5
COMMUNITY –
BEING HUMAN
Jesse Mugambi, Kenya
5.1. Introduction
This Paper focuses on ‘community’ as an anthropological notion,
presupposing that humans are ‘cultural’ beings who through nurture and
culture learn how to live and identify themselves as humans, by means
of cultural processes passed on from generation to generation. European
tribal wars, buttressed with religious rivalries, produced the small “na-
tions” that comprise the European Union today. The Peace of Augsburg
(1555) has remained the basis of European national identity under the
principle of cuius regio, eius religio.^35 At the Berlin Conference (1884-
85) Africa’s six major language groups were truncated into colonial en-
claves at the whim and frenzy of competing imperial powers, without
any regard to previous cultural identities. Struggles for national sover-
eignty in Tropical Africa between 1900 and 2011 have yielded the Afri-
can Union, with its Agenda 2063 launched in 2013. Its seven Aspira-
tions express Africa’s cultural identity as a community of nations and
peoples in the Third Millennium. Humans as a species have at least one