INTEGRATING KABALA: AN IMPERATIVE FOR COLLECTIVE DESTINY OF IGBO AFRICANS

Abstract

The clarion call for Igbo Africans to go back to the primary cell of their existence, being-in-the-world, is gaining cogency especially in this epoch that is fraught with competitive cultures, mass cultures, that are destined to soak away the values that are inherent in the ones already enfeebled by imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism and globalization. The tardiness of African minds to render opaque their docile nature to foreign values, technology and science which are triadic factors that constitute the contents of globalization, is a serious source of worry to Africans, especially in the world that seeks new values and relevance in the new culture of globalization. It is more worrisome, in fact unacceptable, to see Africans deeply involved in activities or passivities that are capable of undermining or allowing ultimately the erosion of remnant African values which will tend to de-globalize them by gradually making themselves irrelevant and better placed in the dustbin of history. This paper is intended to employ the fact of history to remind Africans that they were once in some historical epochs regarded as the cradle of world’s civilization. It becomes disheartening, a bit more frustrating, to remember that Africans lost their grip of position the moment they changed their tools for foreign ones, abandoned their gods for strange gods. These losses and abandonment made Africans to romance with false ideologies. This paper is also intended to suggest ways to deliver Africans out of the consequences of these deadening ideologies, culture of irrelevance and dilatoriness to adopt a unique lineamenta, and articulate philosophy. This paper, however, recommends an unavoidable path to trod and challenge the world as a people who are destined to raise the ‘hope of Israel and its deliverer in the days of trial’. This study is bent to discover the ‘thread of Aryanna’, without which the Igbo Africans cannot adopt a true culture of general character, harmonize their philosophies, science and technologies that are disconnected and disjointed. That thread of Aryanna is found in African Metaphysics – Igbo African Kabala.