The Philosophy of Globalisation and African Culture

Abstract

This paper examines two claims about the ontology of globalisation. First, it interrogates the claim that the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation is underpinned by the theoretical construct of economic and information-epistemic determinism (EI-ED), which has been developmentally significant in the North. The paper contends that this claim is likely to propagate some values that ought not to undergird the end-state vision of the prospective global village (PGV) if the PGV is to be essentially conjunctive rather than essentially disjunctive. Second, the paper contends that if a cohesive and egalitarian PGV is truly the end-point of the philosophy of globalisation, then the African socio-cultural values of a relational understanding of the self and universal brotherhood ought to be globally recognised and emphasised by the North as fundamental to the realisation of the vision of the PGV. The paper seeks to illustrate that if properly applied to the globalising process, these cultural values are ontologically conjunctive in the sense that they have the potential to promote the building of a cohesive and egalitarian global village, since they tend to encourage acceptance and co-operation among the different peoples of the world.

Keywords

Africa, culture, determinism, globalisation, philosophy