A smiling Nelson Mandela, whose new book is a series of musings held together by his intellectual concerns


Our ancestors Yet, from what we know of African history and philosophy before Africa was turned into a hunting ground for slaves and a reservoir for the pillage of raw resources, African society originally set great value on memory management. Tat is what Hero- dotus, father of European history, meant when he described Ancient Egyptians as the most historically conscious of people. It is what foreigners still mean when they describe Africa’s old cultures as ancestor worship. What they mean is that memory management was long an indispensable part of the African way of life. Genera- tions knew how much they could benefit from the experience of predecessors. Tey in turn would add to the common pool of ancestral memory, if they lived well ac- cording to culturally useful norms. For a society’s memory bank is the


prime reservoir from which humans have normally fetched insights and inspira- tion for individual and social growth. Te deeper the memory pool available to any group, the more profoundly innovative its members can be when seeking intellectual tools for solving the many societal prob- lems of life and death. Ancient African society preserved its


social memory in a variety of media, in architecture and medicine, in sculpture and painting, in temple liturgies and lay music and, above all, in language. Scholars now take it for granted that Af-


rica has traditions of oral memory dating back thousands of years. Less well known, but increasingly open to research, is the fact that a considerable portion of Africa’s memory bank consists of written texts. Te latest to be unearthed come from Tim- buktu and Djenne in Mali. Te oldest are Ancient Egyptian papyri and stelae, some more than 5,000 years old. Te recognition that the personal mem-


ories of exceptional individuals like Man- dela form a logical part of a larger African memory pool would stimulate interest and research in that great multi-millennial pool of our ancestral information, now hidden from most because of discrimina- tory education policies designed in the past


New African March 2011 | 73


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92