Exerpt from the book 'The Shadow Of The Sun' that I am presently reading. Book is strictly about Africa. I find these lines very relevant to us in present times.

“One must arrest the process of Africa’s increasing marginalization. Whether this will succeed, I don’t know. “I worry about whether African societies will be able to assume a self-critical stance, and much depends on this.”

That is precisely the subject of a conversation I have one day with A., an elderly Englishman and longtime local resident. His view: That the strength of Europe and of its culture, in contrast to other cultures, lies in its bent for criticism, above all, for self-criticism—in its art of analysis and inquiry, in its endless seeking, in its restlessness. The European mind recognizes that it has limitations, accepts its imperfections, is skeptical, doubtful, questioning. Other cultures do not have this critical spirit. More—they are inclined to pride, to thinking that all that belongs to them is perfect; they are, in short, uncritical in relation to themselves. They lay the blame for all that is evil on others, on other forces (conspiracies, agents, foreign domination of one sort or another). They consider all criticism to be a malevolent attack, a sign of discrimination, of racism, etc. Representatives of these cultures treat criticism as a personal insult, as a deliberate attempt to humiliate them, as a form of sadism even. If you tell them that the city is dirty, they treat this as if you said that they were dirty themselves, had dirty ears, or dirty nails. Instead of being self-critical, they are full of countless grudges, complexes, envies, peeves, manias. The effect of all this is that they are culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve.

Do all African cultures (for there are many of them, just as there are many African religions) belong to this touchy, uncritical mess? Africans like Sadig Rasheed have begun to consider this; they want to find the answer to why, in the race of continents, Africa is being left behind.

Submitted September 22, 2019 at 07:58AM by badger991 https://ift.tt/2LJbFCt