The Conflict of Culture in Africa

Abstract

&F the spate of books published on Africa in I953, the most signicant to my mind was a novel called Blanket Boy's Moon. It tells the story of Monare of Lomontsa, a member of the Basuto tribe. As a child he had lived in the old tribal ways. With other young boys he had herded cattle on the hillsides. He had gone to the tribal circumcision school. Then, later, he had become a Christian. Christianity allows a man only one wife: the tribal society as many as he can afford. Thus the first conflict, the first set of personal tensions come into play: the new ways against the old, the influence of the priest pulling one way and that of the tribal elders another. Still later Monare goes to Johannesburg, the city of gold, where the ways of the priest, which are the ways of the white man, are in full mastery over all. When he returns to his village after his spell in the city he is conscious of going from the present into the past. And then his chief orders him to participate in a ritual murder. Monare the Christian is revolted. By Christian standards ritual murder is a crime against both God and man. But tribal pressure wins in the end and Monare takes part in the murder. The personality of Monare, the man, is now split beyond repair. He leaves the tribe because it is responsible for the evil thing he was forced to do. He wanders in fear through the cities of the Union of South Africa finding no peace, no resting place because in serving his tribal chief he has put himself outside the law and ethics of the Christian present. When arrest and death finally come his fear is matched and mastered by his relief. The long and terrible conflict is over at last. Now there can be peace. Let us allow for the fact that Monare is a fictional creation and therefore more consciously articulate than a man in real life might be. Let us further allow that ritual murder poses the problem in highly dramatic form. But having made those allowances the book still retains its validity as a serious attempt to throw light on what is, to my mind, the most pressing problem of Africa today: the problem of the African's transition from the tribal past into the technological present. There has been much discussion of tribalism in the past. The policy of indirect rule did, in a sense, endorse tribalism. It was often found most convenient not to interfere in any way with the structure of the tribal society but rather to bolster it up and to reinforce the authority of the chiefs and to rule through them. In some cases, the Kikuyu in Kenya are an example, the colonial government even introduced chiefs where these had not been part of the social structure before. To this day there exists an attitude that can be best expressed by the oft repeated statement, 'We do