The Great Tradition And The Little Tradition

The disparity between Europe and Africa lies not so much in the community cultures of each as in the civilizations of each. Although this distinction can be traced back to Sir Henry Maine and beyond, it can best be understood in the terms given it by Robert Redfield, the American anthropologist. He claimed that there was, in all the 'old civilizations of the world' - that is, civilizations grafted on earlier cultures and peoples rather than founded anew as Anglo-American and Australian civilizations were - a disparity between a 'great tradition' and a 'little tradition', Redfield was led to this formulation by his interest in peasant cultures; unlike 'primitive' societies and unlike civilizations, the social groups that exhibit peasant cultures all depends to some degree on the existence of the 'manor' - the city or the Church or some other carrier of a 'great tradition'. The peasants – the carriers of the little tradition - do not themselves participate fully in the great tradition, although in most cases at least some of their members may move into the social groups that represent the great tradition.

Africa and Europe shared a little tradition that diverged on amazingly few points. But both areas also developed great traditions, and there it was that they most tellingly grew apart. On to a more or less common village community structure came to be grafted widely divergent institutions. In Europe the institutions of the great tradition were feudalism, the Church and its various political manifestations, the heresies and the Protestant movements, and finally the Industrial Revolution and all the changes that it wrought.

In Africa, the great tradition lay in the ideas of divine kingship, associated as it was with the major technological developments of metallurgy and ultimately of everything that follows from it. With the expansion of Arab culture across North Africa and down the east coast, the situation developed in which all of North Africa and the Eastern Horn became associated with the Near East. Arab occupation .of Europe was stopped (with a few exceptions) at the Bosporus and in the mountains of the Iberian Peninsula. Marc Bloch, the eminent French historian, has pointed out that one of the reasons that medieval Europe could develop as it did is that there was no invader to destroy European culture as it developed. We are used to thinking of the Teutonic tribes destroying Rome; we are not accustomed to realising that from the eleventh century on, there were no major invaders of Europe. The medieval civilizations - the great traditions - of Europe and those in the Sudan were in some regards alike. But the Arabs destroyed the civilizations that were developing in Africa. Had the Arabs got past the Spanish or the Turks, the medieval and modern history of Europe might well resemble that of Africa much more than it in fact does.

Moreover, Arab intrusion into Africa offered an easy path for Islamic influence once the Arabs themselves were Islamised: Islamic influence was never felt extensively in Europe except as an external factor - what Toynbee has called a 'challenge'. Africa did not 'and does not combat Islam. Christendom, through missionaries and other forces, is still combating it.

Thus, the shutting out of Africa from the European consciousness began with the desiccation of the Sahara. It was reinforced when certain aspects of Egyptian civilization came to be important influencing factors of Aegean and Greek culture, while differing aspects of the same Egyptian civilization went south to Cush and the kingdoms south of the Sahara. Then throughout the era that is known in Europe as the Middle Ages, both Europe and Africa turned inward to their own affairs, but in Africa those affairs were vastly changed by the Arab influx.

Yet through all the medieval period, there was trade - sometimes extensive trade - across the Sahara via the great kingdoms of the Sudanic areas and the peoples of the northern littoral of the African continent. We know, for example, that Africa was, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, flooded with cowrie shells which were brought by the Venetians from the Maldive Islands, and which crossed the desert. Cowries during this period became a type of currency in many parts of Africa, and ultimately became so plentiful that their value underwent serious deflation; in the most important centres they all but lost their value. We knew also that the flow of Negro slaves across the Sahara never totally ceased. Comparatively few got as far as Europe, but some did. During the period that European civilizations were largely cut off from the civilizations of Asia Minor and India, the commerce and other interrelationships of Asia Minor and India, and the commerce and other interrelationships between eastern Africa and Asia were at their height. It begins to look as if Europe were the Dark Continent.

When Europe began to rediscover Africa, along with her rediscovery of the rest of the world, a series of occurrences took place that made smooth and amicable relationships between the peoples of the two continents almost impossible. If we follow tradition and take the exploration voyages sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal as our starting point, we discover that the exploration of Africa can be thought of as a continuation of the movements that began when the Iberians organised to force the Arabs out of the peninsular. In the years after 1407, when Prince Henry of Portugal took part in the sacking of Ceuta, opposite Gibraltar, he formed an academy and was instrumental in letting out on contract the task of exploring the west coast of Africa. His explorers received certain rights and rewards in exchange for claiming these areas in the name of Portugal and more specifically for bringing back items that could be used in national (not to say royal) trade. Among the earliest imports into Portugal were Moorish slaves. Negro slaves were not far behind.

In the next two or three centuries the exploration of the African coastlines was tied irretrievably with the slave trade. As we shall see, slavery is an African institution which has peculiar forms that are totally unlike the institutions of servility that were found in medieval Europe. For this reason, there was an effective misunderstanding between Africans and Europeans about just what slavery consisted of, and yet Africans were able, because they had a tradition of slavery, to exist and even to prosper in a slave situation. This fact led Europeans to state that they considered Africans to be 'natural' slaves and 'born' hewers of wood and drawers of water. As we have seen in our investigation of the development of racial attitudes, this idea very quickly implanted itself and led to disdain on the part of Europeans for Africans and African culture.

The abolition of the slave trade added fuel to the fire. For all that it was a humane movement and one which the modern world of that time had to undergo in order to develop industrialism to the point that it desired, the way in which it was carried out was ultimately most uncomplimentary to Africans and destructive to the relationships existing between Africans and Europeans. As we have seen, minimal claims were made for Africans - they were, after all, 'fellow creatures' and the implication was left that they might not be much more.

The situation was certainly not improved by the explorers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These men, who were driven out of the European cultures which culminated in the strictures of the Victorian era, were, for the most part, either malcontents or men of overweening ambition searching for position and power. Such men were in no position to understand or even to perceive the intricacies of African civilization or the basic similarity between the 'little traditions' - the peasants - of Africa and those of Europe, although some of them - Mungo Park and David Livingstone - did see the similarities. Men like Cruickshank and Winterbottom also could see what they were dealing with and reported fully and correctly. The same could be said, however, for very few.

It was in this era that the idea of the Dark Continent – the phrase was Stanley's - came to the fore. With the exploration and with the expansion of the West which accompanied industrialisation and the vast social and cultural changes then going on, Africa was a. prime target for colonial expansion. In order for colonial expansion to take place, it became necessary to consolidate the view of African cultures as savage and barbarian in order to justify one's activities.

Europe and Africa, which had once been culturally close together, grew successively farther and farther apart. Africa, at the time the colonial empires emerged in the late nineteenth century, was thoroughly the 'Dark Continent', subject to almost all the stereotypes that remained in effect until after 1945. If one begins with Carthage, and has one's thinking dominated by events in a Europe cut off from the spread of Islam, and then by the modern colonial situation, the justification of the view becomes clear: Africa south of the Sahara is one world, and the Mediterranean is another. But the picture must be expanded at both its ends. 

(P. Bohannan: Africa and the Africans, Doubleday).

A Sense of Direction

It is not to be expected that a satisfying philosophy of education will be widely spread when a satisfying philosophy of life is so seldom achieved. If life lacks a sense of direction, so will the education it is possible to give our children whether at home or in school. A generous allowance of pocket-money with which to purchase ice-cream and happiness may well be an unconscious confession of inability to impart gifts more valuable. In such a time of holiday from conviction some kinds of learning will not take place at all and our young people will be left, as many are left today, on the loose. Even techniques and skills themselves - looking, listening, reading, writing - will be acquired with less effectiveness and less intensity. And to try to meet the challenge, as we may be tempted to do, with a reply in material terms is not to meet it, no multiplication - however desirable in itself - in the number of new schools and laboratories, of youth centres or technical colleges, will answer such questions; no re-arrangement of secondary education so that more of it will become 'comprehensive' at eleven or 'multilateral' at fifteen; no piercing of more entrances through the walls of our universities. What has brought this state of affairs? What can be done to remedy it?

Some of the causes of our lack of purpose and direction are, no doubt, physical, two major wars in forty years have drained us of some of our energy. But the failure of nerve threatened long before 1914, and is not unconnected with one of man's greatest achievements - the spread of the scientific temper of mind. A scientific temper must necessarily encourage attitudes of non-commitment; it must incline men to concentrate on material, analyzable phenomena as being the best fitted for steady observation, controllable experiment and useful discovery.

Now an analytic habit of mind, of untold promise as an instrument, has its dangers. Because we are looking for truth through microscopes and testing it by logical processes of examination and reasoning it will be easy to be prevented from seeing much that is true. We owe an immense debt to science, and the future of mankind must more and more be influenced by its findings and applications, but Samuel Butler's subtle fears that we might become its slaves - though in deeper ways than the Erowhonians - ought still to be arrows in the conscience.

As long as science was content to deal with the apparently objective world it was of course possible to remain as untroubled by its finding as were most of the early Victorians. Chemistry, geology, even physics, dealt - however analytically -with matter and things comfortably separate from man. But the application of The Origin of Species in 1859 showed to the many that science could disturbingly include within its province both the animal and the human; and by the end of the nineteenth century it was clear that the human mind itself, the very springs and hidden motives of action, could also be subjected to analysis. We were no longer safe. If our actions were the products of instinctive drives, of conflicts and 'compensation', were we not, after all, as the behaviourists began to whisper, merely mechanisms functioning in an extraordinarily complex way? In the middle of the twentieth century the sociologists seem to be demonstrating clearly that we are all patterned and largely determined by the social groups to which we belong, that the laws of social development are as inexorable as the laws of chemical change. What is the use then of pretending any longer to believe in the freedom of man, or of supposing that in reality all men are not prisoners in the universe?

Scientific method is the product of high intelligence rigorously applied. And such honour - quite rightly - do we pay to the men who seem to be heroically following Truth wherever she may lead, that even if we half refuse to credit the findings or theories of economists, psychologists, even physicists, we are very liable to be driven in doing so into the 'uninvolved' mood that is common today the world over. 'The experts may soon have a different theory to put forward to account for this or that. So don't let us be, like the scientists themselves, as detached as we can; and just wait.' Such a mood must regard enthusiasm, vision and commitment with a cynical eye; the best that men can do is to state their own doubts and uncertainties honestly and plainly; and learn to endure.

Nor is this all. Our historical situation being what it is, many men and women even of serious mind wonder whether faith and a sense of purpose, even if we had them, would any longer be much use. For nuclear weapons are waiting ready to hand and, given an intense enough moment of impatience and despair, what is there to prevent their being dispatched, to bring sudden, calamitous and untold catastrophe with them? Can one see ahead steadily or far in days such as ours? Of what use then is hope - or confidence? And are they not themselves deceiving sentimentalities?

And yet, as we know deep in the heart, we need faith and hope if life is to be lived and not merely endured, or in one ingenious way or another, escaped from. For without them there is no future. To have beliefs and a sense of purpose is to live in harmony with the nature of things. To wish to escape for long from purposes and loves and commitments is like wanting to escape outside an atroosphere of air. (Niblett: Education and the Modern Mind, Faber).