Impact of Western Culture on African Culture - Essay Example

While the complex historical process, which results from, among other things, the socialized state-society units into international normative order or modern, and it is of Western origin is referred to as decentering noted in Sayre, 2010, p.419. Naturally, Africans understood their culture somewhat differently. For instance, the first South African inhabitants who were the San (“Bushmen”) were hunters, gatherers, and herded livestock. The Maasai in Kenya, in East Africa, used to live in Inkajijik (Maasai word for a house) shaped like a loaf of bread made of mud, sticks, grass, cow dung, and cow’s urine.

The Maasai warriors also hunted and killed lions. The process and experience of hunting gave rise to signs of bravery and personal achievement. Africans too had some religious practices like voodoo is actually estimated to have existed for not less than 10,000 years, whose ancient roots are in Egypt and East Africa just to mention a few (Mutunga, 2003). On the other hand, Western culture refers to the advanced culture because its ideas and values promote development and sustenance of advanced civilization.

Since it bases on objective reality and universal human nature, it is open to all, and transcends both geography and race. However, Western culture did not happen to find itself in Africa. To begin with, Western civilization and culture began creeping into African cultural milieu, first through Europeans contact with the Africans, a consequence of Berlin conference whose quest was imperial pilfering of African resources. When these two cultures came into contact, consolidation by the unstoppable wave of globalization acting as a catalyst, colonialism distorted and retarded the tempo and pace of cultural growth in Africa.

This era also led to colonial pillage and plunders, which caused relative stagnation and frequent precipitous African traditional cultural pursuits (Cunningham and Reich, 2009). Subjugation and domination of African culture from the West and the European mode of civilization started to thrive and outgrow African cultural heritage. With traditional African cultural practices paving way for foreign way of doing things, most Africans became fully “westernized”. By late nineteenth century, Africans began regarding their ways of doing things primitive, archaic, and regrettably unacceptable in public domain.

According to Fevre (2005), western culture through colonization, not only certain aspects of African material culture were lost or destroyed, but also African societies lost power and sense of cultural continuity. This extend made it practically impossible to recover the ability to strive for cultural progress on their terms and conditions. Furthermore, Mutunga (2003) believes that Africans had their traditional way of settling disputes or rather conflict resolution systems. With entry of foreign culture, African systems were destroyed and in their places, nothing was given, but rather replaced with authoritarianism of colonialism.

Foreigners created a new crop of elites, nurtured, and weaned on violence altar and colonialism armed with the modern state structures to continue carrying out the art, and act of subjugation of the mass of people in the colonialism service. Indeed, traditional African religious history has changed due to external influences, European-Christian convergence,