AN AFRICAN UNDERSTANDING OF A COMMON HOME

In Africa the common home can only be understood in terms of community, relationship, and belonging. In order to be realistic and concrete, we need to factor in the African concept of family that will help us have a sense of belonging and contribution towards building this “common home.” As we have mentioned in the contextualized perspective of Common home, the same thread runs through from Pope Francis’ understanding of family. Pope Francis proposes the paradigm shift and personal insights and compressive approach to ecology and environment as a “common home”. It is also good that we slot in the African understanding of family amidst ecological and environment crisis that has befallen humanity. African continent is at the receiving end of this crisis, Africa has to wake up. The lying giant needs to wake up to roar again to claim its space at the international platform. The environmental crisis that is affecting the globe has to be viewed from the localized altitude so as to see the bigger panoramic picture of this ecological crisis. African families are crawling on their knees due to colonial hangovers, political poor leadership, terrorism, poverty, poor governance and so forth. The question is how can the African perspective help us understands Pope Francis’s encyclical letter laudato Si’ in the context of African families? The challenge that is first before us is that in Africa the “common home” has a definition that is concretized by place, region, nationality, culture, ideology and traditional believes. In this section our focus will be more on what unites Africans than what divides them. Fact is if the enemy attacks and finds the household in disorder, he will run over the homestead but if he gets the homestead guarded and its members awakened, they will be able to repel off the enemy. Truth is African families are wounded, and disengaged from the global scene. Others in the global scene have turned African continent into a dumping site for western waste, cheap market. Right now the African continent is almost being auctioned by the invasion of china. How can African families, Christians, churches come together to face these invading enemies who are raping Africa off her dignity and morals due to technological advancements? Oborji in his discourse builds clearly on this when delves into the problems which he basis it on cultural and political undertones. He argues that add religious sentiments to them, and there you will witness out blown phenomenon which are simply meant to serve the above goals.This according to Oborji categories it as some of the exaggerated ethnicity if these factors are not well addressed, they will continue to frustrate the on-going work of evangelization and the church formation on the continent, because this is the real cancer that is eating into ecclesial and civil communities. In Africa when we talk about family, it’s goes beyond the western understanding of family. There are many modern changes in the definition of family that the traditional understanding seems discarded. In this part of the thesis, we want to focus on African meaning of extended family that incorporates all as a clan. Most Africans put a lot of emphasis on the brotherhood where there is an amplified sense of family. According to Oborji he stresses that if we have a sense of development in Africa, the language should be that of deepening the relationships among Africans of different ethnic groups living in the same community and nation and between them a people of other religions in the same society of relationship and pluralistic society. The African families have to get their places in the “common home” that Pope Francis is building on. We need to think internationally but also act locally within this common home. African families can get their roles and responsibilities in the common home, but not as spectators or passive fellows, but activity persons in moving the ecological agenda and finding solutions of these ecological crises. These big families in Africa ought to forge the way forwards, not only to wait to be given handouts but being protagonists of transformation. African families need to come up with local bred solutions to their challenges. Ecology seems not be something on the priority list because of what Oborji calls laziness. African families are becoming a burden to themselves, unless they get back to the root of Ubuntu (African ethics), Ujamaa (oneness) and Umanna,(extended family system) Undungu (brotherhood), concepts that real define who Africans are in on a global stage. Oborji’s concept of family is that of which each person is born within an extended family. One has to have a sense of belong. He argues that no one falls from a tree and finds himself automatically in some realities, he quotes Cardinal Arinze on what an extended family is and what it is composed of: African are at home both in the nuclear family and in the extended family. The sense of family belongingness is rather strong. Many African languages have the same word for brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, the same word for grandfathers and uncles, and sometimes even the same name for fathers and masters. The sense of family belongingness pervades all these scales on the genealogical ladder. We all live in the community and this has to help us to build a spirit of working together towards a united front with collaborative global outlook. All this is towards protecting and safeguarding the “common Home” which Pope Francis proposes in the encyclical letter. With the African family model of family as Church, we should be in good position of understanding Laudato Si’ not like any other document but as a call to conversion and reawakening from our long slumber to care of this common home. As Oborji reminds us, that we are sons and daughters of the soil entrusted to carry the torch mantle that has to lead us towards environmental care and protection. This re-awaking has to get us to re-educating ourselves and our people. It’s through re-educating ourselves in new ideals that we can rightly redefine and rebrand our theology in understanding an African concept of family in her resilience in the contemporary changing cosmos. This pedagogy should be based on self-awareness and search for new paradigm shifts of identity amidst the plurality of ideas and religions in this big “common home” Oborji thus states: The stress should be on togetherness, communion, respect for traditions and unquestionable acceptance of what the ancestors have practiced, sectioned and established as the way things are done for maintaining the relationships. In this context environmental and ecological relatedness and co-existence. Nobody should exploit the other or engage in communal strife to endanger the common world amidst the tribal conflicts and civil wars, for they are alien to the practice in traditional African communities and cultures.