Introduction
Serie McDougal III, PhD
Karenga (2002) explains that according to the Kawaida paradigm, culture
must be used as a resource for meeting present challenges and not as a mere reference
of dates and events. In each issue of the Imhotep Journal, the student authors consult
African culture to seek answers and solutions to present questions and problems
that face people of African descent. The present issue of the Imhotep Journal is
dedicated to exploring and explaining the different African healing traditions and
methodologies for maintaining collective well-being. The objective is to identify
diversity among African healing approaches and unity amidst diversity. Cultural
unity is a prerequisite for all other forms of sustained political movement for a people;
it is a source of power. Protruding from the seabed of humanity, beneath the tips of
its iceberg like structure, it represents the mostly invisible force that stabilizes, unites
and guides the thought and behavior of a people. Even African peoples’ experience
with slavery and other forms of colonization have taught the painfully acquired lesson
that attacks on culture represent the most longlasting and sustained forms of attack.
After the visible wounds of abuse have healed, the physical pains have subsided,
and the metal chains of bondage have been broken; it is cultural imperialism that
remains invisibly to affect the thinking and behaviors of generations to come. The
continuous effect of the holocaust of the enslavement and colonization of African
people is not unlike the radioactive substance that remains after the detonation of
a nuclear bomb, poisoning portions of the earth and all living organisms to which
it is exposed for generations after its terrible inception. Afrocentric thought is the
most important cultural imperial nonproliferation treaty of this generation for
the discipline of Africana Studies. For all of its signatories it functions as the sail
that the vessel of Africana Studies has erected to guide it to its destination despite
10 Imhotep Journal
the heavy winds, waters and currents of ethnocentric and anti-African thought. It
allows African people to frame their present intellectual endeavors within the larger
continuum of African history and culture from which it must emerge.
Power is a greater modifier of behavior than law or public policy; and culture
is the center-point of African people’s power. For African people, there is great
power in the ability to draw upon the mosaic of African cultural solutions to solve
its problems and achieve its goals. Afrocentric scholars must be equipped with the
ability to harness and combine African traditions and techniques and arrange them
into a strategy best suited for the task of addressing contemporary situations. The
pressure of assimilation and cultural monism threaten to rob the African World of
the greatest gift it has to offer to the global portrait of human diversity; its unique
cultural character. At the opposite end of cultural imperialism lies the anestisizing
allure of generic humanitarianism that embraces a misguided version of humanism
seeking to forge reconciliation without retribution, multiculturalism without affirming
cultural specificity, and a humanist politically neutral agenda at the expense of Pan
African Nationalism. Without understanding African traditions, African people will
not have the capacity to access the full range of instruments at their disposal for
achieving well being and African development on African terms. Africa’s cultural
substance cannot be undermined by the inability or unwillingness of African people
to decouple modernity and westernity (Asante, 2006). Africa’s cultural substance
represents the oracle that must be consulted by anyone interested in contributing to
its continuous progress. The students in this volume of the Imhotep Journal have set
out to provide some of the knowledge and understanding necessary for solving the
problems that threaten the health of people of African descent and opening the way
of progress.
Serie McDougal, III, PhD
Faculty Advisor for the Imhotep Journal
Introduction 11
Works Cited
Asante, M. (2006). The rhetoric of globalization: Dealing with westernity. Journal
of Multicultural Discourses. 1(2), 152-158.
Karenga, M. (2002). Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles, CA: University
of Sankore Press.
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Imhotep Journal, Volume 7, May 2010
African Well-being and the Healing of Humanity
Wade W. Nobles Ph.D.
“When the human spirit is well whole and healthy, the human being is
characterized by confidence, competence and a sense of full possibility and
unlimited potentiality
1
”
The real function of African traditional healing is found in both the critical
examination of its practice and an understanding of the implication this corpus has
for helping to heal all of humanity. The articles in this volume represent an impressive
contribution to the critical examination. In understanding the question of well-being,
it is necessary to grasp the African meaning of being human and the enduring,
nourishing power and significance African healing traditions have for humanity.
Our beginnings are humanity’s origins in the Rift Valley of Mother Africa.
We come from great people—visionaries, peacemakers, artisans, healers, warriors,
scientists and dignified people. The African presence is documented on every
continent. Our divine walk from the East (KMT and Nubia), to the South (Great
Zimbabwe) and West Africa (the last classical African civilizations of Ghana, Mali,
Songhay) through to the diaspora laid the foundation for the knowledge and skills that
made the New World. Our heritage is a debt that the “ancient,” “modern” and “post-
modern” worlds owe to Africa. For example, Greece’s stolen legacy from Egypt, the
Moor’s contribution to Spain for seven centuries, the African roots in the Xia, Shang
& Zhou dynasties of ancient China, Africans making of the new world’s agricultural,
industrial and informational revolutions.
Ngubane (1979) argues that the African understanding of the person is a
“protein” evaluation of the human being which flowed into Nile Valley high culture
1 Nobles, Wade W., 2009 The African Sense of Being: Rescuing and Reclaiming Humanity for Us
All, Unpublished Manuscript
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