Dr Michael Njume Ebong
This essay explores the vital linkages between cultural heritage and natural heritage in the African and global contexts.
It addresses the question as to whether and how Africa’s ancestral cultural bequest can be mined and deployed to tackle the region’s development challenges, including in particular environmental crises.
We start by clarifying the terminology used in the paper to ensure that the key concepts and terms are understood in context.
Concepts and definitions
Culture: As defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), culture means the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, that encompasses, not only art and literature, but lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs
Cultural heritage: Still according to UNESCO, cultural heritage is, in its broadest sense, both a product and a process, which provides societies with a wealth of resources that are inherited from the past, created in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations. Conservation of cultural heritage refers to the measures taken to extend the life of cultural heritage while strengthening transmission of its significant heritage messages and values.
In the domain of cultural property, the aim of conservation is to maintain the physical and cultural characteristics of the object to ensure that its value is not diminished and that it will outlive our limited time span.
Natural heritage, as defined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), means the world’s natural resources as handed down to the present generation, and specifically, the earth’s outstanding physical, biological and geological formations, and habitats of threatened species of animals and plants and areas with scientific, conservation or aesthetic value.
Conservation of natural heritage means, according to UNEP, the active management of the earth’s natural resources and environment to ensure their quality is maintained and that they are wisely used.
The terms: “culture”, “cultural heritage”, “cultural environment” and “indigenous or village knowledge systems” are used interchangeably in the same way as the terms “natural heritage”, “the natural environment” and “environmental resources” are used to mean basically the same thing. The relative importance African states assign to cultural and natural heritages has been influenced by the course of history, as further explained below.
History: As known and practiced today in Africa, conservation was introduced in the region during the colonial period. Before then, conservation of Africa’s cultural heritage for the benefit of succeeding generations was by practice or performance, apprenticeship training and oral tradition. One serious drawback of this mode of cultural transmission and inter-generational continuity was that much of the intangible or non-material component of that heritage was not recorded or documented due to the historical absence of a systematic written tradition in the region south of the Sahara, with the major exception of Ethiopia. Therefore, Africa’s ancestral “libraries” were the elderly and professional story tellers in the villages. But they are fast disappearing due to the development neglect of African villages since colonial times. Yet another issue was the near total absence of the Western concept of museums for traditional handicrafts used for religious and other purposes. For those reasons Africa faces formidable constraints to overcome in seeking to recover its lost cultural continuity to the present.
With respect to Africa’s natural heritage, its conservation prior to colonization was never really needed as such under today’s nature conservation standards. That is because much of ancestral Africa practiced Animism, the region’s predominant pre-colonial religion or belief system, which conferred agency and life forces to the natural world, and defined man’s reverential bondage with nature.
Conservation of the environment, as understood today, was therefore already writ large in Animism well before the European scramble for Africa in the 19th Century. Whereas Africans thus conceived nature as their existential roof and foundation of their life-support system, the Europeans introduced the Western concept of conservation which sought to separate human settlements from the natural heritage, as in the West. The focus during the colonial period and since then has been on the creation of protected areas such as parks, sanctuaries or botanical gardens. European colonial powers lacked such natural resource hotspots at home and so needed to create them in their colonies mostly for tourism, entertainment purposes and ultimately to populate zoos in Europe. It should be stressed at this point that while Africans maintained for centuries, as their lifestyle, a sacred covenant with nature, it was the reverse in Europe and America where the natural environment was under assault from the excesses of industrialization and where the concept of environmental protection took hold only in late 19th Century with the creation of the U.S. Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the very first on record.
The European attitude towards the conservation of Africa’s cultural heritage was an entirely different and contentious issue during the same period. Considering that Europe had libraries and museums as well as historical, cultural and religious monuments since Greco-Roman Antiquity, colonial support for documenting Africa’s indigenous cultural heritage could have had significant beneficial impact on Africa’s subsequent development trajectory. But in lieu of conservation of African cultures there was instead systematic marginalization of African cultural values and traditions – denigrated as primitive, superstitious, fatalistic, and inimical to scientific progress – in favour of European ones – admired as modern and civilized. All the while, Africa’s finest art objects were spirited away to European museums. The colonial goal was to civilize Africans by replacing Africa’s traditional culture and belief system with the European value system, and remaking of Africa into a cultural mirror image of Europe. The outcome of that brainwashing campaign has been wildly successful – almost beyond belief – in light of the profusion in the region of European languages, nation state models and lifestyles, or the more prosaic extent to which African villages, where what remains of Africa’s fast disappearing cultural heritage can still be traced and documented, continue to be shortchanged and sidestepped by national development plans and programmes, almost exactly as during the colonial period. That notwithstanding, Europe’s historical encounter and interaction with Africa was also accidentally positive in more than one respect. For example, the formal system of education acquired during and since that period, though Euro-centric, was particularly precious as a modernizing agent in a region previously dominated by oral tradition and lack of recorded history. The colonial stock of infrastructure such as rail and road networks, ports or energy systems, although harshly limited in many colonies, was nevertheless also a useful start. Moreover, the Europeans exposed Africa irreversibly to the external world and to the opportunity of racial, cultural and technological exchanges on a global scale. Also worthy of note has been the spiritual and social work of European missionaries in Africa since colonial times. Africa’s post-independence leadership therefore had the basic wherewithal to build on that colonial bequest by establishing the cultural infrastructure that was sorely missing in the ancestral era, such as first-class educational and research institutions, libraries, museums and monuments, arts and crafts, and leveraging the modernization of African villages together with documentation of the knowledge systems they embody – as a deliberate cultural conservation and promotion strategy on a national scale.
Two sides of the same coin: It cannot be overstated that Africa’s current development
predicament stems largely from its fractured pre-colonial cultural heritage and resultant identity crisis. There is also a growing risk that the adverse environmental impact of the unfolding climate crisis could add to the region’s mounting caseload of development challenges.
As such Africa is currently confronted with two issues of strategic relevance to its future: firstly, how it can re-discover its roots and draw sustenance from its past by rebuilding its shattered cultural bridge to ancestral Africa; and secondly, how it can apply its re-discovered cultural identity to tackle the existential threats the climate crisis poses to its natural heritage of environmental resources. Indeed, cultural heritage and natural heritage can be considered to be two, mutuallyinfluencing sides of the same indispensable coin for the health and survival of humanity. For instance, the ecological integrity of the Amazonian and Congo Rainforest Basins, which are today considered to be the most important carbon sinks in humanity’s fight against climate change, has been preserved for centuries thanks to the Animist cultures of the indigenous peoples inhabiting those rainforests since time immemorial. If the same indigenous forest dwellers had had the same Western worldview and concept of progress that sparked the Industrial Revolution in 18th Century Britain, it is very likely that the Amazonian and Congo basins would today be highly “developed and industrialized” but against the backdrop of an ecological wasteland for the rest of humanity to contend with, exactly as humanity today grapples with the climate crisis.
Conversely, if Animist cultures had been the ruling belief system in Britain in the 18th Century, today’s environmental crises rattling humanity would have been most unlikely to occur and probably there would have been no colonization of distant lands and peoples. For those same reasons, and without contesting the universal validity of scientific truths, questions must still arise as to the relevance to the African context of most Western remedies to climate change which, for example, miss the cultural dimension of Africa’s development. It is indeed a paradox to observe that cultural issues are all but neglected by African governments and their international development partners as they craft and deploy development and environmental protection agendas. As evidence, significantly more efforts and resources are going into conservation of Africa’s natural environment than into traditional cultural conservation and reactivation programmes.
Worse still, little or no effort is being made to date, with few exceptions, to tap Africa’s indigenous knowledge systems to be found mostly in village communities to advance the conservation and development agendas concurrently, using interdisciplinary approaches. While anthropologists, ethnologists and historians have produced impressive works on African indigenous knowledge systems since the 19th Century, very little of it is feeding into national development policies and action plans. Ideally, there should be constant crosspollination between traditional and modern knowledge systems, sector by sector, on the one hand, and between academic and national policy and decision-making circles, on the other.
Because that is currently not the case, most nature conservation agendas are being driven from outside of Africa, using mostly extraneous priorities, strategies and tools, all backed up with promises of significant financial outlays from the developed countries. Moreover, most African countries lack strategic plans for converting village-based traditional knowledge resources into modern development assets and this tragic failure results from the marginalization of village communities from national development and modernization streams. Not surprisingly therefore Africa’s decision makers and development practitioners themselves seem to have lost track of local/village knowledge resources, much of which has not been documented or is still to be structured and disseminated, as noted earlier, leading to a huge loss of precious historical memory and cultural continuity. If national policy makers are themselves ignorant of the indigenous knowledge systems of their own countries as they relate one way or another to development and conservation matters, they can hardly factor Africa’s key cultural heritage messages into the debates and outcomes of international conferences. The importance of the cultural dimension to environmental issues can be further illustrated by comparing the world views and value systems of Africa’s ancestral societies with those of the Western world whose industrial civilization and economic development model stand accused for the severe damage inflicted on the global commons to the point of triggering a climate crisis for humanity.
Conflicting world views: As earlier explained, Africa’s traditional world view was by and large moulded by Animism which maintained a relationship of sacred trust between man and nature and projected a cyclical vision of life on earth as humans being part and parcel of nature and not
the lords of nature. Whereas for the Judeo-Christian tradition, which forms Europe’s religious heritage, God is separate from nature, for the Animist God is in nature and relates to mortals through nature. Moreover, the Bible appears to be the only scripture which specifically states that man was created to be the lord of nature, as in Genesis 1: 26-28 : “Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” This is just the very opposite worldview of Animism.
Another possible source of inspiration for European advances in science and technology and impulse to dominate nature and other parts of the world, can be found in the
Greek mythology of Prometheus, who is said to have defied the gods by stealing their fire and giving it to humanity in the form of technology, knowledge, and civilization in general.
Animists would never steal fire from their ancestors; rather they would organize rituals and offer sacrifices to their ancestors to release needed fire.
Yet another debatable factor is Intelligence Quotient (IQ) which might account for the compulsion of some societies to dominate and exploit nature.
In that respect, the world IQ map makes it very clear: populations in parts of the world where the natural ecosystem remains more or less intact if not pristine have average IQ scores well below than 90 (e.g. African and Amazonian forest and village dwellers), while those parts of the world damaging the environment because of their lifestyle (e.g. in terms of high per capita greenhouse gas emissions) tend to have average IQ scores of 100 or more. Since nature does not give humans what they don’t need for their existence, African and Amazonian forest dwellers could consider their low average IQ as their contribution to environmental protection for all of humanity.
Those three factors (Biblical command, Prometheus, and IQ) would therefore seem to be at the origin of the Industrial Revolution, which is the historical root cause of the climate crisis, and can be considered emblematic of the Western view of nature as something of a wild beast to be tamed, controlled and exploited to the maximum for ‘human progress”.
Such an approach to nature proceeds from a linear vision of life as requiring constant “progress” and material accumulation. The key words are: transformation, organization, chronology, movement, growth, speed, efficiency, effectiveness, results, as opposed to the cyclical and timeless stability of natural seasonal evolution prized by Africa’s Animists. Nevertheless, although the Animist and Western visions appear to operate in conflicting tension, the fact is that the Western concept of progress and its resultant economic growth model have become universal thanks to colonization, globalization and other factors. As such most of the benefits and ills associated with industrial civilization are today visible in practically all countries. The climate crisis has thus become a planetary crisis for which solutions are being sought primarily in the context of United Nations conventions, such as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC); UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD); or the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The ultimate goal is to place humankind on the path of “sustainable development”, which has been the mantra since the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. Sustainable development focuses on how economic growth can be transformed from a purely resource extractive production system to a restorative, regenerative and nurturing production model; on how to pursue economic growth without inflicting irreparable harm on the global commons and future generations; on how fast economic growth can be de-carbonized by deploying renewable sources of energy (wind power, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric or nuclear); on intensifying the development of more energy-efficient and less polluting engines and production systems; on accelerating the transition to circular, recycling production methods using waste as raw material inputs; and otherwise further stretching the frontiers of science and technology to perform marvels that would save humanity from ultimate extinction. It is particularly interesting, if not paradoxical, to note that in the search for solutions to the environmental crises afflicting Mother Earth, cultural tools and principles deriving from Africa’s traditional cultures and worldview are finding more favour and practical applications in the industrialized countries than in Africa itself.
How traditional Africa’s value system is contributing solutions to the climate crisis: The following basic principles of Africa’s ancestral worldview and value system stand out as increasingly reflected in emerging trends in the industrialized countries as solutions to environmental crises:.
Global environmentalism is a modern variety of African Animism: Western societies are struggling to adapt to the “laws of nature” as can be seen in the emergence of green political parties (sort of white man’s Animism), and ever increasing number of environmental movements and civil society organizations , such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Green Peace, International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) or more lately Extinction Rebellion (XR) which aims to compel government actions to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.
These intensifying concerns about the need to protect the natural environment amount to a form of “environmentalism” that bears all the distinctive marks of Africa’s traditional Animist culture.
On this issue therefore Africa would be entitled to an intellectual property patent and why not Nobel Prize !
Africa’s cyclical vision redeemed: In a major departure from the linear production model used since the Industrial Revolution, a new circular economic model is emerging with emphasis on sharing, leasing, re-using, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible, the goal being to optimize the product life cycles.
This new circular model replaces the resource wasteful and polluting linear pattern of production based on a “take-make-consume-throw away” model relying on large quantities of materials and energy.
Africa’s communitarian value system is in vogue: The information and communication technology or digital revolution has virtually created a global “African village”. The major characteristics of this digital revolution are very similar to the texture of life in a typical African village in terms of chatting with community members, the spontaneous horizontal linkages it establishes within the community, the spirit of sharing information and other items, and the communitarian and informal corporate models it is inspiring, such as less formal work methods and schedules, examples being teleworkers or Uber’s sharing business model, the increasing preference for work teams and teamwork in specific work communities over hierarchical top down corporate management systems.
The principle of sharing goods and services is credited with reducing consumer per capita carbon emissions.
Conclusion: The foregoing paragraphs are significant in demonstrating how Africa’s indigenous cultural elements and principles can be given practical applications to advance Africa’s and global development and environmental endeavours, in the same way that African masks inspired Pablo Picasso at the turn of the 20th Century to launch the avant-garde Cubist artistic movement which was later to revolutionize European painting and sculpture, and also reverberated in music, literature and architecture. In other words, Africa’s traditional culture should not be regarded as static heritage only fit for academic scholarship and history museums, but should be researched and applied in a dynamic and creative perspective geared to solving development and environmental challenges of the moment. Thus, as Africa grapples with the climate crisis and seeks out ideal mitigation and adaptation strategies, there is certainly a case to be made for significantly equipping, modernizing, and repopulating African villages as the first line of defense against potential climate change perils.
Further, Africa’s communitarian values would require for example that massive investments be made in publicly shared infrastructure, particularly in common transportation systems that reduce carbon emissions and discourage the search for individual solutions. Systematic and in-depth research work on Africa’s rich traditional cultural heritage should certainly yield other concrete examples of how the region’s indigenous cultural endowment can be converted into a laboratory bee hive for finding home grown solutions to development and environmental challenges.
Copyright Dr Michael Njume Ebong
15/06/2022
michael@chede.org
Tel: 679 548 929