Culture Beyond the Visible Spectrum
See also | African Culture & Rites of Passage
Culture ideally must cultivate good habits and trends to be useful to people’s development. Too often when we speak of culture we limit the definition to those overt acts of human culture, things we can hear, smell, see, and touch; beads, clothes, dance, music, and folk beliefs. But culture is what informs us about how to raise our children and how to build a stable home. If our culture is not helping us there but is only good at showing the world how good we can dance then we honestly have a cultural problem. The funny thing is our cultures survived a lot of slavery and colonialism only to come into the 21st century and be destroyed by capitalist Westernism and the values it generates.
Because beyond the animal hides and high kicks in the air what is left that protects these people here dancing for tourists as a unique African people? Sure they speak an African language but go into their home, go into their economics, and look deeply at their identities beyond the tribal boasting? So all of that does not add up to the same agency as the Jew in Israel with his culture. It is either superficial or fails to transform society in any progressive way. In the case of South Africa, we have a ritualized culture of marriage that causes more teenage pregnancies than in any other country on Earth. We have abused African women, unlike any Western culture on Earth. We have crime, and all kinds of immorality despite the patina of an African culture wrapped in an African language.
TikToc and social media have done more damage to modern African culture than 100 years of colonialism
Just yesterday a single mother, who is 32, was explaining how she does not allow men to enter the family home and all these beautiful family values. But then we ask where was that “culture” when she got pregnant for the useless father of her 10-year-old son. When asked “Where is your son right now” she replied “I do not know, he is out playing football, and might be back at 9 PM.” In which Indian Muslim culture does that happen? In which Hindu culture in South Africa does that happen? A 10 year with keys who is free, after school, to roam around? What about his homework? So this is an aspect of culture, but in this case, all the priorities of this culture failed to create an environment for the next generation while prioritizing if the new boyfriend speaks enough Zulu or has enough money to pay the lobola. How can there be “honor” in this culture when 80% of the men are missing from any functional part of their children’s lives?
Here is some more culture that fails to perform within the modern setup. Fails to perform economically to sustain anything, fails politically to protect anything. But visually is stunning.
The culture of a people is not divine, it is not protected by anything other than the sense and agency of the practitioners. People just do things to belong to some tribal identity. Yet, not one tribal identity can protect us in a globalized world of zeros and ones. So eventually all cultures fail and rot on their way to annihilation. Empty skeletons with no intellectual reference to Nia. The youth then look at these cultures as they lose their relevance and authority and find nothing in them but a call back to a more backward time. It is true all over the world, but in the case of Africa, our loss of agency and Nia (purpose) have put a stake right through the heart of our African cultures and made them obsolete and disconnected from the contemporary moment.
Right now we are challenged by many complex problems and beyond rhetoric if our culture(s) only advise us about which beads to wear then we need to look elsewhere for real world solutions.
