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In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
Kwame Anthony Appiah
(First published 1992)
Let me say, finally, why I think that the gap between educated Africans and Westerners may not be so wide for much longer, and why all of us will soon find it hard to know from within the nature of the individual. The answer is simple enough: we now have a few generations of literate African intellectuals, and they have begun the process of examining our traditions. They are aided in this by the availability of Western traditions. Their access to which, through writing, is not different from Westerners'. This process of analysis will produce new, unpredictable, fusions. Sometimes, something will have to give. What it will be, I cannot predict, though I have my suspicions; and you will be able to guess what they are if I say that it seems to me that the overwhelming political and economic domination of the Third World by the industrialised world will play its part.
The fact that our culture's future has the chance of being guided by a theoretical grasp of our situation is an extraordinary opportunity. In 1882 William Lecky, an English scholar, published a History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. Lecky wrote:
If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so universally and intensely believed, why a narrative of an old woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks of her neighbours, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the question. It is not always because we have examined the evidence and found it insufficient...
When I first came across this passage it struck me at once as wonderfully apt to the situation of African intellectuals today. This paragraph records a sense that the intellectual secularisation of Lecky's culture - the 'growth of rationalism' - occurred without a proper examination of the evidence. I have enough faith in the life of reason to believe that Africans will have better prospects if we do not follow that example. And we have the great advantage of having before us the European and American - and the Asian and Latin American - experiments with modernity to ponder as we make our choices.
Why should the issues I have discussed be thought important? There are, for me, two reasons: a practical one (for us Africans), a moral one (for everybody). The moral one is simple: unless all of us understand each other, and understand each other as reasonable, we shall not treat each other with the proper respect. Concentrating on the non-cognitive features of traditional religions not only misrepresents them, but also leads to an underestimation of the role of reason in the life of traditional cultures.
The practical reason is this. Most Africans, now, whether converted to Islam or Christianity or not, still share the beliefs of their ancestors in an ontology of invisible beings. (This is, of course, true of many Europeans and Americans as well.) There is a story - probably apocryphal - of some missionaries in Northern Nigeria who were worried about the level of infant mortality due to stomach infections transmitted in drinking water. They explained to 'converts' at the mission that the deaths were due to tiny animals in the water, and that these animals would be killed if they only boiled the water before giving it to the children. Talk of invisible animals produced only a tolerant scepticism: the babies went on dying. Finally a visiting anthropologist suggested a remedy. There were, he said, evil spirits in the water; boil the water and you could see them going away, bubbling out to escape the heat. This time the message worked. These people were 'converts'; for the missionaries, appeal to spirits was appeal to demons, to what the New Testament calls 'principalities and powers'. For the 'converts', the Christian message was from the High God they had known existed ( there is a king in every kingdom, then why not among the spirits?) and the injunction to abjure other spirits was a reflection only of the usual jealousy of the priests of one god for those of another.
It is this belief in the plurality of invisible spiritual forces, that makes possible the - to Western eyes - extraordinary spectacle of a Catholic Bishop praying at a Methodist wedding in tandem with traditional royal appeal to the ancestors. For most of the participants at the wedding, God can be addressed in different styles - Methodist, Catholic, Anglican, Moslem, traditional - and the ancestors can be addressed also. Details about the exact nature of the Eucharist, about any theological issues, are unimportant: that is a theoretical question, and theory is unimportant when the practical issue is getting God on your side. After all, who needs a theory about who it is that you're talking to, if you hear a voice speak?
These beliefs in invisible agents mean that most Africans cannot fully accept those scientific theories in the West that are inconsistent with it. I do not believe, despite what many appear to think, that this is a reason for shame or embarrassment. But it is something to think about. If modernisation is conceived of in part as the acceptance of science, we have to decide whether we think the evidence obliges us to give up the invisible ontology. We can easily be misled, here, by the accommodation between science and religion that has occurred amongst educated people in the industrial world, in general, and in the United States, in particular. For this has involved a considerable limitation of the domains in which it is permissible for intellectuals to invoke spiritual agency. The question of how much of the world of the spirits we intellectuals must give up ( or transform into something ceremonial without the old literal ontology) is one we must face: and I do not think the answer is obvious. "Every African who wanted to do something positive had to begin by destroying all these old beliefs which make up something marvellous where there is only a natural phenomenon: volcano, virgin forest, thunder, the sun etc." says the narrator of Aké Loba's Kocoumbo, l'étudiant noir. But even if we agreed that all our old beliefs were superstitions, we should need principles to guide our choices of new ones. Further, there is evidence that the practical successes are largely absent in traditional culture. The question of whether we ought to adopt these methods is not a purely technical one. We cannot avoid the issue of whether it is possible to adopt adversarial, individualistic cognitive styles, and keep, as we might want to, accommodative, communitarian morals. Cultures and peoples have often been capable of maintaining such double standards (and I use the term non-perjoratively, for perhaps we need different standards for different purposes), so that if we are going to try, we must face up to these difficulties. Scientific method may lead to progress in our understanding of the world, but you do not have to be a Thoreauvian to wonder if it has led only to progress in the pursuit of all our human purposes. In this area we can learn together with other cultures - including, for example, the Japanese culture which has apparently managed a certain segregation of moral-political and cognitive spheres. In this respect is seems to me obvious that the Ghanian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu is right. We will only solve our problems if we see them as human problems arising out of a special situation, and we shall not solve them if we seem them as African problems, generated by our being somehow unlike others.
