African Cultural Personalities in a World of Change

About the Book

This notwithstanding, over the years, the African culture in all its manifestations became the bull’s eye for attack especially during the Atlantic Slave Trade, Colonialism, Racism. During these periods, Europe dealt coup de grace to the African personality, to his is-ness, by destroying the African cultural values. They disrespected African peculiarities, languages enriched with traditions of centuries, parables, many of them the quintessence of family and national histories; modes of thought, influenced more or less by local circumstances, local poetry which reveals the profundity of African literary wizardry. A lot of these were altered against the background that the African in all his susceptibilities is an inferior race and that it is needful to give him a foreign model beacon to emulate and follow. In our time of globalization, bringing about a new sweep of changes on the African cultural values, a more careful, historically grounded interpretation of the cultural changes occurring on the continent is, therefore, needed and for it to be useful, it should enable us to transcend the narrow and narrowing parameters that currently dominate the discourse on the processes and structures of change occurring in contemporary Africa. This piece is a great accomplishment by African scholars to do a grounded hermeneutics of the structures of changes taking place in Africa. The different chapters are the fruits of the 2018 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies (APAS). The authors, like artists, combine originality with insightful imagination. They have carefully treated the historical, conceptual, basic and substantive issues in cultural change in Africa. Their coherent, systematic and encyclopedic approaches have the capacity to expand the intellectual and professional horizon of its readers.

About the Author

Ikechukwu Anthony, KANU is a friar of the Order of Saint Augustine and a Professor of Religion (ATR) and Cultural Studies, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Tansian University. He is also a visiting Professor at Saint Augustine’s Major Seminary, Jos and the Augustinian Institute, Makurdi. He is the President of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies. Ejikemeuwa J. O. NDUBISI, Ph.D., is a Lecturer at Tansian University, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Oracle of Wisdom: Journal of Philosophy and Public Affairs. He is a member of the editorial boards of many national and international journals. Kanayo NWADIALOR, Ph.D., is a lecturer at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Department of Religion and Human Relations. He is a member of the editorial boards of many national and international journals. His focus area is history of Christianity in Africa with special interest in nationalist historiography.