Challenge of Culture in Africa: From Restoration to Integration

Back to the Sterner Spirit

37 Back to the Sterner Spirit T he Negro peoples have known the ravages of the Slave Trade and of colonial exploitation; even today, in independent Africa, much of what is rightly ours is still in the hands of the stranger. Indeed the black race is the most despoiled of all mankind. Even among the underdeveloped peoples we can vie with none; our place is right at the bottom. Like the afflicted psalmist, we are struggling to rise de profundis – from the depths of the abyss. Imagine the immensity of the effort that is required of this race to overtake the others, to reach the top! We rightly assert our equality with other peoples, our equality as human beings, our equality in possibilities of limitless development. But, in so far as real achievement is concerned, all talk of equality is delusive irrelevance, a lullaby for unwary morons. Indeed when you ponder on how much the Negro must do to catch up with the world, you cannot but be alarmed at the thirst for ease, at the craving for luxury so evident today in independent Africa! This lust for pleasure is rampant precisely where it ought not to venture; it is standing like that abomination of desolation which, as the Prophet Daniel lamented, had been set in the holy places. For when you consider the bleak misery in which millions of the African masses pass their lives, you would logically expect that the African elite and leadership, conscious of this state of things, conscious of their responsibilities, and conscious of the need to express genuinely their solidarity 38 Bernard N. Fonlon with these masses, should be ruled by a stern spirit of selfdenial or, at least, of moderate restraint in the acquisition and the use of worldly wealth, especially where they have the sacred duty to develop the common patrimony and use it to alleviate the misery of the people. Look around you, wherever you may be in Negro Africa, and see for yourself whether this is so. More often than not what meets your gaze is the same old sight that Tacitus saw among the Romanized Britons – delenimenta vitiorum: porticus, balinea et conviviorum elegantiam – the seductions of vice; only among us these assure other shapes: lavish living, luxurious mansions, sumptuous cars, sensual indulgence. The itch to get rich quick is running riot everywhere. No sooner is a bank or exchequer entrusted into African hands than rumours begin to spread of millions spirited away to replenish private coffers. One can imagine the anguish and bewilderment of many an African head of state caught between this state of things and the relentless clamours for Africanisation. For, Africanise he must, not because Africanisation will usher in efficiency and devoted service, but because we have reached the point where you have no choice but to hand over the African’s affairs to the African even when there is every reason to believe that he will make a hash of them. It is a spectacle disheartening and disturbing. At this stage, when the dawn of African independence is just breaking, evils which would normally come with decline and exhaustion have already overtaken us and are eating their way deep into the vitals of the body politic-corruption, embezzlement, nepotism, grasping individualism, cynical indifference to the general welfare. A halt must be called to this down-hill trend. There must be a radical reversal. Nothing short of a complete mental and moral revolution will do. 39 Challenge of Culture in Africa: From Restoration to Integration Behind the giant effort to establish colleges and universities throughout the continent there pulses the driving conviction that, to pull Africa out of the bottomless pit, we need men of high learning and specialised skill. This is obviously so. But it would be an omission fraught with disaster if we failed to make sure that these saviours of Africa are drilled in self-discipline, are forged like steel into men of stoic mind and will. For indeed, seeing the extreme misery of the African masses, how can those dedicated to the cause of redeeming these masses fulfil this mission duly, if they recoil from Calvary, if they shrink back from descending into hell? The situation calls for the spirit of self-sacrifice, indeed it calls for austere asceticism, in the lives of the African elite and leadership. If they are not fortified ill this manner with a will of...