Pub Date : 2007-10-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071024
C. Ukaegbu
A group of Western scholars in the 1950s and 1960s set out to study the characteristics of individuals in developing countries that predisposed them to promote or prevent change. This group of scholars—known as the modernity school of development—contrasted the traditional with the modern personality on a set of attitudes and behaviors, the long list of which need not be repeated in this paper. Based on their empirical findings, modernity scholars concluded that development required the transformation of the traditional man into modern man. There are weaknesses in the studies and findings of the modernity school, but not all characteristics identified by it constitute obstacles to, or facilitators of, development. One of the contrasting characteristics of the two personality types is that the traditional personality is passive and fatalistic, while its modern counterpart is autonomous and commands a sense of self-efficacy. Marxist scholarship, epitomized by dependency theory, heavily criticized and discredited the claims of the modernity school. One of the strongest attacks on modernity thinkers involved their ethnocentric view that non-Western societies must absorb Western culture before they can achieve development. But as Wei-Ming Tu points out, the success of Confucian East Asia in becoming fully modernized without being thoroughly westernized indicates that modernization may assume different cultural forms.1 When one examines more closely the development policies of Nigerian governments, there is evidence that Nigerian leaders, both past and present, exhibit a fatalistic orientation, have a highly dependent mentality, and lack a sense of personal or group self-efficacy. Consequently, their collective leadership style continues to stall the country’s development. In the present paper, I define “fatalism” as the tendency of Nigerian leaders to feel hopeless and act helpless when confronted Leadership Fatalism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: Imaginative Policymaking for Human Development
{"title":"Leadership Fatalism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: Imaginative Policymaking for Human Development","authors":"C. Ukaegbu","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071024","url":null,"abstract":"A group of Western scholars in the 1950s and 1960s set out to study the characteristics of individuals in developing countries that predisposed them to promote or prevent change. This group of scholars—known as the modernity school of development—contrasted the traditional with the modern personality on a set of attitudes and behaviors, the long list of which need not be repeated in this paper. Based on their empirical findings, modernity scholars concluded that development required the transformation of the traditional man into modern man. There are weaknesses in the studies and findings of the modernity school, but not all characteristics identified by it constitute obstacles to, or facilitators of, development. One of the contrasting characteristics of the two personality types is that the traditional personality is passive and fatalistic, while its modern counterpart is autonomous and commands a sense of self-efficacy. Marxist scholarship, epitomized by dependency theory, heavily criticized and discredited the claims of the modernity school. One of the strongest attacks on modernity thinkers involved their ethnocentric view that non-Western societies must absorb Western culture before they can achieve development. But as Wei-Ming Tu points out, the success of Confucian East Asia in becoming fully modernized without being thoroughly westernized indicates that modernization may assume different cultural forms.1 When one examines more closely the development policies of Nigerian governments, there is evidence that Nigerian leaders, both past and present, exhibit a fatalistic orientation, have a highly dependent mentality, and lack a sense of personal or group self-efficacy. Consequently, their collective leadership style continues to stall the country’s development. In the present paper, I define “fatalism” as the tendency of Nigerian leaders to feel hopeless and act helpless when confronted Leadership Fatalism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: Imaginative Policymaking for Human Development","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"161-182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-10-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071021
Stephen Thompson
{"title":"Crummell on the Metalogic of Non-Standard Languages","authors":"Stephen Thompson","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"77-106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-04-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071019
C. Eze
{"title":"The pitfalls of cultural consciousness","authors":"C. Eze","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"37-47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-04-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710111
C. Phillips, Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe leans forward to make his point. He raises a gentle finger in the manner of a benevolent schoolmaster. "But you have to understand. Art is more than just good sentences; this is what makes this situation tragic. The man is a capable artist and as such I expect better from him. I mean, what is his point in that book? Art is not intended to put people down. If so, then art would ultimately discredit itself." Achebe does not take his eyes from me, and I stare back at him. The face is familiar and marked with the heavy lines of aging that one would expect to find on a 72-year-old man's face. But Achebe's lines are graceful whorls that suggest wisdom. He leans back now and looks beyond me, through the window at the snowy landscape. We are sitting in his one-story house in upstate New York, deep in the wooded campus of Bard College. Eor the past thirteen years, Achebe has been a professor at this well-known liberal arts college, which has had writers such as Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer on the faculty. His house is decorated with African art and artifacts, but the landscape and the climate could not be further removed from Nigeria and the world of Achebe's fiction and non-fiction. As though tiring of the wintry landscape, Achebe turns and returns to our conversation. "The man would appear to be obsessed with 'that' word." "Nigger." Achebe nods. "He has an admiration of the white skin. It is the whiteness that he likes, and he is obsessed with the physicality of the negro." Again Achebe falls silent, but this time he lowers his eyes as though suddenly overcome with fatigue. I continue to look at him, the father of African literature in the English language and undoubtedly one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. What I find difficult to fathom is just why Conrad's short novel. Heart of Darkness, should exercise such a hold on him.
{"title":"Was Joseph Conrad Really a Racist","authors":"C. Phillips, Chinua Achebe","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710111","url":null,"abstract":"Chinua Achebe leans forward to make his point. He raises a gentle finger in the manner of a benevolent schoolmaster. \"But you have to understand. Art is more than just good sentences; this is what makes this situation tragic. The man is a capable artist and as such I expect better from him. I mean, what is his point in that book? Art is not intended to put people down. If so, then art would ultimately discredit itself.\" Achebe does not take his eyes from me, and I stare back at him. The face is familiar and marked with the heavy lines of aging that one would expect to find on a 72-year-old man's face. But Achebe's lines are graceful whorls that suggest wisdom. He leans back now and looks beyond me, through the window at the snowy landscape. We are sitting in his one-story house in upstate New York, deep in the wooded campus of Bard College. Eor the past thirteen years, Achebe has been a professor at this well-known liberal arts college, which has had writers such as Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer on the faculty. His house is decorated with African art and artifacts, but the landscape and the climate could not be further removed from Nigeria and the world of Achebe's fiction and non-fiction. As though tiring of the wintry landscape, Achebe turns and returns to our conversation. \"The man would appear to be obsessed with 'that' word.\" \"Nigger.\" Achebe nods. \"He has an admiration of the white skin. It is the whiteness that he likes, and he is obsessed with the physicality of the negro.\" Again Achebe falls silent, but this time he lowers his eyes as though suddenly overcome with fatigue. I continue to look at him, the father of African literature in the English language and undoubtedly one of the most important writers of the second half of the twentieth century. What I find difficult to fathom is just why Conrad's short novel. Heart of Darkness, should exercise such a hold on him.","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"59-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-04-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710110
Chima Anyadike
Many readers and critics of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart come to the easy conclusion that the hero of the novel, Okonkwo, exemplifies or represents Umuofia or Igbo culture and traditions and that the author uses Okonkwo's story to show the process of the collapse of those traditions when they came into conflict with a more powerful colonial culture. Bernth Lindfors, for instance, understands Arlene Elder as saying that Okonkwo is "a typical Igbo man," used by the author to portray the "suicidal fragmentation of Igbo society" during the colonial era (Lindfors, 17). The result, in Clayton MacKenzie's reading of the novel, is that " . . . the Umuofia come to believe in the supremacy of the missionary colonizers as devoutly as they once had in their own theatre of gods" (MacKenzie, 126). However, there are readers of Things Fall Apart who perceive a resilience in Umuofia society which in their view ensures that the center holds, even if things have fallen apart (Sarr, 1993). In this essay, I want to locate the source of that resilience in the twin notions of duality and balance, central to the Umuofia view of life and the world. I argue that these notions form the basis of the conceptual framework which structures the ambivalence at the core of the novel and that they help to explain the Igbo man's tendency to look both backwards and forwards. It is not quite correct to assert, as MacKenzie does, that " . . . the interrelation between the two (the new religion and traditional society) can never be characterized in terms of co-existence, because the economics of Mr. Brown's religion demand ideological substitution, not concurrence or hybridization." {RAL) He may be right about the demand, but certainly not right in his characterization of that relationship as "a logical, business transaction" which the clan finds "as compelling as it did obedience to the Oracle of the Hills and Caves."(Ri4L) The Igbo metaphysical landscape did not disappear from Umuofia with one straight business deal. Perhaps it is more correct to say that yet another duality, tradition and modernity, entered the landscape to join others like male and female, individual and community, spiritual and material, thereby providing those ready to understand the governing principles and how they are put to profitable use opportunities
{"title":"Duality and Resilience in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart","authors":"Chima Anyadike","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710110","url":null,"abstract":"Many readers and critics of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart come to the easy conclusion that the hero of the novel, Okonkwo, exemplifies or represents Umuofia or Igbo culture and traditions and that the author uses Okonkwo's story to show the process of the collapse of those traditions when they came into conflict with a more powerful colonial culture. Bernth Lindfors, for instance, understands Arlene Elder as saying that Okonkwo is \"a typical Igbo man,\" used by the author to portray the \"suicidal fragmentation of Igbo society\" during the colonial era (Lindfors, 17). The result, in Clayton MacKenzie's reading of the novel, is that \" . . . the Umuofia come to believe in the supremacy of the missionary colonizers as devoutly as they once had in their own theatre of gods\" (MacKenzie, 126). However, there are readers of Things Fall Apart who perceive a resilience in Umuofia society which in their view ensures that the center holds, even if things have fallen apart (Sarr, 1993). In this essay, I want to locate the source of that resilience in the twin notions of duality and balance, central to the Umuofia view of life and the world. I argue that these notions form the basis of the conceptual framework which structures the ambivalence at the core of the novel and that they help to explain the Igbo man's tendency to look both backwards and forwards. It is not quite correct to assert, as MacKenzie does, that \" . . . the interrelation between the two (the new religion and traditional society) can never be characterized in terms of co-existence, because the economics of Mr. Brown's religion demand ideological substitution, not concurrence or hybridization.\" {RAL) He may be right about the demand, but certainly not right in his characterization of that relationship as \"a logical, business transaction\" which the clan finds \"as compelling as it did obedience to the Oracle of the Hills and Caves.\"(Ri4L) The Igbo metaphysical landscape did not disappear from Umuofia with one straight business deal. Perhaps it is more correct to say that yet another duality, tradition and modernity, entered the landscape to join others like male and female, individual and community, spiritual and material, thereby providing those ready to understand the governing principles and how they are put to profitable use opportunities","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"49-58"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-04-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710113
Michael J. Monahan
{"title":"Rodney C. Roberts, Editor, Injustice and Rectification","authors":"Michael J. Monahan","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA200710113","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"69-72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2007-04-01DOI: 10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071018
J. Oguejiofor
{"title":"The Enlightenment Gaze: Africans in the Mind of Western Philosophy","authors":"J. Oguejiofor","doi":"10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/PHILAFRICANA20071018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42045,"journal":{"name":"Philosophia Africana","volume":"10 1","pages":"31-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71063609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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