Teilhard de Chardin and Senghor on the civilization of the universal

III.2.3. The Glorification of the Past

Léopold Sédar Senghor sets himself the task to glorify the past of Africa to the detriment of the present situation and the future of Africa. Senghor goes back to Ancient Africa in order to show, as a reaction to the degradation of the African image by the Westerner, that Africans had a glorious past and that we are called to go back to that glorious past in order to exhume the bodies of past glories. Again FANON maintains that Négritude for all its glorification of cultural and traditional African values neglects the socio-economic realities which are far from the romanticised ideals. He says inter alia:

All the proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilization will not change the fact that today the Songhais are underfed and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes.^96(*)

Above all, we reject the inherent paternalism in the romanticised past of Africa because it tries to console Africans with baubles of culture while depriving them of genuine human value and civilization in the midst of their difficulties and their day-to-day experiences. The past of Africa, before the slave trade or before colonisation, was certainly good, but it was also empty of the fruits of technology and technoscience. We cannot go back to the past, we are living the present and we ought to think about the future. Colonialism certainly helped in destroying most of our traditional values, but at the same time, and this is something great, it enabled Africa to benefit from the results of scientific research to make life easier and more agreeable. We all enjoy moving by car, by air, using the mobile phone, navigating on the Internet, in brief, we get pleasure from the new companions brought to us by the scientific culture in so far as they work for our wellbeing.

* ⁹⁶ Ibid., p. 168.