On Modern Afro-Communitarianism and Matolino’s Commitment

Abstract

As human behaviour, practices, and needs evolve in Africa, there is doubt regarding the continued application of Afro-communitarianism as an explanatory model. This doubt could be resolved by classifying Afro-communitarianism into dissimilar kinds to capture the divergent interests of traditional and modern African societies. In this article, I argue for a more nuanced distinction between traditional and modern Afro-communitarianism and locate Bernand Matolino’s limited communitarianism in the latter. I show that by establishing this more nuanced distinction between traditional and modern Afro-communitarianism, we come to a better understanding of how Afro-communitarianism might be useful to African societies, in so far as it is contextualised. So, while traditional Afro-communitarianism might explain the realities of small monolithic African societies, modern Afro-communitarianism, such as Matolino’s limited communitarianism, reflects and fits into the realities of modern Africa and also reflect the thoughts required to capture those current realities about persons and society. Also, with this nuanced distinction, I demonstrate that traditional Afro-communitarianism poses the problem of humiliation, in which an individual’s selfhood and agency are delimited by communal ways of life. To overcome this problem, I draw from Matolino’s limited communitarianism to propose the de-essentialisation of African thought to accommodate plural conceptions of personhood.

Keywords

• afro-communitarianism
• bernard matolino
• limited communitarianism
• personhood
• community
• humiliation