Ochendo: An African Journal of Innovative Studies

This study appraises the concept of culture in Africa with particular emphasis on Yoruba culture. African cultures possess huge potential, but has not been adequately explored to emphasize the need to detoxify the cultures in Africa (especially Yoruba culture) of their impurities. This is with a view to identifying circumstances weighing African cultures down in the comity of nations using Yoruba culture as a contextual sample. The study is qualitative in nature and John Dewey's Progressivism and Oswald Spengler's Cyclical Theory are adopted as guides. Yoruba African communal culture promotes impunity, oppression, waste through the owambe indulgence, and greed. There is conception of supremacy for those in positions of a higher level in the societal construct. This set of people includes husbands, the older ones and traditional heads or religious leaders. These individuals substantially believe that they are superior and can, therefore, perpetrate dastardly acts with impunity. In addition to these, Yoruba culture as an African culture rests so heavily on voodoo as enabled by guiding deities, exemplified in the snatching opportunities from competitors of merit and offering of human blood in money voodoo. These engender some consequences; supremacy repels cooperation, impunity nullifies accountability, voodoo motivate unproductivity through merit substitution, while waste seen in owambe results in non-enterprising deployment of resources. These ills need to be jettisoned for relatability and permissibility of initiatives, inclusive efforts among Africans and their countries, for social growth.

Open Full Text (PDF)