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Cultural Synthesis in Africa
| Article
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10539 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
8,546 Words |
| Author
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Ali A. Mazrui
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The interplay of Africa's indigenous cultures with Islam on one side and Western civilization on the other has had political and economic ramifications. But in the final analysis the central process of the triple heritage has been cultural and civilization.
Civilization may be defined as a culture which has endured, expanded, innovated and been elevated to new moral sensibilities. An interviewer once asked India's Mahatma Gandhi: "What do you think of Western civilization?" The Mahatma is reported to have replied, "I didn't know they had any!" it was presumably the West's "moral sensibilities" which Mahatma Gandhi was questioning when he queried whether the West had as yet evolved a civilization.
But by the other criteria of the concept of "civilization," especially that of innovation, the Western world surely scores rather high in the last three or four centuries of human history. For our purposes, the world "civilization" can be applied to the Western, Islamic, as well as indigenous legacies, provided we always bear in mind that the term is always relative and somewhat hyperbolic.
A number of stages can be discerned in the evolution of the triple heritage at this cultural level. Initially, there is the simple phenomenon of culture contact - two systems of values being introduced to each other and beginning to be aware of each other's peculiarities.
In African history this was followed by culture conflict, as the two or three legacies began to clash with each other as they discovered areas of incompatibility and mutual
... (1982 of 51024 Characters)
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