RELIGION AND HUMAN VALUES : AN INQUISITION OF THE AFRO-CENTRIC IMPERATIVE .
Contemporary debates by scholars on the relevance or otherwise of African values system and thought process had further opened the floodgate of the ambivalence between those scholars seeking to define African values and morality within the parameters of a conventionalized Western religious epistemological hegemony, thereby accentuating the superiority of Western values. On the other side of the debate are scholars pursuing an “Africanist” explanation which embraces an authentic mode of African knowledge construction of human values and morality. The objective of this paper is to examine the Afro-centric imperative of the African thought process in the current moral discourse, in order to extrapolate an endorsement which will grant space for a hybrid of moral reconstructions between Christianity and African indigenous religion and thought process. This study is cached within the theoretical framework of the Afro-centric Cultural Distinctive Paradigm (ACDP) which encapsulates African indigenous religion and human values. However, within the grindstone of spotlighting African human values, is the inevitable project of decolonization. This paper therefore explores the task of decolonizing African thought against the backdrop of the ontological normative dialectics of superiority and inferiority. This paper argues against the superiority of Western thought and values over African values. In order to argue for this conclusion, this discourse finds it expedient to denude in more precise terms, some positive human values of African thought process; an investigation that leads to the interplay between the decolonization of African thought and the decolonization of the African intellectual landscape. This paper disturbs and unpacks the colonial project and calls to contestation Western hegemony and the continuous dominance of Western thought even amongst African scholars (theologians and philosophers). This paper concludes by asserting that the differences that exist between African religious human values and western values must not necessarily have normative consequences; as things can be different without having to be placed within a normative hierarchy. The contention that African values should be of less worth than Western values is therefore repudiated. The Paper advances the understanding of religion and human values from the perspective of African indigenous worldview. The recommendation is that there should be an integrated approach to resolving the current crises of human values.
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