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Between Two Worlds: Cultural Losses in Africa
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10646 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
3,149 Words |
| Author
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Robert W. Nicholls
Robert W. Nicholls is a media specialist with the Howard
University Research and Training Center in Washington, D.C. |
Cultures guide human behavior and connect individuals to a larger society, motivating people in socially approved directions and providing necessary social skills. Africa's contact with industrial nations has had both positive and negative cultural effects. Improvements in infrastructure, education, and medicine have all involved social costs. The brunt of these have been borne by rural areas because of an urban bias that encourages inappropriate consumption habits, increases dependence on foreign products and technology, creates disincentives to farming, and stimulates rural flight. The adoption of Western-style education and mass media has fostered a foreign interpretation of social reality and in many cases engendered a generation gap.
Oral traditions are particularly fragile. Africans traditionally commit knowledge and skills to memory, not to print. Experience, insight, and methodology have been carefully sustained for thousand of years. But today, as African elders and other guardians of ethnic lore join the ancestors, a wealth of traditional knowledge and customs is being lost, often in a single generation. For example, though basic farming technologies are unaltered, the institutions that orchestrate the technology and shape it into a dynamic force have eroded.
Cultural losses as a result of modernization include a loss of valuable information in terms of environmental and sociocultural knowledge; a breakdown of socioeconomic institutions such as kinship, community and religious networks, and the forum and communication channels such networks provide; and the destruction of traditional authority structures, with a corresponding loss of social cohesion and lowering of the moral tone of society.
Such losses are not easy to measure. One way that this can be done is to examine the reports of "returnee" anthropologists, those who study the culture of a specific community during a particular period, then return a decade or two later to document observable changes. This essay compares such reports relative to three African communities: the Mbeere of Kenya, the Basongye of Lupupa Ngye in Zaire, and the Afikpo Igbo of Nigeria. The anthropologist returnees and their essays, respectively, David Brokensha and Bernard Riley, "Change at Mbeere," THE WORLD & I, December 1987; Alan Merriam, "Change in Religion and Arts in a Zairian Village," African Arts, April 1974; and Simon Ottenberg, "We Are Becoming Art Minded: Afikpo Arts 1988," African Arts, April 1989.
Change in Mbeere
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