76 Global Ethics for Leadership
Foreign languages became the mandatory mediums of instruction in the
very few schools where the colonial curriculum was taught, with only a
few Africans as “beneficiaries” with access to colonial privileges.
Struggles for national sovereignty were ruthlessly quashed as subversion
of the colonial state. Some African catechists abandoned missionary-led
churches and formed their own, taking some of the converts with them.
Many of these leaders were imprisoned on charges of subversion, and
their churches were banned. During the 1960s most African colonies
achieved national sovereignty.
In colonial and missionary circles it was commonly expected that
Christianity would be abandoned en masse in Tropical Africa. The op-
posite actually happened. Africans embraced Christianity in large num-
bers, but expressed it in their own cultural symbols, liturgies, hymns and
rituals. Foreign languages continued to be taught and used in schools
colleges and seminaries, but in daily lives African languages, norms,
rituals and symbols remained normative. The predominance of African
cultural identity remains evident, in spite of its denigration in Euro-
American media and scholarship.
Western patronage of African nations has had the effect of delaying
and also de-railing the deepening of the African sense of community,
while entrenching individualism among the African elite. This patronage
is buttressed on a presumption that individualism is superior to commu-
nalism; that West is Best, and that Might is Right- precluding the possi-
bility of mutual learning across cultures, and mutual respect between
peoples. At the economic and infrastructure levels the consequence of
such patronage in Tropical Africa has been few tall skyscrapers in a few
cities, with sprawling informal settlements nearby; few millionaires
swarmed by millions of destitute. The mismatch between the African
Ethos of Community and the Western Ethos of Individualism is a con-
ceptual chasm across which no bridge can be built.