AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE CONTEMPORARINESS OF AFRICAN CULTURAL IDENTITIES

The African quests for self-definition, self-recognition and self-participation in the midst of other cultural and racial identities have been based on their contemporary demands for integral values of their freedom and the sense of African Sustainable Development (ASD) through the promotion of African Cultural Identities (ACIs). The problem inherent in this quest, especially in our contemporary time, has been linked with some difficulties on the part of the Africans themselves, through the institutionalization of sustained intense poverty, corruption, electoral malpractices, ethnic and religious insurgences and the mismanagement of human and natural resources. These strives of our existence are appearing as way of life, and then, defeating the traditional values of ACIs that make our personality to remain unique in the faces of the community of nations. Indeed, the challenges or problems of change which this implies the revisitation of values of ACIs as a mean of demanding the employment of African philosophy as a panacea. Therefore, the paper recognized that the tenets of the African philosophy require that the Africans, the values of their Blackness as their identity, maintain two mutually supportive faces of the truth and trust, through the examination of their past with a view to discovering aspects of it that are useful for collective contemporary existence as a people by preserving ACIs in modelling of our courses of ASD.

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