The Conflict of Cultures: A Plea for Patience

CULTURE, as the anthropologist and sociologist conceive it, is cumulative. It embraces all the modes of thought and behavior handed down by communication and interaction; it is the social heritage acquired through the learning process rather than through inheritance. The cultural anthropologist or sociologist does find differences in culture, but the differences are not racial differences. Cultures are cumulative, based on experience and learning, It is important to emphasize this point because the belief in a pacific and workable adjustment of social situations created by cultural differences depends on the fact that culture can be learned. The problems of social change in West Africa, as elsewhere, arising from the impact of peoples possessing different cultures, do arise precisely because men aspire to assimilate cultures different from their own.

The impact of Europe and America upon West Africa is most obvious in economic life. The houses in which people live, the clothes they wear, and the ways in which they earn their living, the shops and factories, motor roads and railways, all testify to the changes that this impact has wrought. All over West Africa, a large number of men and women earn their living by selling and distributing the manufactured products of Europe and America, from canned foods to luxury cars and radio sets. There are now many ways in which people earn their living, from unskilled labor on the roads, on cocoa, rice, and cotton farms, or in the mines to the work of the highly skilled technician, engineer, barrister, or doctor. The selfsufficient economies of small African communities have been displaced by a money economy and dependence on international trade.

There have also been changes in the physical environments. Forests have been cleared to make room for cocoa farms or new towns, some villages have disappeared while new ones have sprung up along newly built roads, and large towns have grown near mines or factories.

With all this have gone a redistribution of population and new social patterns. Workers who have acquired new skills play new roles. The traditional social structure is changed. No longer does the network of kinship encompass all the activities of social life, and relationships, obligations, and reciprocities are changed or are expressed in new ways.

Illustrations of this may be found in the kinship and marriage systems, which are an essential part of the social structure. In West Africa, as in other African communities, the network of kinship embraces all the needs and activities of life. One’s duties and behavior toward one’s kinsfolk are clearly defined and taught. Included in the kinship structure is the domestic group, which is variously composed: there may be the monogamous household, consisting of parents and their unmarried children; or the polygamous family of one father and two or more mothers, in which the mother and her children constitute a separate unit of the group; or the extended parental family, in which a man lives in the same household with his married sons and their wives; or the domestic group consisting of a man and his wife and their daughters and their husbands.

Though in rural areas these patterns of residence remain, in many new towns and cities the housing situation makes the maintenance of the old traditional patterns difficult. The domestic group is divided. In many rented houses, members of different tribes and classes share the same dwelling, and so the old structure has been destroyed and new ways have to be found to fulfill the ties and obligations of kinship.

Whatever the size of the domestic group in West Africa, the range of relationships recognized for social purposes extends beyond it to the larger kinship group, the lineage, which is a group of relations descended from a common ancestor or ancestress. One owes duties and may expect help from this larger group at certain crises of life. The kinship system provides security.

But marriage and kinship systems are products of evolution. They are affected by the change from a subsistence economy to one based on acquired skills in a money economy. They are also affected by modern systems of communication and mobility, by industrial agriculture and mining, and by the impersonal relations in large towns and cities. Traditional forms of behavior, old sanctions of morality and conduct, the reciprocities and security of the large kinship group, all tend to change. The isolation of the family unit in the town, the splitting up of domestic groups of kinsfolk between urban and rural communities, the new social contacts and relationships in a competitive capitalistic economy, all compel changes in the established ways.

THE encounter between Europe and West Africa has also led to profound changes in political and administrative structures. Colonizing countries, such as Britain and France, have brought together tribes and chiefdoms that were once separate or at war with one another and have administered them as one territory. Out of alien rule and administration the concepts of nationhood and nationalism have been learned, and nationalist Africans have challenged imperialism by using the political philosophies and arguments employed by their imperial rulers. The administrative structures built by imperial officials laid the foundation for nation states. Where opportunities have been given to Africans, they have learned new ideas and skills and have accepted and incorporated changes in their culture to meet the new situation. So, in West Africa traditional chiefs play new roles alongside elected African cabinet ministers and African administrative officers.

The false racial theories by which some have sought to justify imperialism and segregation have been disproved by the successful assimilation of alien political institutions and culture, as exemplified in West Africa. The independent states of Liberia, Ghana, and Guinea — and the approaching independence of Nigeria, the Cameroons, and Togoland — all testify that, given adequate opportunity, contemporary man can master highly developed cultures whatever the color of his skin. The parliamentary institutions of European democracies and the techniques and machinery of government have been successfully adapted in West Africa.

Europe brought to West Africa its own system of education through formal schooling. In West Africa today, there are primary schools, high schools, teacher-training colleges, technical institutes, and universities, all on the French, British, or American model. Those who receive instruction at these seats of learning are prepared for service and leadership in their own countries. They encounter the culture of Europe through what they learn at school, but they five in their own traditional culture, which is undergoing rapid social change.

Education in school or college has been based on the requirements of the European ruler, missionary, or businessman, and it has taught more about Europe and its culture than about Africa. Today in some of the best schools this is being remedied; there is an increasing awareness that the school must be rooted in the culture of the society it seeks to serve. But reading and writing were taught, and some Africans were given the opportunity to share in contemporary European culture.

Those who learned to read and write acquired a new status and prestige. They became clerks, teachers, skilled artisans, or professional men. They became leaders in political life, displacing the chief and the traditional councils from political leadership. The birth of West African nationalism and the agitation for independence are the direct result of education as introduced from Europe and America.

The assimilation of European education and the adaptation to the social changes it has brought about are another proof that pacific and workable adjustments can be made to changes in culture, under favorable circumstances. In West Africa, where the opportunities for education have been given to Africans, even if on a small scale in relation to the total population, those who have benefited have shown that cultural differences are not due to differences in capabilities, as is maintained by scientifically unsupported racialists, but to differences in experience which can be eliminated through the learning process.

There is plenty of evidence from the writings of cultural anthropologists and sociologists to show that differences of culture do not support policies of segregation and separation, for cultures can be and are learned. Every people wants to preserve some aspect of culture which is peculiarly its own and which continues to serve desired purposes in its society. These cherished traditions are not signs of inferiority but of differences in experience.

For every people has its own reflections on the nature and purpose of life and its own beliefs concerning the supernatural, to which its religious rites give expression. In West Africa generally, there is the belief in a Supreme Being who is the Creator of man and the universe, and also in other gods, and in the ancestors who continue to guard and guide the present generation. To peoples holding these beliefs of polytheism and ancestor worship, European missionaries brought the Christian gospel of one God, of salvation through Christ, and of universal brotherhood. Christianity is one of the factors of social change that the impact with Europe has introduced into West Africa.

As an institution, the church has provided fellowship among different tribes, education through the Bible and the hymnbook and through reading and writing, and opportunities for new types of associations that help to provide some of the services and security that the all-embracing kinship groups once provided but no longer adequately do. Christianity has also offered cultural challenges. It has insisted on monogamy in societies whose customs permit polygamy. It has challenged ancestor worship and polytheism, which provided some of the sanctions of conformity to social norms and usages. It has taught new songs and music and frowned on our traditional forms. It has made converts refrain from joining in some tribal rites and religious ceremonies and necessitated their rejection of some cultural patterns. But within the church there is a growing awareness of the problems of social change, and a concerted effort is being made through research and exchange of views at conferences to meet and resolve the new challenges in the light of Christian teaching and insight. The church recognizes the need for every Christian, white or black, to belong to his social group and share its life as fully as possible.

This approach itself expresses belief in the fact that the problems arising from the conflict of cultures can be solved in a pacific way. The spread of the Christian church in West Africa and the prominent part it has played in social advancement give proof that people from different cultural backgrounds share certain values and that fellowship is possible on the basis of intellectual and spiritual communion.

THE impact of Europe on West Africa has often been destructive of social, economic, political, and religious systems. Cultural changes carry some problems of maladjustment in their wake. The obligation to share scientific, technical, and material resources requires a sensitivity to cultural and social values. Money values have often replaced the personal values of the traditional system. In the place of the desire to maintain harmonious human relationships has grown the insatiate acquisitiveness for material things. It is true that the standards of living in West Africa are, by comparison with those of Europe or America, low, and men need material things to live with; but even more, they need an adequate system of values to live by.

A study of the social and political institutions of West African peoples will show that a great deal of emphasis is laid on personal relations and that the quest for a harmonious and peaceful society is basic to all their social practices and institutions. This quest for a humane society is not confined to West Africa, but in industrialized countries like those of Europe and America it has tended to be obscured by the quest for power. At any rate, in the encounter between Africa and Europe, it is Europe’s power that has most impressed the African and stimulated his quest. Europe’s power over nature, conferred by science and technology — its power to produce more things to enrich the life of man, to build roads and railways, to overcome the barriers of space, or to prolong life by successfully combating illness — has expressed the superiority of Europe and has made the African want to learn European ways. For it is clear to Africans, too, that African cultures are less efficient than those of Europe or America for bending nature to serve the needs of man.

Large buildings are being constructed and harbors, roads, railways and airfields, hospitals and dispensaries, schools and colleges; and the trained African personnel that man these services testify to the fact that science and technology can be learned. They cannot be acquired without changes in other aspects of culture and without social problems and maladjustments, but social change in Europe and America has been attended by similar problems.

Contrasts between the cultures of Europe and West Africa are everywhere manifest. Yet even in the remotest village, with its narrow streets and simple mud houses, some product of Western technology will be found in the shop or the home.

The impact with Europe is seen in the clothes that people wear, which may be the latest fashion in New York, London, or Paris or the traditional robes made to suit local tastes and style from materials manufactured in Europe; in the churches, where Christians sing tunes and recite creeds familiar to European congregations; in the schools and colleges, where the language spoken or the ideas examined may be the same as in any European school or college; in the courts, where barristers in wig and gown cite European law before judges dispensing justice according to European traditions. Yet beside all this are the traditional religious ceremonies; the local courts settling disputes according to native law and custom; the old African world of song and dance and rhythm, of family ties and relationships, of chiefs resplendent in traditional regalia. The old herbalist tries out his cures alongside the trained African medical specialist equipped with the latest instruments and knowledge of European medical science. It is in this amalgam of life that cultural adjustment goes on; new ideas being learned or rejected, old ones being discarded or retained or modified.

In the encounter between peoples there is an interchange of experience, and folkways change. In spite of the superiority of Europe in science and technology Europeans have changed in response to the encounter with Africa. West African communities are already evolving cultures that testify both to their encounter with Europe and America and to their own genius and heritage. Under conditions of favorable opportunity and freedom, the process of growth and social change will continue without friction.