Moral Thinking in Traditional African Society: A Reconstructive Interpretation

Authors

  • Christopher Agulanna University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Abstract

A debate concerning the nature of moral thinking in traditional societies has long dominated the scholarship of ethical thinkers and social anthropologists alike. Western scholars and intellectuals had justified colonialism as a “civilizing mission” meant to rescue African “savages” whose only mode of regulating conduct was through religion and magical sanctions. According to these scholars, in traditional cultures, there are no behavioural patterns, which can be properly referred to, as ‘moral’. The argument here is that behavioural patterns of the purely secular kind, which exist in more complex societies, were completely absent in traditional African societies, such that relationships between individuals in society only had a religious undertone.

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