8.2.3. African Resources
Africa is a continent blessed with a lot of natural resources.
Due to poor technical and economic development, these resources are and have
been exploited by the West. Sen ghor thus insists on the spiritual and cultural
resources of Africa.
The foreign contributions, whether capitalist or socialist,
whether from the West or from the East, must be taken cognizance of and be
adapted to the African cultural and economic realities. Neither western nor
eastern, nor African civilization is the universal civilization. Africa has
something to offer in the process of collectivisation of mankind. The Hegelian
and other racist attitudes are therefore wrong:
The Negro-African is not finished before he even gets
started. Let him speak; above all, let him act. Let him bring like a leaven,
his message to the world in order to help build the Civilization of the
Universal.3
I Kenneth Kaunda, in Ruch, E., (ed.), African
Philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 238.
2 Frantz Fanon, Black skin, White Masks,
Great Britain, I970, p. I2.
3 Léopold Sédar Senghor, in Ruch, E.,
(ed.), African Philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 226.
Following the steps of Teilhard de Chardin, Senghor
acknowledges the complementarity of human races and cultures. According to Sen
ghor, the Negritude movement
[...] welcomes the complementary values of Europe and the
white man, and indeed of all other races and continents. But it welcomes them
in order to fertilize and reinvigorate its own values, which it then offers for
the construction of a civilization which shall embrace all mankind. The
neohumanism of the twentieth century stands at the crossroads where the paths
of all nations, races and continents meet, where the four winds of the spirit
blow.I
Above all, the search for the Civilization of the Universal
must not become an excuse for introducing a new cultural colonialism. This
implies an independence of the mind, which is the necessary prerequisite of
other independences: political, economic and social; that is, the right and the
possibility of thinking for oneself, of choosing values for oneself, of acting
by oneself and of being oneself. Such independence must imply not merely the
rejection of the former colonial rule as being the absolute culture, but also
of any other culture or value system which has not been fully integrated into
that of one's own people. Every man is part of a social context: he has a
country, a colour, a history and a civilization.
8.3. The revalorisation of African traditional values
In view of the panhuman convergence, we consider that there
should be a black consciousness among Africans, the recognition and the desire
to establish a community feeling among Africans. All this demands African
solidarity. Africans should, as a people, share not only their material wealth,
but also their spiritual values, their joys and their sufferings.
I Leopold Sedar Senghor, in Ruch, E., (ed.),
African Philosophy, Rome, I98I, pp. 226-227.
The traditional African heritage of placing the community over
individual interests gives them a great advantage over Western cultures in the
process of building up new solidarity structures to replace the obsolete ones.
In this way, because of these values of solidarity and love, Senghor could
assert that African cultures are more likely to help in leading others towards
the Civilization of the Universal.
Kenneth KAUNDA gives us the following characteristics that shape
the personality of the African:I
-He enjoys meeting and talking with people for their own sake
and not merely for what they are doing, what class they belong to or for their
productive usefulness.
-He is patient with trials and is used to his dependence on
Nature. He is forgiving and his anger usually does not last long. This is shown
graphically in the speed with which he has overcome his resentment at having
been for so long under colonial domination. He does not, at least generally,
keep a grudge against Whites for having degraded him for so long, provided of
course that Whites respect him and his human dignity.
-He loves rhythm, music and dance, all of which are physical
expressions of man's life force. Emotion actually characterises the
Negro-African.
-Finally, the African is an inveterate optimist: his contact
with and faith in people lead him to believe that in the long run, he will
succeed in whatever he does.
I Kenneth Kaunda cited in Ruch, E, (ed.), African
philosophy, Rome, I98I, p. 238.
These characteristics of the African form a much more natural
basis for humanistic attitudes than the life style of Europe and America, where
machines and gadgets, the time-clocks and statistics, the political structures
and the ideologies are often more important than the people at whose service
they ought to be used.
With regard to the necessity of revalorising African cultural
traditional values, Negritude will appear as an ideology aiming at
fighting cultural dependence built by colonisation and neo-colonialism. This is
what Pius ONDOUA expresses in the following words:
K Les faits sont clairs: la colonisation et sa
perpetuation a travers la neo-colonisation ont instauré l'.re de la
dependance culturelle. C'est donc dans le cadre de cette dependance culturelle
et dans le but de liquider cette dependance que surgit l'idéologie du
socialisme-negritude de L. S. Senghor. L'auteur a d'ailleurs pris soin de
reconnaitre que l'Europe, en propageant en Afrique, sa civilisation
rationnelle, scientiste, matérialiste et athée, avait
désorganisé la society traditionnelle negro-africaine Ken
tarissant les sources mêmes de sa civilisation ».
»1
As such, Negritude encourages the revalorisation of
African cultural values, because of the bad effects of colonialism which
enhanced cultural dependence on the colonial master.
I Pius Ondoua, « Le Socialisme-Negritude de
L.S. Senghor - Notes critiques » in Annales de la Faculte des Lettres
et des Sciences Humaines, Yaounde, I988, p. 26. The facts are clear:
colonisation and its perpetuation through neo-colonisation have established
cultural dependence. It is therefore within the context of this cultural
dependence that emerges the ideology of the socialism-negritude of L.S.
Senghor. The author even acknowledges that Europe, while propagating its
rational, scientist, materialistic and atheistic civilization in Africa,
disorganised the traditional negro-African society "by drying up the very
sources of civilization".
CHAPTER NINE
EVALUATION OF TEILHARDIAN HUMANISM
Teilhardian humanism appears as the humanism of the third
millennium. It presents a form of conviviality among different peoples,
cultures and civilizations of the planet that takes into account the
specificities of each individual people, culture and civilization. In fact,
amidst a civilization that disregarded the negro-African race, Teilhard de
Chardin could still advocate for humanism, giving more consideration to those
civilizations that were considered as inferior. This chapter aims at evaluating
the humanism of Teilhard de Chardin. A priori, humanism cannot be something
negative; as such, it becomes difficult to criticize this thought that placed
the human person at its centre, considering man as a phenomenon just as the
universe itself. Nevertheless, Teilhardian humanism takes its roots on his
theory of panhuman convergence which needs to be evaluated because it appears
as an irresistible and unconscious phenomenon. His optimism also needs to be
evaluated so as to see whether it is reliable, realistic or merely utopical. It
is to this task that we are going to consecrate this last chapter of our
work.
| 
