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24 Chapter Three A CELEBRATION OF DIVERSITY he capacity to embrace diversity has always been part and parcel of the African mindset. Our cultures melt and spread into subcultures which in turn generate aggregates. In a bid to forge a common cultural identity and avoid asphyxiation, Africans have the onerous task of embracing their disparate subcultures. The submersion of our various cultures into a collective African heritage by means of mutual acceptance is one of the extraordinary ways in which Africans could enter into symbiotic intercourse with their kith and kin of different extractions. This is a rewarding means to communion with members of the global village. Our emotional experiences, our pains and our uncertainties, the strange curiosity of what is generally perceived as our defects and shortcomings should serve as a support base for our convivial strive toward a common identity. One of the prerequisites for the collective survival of Africans is our ability to maintain a conscious relationship with one another and with the global community in which we live. This presupposes sinking our superficial differences and embracing our all too obvious commonalities. We must ensure that our collective consciousness celebrates and enrich rather than alienate us as a people from the community of nations. We constitute an integral part of the international community. Our African heritage should not be hijacked by others to place us in a pariah state. Our collective diversity should be perceived as part of an integrating process of world diversity. Africans must acknowledge that each culture is never a finished product but rather a rung in the continuum of global cultures. Africans are interested in relating rather than dominating, in exchanging rather than expropriating. That’s why we remain our brother’s keepers at all times. A Hausa from Nigeria is a brother to a Hausa in Cameroon. A Fulani in Chad is a sister to a Fulani in Niger, a Bororo from Gabon is kith and kin to a Bororo from Equatorial Guinea, and so on and so forth. Without denying the cosmetic differences that exist amongst us, differences which have been exploited by our enemies to their own advantage, we must acknowledge that what unites us as Africans is vaster that what separates us. This is to say that the celebration of our diversity should constitute a stage in the process toward an African Federation, or better yet, the United States of Africa, the only T 25 contraption that will enable us to stand united. As the adage goes, united we stand; separated we will fall. Our unity will empower us to face up to the different hegemonic challenges that threaten our very survival in a global community that has become the marketplace for the commercialization of ideas. ...

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