At a time when one's breakfast may be the product of two continents and one is likely to end the day with a film-show, or the recorded music of a land across the oceans, it is legitimate to ponder just how far one should emphasize today's African, European or Asian cultures. Modern technology, including transportation and the mass media, modern education and international trade, have brought the whole world within the compass of a single city for the interchange of thought, goods and sympathy. For good and all, we have outstripped Aristotle whose considered view was that the size of a state should be determined by the range of a man's voice which today, thanks to the wireless and newspapers, extends to the whole world.
The universalization of culture has in our time reached such an extent that all romantic attempts, whether Teutonic or Slavonic, Negroid or Latinist to maintain cultural exclusiveness, have come against the ramparts of modernism, of the age of reason, science and technology and international humanism.
It is increasingly accepted today that all men are, basically, the same in their needs and capacity for development and education. Man is an evolutionary animal for whom stagnation and isolation often mean decay or death. Even in our tradition-bound society in Africa , we see before our very eyes today a cultural assimilation (formal or informal) of, or exposure to, local and foreign cultural values fostered by social and economic changes.
Civilization mingles naturally at the kitchen table: African "palm oil chop" and coffee, Indian rice and maize fritters, south European cod and macaroni - no one cares nowadays where a particularly good dish comes from, or cares to resist a good dance rhythm or sculptural beauty, no matter its place of origin.
Anthropologists, in fact, have since unveiled the similarities in the customs of various peoples and the parallel development that took place in the arts of architecture (such as the arch and the dome), agriculture (crop rotation and the use of grinding-mill or turning-wheel), canoe building, horse taming, writing (even among the old Krus and Efiks of West Africa), as well as the acceptance of such beliefs as totemism, exogamy and purification and initiatory rites in different parts of the world.
Having said all his, however, we may concede that there is a sense in which we can still speak of distinct Africa , Asian, European or American cultures. African culture is positive and humanistic, it is our feeling of brotherhood and community, the validity and efficacy of our moral codes and traditional statecraft, our unstinting hospitality.
There is no question about the reality of African culture, but it is necessary to stress that African culture extends beyond the mere desire for traditional sculpture and dancing, or the inarticulate but undying urge in some people to go back to their village sources, "where the real world and the ideal coincide in a romantic idyll". Culture, after all, is the total way of life of a people embracing their material things, their political and social institutions, their habits and customs, religious and philosophical ideas. It embraces so many things - the study of art and related types of behaviour and experience, aesthetics, music, literature, theatre, sculpture, architecture, town-planning, dress, agriculture, education, folk-lore, and land-tenure, morality, secret societies, and more.
Traditional African society was an integrated whole where the political, economic, religious and artistic systems were intimately kneaded together; religion graced every undertaking, including music and dance, sculpture, and rhetoric, in which, Chinua Achebe reminds us, proverbs are the palm oil in which words are eaten. Religion also served the political system and reflected the economic structure. So, in Camera Laye's L'Enfant Nair, the song of the harvesters transforms the atmosphere of work into an organized ritual ceremony marking the end of one season and the beginning of another.
Historians have acknowledged the streams of African musical and therapeutically lore which in earlier ages poured through the Strait of Gibraltar to fertilize the genius of Europe and subsequently America , as well as the inspiration which modern art and material medica have derived from the Old Continent.
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