166 Ethics in Higher Education: Values-driven Leaders for the Future
now know of in deficit and hierarchized terms as the “Third World”, and
in generative language as the “global South”.
By attaining “independence”, the West can now say, “we gave them
sovereignty” and thus share some moral dividends that would have
eluded it had independence never been allowed to the colonies. But
awareness of spirit and of being free as a creative act of the spirit takes
us far beyond the cries of reparation and claims of injustice against a
historical experience that was cruel and in some instances actually evil.
It goes beyond the dictates of modernity and enlightenment in which all
nations of the world are locked into the grids of the European
experience; to quite a different place, in which that freedom in the 21st
century now meets the requirement of the common good and the
demands of common well-being... of new futures of a different kind.
In other words, a key question for Africa in this century is precisely
how active and fully knowing human agency is to be realized in an
ethically cognizant dispensation? On the one hand, we can clearly see
that political freedom creates a strange handicap and incoherence, an
intimate juxtaposition of past and present that Africa represents. On the
other, what this does is that it puts Africa in a unique position in relation
to both human history and human destiny from which position she can
articulate the contours of that new dispensation, and herald the new
social compact on a global scale.
Where Europe destroyed and dehumanized with elation, Africa must
weigh carefully its methods of transcending the realms of that bondage
i.e. she must go beyond naming what she is fighting against, to
courageously naming what she is fighting for. Where Europe needed to
destroy and subjugate so many, Africa must define new formulas for its
reconstruction (in relation to the historical destruction of course!); name
the new icons symbolizing its points of departure; and articulate the kind
of energy she will bring to bear in the building of its future in the new
more humane dispensation.