African Nostalgia and the Redemption of History
A response to Robert Odero’s “The Memory of Paradise (II)” (Part 2 of 2).
(Long post ahead.)
In the first part of this article, we responded to the first of Robert Odero’s reflections on “The Memory of Paradise”, deepening the “vision of the future”, the hope in the afterlife, that he proposed as a necessary counterpoint to a certain African fixation on the past.
More specifically, we proposed adding what we could call a “third dimension” to his notion of hope and the future: rather than hope being a desire for a future that has not yet occurred (an image of the future), hope is, instead, the very beginning or “possession” of that future. Basing ourselves on Leonardo Polo’s notion of “transcendental freedom”, we saw, inter alia, that insofar as we hope, the future is already present in us as future, that is, as an active or effusive openness towards the Transcendent God, an openness that, when elevated by grace, is a participation in Him. In a sense, this “natural”, creaturely hope is not a yearning for future salvation but, instead, the very beginning of salvation, a certain commencement of an ever-increasing and ever-deepening union with God. In the words of Tertullian nearly two millennia ago, “Anima naturaliter Christiana” – the soul is Christian by nature.1 And when this hope is elevated by grace, it becomes the supernatural hope of which St. Paul says: “For in hope we were saved”.2 Such hope, whether creaturely or elevated by grace, is not fundamentally an action; instead, it is a hope that we radically are.
Against this background, we suggested that the African post-colonial crisis, the “breaking of the past”, is in fact
an opportunity to turn towards the future – or instead, to become the turning-towards-the-Transcendent that is future; in other words, to hope. … The breaking of the tribe confounds the word that was transmitted from generation to generation [and is] a stark revelation that [that word] lacks the vigor to make sense of the world. For that reason, the breaking compels us to seek a deeper meaning, a deeper light – and ultimately, a deeper Word.
Yet, in this light, it would seem that any desire to recover our origins is, at best, a waste of time. It would appear not only that the past is broken, but also that there exists a path towards fulfilment, meaning, and identity that has no use for it. What are we to make, then, of the “strong desire to cling to the living memory of our forefathers” of which Odero speaks? Do our cultures have a place in the modern world, or in the Church? In the poignant words of Francis Nyatundo: is it possible to be both truly African and truly Christian? Indeed, is it possible to be truly African today? Or must the African instead abandon his “Africanness” and either seek to be Christian, adopt a totalizing vision of Islam,3 or fall into the pit of modern secularism, so that even in the rejection of Christianity, his African identity is obsolete? Can the African only approach the Christian faith and the modern world as an orphan without lineage?
In this second part of our response, we focus our attention on the second of Odero’s reflections, which probes the question of the contemporary significance of African memory or, if you will, African nostalgia.
Of course, Odero is not the first to address this question (though his response to it presents a crucial step forward). Of those who have, one figure stands out: Léopold Sédar Senghor. In fact, reading this Senegalese statesman-poet, one gets the impression that, above all, it is with the thought of this intellectual giant that Odero dialogues in all his writings. Accordingly, in what follows, we first lay out Senghor’s “African memory”, that is, his reflections on African identity, or négritude. As we will see, his négritude is intimately tied to a certain reductionist materialism that undercuts his otherwise incisive affirmations. Next, we outline Odero’s response: a notion of “memory” that unites “psychic time and cosmic time” – in other words, an attempt to both firmly assert the interiority of the human person and ground it ontologically, an aim that he sees hinted at in Heidegger’s Being and Time (regardless of whether Heidegger actually achieves this aim). However, while Odero points in the right direction, his characterization of memory is ultimately incapable of attaining the ontological grounding that he seeks. To resolve this problem, we draw on the transcendental anthropology of Leonardo Polo to develop a notion of memory that engages the human being in his most intimate depths: the personal act of being. On this basis, we arrive at a surprising conclusion regarding the profound and perennial significance of Africa’s past.
Senghor’s négritude: radiant blackness, tainted
Perhaps no other writer has captured the concept of Senghor’s négritude better than Sylvia Washington Bâ. Senghor himself would probably be the first to agree with this claim. In the preface to Bâ’s famous book published in 1973, The Concept of Négritude in the Poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Senegalese intellectual writes with his characteristic lyricism:
It is a curious sensation for a writer, especially a poet, to feel that he has been understood yet, at the same time, exposed and laid bare. He has been understood and he does not know whether to rejoice or to despair. It is an even stranger feeling to have someone show you in your own work thoughts you did not know you had had, feelings you did not know you had felt. And that was the jolt I had when I read Sylvia Washington Ba’s dissertation, revised and transformed into this book.
Accordingly, we rely on her work for our understanding of négritude in all that follows.
Senghor was born in 1906 in colonial Senegal. His keen mind obtained him a scholarship to study in Paris in 1928. However, at 25 years of age, after finishing his literary studies, the Senegalese poet found himself in a crisis. On the one hand, the French ostensibly operated under the policy of “assimilation” with respect to the subjects of the French Empire. Assimilation was based on the rationalist legalism that characterized revolutionary France:4 by education in French culture and, above all, subjection to her laws – universally valid expressions of universal reason – these subjects would adopt and be inducted into the French republican project and thereby become “French citizens”, sharers in the French national identity, without losing their own distinct, private beliefs and practices (or at least, that was the stated intention).5 However, on the other hand, Senghor would soon note discrepancies between theory and practice in the French political and social policy of the era. And though these discrepancies consisted of an inequality of treatment in material and institutional terms, these were just symptoms of a deeper problem: a profound contempt, on the part of the French, for the black man.6 This, in turn, meant for the black man (be he West Indian, American, or African) an alienation from his identity in social and political life, where he would be treated not as “another man” but, instead, as a “less-than-man”, as fundamentally inferior.7 In later years, Senghor would describe that experience in poignant words:
Black and colonized, black and naked, in the “shock of being seen” by the corrosive eye of the white man. . . . They had no patrimony: they had thought nothing, built nothing, sung nothing. They were nothingness itself, in the depths of the abyss, in the absoluteness of despair.
It was Senghor’s reflection on this experience and on “black identity” that birthed his concept of négritude, an idea that he would later develop through assiduous study and continued refinement. For this statesman-poet, négritude is, quite simply, the way of being of the black man, which is ultimately an “African way of being” – even for the African-American, the African-Caribbean, and other “peoples of African descent”. According to Senghor, this way of being is characterized by the primacy of a kind of “physical intuition” in one’s perception of the universe. In contrast to analytical reason, or even the “intellection” of essences, Senghor claims that, for the black African, primacy is instead accorded to a sensuous participation in the Other, a participation in the Other’s vitality:
In contrast to the classic European, the Negro African does not draw a line between himself and the object; he does not hold it at a distance, nor does he merely look at it and analyze it. After holding it in a distance, he takes it vibrant in his hands, careful not to kill it or fix it. He touches it, feels it, smells it. … He lives a common life with the Other; he lives in a symbiosis. Descartes says, “I think, therefore I am”. The Negro African could say, “I feel, I dance the Other; I am.”8
Senghor also holds that this mode of perception is itself rooted in an ontology: a notion or vision of being as life or vitality. The fact that life is received from one’s parents lies at the heart of, and finds expression in, cultural elements common to the “black African”,9 including: (i) a monotheistic belief in a (distant) Creator God, ultimate source of life, often portrayed in “black African” myths as the Creator of the first man and the first woman, progenitors of humankind; (ii) the belief in (created) spirits (the fount or depository of the vitality of certain natural phenomena – being is seen as alive); (iii) the veneration of the ancestors who, because of their priority of existence, are nearer to God, the supreme source of life; (iv) the revolving of one’s existence around manifestation and transmission of life or vitality; (v) a high esteem for the woman-mother, succinctly expressed in a proverb of the Serer, the people of Senghor himself: “It is the womb that ennobles”; (vi) a primacy of rhythm in his music, a fact to which musicologists attest; and (vii) an emphasis on the “bodily” dimension of the spoken word as itself a bearer of meaning, and on the bodily form of its referent as sharing in – incarnating – an underlying, vital reality. 10
Now, it is evident that “vitality” is not exclusively biological. It is pervaded by interiority – perception, veneration, fraternal and communal bonds, etc. Nevertheless, for Senghor, the biological dimension has a certain primacy: man is real insofar as he is bodily alive; all else is secondary (perhaps even an “alienation”, to use that Marxist term with which Senghor was well acquainted). Even the ancestors seem somehow to live on in the memory and ceremonial dances of the living. Of course, the poetry of Senghor is filled with a vivid, embodied interiority that unites sensuous perception with a keen vision into reality. However, in his theoretical works, Senghor fails to coherently express the union of sensuous perception with interiority that elevates the former rather than diminishing the latter. Perhaps it was the influence of a love for a Marxist acknowledgement, by the revolutionary West Indians he encountered in France, of the realities of the situation of black Africans under French assimilation, inequalities ignored under the formal “equality before the law” that the French legal order declared, that led him to cling so strongly to this reductionist primacy of the biological, the material. Still, the poet within him dared to shun resentment and violence, yearned for a peaceful brotherhood between Europeans and Africans, and penetrated deeply into the Other whom he regarded. Thus, Senghor, who might otherwise have been a resentful and violent revolutionary, was instead a statesman who championed a vision that continues being a grand contribution to resolving the African post-colonial crisis, even though his vision needs to be purified. And to the extent that négritude expresses a real worldview of African peoples, then the cultures of these peoples, too, require purification.
Odero’s memory: the union of “psychic time and cosmic time”
Turning to Odero, just as Senghor’s engagement with Marx was less interested in the questions that concerned the German firebrand than in the relationship of some of his ideas to the topic of African identity, so Odero’s reflections on memory may be profitably understood not only – and perhaps not even primarily – as an engagement with the core problem that Heidegger addresses but, instead, as referring one of Heidegger’s ideas to the same question that preoccupied Senghor. Moreover, Odero’s thought, in general, evinces a lively dialogue with the concept of négritude.11 For this reason, it is profitable to examine Odero’s reflections against the conception of négritude we have laid out thus far: a radiant notion that requires purification from a certain materialism that would situate reality primarily in the body. Viewed in this light, Odero seems to insist on both the realness of human interiority and its “ontological” grounding which, for him, always additionally means embodiment, incarnation.
Nevertheless, Odero’s proposal of an ontological grounding of human interiority, or the human “subject”, the “I”, is inspired by an idea of Heidegger that responds to a central problem in Kantian, Hegelian and post-Hegelian thought: the transcendental subject. So, let’s briefly examine this idea.
The “transcendental subject” and the rejection of truth
The “transcendental subject”12 is a topic that originates with Immanuel Kant. This idea responds to two positions:
(1) Réné Descartes’s methodic doubt, that is, his refusal to accept anything as true if it is possible to doubt it, so as to attain certainty.
This is ultimately a rejection of objective truth (i.e., of the truth of mental objects that appear in our consciousness) and its replacement with the criterion of subjective certainty. This “certainty” is not a quality of the mental object itself but, instead, of the will. For “certainty” has to do with our adhesion to a mental object, our acceptance of it as true – it has to do with an act of the subject, a voluntary act. “Certainty”, then, is a criterion that lies not in the mental object but, instead, in our attitude towards it. Therefore, the proper criterion for assenting to a mental object should lie in that object, if the adhesion of the will is to be justified. Establishing the adhesion of the will itself as the criterion for assent seems to be an unjustified mistrust of consciousness, a fear of diminishing a posited supremacy of the human will.
In any case, it is because of this attitude that Descartes espouses a certain intuitionism, that is, the primacy of “simple and pure intuition”, of unmediated knowledge that seems to need no subsequent act of adhesion. Hence his rationalist notion of “innate ideas” that would form the basis of all knowledge – his rationalism is, first and foremost, a voluntarism.
(2) David Hume’s empirical skepticism, that is, a rejection of such innate ideas as the basis of knowledge, and a reduction of all ideas, or mental objects, to sense impressions. Instead of innate ideas, Hume would insist that (sense) experience is the standard of proof or disproof of rational judgments. This, of course, implies the rejection of all universal notions and their ultimate reduction to discrete, immediate sense apprehensions of particular cases. Consequently, there is no “self”, for instance. For the self is not any sense impression, nor any derivation from sense impressions, but instead the subject to which these impressions and their derivations are supposed to have a reference. Nor is there causality, because the relationship between a “cause” and its supposed effect would be, at best, probable.
However, the “particular case” is not, in fact, the direct result of an immediate sense apprehension. Instead, it is the application, or intentional referral, of a general idea to a mental object (something like a “particular” form abstracted from the sense impressions left by the thing that affects our senses). For instance, the individual case, “this wall”, is the application to the mental object (the lowest, most immediate mental “image” of the wall being looked at) of a general idea (that is, the idea of “that kind of thing”, already distinct from all particularities of the individual wall being looked at – an idea that eventually corresponds to a name, “wall”). To speak of the case as a mental “impression” seems to be the result of a confusion of general ideas with mental objects.
But more radical in Hume’s thought is his reduction of experience to exclude all generalities – even if this exclusion is inadvertently attenuated by a confusion of general ideas and mental objects. Thus, Hume’s skepticism rests on the same attitude that underlies the Cartesian methodic doubt: the rejection of the truth value of mental objects, the mistrust of consciousness, a diminution of the real value of essences, and the assertion of the supremacy of the human will.
The transcendental subject is born of Kant’s engagement with Hume’s thought. First, limiting “experience” to sensation alone seems not to account for certain knowledge that we have that seems to go beyond immediate experience, like universal scientific laws (causality!) or necessary mathematical truths. Objective knowledge seems to occur. However, Kant would agree that sense experience is, in fact, the standard of proof or disproof of rational judgments. So, then, that knowledge which goes beyond immediate, direct experience must actually stem from the underlying structure of experience, which transcends experience, i.e., lies deeper within us than experience does. In a word, it must stem from reason itself. Therefore, experience is composed not only of sense impressions (representations), but also of structures internal to reason (categories) that order these representations. Since the mental object is understood as a composite of representations and categories, the “thing-in-itself” (the noumenon), which would lie beyond representations, is unknowable. Additionally, there must be a higher instance that makes possible the union between the representations proper to sense experience (phenomena) and the internal structure of the experiencing mind (the categories). That instance is the “I”, the transcendental subject.
However, contra Kant, the union of the phenomenon and the categories is not in fact equivalent to the mental object. For the mental object is not merely a mental image but, instead, is, and is experienced as, intentional (from the Latin “in + tendere”, meaning “stretching towards”). The mental object points us to something beyond itself, outside itself. So, not only in Descartes and Hume, but in Kant, too, we find ourselves confronted with the same fundamental departure point: a rejection of the intentionality of the mental object, a rejection that is arbitrarily posited.
Hegel’s critique of Kant, however, does not break with this starting point. Instead, conscious experience is absolutized. For Hegel, the very act of positing an “unknowable” thing-in-itself implies some conceptual grasp of it: the thing-in-itself already lies within experience. The noumenon is a limit that we have already, in some sense, transcended, precisely because we can conceive it. And if the thing-in-itself is devoid of all categories, since these are imposed by our mind, then it is an empty abstraction, a pure “nothing”. There is no distinction between the noumenon and the phenomenon; all is experience. All is the transcendental subject.
But the transcendental subject so conceived cannot be static, for it is not identical to any singular content of experience: every idea contains within itself its contradictory, its negation. Every A implies a NOT-A. Consequently, the subject must not cease to think; the subject must continually realize itself, and must do so precisely by thinking oppositions – the dialectical method. For Hegel, then, the subject, then, is processual. The subject does not just exist; it becomes. It is thought-thinking-itself. The content of experience is not distinct from the subject but, instead, is the very realization of the subject: the subject is the dynamic mental presence. The subject realizes itself by the thinking that is itself; the subject is a “pretension to Itself”.
And so, at last, we arrive at Heidegger. Contrary to what we have seen in Kant and Hegel, Heidegger asserts that the content of experience is not the same as our own being. Self-consciousness is not the conscious self; the “I” contained within my experience, my idea of the “I”, still lies within consciousness and does not reach the transcendental subject, the “being-in-the-world”, the Dasein. Leonardo Polo expresses this idea with the concise formula: “The thought ‘I’ does not think” (el yo pensado no piensa). It would seem that the transcendental subject cannot be known directly, nor can it be known by recourse to ideas, to the “content” of consciousness that would presume to contain the subject. Instead, we must the know the transcendental subject as knowing itself, empty of all content.
As a path to the Dasein, Heidegger proposes sentiment, the “encounter with oneself”. This is explicable, because sentiment is something like a notification of the existent that is not distinct from it, that is, a certain resonance of the transcendental subject within our consciousness. However, the sentiment that would reveal the transcendental subject must not refer the subject to any specific content – otherwise, the Dasein would not be known as it is. Instead, we must have recourse to a sentiment that refers the Dasein to nothingness, to the very negation of the subject itself, to death. That sentiment is anguish.
This path to the Dasein seems to result from the rejection of the truth value of intentionality: the intentionality of the mental object, the immediacy of appearance, as already being “consciousness isolated from reality”. And yet, this does not match the “phenomenon”, for lack of a better word, of the mental object itself, which involves an interior reference beyond itself. Incidentally, the transcendental anthropology of Leonardo Polo can be said to take up the distinction between the “subject” and the content of consciousness, and to elevate it via the acceptance of that experience that is the intentionality of the mental object. Understood along these lines, it is hopefully clearer than it might have been in Part I of this article that the human being knows being, and is radically a knowing of being. The human being, then, does not just exist; he co-exists, “exists with”. Likewise, the notion of the future (“not yet”) is not itself the future; the future is instead the “tension forwards” that the human being radically is: we could describe the future as the “will-be” that we are.
That said, we can now turn back to Odero’s reference to the Dasein, in which he sees a hint at a union of “psychic time” and “cosmic time”.
The psychic and the cosmic: consciousness and the transcendental subject
Before we begin our examination of Odero’s thought, an important clarification is necessary: Odero does not seem to directly engage with the question that preoccupies Heidegger – nor is that his intention.
Odero is more concerned with the glimmer of ontological reality that he intuits (and not without at least apparent vagueness) in Heidegger’s Dasein. He then relates this to a “psychological and interior dimension of time” that he understands to be expressed in words of St. Augustine of Hippo – we amply addressed his interpretation (and translation) of these words in Part 1 – and the history of creation, sin, and redemption, or “cosmic time”. Original sin, for Odero, is a disintegration of the “self”, a disintegration that has all the ontological depth of the creature who shuns his Creator, source of all being. The Spirit of God, sent after the Paschal Mystery, brings about an ontological re-integration not only of man, but also of man with and in the whole of creation.
Understood in this sense, Odero describes African memory as “[instead of a mere ‘storage device’], something much closer to within the innermost core of one’s being, to what precedes one”. African memory, our “sense of the Zamani”, would then be ontological in depth, just as the Dasein is a subject of conscious experience who is “there”, “thrown into history” – in a word, real. Thus, it would seem that the psychic and the cosmic, consciousness and ontological depth, are united. Moreover, Odero thus goes beyond Senghor’s disregard for consciousness in the latter’s inordinate emphasis on sensuous, vital perception. At the same time, Odero portrays the union of the psychic and the ontological as the relationship of the creature with the One who precedes him, of the present with the past, so that “memory” in fact begins with the very veneration of the ancestors and cherishing of received vitality that was so dear to the Senegalese giant.
However, thus conceived, the psychic and the ontological are only apparently united. Odero speaks of memory as the mental presence of the past – the presence of the past in our minds, as what was. But, insofar as the past is contained in our minds in this way, looking at it “ontologically”, it is not past but, instead, mental presence. It is a mental object. Now, just as the notion of “self” is not identical to the conscious self, and the content of experience is not identical to the self that is experiencing, the notion of God the Creator is not, in fact, God the Creator Himself. Memory, understood as recalling the past – even the “ontological” past, that is, God as ontologically precedent to us, His creatures – is simply not ontological in depth. Considered on its own, it is not an opening to what precedes us, “within the innermost core of one’s being”. Granted, Odero does not simply equate memory with this ontological openness. Instead, he says that memory is something “much closer to” such openness than a mere permanence of detached mental representations. Yet, while the mental object is more than an empty mental image, a hollow “copy” of reality, that object is evidently not identical to the reality to which it intentionally refers; and the same is true of our general ideas, including the idea of God Himself.
Nevertheless, while he does not manage to resolve the problem of a relationship between the lived experience of “African identity” on the one hand and Being on the other, Odero does at least point us in an interesting direction. Something like memory does seem to hold pride of place in the “black African” psyche, as Senghor characterizes it. If we are to begin to see what this “something” is, we must first consider a deeper, more radical notion of the past, of precedence, and consequently, of our radical openness to this radical precedence. In short, we must examine the notion of “precedence” in the light of the personal act of being.
Radical precedence, “past”, and “memory”
Before beginning, a brief note: the thoughts laid out in this section should be considered as a preliminary sketch, a first approach to that “something” that seems characteristic of the one whom Senghor calls the “black African”, and whom I call – loosely speaking – the descendant of Niger-Congo-speaking peoples.
First, I will explain what it means to describe the Creator God as radically precedent. Then, I offer some considerations about human precedence, or the human past, and its relationship to this radical precedence. I propose that it is the primacy of this human precedence that is the keystone of “African identity”. On that basis, I lay out some tentative connections between this keystone and some of the cultural elements of “black Africa” laid out by Senghor, as well as the “human past” globally considered, in the light of Africa as the birthplace of humanity. Finally, I propose that Africa’s redemption, and perennial mission to the world, lies in accepting human precedence, but from within a primacy of radical precedence – a radical precedence elevated in the redemptive work of Christ, so that we are not just creatures, but sons of God. Moreover, the nature of anthropological precedence means that such a shift is, in fact, an elevation of all creation, “all flesh”. Africa’s redemption seems to be encapsulated in a particular way in these words: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
The radical precedence of God
To understand what it means to describe God as “radically precedent”, let us revisit a dimension, so to speak, of Polo’s “transcendental freedom” that I simply mentioned towards the end of Part I of this article:
[Union with God] is not [a union] of knowing alone. Even more radically, the union desired is one of love – of God’s accepting of the effusive giving that we are and are called to be, a giving that opens upwards and inwards in the Spirit, into the Son, and towards the Father. This “reaching upwards and inwards” is Polo’s “transcendental freedom”.
Let’s focus on the words in bold: “the effusive giving that we are”. Why does Polo speak of the human person not just as a “knowing”, but also as a “giving”? This has to do with the Thomistic notion we introduced in Part I: the real distinction between the “nominal” sense of being (what a thing is) and the “verbal” sense of being (that a thing is), or between the act of being (or esse) and essence. More concretely, it has to do with the human will, the seat of desire.
When we want something, we want the real thing, and not just an idea of it. A thirsty man doesn’t want to think water; he wants to drink it. Now, this might seem obvious – and it is. But “obvious” is quite distinct from “superficial”. When we consider the phenomenon more closely, it begins to look more complicated: if we only know “what” a reality is (in this case, that it is in some sense “good”), because the reality is not contained in our minds when we know it, then how can we want the real thing, and not just the mental object? That is, if our only possible reference to the real thing is a mental object rather than the reality itself (even if that object is “intentional”, i.e., even if it intrinsically points to or “intimates” reality), then how exactly do we want that which we do not know?
Now, recall that, precisely because we can somehow “notice” that a thing is, and not just know what it is, then there is a cognizant instance in us that corresponds to the esse of the thing and not just its essence. Recall also that this instance must also be as radical as esse, so that it is, in fact, the esse of the person. Thus, the human person is a knowing.
Something along the same lines can be said not just of the cognizant dimension of the human being, but also of his tendential dimension. In other words, since we desire reality itself, and not just the mental object that corresponds to it, then desire is better understood not as a tension towards that which we lack, but instead as an effusive affirmation of reality13 – in short, as an act of love. Indeed, using the word “love” sets the idea into relief: if we “desired” other people only so that they could fulfill some need that we have, then we are not truly desiring – loving – them, but only ourselves. This effusive affirmation of reality is, likewise, real, because it tends towards the real (and not the intentional) good. Such effusion, then, must stem from the act of being: the human person is radically an effusing, a giving.
However, that’s not the end of it. “Giving” seeks to be accepted, with an acceptance as radical as that giving is. But no rock or cloud or star can accept our giving; nor can any plant or animal radically accept our giving. And, while other human persons can give radical – personal – acceptance, that acceptance can never be complete, because, like we ourselves, they do not completely know the “who” that each person is. So, who can accept the giving that each of us is? Well, where does that “giving” come from? Certainly not from our parents, venerable though they may be: the non-material cannot emerge from the material. The giving that we are, then, both comes from and, ultimately, refers itself – constitutively – to God. God radically precedes us.
To be a person is to be a created giving that is both given, and destined to be accepted by, the Creator. But precisely because we are created by God, then God, too, must be Personal. Creation, then, is an effusive, generous act – an act of giving. Therefore, we are given to ourselves; not only are we radically a giving, but we are also (and, indeed, primarily) an accepting of ourselves from God. We radically, or constitutively, accept our being from the One who is our Origin. These considerations lay the groundwork for a more adequate understanding of the notions of “past” and “memory”.
The “past”: truncated gifts
One consideration that follows from what we have just said is this: if every one of us is radically a giving, then so are our ascendants – our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. However, to actually give to another, we must do so through our wills (concrete “effusions”, affirmations of the other), our intelligence, and, ultimately, through our bodies (e.g., words, movements) and through things (e.g., tools, flowers, rocks, etc.).14
Now then, our wills and intelligences, being non-material, are created “directly” by God. And since they are distinct from the personal act of being, then they pertain to the human essence. However, the human body is a different matter. The human body has its origins in two living cells: the sperm and the ovum. These cells, considered on their own, possess the same kind of life proper to the living cells of any animal. While the human sperm and the human ovum come from a human being, when we consider these cells in their existence outside the human body, we see that they have a life that is not the “life” of the human essence – otherwise, they could not exist outside of the human being. As a result, it is more accurate to say that, upon conception, the zygote is “taken up into”, and “invigorated by”, the human essence, which is itself constitutively dependent for its being on the personal act of being.15 For this reason, Polo refers to bodily life as “received life”.16 Received from whom? From our parents, evidently. And because, by its “essentialization”, the human body is to some extent “taken up” into the giving that the human person is, then our bodies are constitutively given, and constitutively accepted. This is so regardless of the intentions of the parties to the sexual act, and even in the absence of a sexual act: by virtue of its “essentialization”, the human body is a manifestation of the personal act of being, of personal giving; it is constitutively a gift. To use a phrase of the theologian of the body, St. John Paul II, the human body, as such, can only be properly understood when interpreted according to “the hermeneutics of gift”.17
Consequently, through our bodies, we are inducted into a second kind of precedence, one that has its roots in radical precedence: an anthropological precedence.
Now, because it is “essentialized”, the human body is distinct from all other material things. And to the extent that we induct external things into our giving through acts of will and the actions of our body, those things, too, are in some measure “essentialized”. No longer do they belong solely to the necessary unfolding of the ancient cosmos. They have become “of man”. They have become historical. They have become part of the human past. Here, we begin to see the full scope of anthropological precedence: it includes all the traces that man has left behind. And, qua essentialized, all these are gift, waiting to be accepted. Moreover, it is precisely in and through the body that we even have a past, that we are historical beings.
However, one final consideration is needed to round out our reflections thus far: mortality. There is something of a rift, a wound between the essence and the body – a wound left by the original sin to which Odero refers. At least in its present state, the human body is doomed to die. It is not completely essentialized. It does not completely share in the giving that the person is. Primarily for this reason, upon death, all the traces that we have left behind cease to be backed by the giving that we are. They remain ungrounded, neither identical to the bare stuff of the cosmos nor enlivened by real, effusive, verbal human be-ing. They are, in short, truncated gifts. As gifts, they are meant for acceptance, an acceptance that our very being demands to give, for we are an accepting; but, as truncated, they must be “taken up” once more into human persons. In a word, the past demands that we remember it.
“Memory”: towards the redemption of the past
We have already said that it is in and through the body that we even have a past. Now, we must add, it is because of the body that there can exist that kind of gift that the past is, that kind of gift that we, in turn, are meant to accept – that we must accept, unless we refuse to be the accepting that we are. Naturally, then, in a culture where life or vitality is cherished, as exists at least among the descendants of Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, and possibly some descendants of Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples, there will be a tendency to look back upon the past as a gift to be received. In other words, there will be an emphasis on memory. This is an important insight, seen partly in Senghor, and partly in John Mbiti, to whose thought Odero explicitly refers in Part I of “A Memory of Paradise”. In addition, precisely because the body inducts us into the past insofar as it is essentialized, then memory, while only possible because of the body, most properly refers to the interiority of man insofar as it is manifested in what is corporeal or material. This is why Odero’s correction of Senghor is so opportune.
The scope of this “African genius” is far greater than it might appear. To see why, consider that, in biological terms, all humans are members of the species Homo sapiens. Consider also that, as far as we can tell, Homo sapiens comes into being in 68,000 BC in the Horn of Africa. And finally, consider that Homo sapiens dwelt longest on African soil, and also that most Homo sapiens remained on the African continent, rather than migrating to other lands – it is because of this, for instance, that Africa exhibits the highest genetic diversity. These facts point to the following: not only does Africa seem to be home to cultures that emphasize memory because they emphasize vitality, but Africa is also the ultimate focal point for all memory, for all acceptance of the past that would be integral – that would be true to itself. In other words, if every person is bound to remember the past so as to take it up once more, then Africa is the site where human history achieves totality. To use the felicitous phrasing that the Latin gerundive form permits, Africa is prima memorianda, “the first [or earliest] one meant to be remembered”. In addition, insofar as her cultures bear, in the flesh, the marks of most Homo sapiens, then they are the living continuation of most of the human past, its living body developing and unfolding with the passage of time. Therefore, Africa not just is prima memorianda, but she always will be. And this is true not just of “Africa past”, but also of Africa present.
Thus, we draw closer to the true depth of the African genius that Odero has pointed us towards. But we are yet to arrive. We are yet to resolve the relationship between “memory” as an action, and an acceptance of radical precedence, or of anthropological precedence. To do so, it is opportune to dwell once more on the nature of the past, as “truncated gift”.
Insofar as the past is gift, it stemmed from the giving that concrete persons are – at this point, that much is clear. However, because the past is truncated, it is not actively “backed by human giving”, so that we cannot accept it as gift. Therefore, knowing the past is not the same as the profound memory we are referring to. “Memory as an act of the intelligence”, tout court, does not have ontological depth, pace Odero. And while we can accept our own past, including the wounds and griefs that others inflict on us, because our body is backed by a personal act of being, that is not the same as accepting that which preceded us.
So, can the past be remembered? Is Africa’s emphasis on memory futile? Not so! Recall that the giving that each person is, refers itself to God for His acceptance. The true meaning of the past, and the gift of the past, then, is hidden in God. For us to fully receive the past as the gift that it is, God Himself must accept it. This is what happened about two millennia ago in the Incarnation at Bethlehem, and it is what continues to happen in man’s relationship with God. And, indeed, so profound is God’s acceptance that all that it touches becomes gift. Then do we see not only all that happened to us, but also all that preceded us, as gift. “Felix culpa! O happy fault!”, the Church dares to proclaim of the sin of Adam. Or recall St. Josephine Bakhita, whom we recalled in Part I:
If I met the slave-merchants who kidnapped and tortured me, I would kneel down and kiss their hands. If what happened to me had never taken place, how could I become a Christian and a religious?
For this saint, the cruel Arab slave traders have become a blessing – their very hands are venerable. Yes, Africa is prima memorianda, but Bethlehem, Israel, the Jews, are, in their flesh, a certain memoria Redemptoris, memory of the Redeemer. And more importantly, the Church, the “Body of Christ”, sprung from His wounded side, is Memoria Redemptoris, with a capital “M”. She is the fulfilment of the Jews. She is the ultimate destiny of human history, which, to be gathered up before passing through Her gates, must continually pass by way of Africa.
But how is the act of memory related to this profound, radical acceptance? If the accepting that we are can only give rise to acceptance in the human essence and body, if “radical memory” can only occur as an action in the act of memory, then what do our considerations thus far add? Apart from making clearer the relationship between this act and “ontological memory”, a connection that Odero hinted at but (in our view) did not explain, we also see this: the act of memory of the past, to be what it is meant to be, must recall that it is ultimately from God that we receive the full meaning of the past, its full reality. Only standing in God (in Christ, in the Spirit), and trustingly accepting this gift from Him, will the past be a gift to us rather than a dead collection of details, or a somewhat intelligible story. Of course, for this to happen, we must, in fact, exercise acts of memory: we must investigate the past, piece it together, recall it, and transmit it. But this is not the consummation of memory. Memory is instead consummated in the redemption of history.
Thus, we catch a glimpse of what the “African genius” is called to be: as prima memorianda, it is through Africa’s memory – and the remembering of Africa – that the entirety of history is gathered up to face the Light that rises from among the Jews, the Son of Man. It is in and through Africa that the entire human race, past and present, becomes in a sense the Bride, awaiting the Bridegroom. Perhaps it would not be going too far to say that Africa’s enduring mission is expressed in these words of Scripture: “All flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Lk 3:6)
Cf. Apologia 17: 5-6: [5] … “Deus bonus et magnus” et “quod deus dederit” omnium vox est. [6] Iudicem quoque contestatur illum: “Deus videt” et “deo commendo” et “deus mihi reddet”. O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae! (emphasis added) (“God is great and good” and “Which may God give”, are the words on every lip. It bears witness, too, that God is judge, exclaiming, “God sees”, and “I commend myself to God”, and “God will repay me”. O testimony of the soul by nature Christian!) See the Latin text here, and an English translation here.
Of course, one must note the stark distinctions between (diverse forms of) Salafism (emphasizing return to the practices and beliefs of the Salaf al-Salih, “the Pious Predecessors/Forefathers”, that is, the first three generations of Muslims) on the one hand, and Sufism (the “mystical” dimension of Islam). At least at first glance, the former seems to be a totalizing vision and is currently involved in the conflicts ravaging the Sahel region. Sufism, which is the dominant expression of (Sunni) Islam in Africa, however, merits further consideration.
On this legalism, see Fioravanti, M. (2023; 1st ed. in Italian, 1995), Los derechos fundamentales. Apuntes de historia de las constituciones [Fundamental rights: Notes on the history of constitutions], Manuel Martínez Neira (trans.), Editorial Trotta, Madrid (link here).
See Lewis, M. D. (1962), “One hundred million Frenchmen: The ‘assimilation’ theory in French colonial policy”, Comparative Studies in History and Society 4(2), pp. 129-137 (link here).
Except where context implies otherwise, I use “man” to mean “human beings in general”. This usage is preferable to more “inclusive” alternatives. “Man and woman” is clumsy. “Humankind”, “humanity”, and “mankind” are abstractions, unlike “man”, which refers to humans in general, but in a concrete way – thus, it refers not to “existent human natures” but, instead, to concrete human beings. Because it is a departure from historical convention, using the term “woman” would call undue attention to the sexuality of the human being, which is not the primary focus of our considerations here. And finally, I prefer to use “person” to designate the personal act of being of the human being, as distinct from the human essence (with which it is always united) and the body; moreover, human beings are not the only personal beings. Therefore, “person” is either too narrow or too broad to refer to “human beings in general”.
See ibid., pp. 137-139; see also Mbembe, A. (2021), Out of the dark night: Essays on decolonization, Columbia University Press, New York (Chapter 2: “Disenclosure”).
Senghor, L. S. (1964 (orig., 1961)), On African socialism, Mercer Cook (trans.), Frederick A. Praeger (publisher), New York, pp. 72-73.
Most of these elements seem to have characterized the cultures of “black Africans” or, more precisely, Niger-Congo-speaking peoples, for almost six millennia. See Ehret, C. (2016 (2nd ed.); 1st ed., 2002). The civilizations of Africa. A history to 1800, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, pp. 68-69 (link here).
As an aside, it is worth mentioning that several of these beliefs resonate strongly with other articles by Odero here on The AfroDiscourse.
See, for instance, these articles by Robert Odero on The AfroDiscourse on language, the woman, and ancestor veneration.
The ideas in this section come from reflection on sections of the following works:
Polo, L. (2007), Evidencia y realidad en Descartes (3rd ed.; 1st ed., 1963), Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S. A., Navarra (link here).
Polo, L. (2010, 3ª ed.; 1ª ed.: 2003). Antropología trascendental. Tomo II: La esencia de la persona humana, Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, S. A., Navarra (see here for Vol. I and II in a single volume).
Polo, L. (2015), Estudios de filosofía moderna y contemporánea. Obras Completas de Leonardo Polo, XXIV, Juan A. García González (ed.), EUNSA, Pamplona (Chapters 1 and 8) (link here).
Vargas, A. I. (2017), Genealogía del miedo: un studio antropológico de la modernidad desde Leonardo Polo, Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, S.A., Navarra (link here).
Kreeft, P. (2012), Socrates meets Hume: The father of philosophy meets the father of modern skepticism, Ignatius Press, San Francisco (contains excerpts from David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding) (link here).
Kreeft, P. (2012), Socrates meets Kant: The father of philosophy meets his most influential modern child, Ignatius Press, San Francisco (contains fragments of Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason) (link here).
DC Schindler expresses something like this effusion when, in his reflections on Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus caritas est, he describes the love of God – charity – as perfect eros and perfect agape, that is, a love that is “as perfectly full of self as can be conceived”, and at the same time, that is “wholly generous”. The final corollary he draws from his reflections seems to express that love is most appropriately described as an “effusing”:
God is perfect agape because he is perfect eros, and this is because God is, in a word, the perfection of love in its totality.
See Schindler, D. C. (2006), “The redemption of eros: Philosophical reflections on Benedict XVI’s first encyclical”, Communio 33 (3), pp. 375-399.
Nevertheless, we feel compelled to add that Leonardo Polo’s threefold structure of love – accepting, giving, and gift – leads us yet further into the mystery of the Trinitarian God: human accepting makes reference to God the Son, “through whom all things are created”; human giving “images” God the Father, so to speak; and the human gift, which proceeds from the accepting-giving that we are, is a (real) reflection of the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
For this reason, Polo says that, in the human person, accepting and giving are on the level of the personal act of being, but the gift is on the level of the human essence. However, he adds that this is not so in God, in whom the Gift is a distinct Person: the Holy Spirit. In addition, the fact that we give through our bodies and through things explains those words of Josef Pieper in his rightly famous 1992 essay on love, if we understand love insofar as it is a “concrete effusion”, an act of the will, rather than the totality of love in its threefold structure:
“Love is the prime gift. Whatever else is freely given to us becomes a gift only through love.”
Pieper, J. (1997), Faith, Hope, Love, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, p. 139.
This distinction between the human essence and the human body does not mean that they are two diverse and independent entities somehow sharing the same “space”. Upon conception, the body is “essentialized”, thereby becoming “of” a concrete human being. Nevertheless, they are distinct; they are not identical. As an aside, just such a distinction seems to be visible in the second account of creation in Genesis: “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Gen 2:7)
See Polo, L., Antropología trascendental, Tomo II, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
Of course, engaging in the sexual act with intentions other than “intentions of gift” is problematic – inter alia, this means a rejection of the meaning of the body, a closure of one’s openness to being (to the reality of the body), and therefore, a renunciation of the giving that one is, a refusal to accept oneself from God, a “turning away” from God. But those intentions do not alter the constitutive meaning of the human body and its natural operations, including those that have to do with the generation of progeny.