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One need not give credence to all the apocryphal claims of the old juju doctors or all the magical feats attributed to them in the Arabian Nights and the Mosaic records of the Bible, but there can be little doubt that, if modern psychology means anything, there is more in the so-called African Super-Science than meets the eye and we shall lose nothing by trying to find out the truth of such claims before it is too late.
Not a few people believe that democracy is a European invention; sometimes, in fact, we are told that it is the product of urbanization in which of course we are late imitators. But recent research seems to indicate that, before the coming of the white man, African communities were more like the city-states of ancient Greece and the later development of feudal despotism or capitalism is an Arab or European importation.
At least we now know that the system of government by absolute chiefs is an imperialist invention to facilitate (cheap) administration in a conquered territory; otherwise under the old tradition, our rulers, whether hereditary, rotatory or elective, were reduced by effective social sanctions to mere figure-heads or symbols of popular sovereignty until imperialism turned them into chefs despostes or sole native authorities.
As a rule, there was no warrior-class, feudal compradors or industrial financial magnates that could endanger the liberty of the people; all, including women in some areas, were armed and served in the wars; all had the franchise and the highest office in the land were usually open to all, sometimes in rotation.
Until the coming of Islam, from the seventh century onwards, African women were not degraded as in Greece Roman civilization or the Oriental system of the purdah, but a rational system of division of labour enabled them to enjoy full economic and social rights and to have free access to the temples as the men.
Indeed, unlike in most of Europe till the present day, they were eligible for the priesthood and practice of the professions like medicine and the arts. They enjoyed full rights of inheritance or bequest, and when they were mothers or grandmothers the honour given to them was unbounded. As for the youth, they enjoyed the widest opportunity and leisure that the old society could afford, and there was no child labour or neurotic segregation of the sexes (save perhaps during the coming-of-age ceremonies in some tribes) that has featured in many other civilizations.
For the African, then, duty was the sole visa to full citizenship and the water tight segregation of society into orders, estates or castes (which, while flattering some people, degraded others and created dissenters from the people) was unknown before the slave trade and colonialism that marked the lowest degradation of the black peoples. In short, our democracy (without the voting or party system, it is true, but based on a valid and viable consensus) long attained heights in reasonableness and humanism - though not in technology - which Western society is only striving to reach today after centuries of struggle and suffering.
But the times change and we with them, and we must not forever look backwards merely to glorify the past; we must strive to develop techniques for merging the best of the past with the changes of today, if we are not to die of stagnation. As we say, each generation dances to the tune of the drum that is fashionable in its time, which suggests that there is a kind of sociological or geographical determinism that rules over fashions, customs and status-symbols.
As is to be expected, African society is gradually if painfully moving along the same lines of development as in Europe or America from the community to the mass: the growth of education and technology, the passage from a subsistence economy based on communal participation to a money economy with emphasis of surplus and profit. As with others, the movement of labour and creation of urban centres in which different ethnic groups meet and mingle have combined with the pressure of Western ideas to weaken the old communal ties and sanctions, and foster increasing class differentiation and social tensions among the people.
These developments are not new and not always negative in their end-result, although almost everywhere today frustration surrounds men and crises confound their every attempt to solve one problem without creating another. It may be that, to paraphrase the dictum of the great Indian patriot Rabindranath Tagore, we can only play host to the world by not disowning our home, our own culture. But if ethnic culture, with its inevitable component of self-praise and social chauvinism, still has validity in the modern world, we cannot deny equal or even greater validity to national and human culture.
Ultimately, this culture means education and communication, that is to say, using education to form common ties and sharing ideas and sympathy with others if only to break through our mortal loneliness. Given the milieu in which we live and have our being today, the wonder is not that we should differ from one another or that all of us should coexist restlessly, but that, in spite of everything, we manage to coexist at all in One World.
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