Wisdom and Sagacity in African Traditional Conflict Management Processes and Systems
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Date
2014-09
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Tangaza University College
Abstract
For centuries until recently, the black man’s mind and the African culture have been conceived by the Europeans as extremely alien to reason, logic and various habits of scientific inquiry. This mentality is felt all through as one reads books by Western philosophers about Africans. Kwame (1995) writes “… As far as the east is from the west so far is Africa removed from philosophy. The West is the home of civilization and philosophy. Africa is the home of wild trees, wild animals, wild people and wild creatures” (p. 69). Since Africans were at some point in history considered as incapable of critical individual intellectual activity, anything like African philosophy was construed as constituting a contradiction, a self-contradiction. Africans lack intellectual faculties and as such they are not able to engage in any philosophical activity.
For the Europeans anything African could not be rational hence philosophical, neither could anything philosophical be African. Levy Bruhl is one of those who held such a conception of Africans as he says that African mind is pre-logical and not conceptual, and because of this the African mind, can with a lot of ease accommodate a contradiction. For him the African mind can entertain several propositions which the European mind would straight away reject as absurd (cf. Ochieng’ Odhiambo, 1995, p 7). The German philosopher Emmanuel Kant too is quoted saying that the African person is quite black from hand to foot a clear proof that what he says is stupid. He further observed that the difference between the white race and black race appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color. These are just but a few examples to show the way how the people from the West thought about Africans as backward, irrational and a people without a history.
It took a lot of courage and hard work for some African thinkers and scholars of the 19th century and beyond like John Mbiti, Placide Tempels, Odero Oruka etc to get up and fight against this intellectual and ideological slavery by endeavoring to prove that Africans like other human beings are rational and as such are capable of philosophical activity.
This presentation is an attempt to join in the fight of many African thinkers and scholars to prove that rationality and critical thinking and hence a philosophical mind is a universal human endowment and traditional Africans were not an exception. There existed in traditional African culture wise men and women, folk sages who helped the community to understand and to interpret the realities of life in different circumstances.
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Keywords
Wisdom, African Traditional, Conflict, Management Processes, Systems