A Critique of Culture as Condition for Social Order in Africa

Abstract

The Oxford advanced learner’s dictionary (9th edition), presents a pivot as “a point [especially in mechanical engineering] on which something turns”. It is based on this idea that we would wish to interrogate the interface between culture and social growth/agenda. This essay would be concerned with the imperatives of culture in every social existence and discourse. It tends to establish that at the helm of Africa’s instability and underdevelopment is the menace of colonialism and later cultural hybridization that eventually paved the way to large scale erosion of African cultural system and knowledge base. This view is supported by the fact that dominant culture gains supremacy at the expense of any local culture it dominates. Through this process, the dominant culture often 
tends to dictate to the other by determining and/or restricting the language, other spiritual and material aspects of a people’s existence. The consequence, then, becomes a virtual loss of identity. These notwithstanding, the misconception and/or overvaluation of local culture as the overarching condition for social order in Africa, have not been of immense help in African social engineering. The thesis of this work is that though culture points to the direction of societal growth, but the uncritical appropriation and overvaluation of culturedoes unimaginable harm to Africa’s social growth. To have a proper handle on this necessitates the employment of qualitative textual review and analysis of relevant literatures