Quarterly Bulletin

 Culture of a people is always changing with the generations of persons in the community. Yet there are some cultural values like sharing, hospitality, respect that are so important to maintain for they really help the community to live well in harmony. Collins Moonga from St. Dominic’s Major Seminary asserts that some aspects of culture are good and even though culture is dynamic, such good values should be maintained

WHAT IS CULTURE

A famous saying goes “no person is an island.” This phrase lays great truth and wisdom. This phrase simply defines part of the nature of humanity, the person, as a social being. Every time one is dealing with the topic of culture, it simply means we are looking at the person as a social being. In culture, we deal with everything that human beings collectively do, think, make and say anywhere in a space or time. Culture to a person is like a software to a computer. A computer cannot be of any use without a software programme. In the same way, culture embodies what it means to be human. So it is wrong to point at someone and say such a one has no culture or is not cultured or to say that race has no culture.

Everyone has a culture. It is only that sometimes we have different cultures. What is culture then? There is no conventional definition of culture and so many people have defined culture differently. In the words of  John S. Mbiti, the word culture covers many things, such as the way people live, behave and act, and their physical as well as their intellectual achievements. Culture, he says, shows itself in art and literature, dance, music and drama, in the style of building houses and of people’s clothing in social organisation and political systems, in religion, ethics, morals and philosophy, in the customs and laws and economic life. Culture in short covers every aspect of a shared human life because it is collective. You cannot as an individual talk of having culture. There is a way people who live together are expected to behave towards one another.

THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE

These cultural values that are possessed by a particular community or society influences our way of perception of the whole creation. For example, in our indigenous Zambian culture, hospitality was a value that affected our way of interaction and relation at every level. This is the value that made Zambians show readiness to receive strangers kindly without any expectation of reward. It was such a value that made us maintain larger extended families. No wonder we had no phenomena of street kids because everyone at least belonged to some family even after one lost all the members of your first family (nuclear). It is this same value that made us welcome even those that came from across our boarders like the missionaries who brought us the Good News of our salvation or later on our colonial masters, and many of our brothers and sisters of other races apart from ours. It is such cultural values that influenced the ideologies of “One Zambia, One Nation.”

Sharing was a value in the Zambian culture. I remember when I was growing up we had a backyard garden where we could grow vegetables and other crops for home use. Whenever the crops were ready for consumption, my mother  would  pluck  some  and share with all our immediate neighbours on the first day of harvest without waiting to be asked for some. Even when my mother went out to the village, maybe for a funeral or something else, she would always come back with food stuffs given to her by the people she would have visited. On arrival, she would share, whatever she brought, with the neighbours, no matter how small the quantities. This also happened to us when one of our neighbours went visiting; we received something on their arrival. Sharing was not done when one had things in abundance. Even those seen as poor in the neighbourhood had something to share at some point. This consolidated the relationships in the village.

The other cultural value among Zambians was respect for the elders of the community. Every person who was older than you in the community had to be respected, even a stranger. As a young member of the community I could be sent by any elder even when we were not related to such a one. This relation had a dual relation: the young respected the elder but the elder also had the duty to provide for the young ones. That is why when an elderly person found the young ones fighting it was his or her duty to resolve the fight by separating the ones fighting. These seemed like small gestures but they added value to the life in the community.

A DYNAMIC CULTURE

Now one of the attributes of culture is that culture is dynamic, it is in a state of continuous change, and it is not static. The way we perceived these cultural values yesterday is different from today. Some good cultural values have been manipulated to suit certain individual’s interests. For example, those in political leadership of our country in a way have manipulated the value of respect to mean being on their side all the time. Anyone who expresses a different opinion is being disrespectful to authority. Sometimes however people have to give  up  some  of  their  way  of life in order to respond to the situation presented. It is undisputed that it is the nature of things that everything is constantly changing. Let us borrow from the philosophy of Heraclitus. Contributing to the problem of reality, he said that all things are in flux. He expressed this concept by saying that you cannot step twice in the same river.

The same thing can be said about our culture, we cannot avoid its nature of being dynamic. But we can deliberately choose to preserve some of the key cultural values of our society if we are to retain the identity as a nation. For instance, we can retain one aspect of our way of life that will give us identity; it could be our working culture, dressing, eating, music, language, respect or hospitality.

KEEPING THE GOOD THINGS IN CULTURE

Charles Darwin in his theory of evolution about survival of the strong and extinction of the weak used the phrase “natural selection.” He said that over millions of years of time all living creatures on the planet arose by gradual modification from a common ancestor. Now this so called descent with modification happened through a process of natural selection in direct comparison to methods of plant and animal breeders. He said when someone wants to have a sheep that produces better and larger amounts of wool, or corn that tastes sweeter, then selective breeding is employed. In this way, the rancher or farmer encourages those animals or plants that have the desired features to reproduce and prevents those without these features from reproducing offspring. Darwin called this artificial selection and then argued that, in nature, the same kind of thing happens. This can be applied in preserving our culture, at the same time moving with time.

So, we can deliberately employ some artificial selection to our culture so that we maintain a strong cultural value system as a society. This will help us fight certain vices that are slowly eroding our cultural value system in the name of modernity – vices such as having street kids, being dishonest at work places, corruption, defilements, tribalism, culture of insults and many others. This is not to say our society was totally free from such vices at an earlier time. But the rate at which these are happening now is too high and slowly becoming culturally acceptable in our nation. And this is not good for our future.

Collins Moonga
St. Dominic’s Major Seminary
Lusaka, Zambia