REFORMING AND RE-INVENTING THE AFRICAN MIND (6)

Does the African Mind Need Reform or Re-invention? -4

We have in the last issues identified three philosophical and even ideological positions through which the deformation and disorientation of the African mind have been analyzed and also their possible solutions towards the reforming and re-invention of the African minds, which could be categorized as the radicalist view, the conservative view; the detached critcalist view point.

We have so for been exposing the first of the positions which we called the Westernization or modernist perspective on the African mind, which also had implemented a radicalist solution, which would tend to obliterate any thing African in the African mind, which we call an iconoclastic attitude to the African mental reality. This means a dedication of a discontinuity between the African past and her traditional epistemic, moral, aesthetic and cosmoginic and cosmological categories and analysis of reality, and what she is to need for the present and future, if there must be a mental reformation or re-invention, or mental renaissance. So Westernization or western oriented modernization is supposed to bring about this new African mind and rationality. This is what Chinua Achebe will call “things fall apart” and no longer at ease. So modernization of the African mind meant then as Mundane (1988) would say, the process of organizing and re-organizing both the structures and the mind. When it is realized that some of the great Western intellectuals like Hegel and Trevor-Roper had already said that Africans have no history, that meant that “there was no Africa past, nothing of value, neither their customs, nor their culture.

The implication then that Africa was expected to take on the customs, the logic and the language of the colonizer. He had no future of his own to look forward to and hence it was incumbent upon the generous and caring White man to carve out a future for him, thus perpetuating the myth, of the African as the White man's burden'

Advice Viriri and Pascha Mumgoini, African Cosmology and the Duality of the Western Hegemony. The search for an African identity” In Journal, of pan African studies vol. 3 No 6 March 2010).

African mind had to be subjected infact without the any thorough analysis and dialogue into the Western Aristotelian paradigm of binary opposition where she is categorized into the first negative molds, uncivilized versus civilized, pre-logical versus logical, mythical (pre-scientific) versus scientific; pre-critical versus critical, emotive versus rational; pre-reflective versus reflective.

Given this categorization of the African mind, progress, well-being understanding reality meant the exorcising of the African mental idols and reconstruction or changing of the African mental categories perspectives, in the mold and likeness of the European mind which people call, Euro-centricism. Hence the way to the future is iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is breaker of images. It is hidtorically connected 8th 9th century movement in which some people rose against the use of images in religious worship in the churches of the last; or puritan movement in the 16th -17th century. So an iconoclast can be described as one who attacks cherished beliefs. Thus in a transferred sense, we see the Westernization process by which all about the African past and mentality was destined for destruction or to neglect as an iconoclastic attitude. and worldview under the philosophic of the guest for universality and The school system became a vehicle for this systematic destruction and reproofing and re-plantation into the Western devised categories objectivity. Many African intellectuals came to buy this ideology of Western culture and imperatives as a true representative of the universal standards.
Africans were then held to be incapable of ruling themselves because of primitive irresponsibility. Therefore thing need enlightened masters to show them the ways of superior civilization and deliver them from ignorance.

Most of the African intellectual converts have tasted the Western lifestyle call for the substitution of Western culture and mental categories and even language for the authentic African ways Balendrier of this Westernized African elite who in his essay said “European dress represents the most perfect form of beauty ever achieved by the aesthetic sense of man”. He will go on to say, “we advocate the3 expansion of western civilization throughout Africa”. Balendrier would then say: “this whole hearted conviction conceals fundamental and surprising anxiety. It reveals a profound doubt as to the intrinsic value of African civilizations in terms of institutions, beliefs, language and arts”. This western-oriented elites which stills an overwhelming majority of the African elite today, and those who direct African affairs come to represent a mentality that would not like to identify with most of the African ways which symbolizes the state of savagery, hence the recommendation for a headlong towards a foreign civilization. This fascination and longing for whatever is western still remains the dominating attitude and mentality of the African elite and aspiration of the younger folk. This manifest the conviction that African culture and epistemic categories is far inferior and cannot meet the standard of a high culture. The White man himself is almost a spirit, the model and quintessence of a true human being whose values, mannerism and even his mistakes must be assured without much ado. He has assimilated the imposed binary opposition categories in which things of Africa, as assumed to be irrational as opposed to the rational, closed as opposed to the open.

The westernized African is aptly portrayed by the African writer- Okot P. Bitek- in his song of Lavino and song of O' Col. Lavino lashed at O; Col for abandoning his ancestors and culture. O' Col was a prototype of Westernized African Iconoclast, very pessimistic of Africa. For him there is nothing in the African past to regret. All we have is backwardness in technology; anachronistic clinging to out-molded forms of government and medicine. He will not go back. He will rather destroy the homestead, uproot the pumpkins: a total rejection of his traditional culture.
Even some African philosophers have also been directly or indirectly co-opted in this westernization project. Infact some African philosophers who defend a common universalist standard for rationality to the detriment of particularism have been accused of subtle support of the western model of rationality. This we will x-ray later.

Some statements by such authors and philosophers seem to buttress the above suspicion. One of such statements is that of Chielozena Eze when he said; Africans instead of directing their dissatisfactions with their oppressive religion and morally depraved rulers as well as against residue of primeval cultural forms, that prevent the flourishing of life, turn their anger at concepts traditionally associated with the west the worn enemy such as colonialism, imperialism and globalization.

In a recent rebuttal of those who wil blame the west for African woes and deterioration he declared that the hatred for the west creates in the African a combative state which hinders the mind from engaging in a somewhat empassioned analysis of the world. Continued the individual is forced to tread on her convictions acquired through her engagements with the world. A part of her recognizes that some aspects of her native culture no longer supply adequate answers to most existential questions of her times yet she is forced to cling to those aspects for the simple reason that they her own people's heritage.
(hielozena Eze ; Thoght and the Nigerian Mentality: Combative mood, March 1 2009, in Niger Villlage Square, Internet Explorer.)

Expressing the same western oriented attitude Towa said: “if the spirit of the tradition past is operative in the present and it is understood that the immersion of traditional men in that spirit is responsible for our conquest and domination by Europe, then we should seek out the secret of the power which overwhelms us and assertain the direction for which it came. Towa finds this secret in the European practice of rationality, the key to the scientific and technological progress. Thus he called for the exorcision with the obsession of originality and difference.