiteracy.

Africa as a continent is definitely coming of age. In many ways we can say that light is being shed on our “dark” history—by which we mean that we are slowly beginning to understand ourselves and to come to an awareness of our unique role in world history. In our own way, we can now boast of being a People of the Preeminence of the Spoken Word as well as a People of the Rich Diversity of the Spoken Word.

But what of the African Americans, who seem to have lost all traces of the languages of their African origins?

If the Word arrived on the shores of sub-Saharan Africa with the Portuguese in 1491; it arrived on the shores of the New World (in the Americas) in 1492 with Christopher Columbus—just one year later. It took about 400 years of interaction between the Negro and his slave master before the blight of slavery was abolished—at least legally. Despite itself, the New World began thenceforth to play its role in the drama of the movement of Logos in human history. At the same time, and unbeknownst to the West Africans who were ferried across the Atlantic, a different variety of the negro spirit was being forged in this new furnace of suffering. On the one hand, the American continent houses a group of estranged Africans who have lost all trace of their original languages. And yet the yearnings for redemption from bondage and the deep piety that characterizes the Negro people as a whole has not disappeared. Only God knows what the future holds for them in particular and for us in general.

If ever Africa shall show an elevated and cultivated race, —and come it must, some time, her turn to figure in the great drama of human improvement— life will awake there with a gorgeousness and splendor of which our cold western tribes faintly have conceived. In that far-off mystic land of gold, and gems, and spices, and waving palms, and wondrous flowers, and miraculous fertility, will awake new forms of art, new styles of splendor; and the negro race, no longer despised and trodden down, will, perhaps, show forth some of the latest and most magnificent revelations of human life. Certainly they will, in their gentleness, their lowly docility of heart, their aptitude to repose on a superior mind and rest on a higher power, their childlike simplicity of affection, and facility of forgiveness. In all these they will exhibit the highest form of the peculiarly Christian life, and, perhaps, as God chasteneth whom he loveth, he hath chosen poor Africa in the furnace of affliction, to make her the highest and noblest in that kingdom which he will set up, when every other kingdom has been tried, and failed; for the first shall be last, and the last first.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

A final message to whoever else dares to say that Africa has no history because of a want of written records or lack of any development worthy of its name. To such as these we answer that, if history is reduced to written material, then yes, Africa has little or none of that. But if history is living tradition and not a mute and written word—then we disagree wholeheartedly. Our “book” is not static and lifeless but dynamic and living, like an ageless Baobab tree. The cover is not glossy and smooth but textured and rough, like the bark of a tree. The spine that holds the pages together is a gigantic trunk whose “chapters” are its branches. The pages are not written using quill pens or fancy computers but by the daily work of ordinary men and women. The living branches bear fruit for posterity whereas the dead branches (when they fall) serve as “footnotes” and “manure” for the tree’s self-regeneration. Its roots (to appropriate Hegel’s own words) are “wrapped in the dark mantle of night”. They belong to the unconscious past—below the unsuspecting gaze of the ignorant. For is not all life grounded in what is not conscious, and does not the brightness of consciousness emerge from that very root?

Plants can grow only when their roots are in the dark. They emerge from the dark into the light. That is the direction of life. The plant and its direction die when the root is exposed to the light. All life must be grounded in what is not conscious and from that root emerge into the brightness of consciousness. Yet I see consciousness becoming more and more deeply the root of our life. A relation to other lives is seen, one event is brought under the same law as others, and we get closer and closer in our scrutiny to the beginnings, the origins of life. The root of life itself, what is innermost to it, is lit up. Can life sustain this? Can it become consciousness and at the same time remain alive?

Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, Life threatened by consciousness

Share

References

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999)

Guardini R., Letters from Lake Como: Explorations on Technology and the Human Race (Ressourcement: Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought) Paperback – June 10, 1994

Stowe H. B., Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly (1852). Waggoner, C. (2007, November 14). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/uncle-toms-cabin-1852/

  Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

(reading time: about 20 minutes)

There is a sense in which spoken words are alive and written words are dead. We are conscious of this difference whenever we distinguish between the spirit of a word and the letter of that same word. Something in our subconscious whispers to us that the written word does not do justice to the word, Word.

In the written word—be it on paper or parchment or papyrus or in a text message in a digital device—the bodily vitality of the ringing word is absent. When a word is trapped or entangled in a lifeless page or in a device, it is incomplete—like a body that lacks the soul for which it was made or the material counterpart of a sacrament lacking its spiritual component. Water without the power to wash is not water, just like bread that lacks the power to stave off hunger is not bread. An artist may paint a glass of water so real that one is tempted to drink from it, and the latest A.I. model may design a hologram of a loaf of bread so real that one is tempted to eat it; still, no matter how close these imitations come to the real deal, they remain artificial. That is, they are the product of man’s artifice, not creatures who emerge from God’s creative act.

Only words formed by the human voice, i.e., speech, have the delicacy and power that is necessary to stir the depths of the emotions. Only words formed by the human voice are strictly speaking, Words. Words are a living reality that soar through space and time—between a speaker and a listener. Words feel most at home not on a lifeless page of a book but in the living heart of a living being. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle is generally interpreted as having defined man as a zoon echon logon1 or “Word-Bearer”. By this, he meant that we call man “rational” because he expresses the depths of his experience in words. To put it more simply, to speak is to be human.

The aforementioned distinction between the written and the spoken word constitutes one of the major differences between Protestant Christianity and Catholic Christianity. According to the Protestant-Christian perspective, The Word is fundamentally the Bible. According to the Catholic-Christian perspective however, The Word is not first and foremost a holy book—a long text message from God to mankind. The Word is a Person, the second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.  In the late Middle Ages—before Protestantism was a reality—Christians had to fight a similar semantic battle with the Muslims, who classified Jews and Christians under the category of People of the Book. Medieval Christians, basing themselves on the prologue of the Gospel of Saint John that spoke of “The Word that was in/from the beginning”, preferred to call themselves the people of the Word—a living and active Word, not a mute and dead one.

The saving God who came to us was the eternal Word. But that Word did not come in a blaze of spiritual illumination or as something suddenly appearing in a book. He was made flesh (John 1.14), flesh that could be seen, heard, grasped with hands, as St. John so graphically insists in the opening lines of his first letter.

Romano Guardini, The Word and Hearing, 1939.

When the aforementioned Word became flesh, He became the new locus of world history—not just for the Jews in particular or the Europeans in general but for people of every race and tongue. There is in fact a sense in which we can say that a people enters history proper, only in so far as it has had an encounter with this Word.

When a philosopher-historian like G. W. F. Hegel (1770 – 1831) made an attempt to interpret African history through his Enlightenment lens, he concluded that Africa had no history it could boast of. For whatever reason, it did not seem to strike such Enlightenment historians that the Africans they were encountering had native languages of their own or that the presence of speech signals the presence of a system of thought. Perhaps they were influenced by the prejudice that historical worth could only be ascertained by the presence of written words or of scientific inventions. Perhaps after 18 centuries, Plato’s prophecy about overreliance on the technology of writing was finally coming true.

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

Plato, Phaedrus, 4^th century BC.

The case we are trying to make here is that, by the time of the so-called “Enlightenment”, Western civilization had lost its true identity because they had lost its living memory. They had lost their capacity to relate with other Word-Bearers because they themselves had stopped bearing within themselves The Living Word.

In his book, Geographical Basis of World History (1820s), Hegel divided Africa up into three regions (based on racial differences): North Africa, Egypt, and “Africa proper.” About “Africa proper” he wrote;

Africa proper has no historical interest of its own, for we find its inhabitants living in barbarism and savagery in a land which has not furnished them with any integral ingredient of culture. From the earliest historical times, Africa has remained cut off from all contacts with the rest of the world; it is the land of gold, forever pressing in upon itself, and the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night.

Not only did the Enlightenment as a cultural movement relegate “Africa proper” to the dustbin of history (as can be glimpsed above in Hegel’s excerpt), it also spread a negative prejudice against whatever is or is supposed to be “medieval” in European history. According to the wisdom of that time, good things came with the Enlightenment; everyone who came before or did not fit into their mindset belonged ipso facto to a period of darkness. The purpose of this intellectual cultural movement was to reform society using pure reason, challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith and advance knowledge through the scientific method. Most sectors of society in the contemporary world—be they scientific, political or economic—can trace their roots back to the cultural soil of 17^th and 18^th century Enlightenment Europe.

The view of Africa as a land of childhood; removed from self-consciousness; wrapped in darkness, etc. was taught not only by Enlightenment thinkers like Hegel, it was picked up by anthropologists like Levi-Bruhl2(1857–1939), a Frenchman trained in philosophy and who furthered anthropology with his contributions to the budding fields of sociology and ethnology.

The common denominator in all these “enlightened” views is that, as a people, Africans are yet to come of age because they are still firmly embedded in their tribes or groups, wherein the common weal is more important than the well-being of the individual. The community still determines the individual’s values and social orientation. This strong community orientation also explains the perennial tribal confrontations we are so used to in our political debates.

The argument Hegel had made in his main historico-philosophical work, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, (published in 1807) was that history is marked by the advance of Reason or Spirit (Geist in German) in time. Since Africans were still living on the level of Pathos (emotion) and Ethnos (ethnicity), they had not yet graduated to the levels of Ethos (Ethics) and Logos (Reason/Geist), they strictly speaking, had no history.

The counterargument we are making in this essay is that history proper is unveiled when the logos (speech) of man encounters the Logos (Word) of God and not in the development of reason understood in the Enlightenment sense. The nuance we are adding in our argument is that, by the time of the Enlightenment, the word “Word” had lost its original meaning. Indeed, this might also help explain its manifold interpretations and translations by this time in history: Spirit, Geist, Reason, Rationality, Meaning, Mind, Word, etc. From the time of the Renaissance and, in a fuller sense, since the time of the Enlightenment, the word “rational” had come to mean only that which can be proved by experiments. Logos had come to mean science, or technique, or pure functional reason. In other words, Logos had been reduced to logic. Only the skeleton of its former self remained. It had lost its moral energy. It had been drained of its soul. It, nay, He, had died, as Nietzsche would later say (much more clearly) in his The Gay Science and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

When the authentic Logos—who transcends time and place—engages a people in meaningful dialogue (dia-logos), He, not the Enlightenment’s abstract reason, sheds light on that people’s historical journey through time. The argument we make here is based on the philosophical assumption that man is fundamentally distinguished from all other animals (from all other embodied souls) through his possessing logos—which most translate as “reason,” but which we would prefer to interpret here as “speech.” If this (lowercase) logos of man does not encounter the (uppercase) Logos of God, an entire people risks remaining in existential darkness—and this is not a mere metaphor. The Logos is, in a very real sense, a type of living energy or fire. He, says St. John in his famous prologue, is the true light that enlightens the intellect of all men. What physical light is to our physical eyes, the true and ultimate enlightenment granted by The Logos is to our human intelligence.

Having clarified this, we can now declare that we are in a proper position to start (re)telling our story and history through this new lens. The systematic spread of The Word in the African continent took place in different phases:

The first centuries of Christianity saw the evangelization of Egypt and North Africa. A second phase, involving the parts of the Continent south of the Sahara, took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A third phase, marked by an extraordinary missionary effort, began in the nineteenth century.

Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia in Africa, 1995

Compared with the European continent, The Word arrived on the shores of sub-Saharan Africa relatively late. The first recorded inroad into sub-Saharan Africa took place in 1491, when Portuguese explorers entered the mouth of the Zaire River at a place called Pinda. The then king of Congo, Nzinga-a-Nkuwu asked for missionaries to proclaim the Gospel in his land.

A certain number of episcopal sees were erected during this period, and one of the first fruits of that missionary endeavour was the consecration in Rome, by Leo X in 1518, of Don Henrique, the son of Don Alfonso I, King of Congo. Don Henrique thus became the first native Bishop of Black Africa.

Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia in Africa, 1995

Even though the missions established by the Portuguese came to an end in the 18th century owing to various difficulties, the seed of The Word had already been planted in the soul/psyche of this people in Central Africa. The dia-logos had begun.

References

Guardini R. (1939) (1997 edn.), Preparing Yourself for Mass, Sophia Institute Press.

John Paul II (1995, September 14), Ecclesia in Africa [On the Church in Africa and its Evangelizing Mission], Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Plato, Phaedrus, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm

(reading time: about 11 minutes.)

Introduction

Science originates from nature. This principle would sit comfortably within the Corpus Aristotelianus (the Complete Works of Aristotle). I am yet to encounter it within his immense writings and if any reader happens to come across it, please accept my misgivings. For now, two key notions are important: science and nature. Both these terms represent entire realms of reality; they are in fact two worlds. At the bedrock of science lies metaphysics as prima scientorum (the very first among the sciences).

But before we follow this train of thought, let me revisit my short journey in exploring climate change. I first got into climate action around ten years ago when I made a semi-academic presentation of the newly published encyclical letter by Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ at a university in Nairobi. It was in Laudato Si’ that most people discovered the relevance of intellectual and moral conversations surrounding ecology and planet Earth, our common home. Previously, science already held certain insights about the changes occurring in the natural world (see part II of this article). However, the encyclical, broadly theological in design, introduced us to topics like “cultural ecology,” “human weakness,” and “ecological conversion.” I remember a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was and remains particularly striking:

“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing, thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.”

The almost personalized attention to the natural world that is now being asked of us is somewhat new. Historically, humanity has thrived in the universe through deeply ingrained survival psychology (very observable in animals, for example) which has ensured that, by striving to dominate and use the resources of the universe, man can progress as a species, or perish and vanish from the face of the earth. This has happened to other species in the past—they are now only pre-historic relics. The phenomenon of existing in constant competition with the rest of the natural world to survive and thrive led the early 19th century English naturalist and biologist, Charles Darwin, to formulate the theory of evolution by “natural selection”, and he coined the ubiquitous term “survival of the fittest”. More recently, survival psychology has been applied to other fields, such as economic analyses of human behavior.

This survival psychology can be condensed into two main points:

• Man is in constant competition with his environment for survival.

• Man is in a quest to dominate, use, and even abuse the ecosystem to emerge as the superior species in the natural world.

The above, coupled with the emergence of large-scale industrial human action in the 19th century, meant that over time, the entire ecosystem would begin to feel the negative effects of human activity around the globe—as indeed, it did.

For this reason, we are now called upon to change our view of the universe. We are summoned to have a new relationship with nature. In large part, this new relationship is hinged on the fact that nature does suffer from the drastic effects of massive, modernized, and commercialized human action. Nature suffers. When Darwin was carrying out his experiments (and in the preceding eons), human activity had not actualized the industrial possibilities that would become reality mere decades later. Disproportionate carbon dioxide emission, large-scale generation of non-biodegradable waste, soil and water exploitation and exhaustion—all this has become commonplace, something that was unimaginable when human life was subsistence-based.

As thinkers, it is our task to uncover reasons and principles that can explain common experience. This article aims to unravel the fundamental principles that can guide an intellectual approach to the suffering of the natural world from extreme human action. I aim to speak for the universe in ways that it cannot speak for itself. Does the universe have an internal structure that determines how it should operate, the failure of which could lead to irreversible damage, or even to destruction of all that lives and exists in it? Can we rationally speak of having a new relationship with Nature as human beings?

First, we delve into the origin of the universe to determine if it has a structured order of operation and merits a new relationship with mankind.

The universe: created or randomly existing?

Philosophy is the love of wisdom (“sophia” in Greek). Wisdom is a type of knowledge of the ultimate causes and ends of things. A statement or thought is considered wise if it delivers the ultimate meaning of and fully understands the matter at hand. Philosophy can, therefore, provide profound insights (wisdom) about things that have been said and discussed, including climate change.

This brings us back to our two key notions: science and nature. Science is traditionally defined as knowledge through mediate causes. The subject matter of scientific knowledge is the natural world (nature). It is from nature that we derive physics, chemistry, geology, biology, etc., and all their constituent specializations. In a prior research work, I was able to study a fundamental principle of Nature that directly opposes any sort of opinion along the lines of accidental existence, which is that it is a created universe. I was able to address the fact that our living planet is linked in a timeless way to its giver or Creator from which it does and will always attain its intellectual and moral content:

“Contemporary studies robustly reveal the rationality of the material constitution of the Universe. So articulate is this revelation that cosmological science simply cannot concur with the [affirmation] that the world originates from nothingness. … Aquinas's recourse to the … study of [universal movement or change] … [demonstrates] that the very rationality of this movement encloses certain metaphysical tenets that guide us to the original divine attribution of such motion. God is the author of all being.”1

The universe is created in both space and time (although Aristotle could only fathom it as being eternal and necessary, i.e., inevitable). The Philosopher’s position of the eternal and necessary universe is based on the view that the universe is in perpetual motion and the Prime Mover only sustains this movement. This Prime Mover, however, does not account for the origin of the existence of the universe. In our introduction, we alluded to the fact that mankind needs to establish a new relationship with nature. Now, by getting down to the fundamental origin of the universe from God as the author of all being, we can see how this kind of relationship can even begin to exist. The environment is not a simple inanimate and random existence whose yesterday and tomorrow are widely unknown. It is well-crafted and rationally made because its author is rational. There is some sense to everything that we interact with through our sense perceptions.

A relatable universe has deep and intrinsic metaphysical and ethical implications for Ecology. Our planet is not an unconditional apparatus or tool at the hands of human beings to exploit as they deem fit. Planet Earth exists with an intrinsic design from its Maker. Our primary task as components of this universe is to discover how the Universe works. Fundamental to this quest of discovery is a deep-seated respect for the mind and intention of the Creator. Climate, the environment, and the natural world possess a moral and intellectual inherency. We can speak of good conduct and bad conduct concerning the environment. Conversations around man’s self-destruction due to the overexploitation and abuse of nature do not necessarily have to take on an “apocalyptic” outlook, but can have a scientific and logical basis.

Going forward, we derive metaphysical insights about the origin of the universe to find a firmer base for the moral and intentional physiognomies of the climate change dialogue.

What, how, and why does God create?

Post-Hellenistic Thought, enlightened by Judeo-Christian principles, was a great plus to philosophical exploration. Creatio ex nihilo (Genesis 1-2) is not the metaphysical description of how nothingness becomes something, as if nothingness itself was the basis of action, but rather the nature of the action of the Pure Acting Being, God Himself. St. Thomas Aquinas describes God as the subject of the creative act; not nihilum as a sort of object which represents the raw material or prime matter or even the departing point of the action of God. There lies the fine line of logic that changes the entire discussion: “It is not that nothingness is the origin of universal being. Rather, God creates from nothing”.

As Aquinas attests, the reason why God creates from nothing is that the nature of His action is Pure Act, absolutely perfect, needing no activation or motivation from outside itself: “And because of this He can make something from nothing”. Aquinas affirms that God acts without any intermediary (De potentia, q. 7 a. 10 co.). And because creation is an outpouring of the Divine Goodness, we can say, in the words of St. Augustine: “Because God is good, we are. / Because He is good, we are; and in so far as we are, we are good” (Augustine of Hippo, De Doctrina Christiana I, 32).

Creatio ex nihilo as the new category of causality is such a condensed principle that it carries with it several non-exhaustible sub-postulates. Due to the nature of the present article, I am not able to elaborate in a fully speculative way on the various premises and conclusions that are elucidated by the notion of the act of creation, but I will, in summary, emphasize that:

• God is not simply the detached nature of a common being and creatures do not simply share in God’s act of being. No, the Divine Being is the unique separated act of being while all created being is composed in an intelligent, intended, and free manner by God. They are two totally different ways of existence. This also reveals that, with respect to the universe, God is not an indifferent clockmaker, or dependent on the world for His own perfection, as if the world and all that were within it were mere instruments for His own self-satisfaction. God is perfect in Himself, and creation is a free gift or bestowment.

• Created being is endowed with those perfections that pertain to their respective act of being—in a participative and effective (real) kind of way. These perfections are distributed according to the nature of being of the creature (essence) which somehow defines or limits their possession of these acts and perfections.

Implications for Modern Ecological Science

The fact that the Universe has a personal origin in God forms the basis for the new relationship that human action must develop with nature. Our interaction with the natural world is not purely mechanical. Herein lie the metaphysical and ethical implications of the notion of creation to positive sciences, such as ecology.

Now, science is often too technical to come to terms with philosophical principles and ecology is no exception. Many a time, in my experience, when ecological scientists are asked why human behavior toward the environment should change, they will simply respond: “We change or we perish!” This is indeed true—but it is not the entire truth. Hence, we begin to see philosophy’s unique contribution to the discussion about why humankind should establish a new relationship with nature. The fundamental reason why the human ecological approach must change is not only the possible destruction of nature, but also that we need to align ourselves with the truth, with God’s intended purpose of bringing reality into existence. The natural world is not an unpremeditated entity but a well-thought-out, created gift that bespeaks the Creator. This realization can steer the approach of scientific study and provide the ground and focal point for optimism in ecological studies.

Mankind has a formidable journey ahead of him: he must change his perspective and purpose in this world from simple survival to the conservation and betterment of our common home.

Moreover, while lying outside the scope of technical ecological science, the perspective outlined in Laudate Deum (LD) is vital: ecological concerns are intimately connected to the dignity of human life. Our care for each other and care for creation are bound together. The personal dimension of the climate conversation once more comes to the forefront. “What is being asked of us is nothing other than a certain responsibility for the legacy we will leave behind, once we pass from this world” (LD, 18).

Conclusion: Philosophy and the Foundations of Ecological Science

In the first letters of the introduction above, I highlighted the fact that science is pre-conditioned by nature. Ecology as a science also applies this principle. Ecological studies, for the most part, are based on the observation and recordings of the climate phenomenon over a considerable amount of time (around 35 years or more). However, research and technology are tools in the hands of people. What matters most is the attitude and mindset of the researchers and technologists, their philosophical disposition.

As we have seen, the universe is not a random or arbitrary existence. It is inherently rational. It is intentional. Therefore, we must look at ecology with new eyes. Our natural home and planet is not an unconditional apparatus or tool for human beings to exploit as they deem fit. Planet Earth exists with an intrinsic design. Our primary task is to discover how the universe works. Only then can we safely dominate it (the Creation mandate–see Genesis 1:28). Fundamental to this quest of discovery is a deep-seated respect for the mind and intention of the Creator, for which philosophical reflection plays a crucial role.

Leave a comment

Share