7.1.1. Being
When the Westerner considers reality as empirical, Africans
look at being as dynamic. In effect, for the Westerner, everything can be
tested and can be explained scientifically. He believes in empirical causality
and seeks to know the material causes of things. He holds that a thing is what
it is and not something else. He is more or less occupied with experience and
bases his conception of reality on the law of non-contradiction, law of
identity, law of the excluded middle, which are the basic principles outside
which thought would be incorrect.
For Africans, Being is dynamic, not static. Father Placide
TEMPELS in this light affirmed that for the Bantu, Being is force. It
is concrete, real. As such, we are aware of the fact that there are causes and
reasons that cannot be explained scientifically. Africans are aware of the fact
that a thing can be itself and still be something else. We are not only aware
of this, we live it intensively. Sometimes, our vision of things tends to defy
the principles and categories of western thought. There is more to the world
than what only the eye can see. We are engaged in the events and things that
occur and we are involved in Being. Let us consider the illustration of Jude
Thaddeus MBI on this point:
A tree falls and kills a man. The westerner would say
there was an accident, a tree fell and killed a man. Then he would bring out
his equipment and go to examine the tree. Perhaps he would discover that the
tree was hollow inside. Perhaps, he would be able to establish that there was a
storm at the time the tree fell. The man happened to be passing just at
that
moment and so he got killed. To prevent this from
happening again, he would, perhaps, decide to fell all trees within a certain
distance from the highway.I
Mbi continues by showing how Africans look at things in a way
that is different from the western vision of the world:
He lithe westerner] doesn't think of praying about
the matter. Our peoples, on the other hand, would look at the man. They
would want to know why the tree fell on this man. For them this is not
just a simple event. It is an occurrence that has meaning. God, the Ancestors,
the spirits, other human beings come into picture. Relationship has been
disrupted somewhere and this situation must be set right in order to prevent a
repeat of this kind of occurrence. They would go for a nggambe man to
find out the origin of this evil. Then they would offer sacrifices of
appeasement and try to procure protection for the members of the family. They
don't think of changing the physical
conditions.2
These are two completely different approaches to the same
situation. When the Westerner will stress on the material dimension of events,
the African will stress more on the spiritual dimension of it. He will see
spirits everywhere. Because Africans usually think and react the way they do,
they are often condemned as being superstitious and illogical. After all, can
we say that what is not known necessarily does not exist? Can we actually
attribute the effectiveness of what is only to that which is known? Do we have
the right to reject totally the African's understanding of being as dynamic?
This will certainly lead us to the absolutisation of rationality in its
scientific and technological form, the error of Positivism.
I =ude Thaddeus Mbi, Ecclesia in Africa is
us, Yaounde, 2004, pp.70-7I. [Author's emphases] The expression
"nggambe man" refers to a soothsayer.
2 Id.
We suppose, therefore, that it is wiser to see the western
vision and the African vision as complementary ways of being-in-the-world. The
human being is both matter and spirit:
A purely rationalistic approach to reality, which takes
account only of the materially demonstrable, can be just as lopsided as one,
which sees spirit everywhere. It doesn't help the situation if we simply
disregard and condemn. It would do a lot more good if we try to understand and
move forward...I
It is important to acknowledge our differences in the way we
look at Being instead of trying to condemn one attitude or the other. The two
visions are necessary in the construction of the Civilization of the
Universal.
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