Written By | Evan Sande Ndahura
The writer, Evan Sande Ndahura
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CULTURE
There was a time in Africa when culture was not an accessory to life but its very spine. The beauty of African traditional culture did not reside only in royal regalia, kingship, or the splendour of coronations. Its deepest strength was woven into everyday relationships—how people greeted one another, how elders corrected the young, how communities mourned, celebrated, prayed, and loved together. Culture was the grammar of African life.
African culture was never merely about tribes, clans, taboos, or rituals. Its most powerful expression was found in communal moments: give-aways, weddings, initiation ceremonies, harvest celebrations, and the coronation of kings and chiefs. These were not events; they were living theatres of identity. To be invited was an honour. To attend was to belong. To dance was to remember who you were.
At such gatherings, drums spoke before mouths could open. Feet answered rhythms older than memory. One prayed that the dancers would never tire, because as long as the dance continued, the community itself felt eternal.
Long before modern constitutions and imported political systems, African societies were held together by culture. Ubuntu among the Bantu—“I am because we are”—was not a slogan but a lived philosophy. Julius Nyerere reminded us that African traditional society “did not place the individual against the community; it saw the individual as an integral part of it.” Sharing was not charity; it was duty. Leadership was not accumulation; it was service.
Cheikh Anta Diop argued that African civilisations possessed deep moral and cultural coherence long before colonial disruption. Likewise, Frantz Fanon warned that when a people abandon their culture, they risk losing the psychological foundation of their freedom. Culture was Africa’s moral compass.
Traditional dances were not entertainment alone; they were archives of history.
These dances made weddings unforgettable, give-aways sacred, and coronations divine. They bound generations together. A child who danced knew where they came from.
With the coming of Western culture—backed by colonial domination, missionary contempt for African traditions, and later globalised consumerism—Africa began to trade its drum for machines. Music became digitised, auto-tuned, and detached from community. Dance shifted from collective memory to individual performance. What once healed now merely entertains.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o warned that cultural domination begins with the destruction of indigenous languages, arts, and narratives. Once Africans began to see their dances as “primitive” and foreign music as “modern,” the rupture had begun. We lost not only beauty but also identity and pride.
Today, only a few African societies that have preserved their traditional leaders and institutions still retain this cultural richness. When one attends such ceremonies and compares them to functions dominated entirely by Western music, one feels an internal bleeding—a grief for what has been lost.
Chinua Achebe’s prophetic words echo painfully today: “Things fall apart when the centre cannot hold.” Achebe reminded us that “Mother is supreme,” meaning roots, origins, and culture are sacred. Africa lost its centre when it abandoned its cultural grounding. Our leaders forgot the mother.
The consequences are visible: political turmoil, coups, corruption, dictatorship, and bad governance. These are not merely political failures; they are cultural bankruptcies. Traditional African societies emphasised accountability, communal shame, respect for elders, and moral leadership. Today, greed has replaced generosity, envy has replaced unity, tribalism has replaced kinship, and violence has replaced dialogue.
Africa erred when it:
As Kwame Nkrumah observed, political independence without cultural independence is hollow.
Africa’s heritage can still be reclaimed:
As Fanon urged, each generation must discover its mission and fulfil it—or betray it.
Africa does not need to imitate in order to progress. It needs to remember. The drum must speak again. The dance must return to the centre. Culture must once again be the bond that ties African society together. Only then can young generations rise with confidence, dignity, and purpose.
About the writer
Sande Evan Ndahura is an African socio-political and cultural writer, poet, and public intellectual whose work passionately interrogates Africa’s loss of identity and the urgent need for cultural restoration. His writings span newspaper columns, political commentaries, cultural essays, and reflective poetry exploring African heritage, leadership, governance, morality, and post-colonial identity.
Ndahura consistently challenges African leaders and intellectuals to rethink development beyond economics, arguing that culture is the true foundation of sustainable governance. His poems mourn the erosion of African values while calling for a renaissance rooted in tradition, dignity, and communal responsibility.
Influenced by Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, and Cheikh Anta Diop, Ndahura’s work is marked by deep nostalgia for Africa’s moral past and an unyielding hope for its rebirth.
For Ndahura, culture is not memory—it is mission.
