Culture and Ideology

Pan-African Culture and Ideology
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	As Seku Ture wrote in his work Pan African Culture and Revolution, To every culture, corresponds an ideology and the nature of culture is but a transposition of the ideology which as a set of rules of conduct fit for the attainment of certain ideals, follows un-intermittently the development noted in culture which is the framework of ideology. The latter remaining the content of the former.

	*The Ideological Struggle*

	If one visits the Wikipedia cite on Culture you will find the following observation: Though of many varied origins, African culture, especially Sub-Saharan African culture has been shaped by European colonialism.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
	This is precisely the essence of the kind of anti-African reasoning that Pan-Africanism from its inception has had to fight and overcome. See for example a representative refutation of this approach in an excerpt from Kwame Nkrumah's presentation at the Congress of Africanists Africanism and Culture
	It is the distortion of African history that is the major ideological impediment to Africa's liberation. As Nkrumah wrote in Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonisation,
	One of these subtle methods (of coercion) is to be found in the account of history. The history of Africa, as presented by European scholars, has been encumbered with malicious myths. It was even denied that we were a historical people. It was said that whereas other continents had shaped history, and determined its course, Africa had stood still, held down by inertia; that Africa was only propelled into history by the European contact. African history was therefore presented as an extension of European history. Hegel's authority was lent to this a-historical hypothesis concerning Africa, which he himself unhappily helped to promote. And apologists of colonialism lost little time in seizing upon it and writing wildly thereon. In presenting the history of Africa as the history of the collapse of our traditional societies in the presence of the European advent, colonialism and imperialism employed their account of African history and anthropology as an instrument of their oppressive ideology.
	Earlier on, such disparaging accounts had been given of African society and culture as to appear to justify slavery, and slavery, posed against these accounts, seemed a positive deliver of our ancestors. When the slave trade and slavery became illegal, the experts on Africa yielded to the new wind of change, and now began to present African culture and society as being so rudimentary and primitive that colonialism was a duty of Christianity and civilization. Even if we were no longer, on the evidence of the shape of our skulls, regarded as the missing link, unblessed with the arts of good government, material and spiritual progress, we were still regarded as representing the infancy of mankind. Our highly sophisticated culture was said to be simple and paralyzed by inertia, and we had to be encumbered with tutelage. And this tutelage, it was thought, could only be implemented if we were first subjugated politically.
	The history of a nation is, unfortunately, too easily written as the history of its dominant class. But if the history of a nation, or a people, cannot be found in the history of a class, how much less can the history of a continent be found in what is not even a part of it - Europe. Africa cannot be validly treated merely as the space in which Europe swelled up. If African history is interpreted in terms of the interests of European merchandise and capital, missionaries and administrators, it is no wonder that African nationalism is in the forms it takes regarded as a perversion and neo-colonialism as a virtue.
	In the new African renaissance, we place great emphasis on the presentation of history. Our history needs to be written as the history of our society, not as the story of European adventures. African society must be treated as enjoying its own integrity; its history must be a mirror of that society, and the European contact must find its place in this history only as an African experience, even if as a crucial one. That is to say, the European contact needs to be assessed and judged from the point of view of the principles animating African society, and from the point of view of the harmony and progress of this society.
	When history is presented in this way, it can become not an account of how those African students referred to in the introduction became more europeanized than others; it can become a map of the growing tragedy and the final triumph of our society. In this way, African history can come to guide and direct African action. African history can thus become a pointer at the ideology which should guide and direct African reconstruction.
	This connection between an ideological standpoint and the writing of history is a perennial one. A check on the work of the great historians, including Herodotus and Thucydides, quickly exposes their passionate concern with ideology. Their irresistible moral, political and sociological comments are particular manifestations of more general ideological standpoints. Classically, the great historians have been self-appointed public prosecutors accusing on behalf of the past, admonishing on behalf of the future. Their accusations and admonishings have been set in a rigid framework of presuppositions, both about the nature of the good and about the nature of the good society, in such a way that these presuppositions serve as intimations of an implicit ideology.
	In fact, African history has been one of great achievement and fierce, consistent resistance to exploitation and oppression. The peoples' general inclination and learned habit of resistance is the most pronounced influence shaping Pan-African culture. As President Ture said, The determined and conscious resistance to penetration and foreign domination, we have seen, is a constant feature in the drive for the assertion and preservation of African people. The people possess a rich tradition of fighting, of armed opposition and of socio-cultural resistance to colonial rule... Logically then, if Pan-Africanism is to move forward we must formalize and fine-tune this collective predilection. This is precisely what Dr. Kwame Nkrumah advocated in all his work and theory. For example, in Consciencism he provided Africa and the world with a survey of the role of thought and action in redemption of oppressed societies and peoples, likewise in Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, written with input from and reference to the leading African resistance fighters of the time, Dr. Nkrumah gave Pan-Africanism a blueprint for prosecuting the continental war for liberation.

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