Teilhard de Chardin and Senghor on the civilization of the universal

3.1.2. The Revalorisation of African Traditional Values

In view of the Civilization of the Universal, 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.

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:^86(*)

· 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.

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, Négritude 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:

Les faits sont clairs: la colonisation et sa perpétuation à travers la néo-colonisation ont instauré l'ère de la dépendance culturelle. C'est donc dans le cadre de cette dépendance culturelle et dans le but de liquider cette dépendance que surgit l'idéologie du socialisme-négritude de L.S. Senghor. L'auteur a d'ailleurs pris soin de reconnaître que l'Europe, en propageant en Afrique, sa civilisation rationnelle, scientiste, matérialiste et athée, avait désorganisé la société traditionnelle négro-africaine «en tarissant les sources mêmes de sa civilisation ».^87(*)

As such, Négritude encourages the revalorisation of African cultural values, because of the bad effects of colonialism which enhanced cultural dependence on the colonial master.

* ⁸⁶ Kenneth Kaunda cited in Ruch, E, (ed.), African philosophy, Rome, 1981, p. 238.

* ⁸⁷ Pius Ondoua, « Le Socialisme-Négritude de L.S. Senghor - Notes critiques » in Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, Yaoundé, 1988, p.26.