The Riddles of Africa folk Souls: Road to National Identity & Values

By Max O. Thompson-Eleogu

About the Book
We are living in a period where the old age is dying, and the new age is not yet born. We must ask ourselves these questions. What is an authentic lifestyle? What is the proper social order? These are significant questions, and as crucial as they are, they need answers and answers that are true. Rather, the consensus is that these answers are beyond the apprehension of Africans. Other questions covered in this book are: What is the human soul? Why do we suffer from the disintegration of the soul? Are we truly free or dependent on the iron rule of the machine world? What is cosmic thought and its relation to human soul? What is the problem of intuitive flash and the myth of Western modernity?
What is national identity and values? These questions have their root in the symptom of disrupted historical period that plagued the world and the entire continent of Africa. The plague obliterated our ways of life, and it was replaced with a machine world which denied us of the mysteries of the living earth and the human soul. Currently, this plague continues to haunt us because post-colonial African states were born out of this plague. In this book, I believed that the problem of Africa could be resolved in placing it in a wider context of world historical consciousness because Africa is a part of the world and its crisis.

About the Author
Max O. Thompson-Eleogu is a native Nigerian, who lives and was schooled in the United States of America, for both his undergraduate program and graduate program. He authored the book AFRICA---THE ROAD TO AFRO-MODERNITY. He is a Distinguished Fellow and founder of NobbleAfriq Institute, a select and innovative think-tank, whose trajectory is the transformation of African politics and its people. He was trained as a philosopher with an unwavering interest in African philosophy, African American philosophy and Continental philosophy. His other interests include African Mysticism and Spiritualism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886838824

Book preview

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the souls of African slaves that died on their unwishful voyage to America. Their corpses were thrown to wild animals in the ocean to be feasted on and devoured. But their souls remained intact because they hold the riddles of the soul.

INTRODUCTION

This book covers the most misunderstood questions of our age: What is the riddle of African soul? And what is national identity and values? These are the three categories that dominated the narrative of this book, also the contending issues in the post- independence Africa that aroused conflicts of different proportions: from the civil wars, political riots, killing of innocent citizens, collision of tribes against one another, etc. I propose to survey the hindrances preventing us from getting to peaceful solutions on these issues. In the year 1993, I was sworn in as an American citizen and I equally retained my Nigerian citizenship, which changed my status to a dual citizenship. Now, I am proud to make the two countries my home. My status as both Nigerian and American changed my perspective on what it means to be an American and a Nigerian. Citizenship of a country is not based on blood ties, common language or religion. These are collective identities rooted on ethnic origins, objective characteristics that identifies the individual relation to the collective identities. However, the core of citizenship is national identity or nationality. we cannot confuse it with so called collective identities., such as, class, gender, race; they might overlap with national identity, but they rarely succeed in undermining its hold. National identity is a creative act or intuitive thinking as the product of the universal soul. The folk soul is linked to the universal soul; it’s both universal and culturally specific phenomenon. What is intuitive thinking? Intuitive thinking is the capacity of the folk soul to transform the meaning of an object without altering its physical composition. For example, the Nigerian flag is made of piece of green and white clothes, but share meaning beyond the piece of clothes; however, the meaning was not there initially, but through cognitive effort and general consensus the meaning emerges. Therefore, the green symbolizes agricultural land while the white symbolizes peace. National identity or nationality is not natural phenomenon or objective qualities, such as, the color of your eyes, color of your skin. It is not an ethnic origin rooted in a primordial ancestors.

Below are two exacts reported in the early years of Nigeria’s amalgamation. Today, we are still been haunted by the ghost of naturalness of objective and subjective qualities. I referred to them as scientific approach to understanding humans and human values.

Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no Nigerians in the same sense there are English, Welsh or French. The word Nigeria is a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria from those who do not.

Another author wrote as follows:

Since 1914 the British Government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigeria people themselves are historical different in their backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs and do not show themselves any sign of willingness to unite. Nigeria unity is only a British intention for the country.

I chose to keep the identities of the authors of these exacts anonymous and focus on the developments this book is aiming to achieve. What is the aim of this book? It points to the possibility of understanding the world and a new world view which is a coalescence of folk soul and scientific sustainable way of life; that could guide twenty-first century African citizens to democracy.

In Africa, we are trapped in a transition age, while the old age is dying, and the new age is not yet born. This book is written for us to begin our quest for positive solutions and not rely on outside experts or technocratic faiths for solutions. It’s now obvious that we can no longer search for our human identity and national identity out of the old world of the past. Our old tribal world and ancestral world are not lost but outgrown. As such, our human identity, national identity and the meaning of who we are cannot be found; rather, they are to be created and achieved. Through this process of creation and achievement, we ask ourselves the following questions: What is authentic lifestyle? What is the proper social order? These are significant questions, as crucial as they are, need answers and answers which are true. Rather the consensus is that these answers are beyond the apprehension of Africans. In fact, they will never and never will be achieved. Why is it so? Because of our hesitant effort to proceed forward to a new age, rather, we settled on the exploration of the debris of scientific discoveries and disregarded the rich phenomena of our unconsciousness soul. What are the riddles of African soul? The soul as utilized in this book is not an abstract entity from generalization. How do we resolve the enigma of the soul? The enigma of the soul could be resolved by understanding both the human and cosmic proportion of the soul. It included the soul of the anguished African slaves forced into the slave boat against their will. Their bodies were feasted by sharks in the high sea. We ought to reconcile with these souls before we could advance to the next level of human development. I also began this book by understanding the nature and function of the soul, its unconsciousness and its relation to consciousness soul. After the advent of scientific revolution, only a part of the psyche was experienced by our everyday consciousness whereas most of the soul life is shrouded in the darkness of the unconsciousness. The common thread that runs through this book is about the riddles of the soul, the depth of our consciousness and how it would help us to resolve contemporary notorious problems of Africa, most especially National Identity and values.

Beginning with the chapter one, the disintegrated soul. The problem of Africa is the misconception of the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious soul. Let me put it right, the hegemony of scientific approach to the world and non-scientific approach, known as intuitive thinking. Throughout the period of slavery and colonialism, we abandoned the unconscious aspect of the soul as illusory and primitive. We let go the foundation laid down by our ancestors. To further our depth of understanding into the riddles of Africa’s soul, we ought to understand that the soul as a phenomenon is the foundation of existence. It has both culturally specific meaning and universal meaning. What follows here is a brief summary of the world obstacles that inhibited the progress and growth of Africa. We must understand these issues within the wider context of the world history because Africa is part of the world. Only within the world history can we be able to understand what it means to be an African today.

Second, it is about the people of Africa. The meaning of a process is represented by the inner being which the process manifest. The denial of any such inner being to the universe as machine leads inevitably to the denial of it to human beings. People Matter(s), Remaking the African societies through the remaking of the people. Remaking the people is to return them back to their origin in nature and cultural-spiritual realm for them to comprehend the path of the evolution of the soul. If people and their origin are ignored, for example, in respect to the contemporary African people, hence forth, we shall end up constructing all dubious forms of metaphysical realism as the basis for politics and society, which in turn, will result to chaos and disintegrated soul.

Third among the universal obstacles are the freedom and the necessity of the will. Are we truly free or dependent on the iron rules of the mechanical world view of the science? This problematic question was seriously challenged from antiquity in the period of the atomist to the present age of science. We are confronted with the conflict of the evolution of the soul and the deterministic rules of the mechanical universe. The problem of Africa had its root in a symptom of disrupted historical period that plagued the world and the entire continent of Africa. The plague obliterated our way of life and denied the mysteries of the living earth. In short, it is a mechanical and scientific approach to life in general. The consequences of this plague were loss of our essential nature of our human soul, such Ideals as, human freedom, intuitive thinking, and our human identity. Post-independence African states were born out of this plague. The search for sane soul began in the ‘60s, a turbulent period of massive revolt against the plague which later brought about a new sensibility in human unconsciousness. The collapse of the European ideology and hegemony. America launched the first astronauts to the moon. Revolutions and counter cultural demonstrations against old cultural ideals, riots escalated in the American streets and the university campuses. The Vietnam War consumed the lives of young men and women in the battle fields, civil rights march and demonstration for equal justice by the African Americans. The tension of the cold war between the America and Soviet Union, which divided the world into two ideological halves. Finally, the European deemed it necessary and convinced that the Africans had grown into self-consciousness as human beings, as such, they are entitled to rule themselves and the post-colonial African states were born.

In chapter two, the quest to understand the unconscious nature of the soul took a much wider direction which is the context of cosmic thought and human being. Cosmic thought is the soul, and the soul is cosmic thought. This chapter examined the different aspects of cosmic thought within its historic moments and its relation to human beings. In the previous chapter, I began with puzzling big questions. The problems created by mechanical world view. For us to understand, the broad notion of the soul and how to apply this knowledge in the healing of African culture and change the narrative of human conditions. Resentment among different tribes and among people within the same nation-state. In order to answer this question, what is cosmic thought? The cosmic thought was first conceived by a pre-Socratic philosopher known as Heraclitus of Ephesus; he called it the Logos, or the word. In the first chapter of St. John’s gospel, he wrote, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. The word as was used here is the logos and it is not in the literary sense of our everyday language. The logos is the cosmic thought, the archetype of creation. Heraclitus and St. John were both describing the fundamental nature of creation which is the Logos or the Word. The logos through which every creation emerged and continues to evolve. Steiner said that different aspects of our human nature relate to the cosmos in a great variety of ways, and their evolution is linked to that of cosmos. By considering the cosmic evolution, we gain insight into deeper secrets of our human make up.

The secrets we discovered in the innovative research of the twentieth century, which included depth psychologists and theoretical physicists. Depth psychology was founded by Sigmund Freud. Beginning with the project of Barbara Lovett Cline’s, Men Who Made the New Physics. The forward was written by Silvan Schweber, "the advance of the past thirty years in our understanding of the composition of matter at the subnuclear level constitute one of