Methodology: Foucauldian genealogy
4.3. Seven principles for doing discourse analysis
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these are part of the one family. The family is one but extended.”14 Marriage is taken as a good and serious thing in the sense that it is a covenant between two (extended) families, kindred and villages. The extended family system is very much alive in contemporary Africa inspite of the wave the Western value system is making. It is a conflict-and-crisis-resolution ocean. “Living together” and the sense of “community of brothers and sisters” are the basis of, and the expression of, the extended family system in Africa.
The rationale behind it is that balance of kinship relations, seen as essential to the ideal balance with nature that was itself the material guarantee of survival, called for specific conduct. It should be pointed out that the most admired value in the traditional African economic arrangement is the social security or economic insurance guaranteed by the social organization typified by extended family system. The security is not just for the old age, but also for the poor and disadvantaged members of the family. In other words, the comforting family atmosphere is provided by the extended family system. It is a system that ultimately anchored and still rests on the philosophy of “live-and-let-live”. It is a principle which defines rights and duties, responsibilities and obligations towards the less fortunate, those incapacitated in one way or another. In essence, extended family is a veritable instrument in community continuity and stability. E.A. Ruch and K.C Anyanwu shows that not only the living members of a family or a village are joined together in a community by a language of
„we‟ and a feeling of „we‟, but also those who have passed away and who are present as spirits. They state that:
The whole African society, living and living-dead, is a living network of relations almost like that between the various parts of an organism. When one part of the body is sick the whole body is affected. When one member of a family or clan is honoured or successful, the whole group rejoices and shares in the glory, not only psychologically (as one would rejoice when the local soccer team has won a match), but ontologically: each member of the group is really part of the honor.15
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African communalism sees life as a continuum; “this is why the great family is not only made up of the living, but of the dead and future generations. The link of communication is maintained and reinforced through rituals which maintain the cosmological equilibrium.”16 Indeed, African communalism is life in the extended family carried out at the community level. Bearing in mind that the community is an aggregate of the extended families coming together to form a community. “The close relation between life in the family and life in the community is such that one cannot exist without the other and the solidarity to one is solidarity to other.”17 In African communalism:
Communalism is the extended family writ larger. Due to its central concern on „man‟ not as discrete entity but as a being-in-relation-to-others, it is often characterized as African humanism or African brotherhood as Julius Nyerere would like to call it. Basic to this brotherhood is
„feeling-involved-with-others‟ analogous to and yet distinct from Heideggerian concept of man as a „being-with‟.18
African is first and foremost a member of his family, the extended family, the community and his society in that order before being an individual. “Members of the community cultivate an attitude of mind which regards all as one and stresses that members belong to one big family.
There is a metaphysical belief in the superiority of claims of the family and the community over the individual...”19 What remains true of the communalist ideas is that among the members of the extended families and villages in traditional African societies mutual help was and is a widespread trait of social life. It could be formulated best in a negative way, namely that a member of a family or a village who is in great existential difficulties will not be left alone. Somebody will be there to help or to show a way out of the predicament. And with regard to the different forms of government it can be said that all of them are measured in terms of whether they function for the well-being of the people in the long run. From extended
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family system, one can deduct wider practice of individual communal relationship in terms of communalism.