Solidarity instead of competition

African Humanism: solidarity instead of competition.
‘Civilization with a human face’, is one of the definitions one could give to African Humanism.
What are the concerns, or centers of interest of African Humanism?
Firstly, the Present is considered more urgent and overall more important, than the Future or the Past.
Even when considering the place we give to the past as history, or causal reference for contemporary events, our focus must be the present, for our perception of the present is what gives the real moral value to anything we say or do together.
Today, at this very day and moment in time, there are people waiting for answers to their daily problems. Answering these concerns by the past or the future amounts to taking escape routes, rather than addressing current conditions.
When focus is on the past, people are often given confrontational readings of history, easily usable for ideological discourses. Old grudges can be revived, or invented, and people can fall prey to what we called the danger of the discourse of origins.
Future driven language has been the favorite, or dominant operative mode of much of the Western civilizational proposition.
As African humanists have shown with great detail, the Western European project has in large parts been and continues to be ignorant of the effects created by this future prioritizing in other people’s present mode, how it affects in their everyday lives.
The voices who have uttered the message of African Humanism are known to the world.
When we think of Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela, we know their message is speaking for every human being on earth, in the situation where they are right now.
This is humanity for them, not a projected select species of synthetically updated biology systems living on Planet Mars.
Their sense of the future is informed by their knowledge, and focused on resolving things, of the present moment. For African Humanism, real progress is toward the present.
On the other hand, the vision of mostly technological civilization all set toward the future, is by nature oppressive and reductive to the present. In fact, it has a highly manipulative potential toward corruption, as claims of science can stretch from snake oil profit making on one extreme, all the way to the willful manufacturing of ignorance on the other extreme. Africans have suffered both conditions. Their ancestral memory as well as their current living conditions have been obliterated under the weight of wishful language, and their present is chained by other people’s distant dreams.
The conquests of the Americas, of Australia, the colonization of Africa and much of Asia and many other places, were all done in the name of the future.
A future that was there in the form of a promised reward to those who would actually do the conquest, and as projected benefits for those who sent them.
There is a big moral and ethical difference between thinking about what should be, and thinking about what is.
This highly subjective idea of the future is what guides the Western “civilizational” vision, as well as its definitions of humanity and Humanism.
Religiously or philosophically it’s all packaged as a project, much like the uncertain journeys and dreams of sea pirates.
African humanists raised their voices, loudly saying they are not part of the Hegelian grid of thinking.
They rightly saw this grid as mere justification for the colonial project.
The dialectical mechanics of this philosophy operates with the thought that the outcome justifies the means. By doing so, this philosophy allows for a deliberate ideological reading of history as well as present current affairs, and allows itself to be ignorant of the voices existing right around it.
The domination of the future discourse, creates competition.
The intervention of the present mode, results in solidarity.
People learn about how to put a fire out together, should it happen in the future, so they can be ready when it happens in the present tense.
Prevention is a way of thinking about the future, so it remains connected and valued according to its use in the present time.
At the root of the escape toward the future, is fear.
This type of fear, which can trigger an escape to such a scale, is capable of fighting world wars and committing genocides, as the sad examples of Italy and Germany under fascism have shown.
The language of a glorified future made of a 1000 year Reich was enough of a tomorrow, to create the ugliest of yesterdays. The invocation to future technology as magic, turned the blood spilt and the lives lost to a cold neutral necessity, in order to be on the road, in the direction, going toward, the carrot of ever growing greatness.
The mass soul-suicide of people, forgoing their present in the name of some elusive made-up future, is what the definition of war and social injustice means to African Humanism.
His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, spoke to the League of Nations. After the League was reformed as a result of its incapacity to combat fascism, the Emperor spoke again before the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Part of the speech he gave then, became an anthem for Panafricans everywhere, and were enshrined by Bob Marley in the legendary song “War”. Spoken by a King, in the name of a whole continent, to every nation on earth.
It is an anti-war message, set like a spiritual missile to shatter any walls of racial segregation.
Hundreds of millions across the world have heard this song, and taken its message to heart.
The far away dreams of total domination of one race over another, creates in our present time sad and difficult realities.
African Humanism is needed, to bring moderation to the addiction and potential enslavement to futurism, be it right or left minded on the political spectrum.
It needs to be said, and be repeated until it is heard and understood, that African Humanism is the only humanism that can speak in everyone’s name.
It comes from Africa as a voice, but seeks to reach and educate the entire world.
People everywhere need to know that it exists, that its thinkers, teachers, and visionaries, are women and men who fought tirelessly, and still uphold the noble and moral struggle for human dignity.
There are many roads and different approaches found within the general landscape of African Humanism.
But each agrees that it must all lead us to decisions, made to improve our lives in the present time.