Challenge of Culture in Africa: From Restoration to Integration

The Witness of the Ancients

31 The Witness of the Ancients T his idea – that pleasure unmans, that manhood is won but by mastery over the appetites, by detachment from those things for which the body craves, that addiction to pleasure is slavery – is no modem brainwave. It was the central principle in the philosophy of the Stoics who flourished for some centuries before and after Christ and held that virtue is the highest good and that wisdom consists in independence from the passions. Horace in one of his Epistles tells the story of the horse and the stag that were feeding in a common field. The horse wishing to have the pasture all to himself began a struggle with the stag; but being worsted in the fight he sought the help of man and accepted the bridle and the saddle. Thanks to this ally he worsted his rival. But returning gleefully from his war, he discovered, to his dismay, that he could shake off, alas, neither the bit from his mouth nor the rider from his back! Sic qui pauperiem veritus potiore metallis Libertate caret, dominum vehit improbus atque Serviet aeternum, quia parvo nesciet uti. Thus, (warns Horace) he who dreads poverty lacks liberty, (a boon more precious than mines) becomes a covetous wretch and carries a master; and will remain for ever a slave, because he has not learnt to be content with little. . . . Fuge magna: licet sub paupere tecto. Reges et regum vita praecurrere amicos.11 32 Bernard N. Fonlon Shun grandeur (he exhorts): beneath a humble roof you may outstrip, in the race of life, kings and friends of kings. At the start, I brought culture back to its origin and said that as a form of tillage, a higher form at that, the process comprises the action of the tiller, a state induced thereby into the tilled, the growth of the resultant crops and the yield of fruit by these. There is, however, a difference. In the culture if the vegetable, energy is expended mostly by the tiller; that which is cultivated assumes its state, grows and bears effortlessly. Not so with man as we have seen: the tiller or teacher sweats; the learner as well. There can be no growth in learning or in virtue unless the learner is determined to shun delights and live laborious days. And those who would leave, on departing this life, a name. for science or heroism must give themselves up for years on end to painful and patient drudgery, must die to themselves, as the gospel says. This proves that the cultural process, by its very nature, calls for sustained effort, calls for manly energy. History shows, again and again, that, when exertion ceases and luxury takes over, decline commences and the knell of a people’s greatness begins to toll. Therefore, nowhere at any time, mould the ideal of manliness be forgotten in the rearing of the young. A people loses sight of this truth to its cost. If this is so for all nations, how truer still is it for us at this stage of our revolution! To build our country we need armies of citizens equipped to the utmost with knowledge and skill; and the number of such citizens among us is painfully inadequate. Therefore each Cameroonian we educate today is, ipso facto, destined to be a more efficient tiller of the nation tomorrow, will share in the stupendous task and responsibility of national reconstruction. 33 Challenge of Culture in Africa: From Restoration to Integration If this future participation is to be effective, we must, during the course of his education, give him as motto and din daily into his ears the last admonition which King David, dying, gave to his son Solomon: - Esto vir! - Be a man12 Socrates taught the same doctrine centuries before Christ, namely, that those destined to share public responsibility must be brought up in rigorous discipline: Tell me, Aristippus, if it were required of you to take two of your youths and educate them, the one in such a manner that he would be qualified to govern, and the other in such a manner that he would never seek to govern, how would you train them respectively? Will you allow us to consider the matter by commencing with their food, as with the first principles? Food, indeed, replied Aristippus, appears to me one of the first principles,’ for a person could not even...