The African Community Life

Kevin Dawson considers how enslaved Africans carried aquatic skills—swimming, diving, boat making, even surfing—to the Americas. Undercurrents of Power not only chronicles the experiences of enslaved maritime workers, but also traverses the waters of the Atlantic repeatedly to trace and untangle cultural and social traditions.

This handbook reflects on quality-of-life in societies on the continent of Africa. It provides a widely interdisciplinary text with insights on quality-of-life from a variety of scientific perspectives. The handbook is structured into sections covering themes of social context, culture and community; the environment and technology; health; education; and family. It is aimed at scholars who are working towards sustainable development at the intersections of multiple scientific fields and it provides measures of both objective and subjective quality-of-life. The scholarly contributions in the text are based on original research and it spans fields of research such as cultures of positivity, wellbeing, literacy and multilinguism, digital and mobile technologies, economic growth, food and nutrition, health promotion, community development, teacher education and family life. Some chapters take a broad approach and report on research findings involving thousands, and in one case millions, of participants. Other chapters zoom in and illustrate the importance of specificity in quality-of-life studies. Collectively, the handbook illuminates the particularity of quality-of-life in Africa, the unique contextual challenges and the resourcefulness with which challenges are being mediated. This handbook provides empirically grounded conceptualizations about life in Africa that also encapsulate the dynamic, ingenious ways in which we, as Africans, enhance our quality-of-life.

In African Life and Customs, Blyden examined the culture of "pure" Africans-- those untouched by European and Asiatic influences. He identified the family as the basic unit in African society and polygamy as the foundation of African families. He described African social systems as cooperative; everyone worked for each other. No one went without work, food, or clothing. Blyden challenged white racial theorists who held Africans were inferior and whose arguments supported their preconceived ideas. He assumed Africans to be "distinct" rather than inferior, and he analyzed African culture within the context of African social experiences.

Historians who tried to write some history of some parts of Africa before the last quarter of the 20th century had many handicaps. Many of them were foreigners who neither understood the language nor appreciated the life values of the African people about whom they tried to write. Some were Africans or African Diaspora who were products of foreign scholars and too tied to their teachers to be different at that time. There was another academic handicap confronting writers who attempted to write about African Civilization, culture, or history at that time. Mainly two schools of thought concerning the development or lack of it in the African race handicapped them. The first group of the theorists maintained that Africans made no development worthy of classification as historical achievement or history before the arrival of Europeans in Africa. This group agreed that every development in Africa started after the European contacts were made and because of the contacts. The second group of theorists on African development held the view that African people made some insignificant developments before Europeans arrived in Africa. They also maintained that the European contact brought about total devastation of the minor developments made leaving the people to start all over again. They also agreed that every development made thereafter were reactions to the European impacts and therefore direct results of European presence and contacts in Africa. In summary, both schools of thought held that every notable development of Africa, especially south of the Sahara desert, was a result of the impact of the European contact with Africa. According to the first school of thought, all developments were results of the European contacts making the Africans to start thinking and producing meaningfully thereafter. The second school of thought agreed that after the total devastation of African developments caused by the European contacts, every African significant development was a result of some type of reconstruction caused by the European activities. Both schools of thought agreed that nothing significant in the African development or civilization was indigenous. The impact of these unfounded theories was that historians in particular and writers in general who wrote about African developments tried very hard to find traces of European actions in every major African development. Finding European or foreign impacts on African community development became a major concern of a successful African historian or writer on any cultural matter. It is not surprising therefore; that African indigenous institutions large or small were not the main concern of these writers. However, the above-unfounded theories on African history and development have been discarded. African developments have recently been treated as usual human developments passing through historical evolution as other peoples of the world. Just as it is with other peoples of other parts of the world, contacts with foreigners produce some impacts on both the peoples and the foreigners. The effects of such contacts are never the same. Likewise, early European contacts with African people had varying effects on the developments of the African peoples. Recently the spread of the television has impacts on the way other peoples who have never been to Africa see African peoples. The scenes of wars, disorder, diseases and misery in some parts of Africa shown on the television all over the world for one reason or the other do not completely represent life in Africa. The scenes seem to present an incomplete picture of the African peoples and their total community life. It is only through a thorough study of the African community life that a complete picture of the African development and civilization can be seen. This book, THE AFRICAN COMMUNITY LIFE Indigenous Concepts on Society, Government and Development: The Abiriba Community Case Study, presents Africans

This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.

Wealth, Health, and Hope in African Christian Religion offers a portrait of how contending narratives of modernity in both church and society play out in Africa today through the agency of African Christian religion. It explores the identity and features of African Christian religion and the cultural forces driving the momentum of Christian expansion in Africa, as well as how these factors are shaping a new African social imagination, especially in providing answers to the most challenging questions about poverty, wealth, health, human, and cosmic flourishing. It offers the academy a good road map for interpreting African Christian religious beliefs and practices today and into the future.

Eminent black social ethicist Peter Paris focuses on African "spirituality"--the religious and moral values pervading traditional African religious worldviews. Paris's careful scholarship and his eye for value in varying cultural milieus combine to model comparative cultural analysis and to clarify cultural foundations of black ethical life.

In his widely acclaimed survey, John Mbiti sheds light on the survival and prosperity of African Religion in different historical, geographical, sociological, cultural, and physical environments. He presents a constellation of African worldviews, beliefs in God, use of symbols, valued traditions, and practices that have taken root with African peoples throughout the vast continent. Mbiti’s accessible writing style sympathetically portrays how African Religion manifests itself in ritual, festival, healing, the human life cycle, and interplay with the mystical and invisible world. The account embraces foundational traditions, while touching on elements that spawn transitions, including migration, the spread of Christianity and Islam, political-economic development, and modern communication. This popular introduction leaves readers with informed knowledge of the riches of African heritage.

Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category of seselelame (literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.