Page 33 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 25
P. 33
Community
The disadvantaged culture, (2) Western capitalism gets fullness and the harmonious life
which is African culture, stunted and fails to thrive in of a human person; an action
could not assimilate totally an African setting/Third World is bad if it has a more or less
the dominant Western culture. situations, and decided tendency to break into
This has led to the dislocation (3) The global economic order and narrow the totality and
of African culture, which led is, thus, not in balance. fullness of humanism.
Africans to struggle and fight for
their cultural renaissance and Pillars of Afrikan Economic Conclusion
liberation, within the context of Humanism Therefore, we believe that for
economics, whilst the dominant (a). It believes and maintains Africa to have universal power,
culture, pushes forward with that any harmful action it would have to have a strong
its existent dominant cultural against another individual is African-oriented ‘substantivist’
way of doing things. Cultural a threat to the whole society; economic philosophy, that is
domination entailed the a restriction on individual’s culturally rooted and grounded
distortion of the personality of economic activity places severe in an African idiom.
a part of the African peoples, constraints on the economic The challenge is to continue
their history, systematically welfare of the whole society; if from where Karl Polanyi ended,
disparaged and suppressed, the individual prospers, so does i.e. develop our locally-based
their religious and moral his/her extended family and the African economic constitutive
values, attempted to replace community; an individual could rules, untangle the Western
progressively and officially prosper so long as his/her pursuit capitalist constitutive rules, and
their language with that of the of prosperity does not harm or then set in place new economic
colonizer, thus rendering them in conflict with the interests of constitutive rules, which would
powerless and stripping them the community; the society’s be globally competitive and
of their raison d’etre. This interests have to be paramount; create an equilibrium in the
encounter, as we have seen in unless an individual’s pursuit global economic order. What a
parts of Africa, results into what of prosperity conflicts with mammoth task!
is called creolisation, which society’s interests, the State
creates another different type of must intervene. These two cultural economic
a problem. worlds have remained separate
(b). It seeks to move our because their values are not
We need to ask ourselves why society forward to a higher and compatible. In South Africa we
capitalism thrives so well in reconciled form of society, in still talk of a country of “two
Europe and fails so much in which the quintessence of the nations” or a country “with
Sub-Saharan Africa? Why there human purpose reasserts itself two cultural economies”, i.e.
are no Spaza shops in Europe? in a modern, free and democratic the First Economy (Western
The following are effects of economic context and to create Cultural Economy) and the
such encounter: a new society that is humane, Second Economy (African
(1) The Africans/Third just and harmonious. Cultural Economy).
World countries become ©. It believes that an action is
disadvantaged, good if it preserves the totality,
WWW.MSINGIAFRIKAMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 25 | MARCH 2024 33
