Re-Theorizing Indigenous African Arts and Aesthetics for African Development: The Yoruba Example

Abstract

The African developmental challenge in a broad configuration, be it political, cultural, artistic, aesthetic, scientific and economic, has been predicated and interrogated on the basis of conflict between tradition and modernity. However, many researches in this sphere of analysis have paid little attention to the superimposition of the European gaze on Africa which has tried to denigrate the African past in a bid to impose or foist what may be regarded as a ‘dubious modernity’ that tries to severe the contemporary African being-in-the-world from its tradition. In this paper, I try to show that African culture and arts, especially from the trajectory of tradition cannot be separated from modernity. Just as tradition provides the pivot on which modernity is erected, there are also traces of tradition in modern expressions of African arts and culture. In this paper therefore, I defend the view that it is tradition, as can be gleaned in African arts and aesthetics, especially in Yoruba culture of South-Western Nigeria that provides the basis for modern African culture in its utilitarian and moral dimensions. I also do a critique of the philosophical arguments bordering on the tradition-modernist debate in African philosophy and then make a case for African modernity rooted in tradition, the absence of the latter has led to the stunted development of arts and culture in contemporary Africa. The Yoruba artistic and aesthetic weltanschauung (worldview) is then used as the basis for my thesis of re-theorizing indigenous African arts and aesthetics for African development. The methodology of this paper is made up of historical, analytic and reconstructive aspects of philosophy. The paper traces the history of the denigration of African arts, and engages in the analysis of its constitutive forms. Thereafter, an attempt is made to reconstruct these various elements to pave way for a development oriented culture predicated on the synergy of tradition and modernity. It is concluded that the development of Africa is to be largely founded on values which tradition has bequeathed, though from a critical perspective, and which must be reckoned with if there is to be a genuine African renaissance.