Prof Ali Mazrui Pretender to Universalism: Western Culture in the Globalising Age Listen to the interview (real) Read

the summary Keynote for the Royal Society of Art and the British Broadcasting Corporation, to be delivered in London, England, on June15, 2000. This lecture is indebted to the author's earlier work on globalization and the politics of culture change. A Yugoslav from Montenegro once taught an African from Mombasa, Kenya, at Oxford University. Among the lessons which the professor from Montenegro taught the young African was a simple proposition: "The sins of the powerful acquire some of the prestige of power." The Yugoslav was John Plamenatz who was at the time a distinguished Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and who later became a professor of political theory at Oxford. The student was Ali Mazrui. In that simple proposition John Plamenatz captured the importance of power in universalizing the culture of the powerful. Even the very vices of Western culture are acquiring worldwide prestige. Muslim societies which once refrained from alcohol are now manifesting increasing alcoholism. Chinese elites are capitulating to Kentucky Fried Chicken and MacDonald hamburgers. And Mahatma Gandhi's country has decided to go nuclear. Western civilization is a pretender to the status of universal validity. Yet there are three forces which contradict that claim. One force is within the West itself. This is the force of historical relativism. What was valid in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century is not necessarily valid in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If validity is changeable in the West itself from generation to generation, how can the claim to universalism be sustained? Another challenge to the West's claim to universalism is not historical but cross-cultural. This latter challenge is the old nemesis of cultural relativism. We may even reverse the order of the challenge to Western universalism - the cross-cultural challenge first and the historical challenge second. But in addition to historical and cultural relativism, there is relativism in practice, or comparative empirical performance. Is Western practice at variance with Western doctrine? Indeed, are Western standards better fulfilled by other societies than by the West? In some respects, is either Africa or Islam ahead of the West by Western standards themselves? But let us first explore globalization before we return to the three areas of relativity -- historical, cultural and empirical. What is Globalization? What is "globalization"? It consists of processes which lead towards global interdependence and increasing rapidity of exchange across vast distances. The word "globalization" is itself quite new, but the actual processes towards global interdependence and exchange started centuries ago. Four forces have been major engines behind globalization across time. These have been religion, technology, economy and empire. These have not necessarily acted separately, but have often reinforced each other. For example, the globalization of Christianity started with the conversion of Emperor Constantine I of Rome in 313 C.E. The religious conversion of the head of an empire started the process under which Christianity became the dominant religion not only of Europe but also of many other societies thousands of miles from where the religion started.

The globalization of Islam began not with converting a ready-made empire, but with building an empire almost from scratch. The Umayyads and Abbasides put together bits of other people's empires (former Byzantine Egypt and former Zoroastrian Persia, for example) and created a whole new civilization. Voyages of exploration were another major stage in the process of globalization. Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century opened up a whole new chapter in the history of globalization. Economy and empire were the major motives. There followed the migration of people symbolized by the Mayflower. The migration of the Pilgrim Fathers was in part a response to religious and economic imperatives. Demographic globalization reached its height in the Americas with the influx of millions of people from other hemispheres. In time the population of the United States became a microcosm of the population of the world - with immigrants from every society on earth. The industrial revolution in Europe from the eighteenth century onwards was another major chapter in the history of globalization. A marriage between technology and economics resulted in levels of productivity previously unknown in the annals of man. Europe's prosperity whetted its appetite for new worlds to conquer. The Atlantic slave trade was accelerated, moving millions of Africans from one part of the world to another. Europe's appetite also went imperial on a global scale. The British built the largest and most farflung empire in human experience. Most of it lasted until the end of World War II. The two World Wars were themselves manifestations of globalization. The twentieth century is the only century which has witnessed globalized warfare - one from 1914 to 1918 and the other from 1939 to 1945. The Cold War was another manifestation of globalization (1948-1989) - because it was power-rivalry on a global scale between two alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. While the two World Wars were militarily the most destructive empirically the Cold War was the most dangerous potentially. The Cold War carried the seeds of planetary annihilation in the nuclear field. The final historical stage of globalization came when the industrial revolution was mated with the new information revolution. Interdependence and exchange became dramatically computerized. The most powerful single country by this time was the United States. Pax Americana mobilized three of the four engines of globalization - technology, economy and empire. Pax Americana in the second half of the twentieth century did not directly seek to promote a particular religion - but it did help to promote secularism and the ideology of separating church from state. On balance, the impact of Americanization has probably been harmful to religious values worldwide - whether intended or not. Americanized Hindu youth, Americanized Buddhist teenagers or Americanized Muslim youngsters are far less likely to be devout to their faiths than non-Americanized ones. Between Hegemony and Homogeny This brings us to the twin-concepts of homogenization and hegemonization, however ugly the words may be!! One of the consequences of globalization is that we are getting to be more and more alike across the world every decade. Homogenization is increasing similarity. The second accompanying characteristic of globalization is hegemonization - the paradoxical concentration of power in a particular country or in a particular civilization. While "homogenization" is the process of expanding homogeneity, "hegemonization" is the emergence and consolidation of the hegemonic centre. With globalization there have been increasing similarities between and among the societies of the world. But this trend has been accompanied by disproportionate global power among a few countries. By the twenty-first century people dress more alike all over the world than they did at the end of the nineteenth century. (Homogenization). But the dress code which is getting globalized is overwhelmingly the Western dress code (Hegemonization). Indeed, the man's suit (Western) has become almost universalized in all parts of the world. And the jeans' revolution has captured the youth dress culture of half the globe.

By the twenty-first century the human race is closer to having world languages than it was in the nineteenth century if by a world language we mean one which has at least three-hundred million speakers, has been adopted by at least ten countries as a national language, has spread to at least two continents as a major language, and is widely used in four continents for special purposes. (Homogenization) However, when we examine the languages which have been globalized, they are disproportionately European - especially English and French, and to lesser extent, Spanish. (Hegemonization) Arabic is putting forward a strong claim as a world language, but partly because of the globalization of Islam and the role of Arabic as a language of Islamic ritual. By the twenty-first century we are closer to a world economy than we have ever been before in human history. A sneeze in Hong Kong, and certainly a cough in Tokyo can send shock waves around the globe. (Homogenization) And yet the powers who control this world economy are disproportionately Western. They are the G-7: The United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy in that order of economic muscle. (Hegemonization) By the twenty-first century the Internet has given us instant access to both information and mutual communication across large distances. (Homogenization) However, the nerve center of the global Internet system is still located in the United States and has residual links in the United States Federal Government. (Hegemonization) The educational systems in the twenty-first century are getting more and more similar across the world - with comparable term-units and semesters, and increasing professorial similarities, and similarity in course content. (Homogenization) But the role-models behind this dramatic academic convergence have been the educational models of Europe and the United States, which have attracted both emulators and imitators. (Hegemonization) The ideological systems of the world in the twenty-first century are also converging as market economies seem to emerge triumphant. Liberalization is being widely embraced, either spontaneously or under duress. Anwar Sadat in Egypt opened the gates of infitah, and even the People's Republic of China has adopted a kind of market Marxism. India is in danger of traversing the distance from Mahatma Gandhi to Mahatma Keynes. (Homogenization) However, the people who are orchestrating and sometimes enforcing marketization, liberalization and privatization are Western economic gurus - reinforced by the power of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United States and the European Union. Indeed, Europe is the mother of all modern ideologies, good and evil - liberalism, capitalism, socialism, Marxism, fascism, Nazism and others. The most triumphant by the end of the twentieth century has been Euro-liberal capitalism. (Hegemonic Homogenization) Islam: Victim or Victor? At the moment the Muslim world is a net loser from both homogenization and hegemonization. However, will Islam one day gain from homogenization? Only if Muslim values penetrate the global pool. Can people share Muslim values without sharing the Muslim religion? For example many U.S. Muslims find themselves sharing social values with Republicans in the United States: in favour of prayer at school against easy abortion

against too much homosexual permissiveness in favour of family values and stable marriages. One can be in agreement with Islamic values without being a Muslim. Indeed, the US after World War I briefly agreed with the Muslim value against alcohol - and passed the Eighteenth Constitutional Amendment in 1919 outlawing alcohol. But not enough Americans were convinced. More than a decade later (after Al Capone's adventures) the Twenty-first Constitutional Amendment was passed in 1933 allowing alcohol. Will Muslim values in the 21st century once again gain favour in the United States? There was a time in history when the Muslim presence in the Western world once carried great intellectual and scientific influence. These were the days when Arabic words like algebra and cipher entered Western scientific lexicons. One of the remarkable things about the twentieth century is that it has combined the cultural Westernization of the Muslim world, on the one hand, and the more recent demographic Islamization of the Western world, on the other. The foundations for the cultural Westernization of the Muslim world were laid mainly in the first half of the twentieth century. The foundations of the demographic Islamization of the Western world are being laid in the second half of the twentieth century. Let us take each of these two phases of Euro-Islamic interaction in turn. In the first half of the century, the West had colonized more than two thirds of the Muslim world - from Kano to Karachi, from Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, from Dakar to Jakarta. The first half of the twentieth century also witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the more complete de-Islamization of the European state-system. The aftermath included the abolition of the Caliphate as the symbolic center of Islamic authority. The ummah became more fragmented than ever and became even more receptive to Western cultural penetration. Other forces which facilitated the cultural Westernization of the Muslim world included the replacement of Islamic and Qur'anic schools with Western style schools; the increasing use of European languages in major Muslim countries; the impact of the Western media upon distribution of news, information and entertainment, ranging from magazines, cinema, television and video, to the new universe of computers. Homogenization was responding to the forces of hegemonization. Finally, there has been the omnipresent Western technology - which carries with it not only new skills but also new values. The net result has indeed been a form of globalization of aspects of culture. However, this has been a Eurocentric and Americocentric brand of globalization. An aspect of Western culture is eventually embraced by other cultures - and masquerades as universal. An informal cultural empire is born, hegemony triumphant. The globalization of two pieces of Eurocentric world culture may tell the story of things to come: the Western Christian calendar, especially the Gregorian calendar, and the worldwide dress code for men, which we mentioned earlier. Many countries in Africa and Asia have adopted wholesale the Western Christian calendar as their own. They celebrate their independence day according to the Christian calendar, and write their own history according to Gregorian years, using distinctions such as before or after Christ. Some Muslim countries even recognize Sunday as the day of rest instead of Friday. In some cultures, the entire Islamic historiography has been reperiodized according to the Christian calendar instead of the Hijjra. From the second half of the twentieth century, both Muslim migration to the West and conversions to Islam within the West have been consolidating a new human Islamic presence. In Europe as a whole, there are now twenty million Muslims, ten million of whom are in Western Europe. This figure excludes the Muslims of the Republic of Turkey, who number some fifty million. There are new mosques from Munich to Marseilles.

Paradoxically, the cultural Westernization of the Muslim world is one of the causes behind the demographic Islamization of the West. The cultural Westernization of Muslims contributed to the "brain drain" that lured Muslim professionals and experts from their homes in Muslim countries to jobs and educational institutions in North America and the European Union. The old formal empires of the West have unleashed demographic counter-penetration. Some of the most qualified Muslims in the world have been attracted to professional positions in Europe or North America. It is in that sense that the cultural Westernization of the Muslim world in the first half of the twentieth century was part of the preparation for the demographic Islamization of the West in the second half of the twentieth century. But not by any means are all Muslim migrants to the West highly qualified. The legacy of Western colonialism also facilitated the migration of less-qualified Muslims from places like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Algeria into Britain and France - again post-colonial demographic counterpenetration. There have also been occasions when, in need of cheap labor, the West has deliberately encouraged immigration of less-qualified Muslims - as in the case of the importation of Turkish workers into the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. As another manifestation of the demographic Islamization of the Western world, there are now over one thousand mosques and Qur'anic centers in the United States alone, as well as professional associations for Muslim engineers, Muslim social scientists and Muslim educators. There are over six million American Muslims - and the number is rising impressively. Muslims now outnumber Jews in the United States since the end of the twentieth century. Islam is currently the fastest growing religion in North America. In France, Islam has the second-highest number of adherents; Catholicism has the most followers. In Britain, some Muslims are experimenting with their own Islamic parliament, and others are demanding state subsidies for Muslim schools. The Federal Republic of Germany is realizing that importing Turkish workers in the 1970s was also an invitation to the muezzin and the minaret to establish themselves in German cities. Australia has discovered that it is a neighbor to the country with the largest Muslim population in the world (Indonesia). Australia has also discovered an Islamic presence in its own body-politic. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three Abrahamic creeds of world history. In the twentieth century, the Western world is often described as a Judeo-Christian civilization, thus linking the West to two of those Abrahamic faiths. But if Muslims already outnumber Jews in countries like the United States, perhaps Islam is replacing Judaism as the second most important Abrahamic religion after Christianity. Numerically, Islam in time may overshadow Judaism in much of the West, regardless of future immigration policies. The question has thus arisen about how Islam is to be treated in Western classrooms, textbooks and media as Islam becomes a more integral part of Western society. In the Muslim world, education has got substantially Westernized. Is it now the turn of education in the West to become partially Islamized? The Euro-Islamic story of interpenetration continues to unfold. Is this a new threshold for globalization? Or is it just another manifestation of the postcolonial condition in world history? In fact, it may be both. The counterpenetration of Islam and Muslims into Western civilization will not in itself end Western hegemonization. But an Islamic presence in the Western World on a significant scale may begin to reverse at long last the wheels of cultural homogenization. Values will begin to mix, tastes compete, perspectives intermingle, as a new moral calculus evolves on the world scene. Empirical Relativism and Moral Performance Let us now return to the three forms of relativity with which we began -- historical, cultural and empirical. Hegemonic and homogenizing as Western culture has been, it has not been without its contradictions and serious shortfalls. Its claim to universalism has been up against the relativity of history (temporal), of culture

(cross-cultural) and of implementation (the logic of consistency). Let us begin with this third area of relativity -- the tests of empiricism and performance. Empirical relativism has two aspects. One aspect concerns whether in practice Western civilization lives up to its own standards. The other aspect concerns situations in which Western ethical standards are better implemented by other civilizations than by the West itself. When a famous Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence pronounces that "all men are created equal" and then the founders build an economy in America based on slavery, that is a case of Western culture failing by its own standards. On the other hand, if during the same historical period we study economies without either slavery or caste among the Kikuyu in East Africa or the Tiv in West Africa, we are observing societies which were more egalitarian than the liberal West. The Western Christian ethic of the minimization of violence has repeatedly been honoured by Westerners more in the breach than the observance. In the last hundred years Christians have killed vastly more people than have followers of any other religion in any single century. Many of the millions of victims of Christian violence in the two world wars were themselves fellow Christians -- though the Holocaust against the Jews and the Gypsies stand out as special cases of genocide perpetrated by Westerners in otherwise Christian nations. If minimization of violence is part of Christian ethics, it is a standard which has not only been violated by the West. It has also been better implemented by other cultures in history. In the first half of the twentieth century India produced Mohandas Gandhi who led one of the most remarkable nonviolent anticolonial movements ever witnessed. Westerners themselves saw Gandhi's message as the nearest approximation of the Christian ethic of the first half of the twentieth century. Mahatma Gandhi's India gave birth to new principles of passive resistance and satygraha. Yet Gandhi himself said that it may be through the Black people that the unadulterated message of soul force and passive resistance might be realized. If Gandhi was right, this would be one more illustration when the culture which gives birth to an ethic is not necessarily the culture which fulfills the ethic. The Nobel Committee for Peace in Oslo seems to have shared some of Gandhi's optimism about the soul force of the Black people. Africans and people of African descent who have won the Nobel prize for Peace since the middle of the twentieth century have been Ralph Bunche (1950), Albert Luthuli (1960), Martin Luther King Jr. (1964), Anwar Sadat (1978) Desmond Tutu (1984) and Nelson Mandela (1993). Neither Mahatma Gandhi himself nor any of his compatriots in India ever won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Was Mahatma Gandhi vindicated that the so-called "Negro" was going to be the best exemplar of soul force? Was this a case of African culture being empirically more Gandhian than Indian culture? In reality Black people have been at least as violent as anything ever perpetrated by Indians. What is distinctive about Africans is their short memory of hate. Jomo Kenyatta was unjustly imprisoned by the British colonial authorities over charges of founding the Mau Mau movement. A British Governor also denounced him as "a leader into darkness and unto death." And yet when Jomo Kenyatta was released he not only forgave the white settlers, but turned the whole country towards a basic pro-Western orientation to which it has remained committed ever since. Kenyatta even published a book entitled Suffering Without Bitterness. Ian Smith, the white settler leader of Rhodesia, unilaterally declared independence in 1965 and unleashed a civil war on Rhodesia. Thousands of people, mainly Black, died in the country as a result of policies pursued by Ian Smith. Yet when the war ended in 1980 Ian Smith and his cohorts were not subjected to a Nurembergstyle trial. On the contrary, Ian Smith was himself a member of parliament in a Black-ruled Zimbabwe, busy

criticizing the post-Smith Black leaders of Zimbabwe as incompetent and dishonest. Where else but in Africa could such tolerance occur? The Nigerian civil war (1967-1970) was the most highly publicized civil conflict in postcolonial African history. When the war was coming to an end, many people feared that there would be a bloodbath in the defeated eastern region. The Vatican was worried that cities like Enugu and Onitcha, strongholds of Catholicism, would be monuments of devastation and blood-letting. None of these expectations occurred. Nigerians -- seldom among the most disciplined of Africans -discovered in 1970 some remarkable resources of self-restraint. There were no triumphant reprisals against the vanquished Biafrans; there were no vengeful trials of "traitors". We have also witnessed the phenomenon of Nelson Mandela. He lost twenty-seven of the best years of his life in prison under the laws of the apartheid regime. Yet when he was released he not only emphasized the policy of reconciliation -- he often went beyond the call of duty. On one occasion before he became President white men were fasting unto death after being convicted of terrorist offences by their own white government. Nelson Mandela went out of his way to beg them to eat and thus spare their own lives. When Mandela became President in 1994 it was surely enough that his government would leave the architects of apartheid unmolested. Yet Nelson Mandela went out of his way to pay a social call and have tea with the unrepentant widow of Hendrik F. Verwoed, the supreme architect of the worst forms of apartheid, who shaped the whole racist order from 1958 to 1966. Mandela was having tea with the family of Verwoed. Was Mahatma Gandhi correct, after all, that his torch of soul force (satyagraha) might find its brightest manifestations among Black people? Empirical relativism was at work again. In the history of civilizations there are occasions when the image in the mirror is more real that the object it reflects. Black Gandhians like Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu and, in a unique sense, Nelson Mandela have sometimes reflected Gandhaian soul force more brightly than Gandhians in India. Part of the explanation lies in the soul of African culture itself -- with all its capacity for rapid forgiveness. It is a positive modification of "the Picture of Dorian Gray.' In Oscar Wilde's novel, the picture of Dorian Gray is a truer reflection of the man's decrepid body and lost soul than the man himself. The decomposition of Dorian's body and soul is transferred from Dorian himself to his picture. The picture is more real than the man. In the case of Gandhism, it is not the decomposition of the soul but its elevation which is transferred from India to the Black experience. In the last one hundred years both Indian culture and African culture have, in any case, been guilty of far less bloodletting than the West. Christian minimization of violence has been observed more by non-Christians than by ostensible followers of the Cross. Empirical relativism continues its contradictions. But Western claims to universalism are challenged not just by the forces of empirical contradictions. They are, as we indicated, also challenged by the relativism of history and the relativism of culture. Let us now elaborate on these two areas of history and culture. Between Cultural and Historical Relativism If under cultural relativism, cultures differ across space (from society to society), under historical relativism cultures differ across time - from epoch to epoch or age to age. In Western society premarital sex was strongly disapproved of until after World War II. In the 19th century it was even punishable. Today sex before marriage is widely practiced with parental consent. This is historical relativism. Are laws against gays and lesbians a violation of human rights? Today half the Western world says "yes". Yet homosexuality between males was a crime in Great Britain until the 1960s - though lesbianism was not

outlawed. Now both male and female homosexuality between consenting adults is permitted in most of the Western World. This is historical relativism. On the other hand, in most of the rest of the world homosexuality is still illegal in varying degrees. We are confronting a clash between historical relativism in the West and geo-cultural relativism in the Third World. In Africa the two extremes on homosexuality are the neighboring countries of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Zimbabwe's President Mugabe is a personal crusader against homosexuality. South Africa, on the other hand, has legalized it. Almost everywhere in the Western World except the US capital punishment has been abolished. The United States is increasing the number of capital offenses for the time being. But it is almost certain that capital punishment even in the US will one day be regarded as a violation of human rights. This would be historical relativism within the Western civilization. In Africa South Africa has tried to lead the way against the death penalty. Has it outlived its rational utility? Sometimes cultural relativism and historical relativism converge. This is especially true when Muslim and African countries want to revive legal systems which go back many centuries. Such countries attempt to reenact the past in modern conditions. Sudan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are among the examples where cultural and historical relativism converge. Can you have polygyny or polygamy by consent? In the US the term "pro-choice" is reserved for the issue of whether a woman wants a baby or not. In the Muslim world and in Africa a woman's right to choose may include her choice to marry a man who already has another wife. "I would rather share this man than not have him at all". At least one of Moshood Abiola's multiple wives in Nigeria had a Western Ph.D., a measure of polygamy by consent. In the West a woman may choose to become a mistress of a married man but she is not allowed to marry the same man and have equal rights as a second wife. That is cultural relativism in sexual mores. Are human rights sometimes trapped between the sacredness of art versus the sacredness of religion? As the West has got more and more secular, it has looked for new abodes of sacredness. By the late twentieth century the freedom of the artist was more sacred to Westerners than respect for religion. Hence the clash which occurred from 1988 onwards between the Western world and the Muslim world in relation to Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses. The book makes fun of the Holy Scripture of Muslims, the Qur'an - suggesting that perhaps the verses were a fake or inspired by the Devil. The novel strongly suggests that the prophet Muhammad was a fraud and not a very intelligent one at that. The book puts women bearing the names of the Prophet Muhammad's wives in a whorehouse - prostitutes called Hafsa, Aisha, Khadija, the historic names of the Prophet's wives. The names of the prophet's wives were supposed to be aphrodisiac for sexual excitement. Iran issued a fatwa or legal judgment accusing Rushdie of a capital religious offense and sentenced him to death in absentia. Iran was the only one of some fifty Muslim countries to pass the death penalty on Rushdie. But there were popular Muslim demonstrations against Rushdie from Kaduna to Karachi. Rushdie has had to spend most of his life since then in cautious hiding. The bad news is that a number of airlines refused at times to have him as a passenger because he is a security risk. The good news, on the other hand, is that he is a millionaire several times over from the book and related products. He is more wealthy but less secure. Westerners have argued that as a novelist Rushdie had a right to write anything he wanted. Muslims from Lamu to Lahore have argued that he had no right to hold up for obscenity and ridicule some of the most sacred things in Islam. The sacredness of the artist has been in collision with the sacredness of religion over Salman Rushdie's novel. The West's claim to universalism sometimes extends from Western values to

Western custodial claim to the defense of those values. Even if Western values are universal, is Western practice an implementation of those values? One of the most remarkable coincidences of the year 2000 concerns how democracy collided with two people called Haider -- one a Syrian and the other Austrian, one liberal and the other extreme right-wing, one a writer and the other an activist and politician. In Austria Dr. Jorg Haider was Deputy Governor of Carinthia and Chair of the neo-Nazi FPO party which joined the government coalition in the year 2000. The coalition was the outcome of electoral democratic forces in Austria. And yet pro-Democracy fellow members of the European Union have turned against the government of Austria and have tried to squeeze Haider's party out of the democratically elected governing coalition. Was democracy fighting against democracy in the European Union over the Austrian question? Certainly most members of the European Union have decided that there is a limit to freedom of political participation. The other Haider is Haider Haider, the Syrian, who published in Cyprus in 1983 a novel entitled BANQUET OF SEAWEED. Lebanon republished the novel in 1992 without any earth tremor. In November 1999 Egypt's Ministry of Culture followed suit. It published the volume among the major works of modern Arabic literature. There was delayed reaction -- until EL-SHAAB, a pro-Islamist newspaper, published extracts ostensibly insulting to the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. Was the Syrian Haider as much of a threat to the fundamentals of his own Arab civilization as the Austrian Haider had been to his own European civilization? When individuals threaten the fabric of civilization, should democracy give way? If Arab and Islamic civilizations are threatened by a Syrian Haider, should democracy be subordinated to higher values? If Western civilization is threatened by the Austrian Haider, should Austrian democracy be subordinated to European civilization? In reality both Islam and the West have put limits to freedom of expression and indeed to democratic outcomes. Over Austria the European Union has decided that the values of Western civilization are more important than the outcomes of Austrian democracy. Should the novel BANQUET OF SEAWEED be judged by the standards of Islamic civilization or by the criteria of democracy? The dilemma is crucial and unresolved. Empirical Relativism and Comparative Censorship The third area of relativism is once again empirical. How do cultures behave in practice? Our discussion has already entered the arena of Western civil liberties. In what sense is the cultural distance between the West, Africa and Islam narrower than often assumed? One compelling illustration concerns the issue of censorship and the implementation of values. Here we are again dealing with empirical relativism. A book may be censored because of the moral repugnance of its contents. Most Muslim countries and some African ones have banned Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, because they viewed it as blasphemous and morally repugnant. Alternatively, a book may be censored or banned because of the moral "repugnance" of its author. St. Martin's Press was going to publish in 1996 a book entitled Goebbels, Mastermind of the Third Reich. Enormous international pressure was put on St. Martin's Press to withdraw the book. Most of the pressure came from people who could not possibly have read the manuscript of that particular book. The moral objection was to the author of the book, David Irving, who was viewed as an anti-Semitic revisionist historian of the Holocaust. In the case of the particular book on Goebbels, it was probably the singer (David Irving) rather than the song (Mastermind of the Third Reich) which finally made St. Martin's Press change its mind and withdraw the book. David Irving has since been legally condemned in Britain as anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denier.

But a book may also be censored or banned out of fear of its consequences - the equivalent of "clear and present danger". When India gave this kind of explanation for banning Rushdie's Satanic Verses - that the book would inflame religious passions - the West was less than sympathetic. Certainly Rushdie's publishers paid no attention to prior warnings from India before publication that he book was inflammatory. The publication of the book even in faraway London did result in loss of life in civil disturbances in Bombay and Karachi in 1989. In contrast, distinguished Western publishers have been known to care enough about the safety of their own staff to make that the reason for rejecting a manuscript. One prominent case is Cambridge University Press's rejection of the book, Fields of Wheat, Rivers of Blood by Anastasia Karakasidou. The book was about ethnicity in the Greek province of Macedonia. Cambridge rejection was directly and frankly linked to its fear for the safety of its staff members in Greece. If Viking Penguin Inc., the publishers of The Satanic Verses, had cared as much about South Asian lives as Cambridge University Press cared about its own staff in Greece, the cost in blood of The Satanic Verses would have been reduced. The issue here is still empirical relativism. Does Western practice meet Western standards? Let us now turn more closely to comparative methods of censorship as an aspect of empirical relativism. Censorship in Muslim countries is often crude, and is done by governments, by Mullahs and imams, and more recently by militant Islamic movements. Censorship in the West, on the other hand, is more polished and more decentralized. It is done by advertisers for commercial television, by subscribers to the Public Broadcasting System, by ethnic pressure groups and interest groups, by editors, by publishers and by other controllers of means of communication. In Europe it is sometimes also done by governments. The law in the United States protects opinion better than almost anywhere else in the world. In 1986 my television series The Africans: A Triple Heritage was threatened with legal action by Kaiser Aluminum because I had described the company's terms for the construction of the Akosombo Dam in Ghana as exploitative. Both my own personal lawyer and the lawyers for Public Broadcasting System (PBS) were unanimous in their opinion that Kaiser Aluminum did not stand a chance under American law. We called Kaiser's bluff, showed the offending sequence, and Kaiser Aluminum did nothing. The threat to free speech in the United States does not come from the law and the Constitution but from nongovernmental forces. The same PBS which was invulnerable before the law on the issue of free speech capitulated to other forces when I metaphorically described Karl Marx as "the last of the Great Jewish prophets." The earlier British version of my television series had included that phrase. The American version unilaterally deleted it out of fear of offending Jewish Americans. I was never asked for permission to delete. Ironically many viewers in Israel saw the British version complete with the controversial metaphor. What PBS had done was a case of decentralized censorship. The laws of the United States granted me freedom of speech and freedom of opinion - but censorship in the country is perpetrated by editors, financial benefactors and influential pressure groups. It is a special kind of empirical relativism. On one issue of censorship the relevant PBS producing station did consult me. WETA, the PBS station in Washington D.C. was unhappy that I had not injected enough negativism in my portrayal of Libya's Muammar Gaddafy in a sequence of about three minutes. I was first asked if I would agree to change my commentary and talk more about "terrorism". When I refused to change my commentary, WETA suggested that we changed the pictures instead - deleting one sequence which appeared to humanize Qaddafy (the Libyan leader visiting a hospital) and substituting a picture of Rome airport after a terrorist attack (which would re-demonize the Libyan Leader). After much debate I managed to save the positive humanizing hospital scene, but surrendered to the addition of a negative scene of Rome airport after a terrorist attack. My agreement was on condition that neither I nor the written caption implied that Libya was responsible for the bomb. But ideally WETA would have preferred to delete the sequence about Libya altogether.

Two years later I was invited to Libya after the Arabic version of my television series was shown there. It turned out that WETA had more in common with the censors in Libya than either realized. Although the Libyans seemed pleased with my television series as a whole, the three-minute sequence about Muammar Qaddafy had been deleted from the version shown in Tripoli. If WETA had regarded the sequences as too sympathetic to Qaddafy, perhaps the Libyans decided they were not sympathetic enough. And since the Libyans were not in a position to negotiate with me about whether to change the commentary or add to the pictures, they decided to delete the sequence altogether. In the United States the sequence about Qaddafy had also offended Lynn Cheney, who was at the time chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The sequence was a major reason why she demanded the removal of the name of the Endowment from the television credits at the end of the series. Much later, after she stepped down as Chair, she demanded the abolition of the National Endowment for the Humanities itself altogether. She cited as one of her reasons precisely my own television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, using it as an example of the type of objectionable liberal projects which the Endowment had tended to friend. Another illustration of decentralized censorship and empirical relativism which has affected my own work involved my book Cultural Forces in World Politics. Originally it was to be published by Westview Press in Colorado. They were about to go to press when they declared that they wanted to delete three chapters. One chapter discussed The Satanic Verses as a case of cultural treason; another chapter compared the Palestinian intifadah with the Chinese students' rebellion in Tienemann Square in Beijing, China, in 1989; and the third objectionable chapter compared the apartheid doctrine of separate homelands for Blacks and Whites in South Africa with the Zionist doctrine of separate States for Jews and Arabs. Clearly the Westview Press wanted to censor those three chapters because they were the most politically sensitive in the American context. I suspected that I would have similar problems with most other major US publishers with regard to those three chapters. I therefore relied more exclusively on my British publishers in London, James Currey, and on the American offshoot of another British publisher, Heinemann Educational Books. My book was published by those two in 1990. This is the positive side of decentralized censorship in the West. At least with regard to books, what is under the threat of censorship by one publisher may be acceptable by another. Or what is almost unpublishable in the United States may be easily publishable in Britain or the Netherlands. With national television the choices are more restricted even in the West. Many points of view are condemned to national silence on the television screen. The West does not meet its own democratic standards. What conclusion do we draw from all this? The essential point being made is that strictly on the issue of free speech, the cultural difference between Western culture and Islamic culture may not be as wide as often assumed. In both civilizations only a few points of view have national access to the media and the publishing world. In both civilizations only a few points of view have national access to the media and the publishing world. In both civilizations there is marginalization by exclusion from the center. But there is one big difference. Censorship in Muslim societies tends to be more centralized, often done by the state, though there are also restrictions on free speech imposed by Mullahs and Imams and militant religious movements. In the United States, on the other hand, there is no centralized political censorship by governmental or judicial institutions. Censorship is far more decentralized and is exercised by non-governmental social forces and institutions. The Relativity of History Let us now return to the issue of historical relativism between the West and the world of Islam. Popular images of Islamic values in the West tend to regard those values as "medieval" and hopelessly anachronistic.

In reality most Muslim societies are at worst decades rather than centuries behind the West - and in some respects Islamic culture is more humane than Western culture. The gender question in Muslim countries is still rather troubling. But again the historical distance between the West and Islam may be in terms of decades rather than centuries. In almost all Western countries apart from New Zealand women did not get the vote until the twentieth century. Great Britain extended the vote to women in two stages - 1918 and 1928. The United States enfranchised women with a constitutional amendment in 1920. Switzerland did not give women the vote at the national level until 1971 - long after Muslim women had been voting in Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Indonesia. British wives earned the right to own independent property in 1870. Muslim wives had always done so. Indeed, Islam is probably the only major religion which was founded by a businessman who was in commercial partnership with his wife, Khadija. What we are dealing with here is the practical implementation of values. Even if Western values were universal, is Western practice compatible with the values? Is the West the best embodiment of its own values? Empirical relativism reveals glaring Western contradictions. The United States, the largest and most influential Western nation, has never had a female President or Head of Government. France has never had a woman President either, or Germany a woman Chancellor. On the other hand, both the second and third Muslim societies in population (Pakistan and Bangladesh) have had women Prime Ministers more than once each. Pakistan has had Benazir Bhutto twice as Prime Minister and Bangladesh has had Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Rahman Wajed consecutively in power. Indonesia has a female vice President - Megawati Sukarnoputri. Turkey, another Muslim country, has also had a woman Prime Minister - Tansu Ciller. Turkey is a Muslim society which inaugurated a secular state as recently as the 1920s, but has already produced a woman Chief Executive. The United States has been a secular state for two hundred years - and has still not produced a woman president. CONCLUSION In this lecture we started from the premise that "the sins of the powerful acquire some of the prestige of power". The West has become powerful over the last five to six centuries. Western culture and civilization became influential, and attracted widespread imitation and emulation. Western hegemony precipitated widespread homogenization of values, styles and institutions. Much of the world became Westernized. The Westernization of the world has been part and parcel of the phenomenon which we have come to refer to as "globalization". The economic meaning of "globalization" refers to the expansion of world economic interdependence under Western control. The informational meaning of "globalization" refers to the triumph of the computer, the Internet and Information Superhighway. The comprehensive meaning of "globalization" refers to all the forces which have been leading the world towards a global village. Globalization in this third sense has meant the villagization of the world. In the economic and informational meaning of globalization, the West has been the primary engine of global change. However, in the comprehensive meaning of globalization (leading towards the global village) some other civilizations have been equally crucial at other stages of history. The West's triumph in the last two or three centuries has led to the claim that Western civilization has universal validity. Such a claim faces three challenges -- the challenge of historical relativism (what was valid in the West a hundred years ago is not necessarily valid today), the challenge of cultural relativism (what is valid in the West may not be valid in other cultures and civilizations) and the challenge of empirical relativism (not only does the West fail to meet its own ethical standards, but those standards are sometimes better fulfilled by other cultures than by the West).

In comparison with the West this lecture has used mainly illustrations from Islam and Africa (two overlapping civilizations), with some important lessons from India's Mahatma Gandhi. We can conclude that, in distribution, Western civilization is the most globalized in history. No other civilization in the annals of the human race has touched so many individual members of that race, or so many societies in the world. But global distribution is not the same thing as universal validity. After all, Marxism was once globally distributed to almost a third of the population of the world. That did not give Marxism "a third of universal validity". Indeed, we now know that Marxism and communism have shrunk in distribution almost overnight. If there is a universal ethical standard in the world, we have not yet discovered it. It is certainly not the Western ethical standard -- otherwise the United States would not be wondering whether the death penalty is moral or not. Nor would racism still be prevalent in the Western world. This lecture continues to assume that human history is a search for the Universal. The Western world has not found it -- but it has certainly taken us a step or two towards it. The West has also helped to create the conditions not only for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but also conditions for the pursuit of the Universal for generations to come.

Ethnicity in Bondage : Is Its Liberation Premature? Keynote address by Ali A. Mazrui (Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, SUNY Binghamton), UNRISD/UNDP International Seminar on Ethnic Diversity and Public Policies, (New York, 17-19 August 1994) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------Two interrelated forces in world history have contributed towards the erosion of human diversity. One force has been the triumph of the nation state as a model of political organization; the other has been the wider impact of Western civilization as a whole on societies far and wide. The nation state as a model was predicated on cultural homogenization. Far from a hundred ethnic flowers being allowed to bloom, these were often denied sustenance, and were sometimes brutally crushed altogether. The nation state was often culturally monopolistic. In Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, it even attempted to be genetically monopolistic. That was what the Holocaust was partly about, the Aryan purity goal. In post-Ottoman Turkey, the nation state has tried to be linguistically monopolistic, denying legitimacy to the languages of other indigenous ethnic groups. The Kurdish language suffered in Turkey. Iraq tried to turn Kurds into Arabs; Iran to turn them into Persians. In the first quarter-century of post-colonial Africa, the concept of the nation state rejected the word "tribe", treated ethnicity as a political pathology, and erected constitutions that made little effort to accommodate ethnic loyalties. The UNESCO General History of Africa banned the word "tribe" from its eight volumes. All in all, the whole paradigm of the nation state was so committed to the principle of cultural homogeneity that ethnicity often retreated in shame. Ethnicity was indeed in bondage.

The other modern force that has eroded human diversity is the closely related one of the impact of Western civilization as a whole on societies far and wide. While Western liberalism itself values pluralism and diversity, few forces have done more to create uniformity in the world than Western culture. At the end of the twentieth century, many more people are dressing alike, eating alike, thinking alike and speaking Western languages than was conceivable at the beginning of the century. As the world has become more Westernized, it has become less diversified. And yet it is precisely at the end of the twentieth century that ethnicity is at last trying to break loose from the confines of both the nation state and the inhibitions of Western civilization. A hundred ethnic flowers are indeed trying to bloom - but the short-term cost is high. Full many a flower not only weeps, but bleeds. In the short term, is the cost worthwhile? Or does the world have to get used to the idea that ethnic loyalties are here to stay and cannot be wished away - either by the ideology of the nation state or by the relentless erosion caused by Western culture? Or is the liberation of ethnicity premature? Between Ethnicity and Labour When Moshood Abiola won the Nigerian presidential election in June 1993, he was the first southerner to be elected executive head of state in the country's post-colonial history. In previous elections Nigerians brought northern Muslims into power. In June 1993 they still brought back a Muslim victor - but this time he was a southerner. Did the military government of Ibrahim Babangida nullify the elections for those ethnic and regional reasons? Was Moshood Abiola denied the presidency because he was Yoruba rather than Hausa? Abiola's biggest mistake of 1993 was in exaggerating the scale of Western hegemony in the world. On being denied the presidency, instead of staying at home to fight it out, he travelled to the capitals of the Western world to seek international help in the fight against the military government in Nigeria. Washington and London made small gestures. Abiola damaged himself seriously at home. In 1994, a few weeks before he resumed his struggle for the presidency, Abiola was in Washington again. But this time he knew that the main battlefield had to be Nigeria. He telephoned my home and missed me. With the help of my wife, he tracked me down at a hotel at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He told me "I am going to Nigeria to become president. I will see you at the inauguration!" I was startled. In a sense I am still startled. But that phone call was also a lesson to me in political courage. A few weeks later Abiola declared himself president of Nigeria at a rally in Lagos attended by thousands of people. It is true that he should have done that a year earlier. He had gambled in 1993 on Western hegemony and lost. But, on matters of principle, "better late than never"! Abiola's electoral support had been multi-ethnic. But his support in the fight against the military rgime came to be heavily Yoruba and based in the Western region. The fight has produced one remarkable phenomenon the strike of the oil workers and their supporters in defence of Abiola. The strike became the most impressive utilization of labour power for democratic ends in the history of post-colonial Africa - regardless of whether or not the strike ultimately succeeded. Its capacity to sustain itself for many weeks and hold the nation's economy to ransom on an issue of national democratic principle has already earned it a place in post-colonial history. In Poland under communism in the 1980s, the defiance of the trade union movement, Solidarity, was widely acclaimed in the Western world. The petro-labour strike in Nigeria in the 1990s in defence of democracy fired few imaginations in the Western world - in spite of the fact that Nigeria was several times the size of Poland in population, and was Africa's most populous country. Lech Walesa became a household name in the West, and he won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1983. Who knew the names of Nigeria's trade union leaders outside Nigeria? Were any of them likely to win the Nobel Prize for Peace?

The double standards of the world persisted, distorted by Western hegemony. What passed for heroism in Europe (i.e. Solidarity in Poland) passed for instability in Africa (i.e. the strike of Nigeria's oil workers). What was seen as martyrdom in Eastern Europe (harassment of Lech Walesa) was seen as another example of African tyranny when African democrats were victimized. The Western focus was disproportionately on who was killing democracy in Africa, and inadequately focused on who was fighting for democracy on the continent. African villains got more coverage than African heroes. Between Ethnicity and Language The "nation" part of the "nation state" was interpreted to mean considerable cultural homogeneity. The "state" part of the "nation state" was interpreted to mean considerable political centralization. The two forces of national homogenization and statist centralization played havoc with ethnic identities. The state institutions regarded ethnic groups as a danger to the centralizing authority of the state. The new national consciousness regarded ethnic consciousness as a danger to national cohesion. A national language was encouraged at the expense of ethnic languages. In some cases the promotion of the national language was itself a form of oppression. Afrikaans in South Africa continued to be regarded as not only the language of the oppressor but also the instrument of oppression. Curiously enough, the Hutu and the Tutsi spoke virtually the same verbal language and were engaged in very different non-verbal communication. Perhaps nowhere outside Rwanda and Burundi is there such a dramatic distinction between verbal convergence of Hutu-Tutsi communication and non-verbal divergence in HutuTutsi communication. In Rwanda and Burundi they have a shared language but not shared communication. These are people divided by culture but not by language. And yet which countries in Africa are giving ethnic languages recognition as the twentieth century comes to an end? By a strange twist of destiny, it is the most ancient of sub-Saharan African states - Ethiopia - and the most modern of the sub-Saharan states - South Africa. The government of Ethiopia after Mengistu Haile Mariam is decentralizing political authority to ethnoregional units with jurisdiction over language policy in their own areas. This has happened after many generations of Amharic hegemony. South Africa, in the wake of political apartheid, has conceded recognition to eleven official languages. This has happened after centuries of the victimization of indigenous languages. Apartheid had tried to create homelands justified on the basis of racial characteristics. These were the bantustans. Is post-apartheid South Africa creating "lingo-stans" - islands of languages rather than islands of race? How does the trend towards lingo-stans relate to experience elsewhere in Africa? Is Ethiopia's experiment with devolution of power to the regions partly a case of empowering lingo-stans? Certainly the languages of the Oromo and ethnic Somali in Ethiopia have received greater legitimacy in the new Ethiopia than ever before. Zaire is sensitive to the need for some kind of system of lingo-stans. Its educational system recognizes pivotal regional languages - Chiluba, Kikongo, Lingala, Swahili. The languages have a special role in schools in their respective areas of Zaire. In spite of these tendencies, linguistic nationalism in most of sub-Saharan Africa is exceptionally weak. Linguistic nationalism is the version of nationalism that is concerned about the value of its own language, that seeks to defend it against other languages, and that encourages its use and enrichment. Africans south of the Sahara are nationalistic about their race, often about their land, and many are nationalistic about their particular "tribe". But nationalism about African languages is relatively weak as compared with India, the Middle East or France. In this generalization I include Africans in South Africa - I will elaborate on South Africa a little later. If I am right that nationalism about languages is weak in sub-Saharan Africa, as compared with, say, India, what are the reasons? It is indeed relevant, but not adequate, to point out that most sub-Saharan countries are multilingual. Deciding which indigenous language to promote as a national language carries the danger of

ethnic rivalries. This is perfectly true. Any move to make Hausa the national language of Nigeria could precipitate a national crisis in Yorubaland and Igboland. Luganda would be strongly resisted outside Buganda in Uganda. But India, too, is a multilingual country. And language policies have sometimes provoked riots. The original constitutional ambition to make Hindi (a northern language) the language of all India has understandably met stiff resistance in the South. Compromises have had to be made. In spite of the presence of so many languages in India - and sometimes because of it - linguistic nationalism is one of the political forces in the land. Where Africa's languages differ from India's is partly a matter of scale. While the three major Nigerian languages (Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo) are spoken by some 20 million people each (Hausa more, others less), most African languages are spoken by far smaller numbers. In contrast, some Indian languages are spoken by up to one hundred million people. Hindi is spoken by several hundred million. In a multilingual society, does the scale of the linguistic constituency contribute to nationalistic sensitivity in defence of the language? In addition to linguistic diversity and linguistic scale, there is the distinction between the oral tradition and the written. The overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African languages belonged to the oral tradition until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is no ancient written literature outside Ethiopia and the Islamized city states of East and West Africa. Without a substantial written tradition, linguistic nationalism is slow to emerge - although there are exceptions, such as the linguistic nationalism of the Somali based mainly on the oral tradition. The main Indian languages have a long written tradition, with ancient poets and many written philosophical treatises. These help to deepen a propensity for linguistic nationalism. But the written tradition can include one additional element - sacred literature. Because most African languages were unwritten until relatively recently, those oral languages do not have sacred scripture. Sacred scripture is itself an additional fertilizer for linguistic nationalism. Linguistic nationalism among the Arabs has been greatly influenced by the Holy Book, the Koran, as well as by great Arab poets of the past. Finally, we must bear in mind that the humiliation of black people has been much more on the basis of their race than on the basis of their languages. African nationalism is therefore much more inspired by a quest for racial dignity than by a desire to defend African languages. All these are massive generalizations with a lot of exceptions. Some Ethiopians were literate and sophisticated long before the written word was a common currency among the Anglo-Saxons on the British isles. Large sections of the Tanzanian population today have shown nationalistic attachment to the Swahili language. They write not just letters but poems to the editor as a matter of course. And yet Africans describe their countries as being "English-speaking" and "French-speaking" in a manner in which ex-colonial Asia never does. Whoever speaks of "English-speaking Asian countries", like India, or "French-speaking Asian countries", like Viet Nam? Because sub-Saharan Africans are rarely linguistic nationalists, they are seldom resentful of their massive dependence on the imported imperial languages. A politician may speak six indigenous languages fluently. If he or she does not speak the relevant European language, he or she cannot be a member of parliament in the great majority of sub-Saharan African countries. To be head of state in Kenya, a candidate needs to be trilingual - competence in Swahili, in English and in one of the major ethnic languages of Kenya. Swahili is the trans-ethnic lingua franca at the grassroots level and the primary language of oral speeches at the national level. English is still the official language of documentation, the constitution, the judiciary and most of the debate in parliament. The most influential newspapers are also those in the English language. But, on the basis of experience so far, a Kenyan president has also needed a major ethnic constituency as the foundation of his political support. It is because of these considerations that a Kenyan president has so far needed to be trilingual.

A president of Tanzania, on the other hand, has only needed to be bilingual - with competence in Swahili and the English language. Proficiency in an ethnic language for a major politician in Tanzania has sometimes been more of a liability that an asset. At the very least neither Julius K. Nyerere nor Ali Hassan Mwinyi has needed ethnic languages for his ascent to the pinnacle of the political system. Technically, a president of Uganda could be unilingual in the English language and get away with it. The country is so linguistically fragmented that many Ugandans are in any case multilingual as citizens - but would be quite prepared to accept a head of state who was unilingual in the imperial language of English, much as the people of Malawi once accepted Hastings Banda as their leader although he had lost competence in his native language and could only speak to the people in English. In Kenya the official language of the constitution is English but the de facto language of electoral politics is Swahili. In Kenyatta's last years, legislation came before parliament in English and was debated in Swahili because the president insisted that Swahili was the parliamentary language of Kenya at the oral level. In today's parliament in Kenya, legislation still comes in English - but there is the flexibility of debating it in either English or Swahili. Constitutions all over sub-Saharan Africa are written in a European language, making them unintelligible to the majority of the population. In the great majority of African countries the constitution has not been translated into an African language. It is difficult to build a culture of constitutionalism in Africa if concepts like "civil liberties", "due process", "independence of the judiciary" and "habeas corpus" are never translated into the indigenous languages accessible to ordinary citizens. Constitutionalism becomes foreign as a system partly because it is completely alien linguistically. Banda spoke only English and became president of Malawi; there is no example in subSaharan Africa of a president who is elected to the presidency without a European language. Yes, linguistic nationalism is weak in Africa south of the Sahara. Surprisingly, the two greatest exceptions are two peoples that are otherwise vastly different from each other - the Somali and the Afrikaners. It is arguable that they are the only ones who are true linguistic nationalists in sub-Saharan Africa. They are very possessive, defensive and proud of their languages and have regarded them as central to their cultural identity. Do the similarities end there? The Somali are pre-eminently a people of the oral tradition, who did not even have an official orthography for the Somali language until 1972 when Siad Barre finally chose the Roman alphabet. The Afrikaners have had three hundred years of the written tradition, beginning paradoxically with texts written in the Arabic alphabet (which Siad Barre rejected in 1972). But this Afrikaans written tradition has been very limited. In reality Afrikaans was mainly an oral tradition until the nineteenth century. The Somali have never attempted to impose their language on anybody else over the centuries. Afrikaans, on the other hand, is widely perceived by many South Africans not only as the language of the former oppressor but also as the actual instrument of oppression. Many South Africans believe that Afrikaans was forced not only on millions of school children but also on rural workers, peasants, broadcasting media, domestic employees and simple neighbours in Afrikaans-speaking areas. Unlike the Somali language, Afrikaans was not simply defended against outsiders - it was imposed upon outsiders. Did Afrikaners carry linguistic nationalism too far? Towards the Future But this issue of language is tied to that other force hostile to ethnicity - the triumph of Western culture as a globalizing experience. Western liberalism may be doctrinally in favour of pluralism - but Western culture destroyed the civilizations of the Western hemisphere and has put the civilizations of Africa and Asia under siege. The world is getting

less diverse because it is getting Westernized. The future may be post-modern but can it ever be postWestern? What is happening in the 1990s is a decline in the nation state with a temporary strengthening of Western hegemony. The two forces that have militated against ethnicity are themselves diverging - the nation state is under stress while Western hegemony is temporarily enjoying the fruits of a world with only one super power. The nation state is being challenged at the sub-national level by such forces as religious militancy and ethnic assertiveness. But the nation state is also being challenged at the supra-national level by such developments as the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Association of South East Asian Nations and other regional groupings in search of ways of pooling national sovereignties. On the other hand, the West is triumphant because the Soviet Union has disintegrated, the Warsaw Pact has collapsed, China and Viet Nam are flirting with the market economy, India has returned to the fold of liberal capitalism, the United Nations is under Western domination, Africa is in disarray, and Latin America has returned to the cultural fold of Western civilization. (Latin America has always been culturally part of the First World but economically part of the Third World.) The two enemies of ethnicity are pulling in different directions - the nation state is growing weaker, Western hegemony is temporarily more triumphant. Is ethnicity better off or worse off as a result? Ideally ethnic forces should have been released when both the nation state and Western globalization were on the decline. And yet ethnic forces are being released midstream. It is in that sense that the emancipation of ethnicity is, to a certain extent, premature. It should have waited until Western civilization was truly on the decline, simultaneously with the decline of the nation state. Western civilization will decline in the twenty-first century. And yet that premature emancipation of ethnicity may itself contribute towards the erosion of Western hegemony. What was once a victim of Western hegemony (ethnicity) may reciprocate in kind - a case of the biter bitten. Ethnicity was once diminished by Western globalization. Ethnicity has lived to help diminish the scale of Western globalist pretensions. Islamic militancy may challenge Western supremacy. Tribal identity may challenge the nation state. The stream of experience meanders on In the vast expanse of the valley to time The new is come and the old is gone And people abide in a changing clime!

HCI and Multiculturalism in Southern Africa Jacques Hugo, CHI-SA February 2002 Introduction The quest for socio-economic empowerment in any country requires that we emphasise education, training and resource accessibility. Regrettably, almost the whole of Africa has an enormous skills deficit that needs to be made up. In the knowledge society that will characterise the era ahead, it is not enough just to concentrate on literacy and primary education. We need to make a quantum leap and actively embrace methodologies and technologies that will help leverage South Africa's commitment to revival and growth. Although the local and international press is making no secret of South Africa's comparatively poor international competitiveness, innovation and productivity, it is encouraging that the much-publicised

"African Renaissance" includes among its many objectives the "active stimulation of information transfer, intellectual inputs, patriotic investments, and the promotion of Africa and things African". In response to this, various institutions in South Africa are calling upon local and international experts to become involved in the revival and growth of African economies and industry. Foremost among the areas singled out for urgent and immediate attention are the most powerful enablers of socio-economic growth in the new millennium: education, skills development, and the development of the Information and Telecommunications Technology (ICT) industry. The promotion of "things African" refers particularly to the recognition and exploitation of cultural values in all areas - government, education, commerce and industry. Although HCI is still in its infancy in South Africa, the changing socioeconomic landscape in South Africa is where some of the most exciting and challenging opportunities for practitioners in interdisciplinary fields like HCI lie. In fact, South Africa can be regarded as a virtual laboratory where the many complex socio-politico-economic issues can be investigated at first hand. We know that there is a link between culture and economical and technological development, but there are still many unanswered questions and problems related to the relationship between multiculturalism and HCI. It is not the purpose of this article to attempt to answer these difficult questions. I will rather highlight the opportunities presented to researchers, educators and developers in the HCI community by the unique perspective on "multicultural HCI" in South Africa. HCI in South Africa - problems and opportunities At present HCI in South Africa can be characterised as follows: A scarcity of qualified practitioners and educators. There are only about 20 people involved full-time in HCI. The majority are academics and only three or four are working as full-time practitioners in the industry. A lack of awareness and implementation at industry level - the evidence for this is found in the lack of press coverage of HCI or usability matters and the lack of membership of professional human factors societies. At present there are only sixteen SIGCHI members in South Africa. Isolation and fragmentation between academia, industry, private Research and Development, and government. There is little coordination between universities to ensure conformity and standard of HCI curricula. HCI in industry is largely limited to usability testing, but, as laudable as this might be, the scientific rigor of the methods employed is not very high yet. Usability principles are often enthusiastically implemented, but due to a lack of resources and inadequate training, guidelines are blindly adopted from literature and few structured methodologies are followed. Inadequate or non-existent funding of HCI research. At present funding sources are limited to university research budgets and so far no large-scale formal studies outside academic environments have been undertaken. However, the South African government has approved significant funding initiatives for IT applications, especially for community development projects. We are hoping that an appeal to funding agencies in government for inclusion of HCI initiatives will reach sympathetic ears. In certain HCI research studies we often find that researchers blend concepts of culture with race and also incorrectly equate language with race. This could be due to the fragmentation mentioned earlier - vested interests often prevent interdisciplinary collaboration. The result is a tendency to approach questions about the relationship between culture and technology from either an anthropological, or from a technology angle. What is culture? Before we continue, it is necessary to first consider the meaning of the term "culture" in this context: Culture can be defined as "the shared patterns of behaviours and interactions, cognitive constructs, behavioural norms, expectations and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialisation. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group." [1] From this we can infer that the term "multicultural" refers to different cultural patterns found among different groups of people in a particular country of region. Although "cultural diversity" is often used as a synonym

for multiculturalism, it actually refers to differences between different cultural groups in a specific environment, for example multiple groups within a defined environment, such as a workplace or township. When we apply this definition to the shared patterns in a nation, we can speak of a "national culture" which is a set of values, attitudes, beliefs, and norms shared by the majority of the inhabitants of a country. These shared patterns become embodied in the laws and regulations of the society, as well as in the generally accepted norms of the country's social system. Although it might be possible to "unpack" the shared patterns into a generic list of components, this will always result in artificial divisions because all components are interdependent. I have nevertheless found the following classification of components useful for discussion purposes: Learned behaviours Habits Communication habits Customs Locus of control (internal or external) Ethnicity and Social organisation Race Language Religion Environment Economic conditions Physical environment (climate, geography, etc.) Diet Values and beliefs Work ethic Dress, fashion Politics The South African cultural orientation In any multicultural society learning about culture is an exciting and creative process. But it can also provoke anxiety because of the painful realities that constitute the histories of South Africa and the ongoing interactions with the content that we have with diverse cultural realities. Cultural content and encultured learning, as one example, is a complex sociological and psychological process and one topic that is already being researched by South African institutions. Researchers are discovering that culture is far more exciting and interactive than simply digitising various cultural artefacts. I believe that certain attributes of culture cannot be divorced from a certain group. Others, like language or race, are not necessarily unique to a culture. Moreover, the framework, according to the definition above, is not static and certain aspects of culture, like communication habits, can change over time, especially under pressure of influences like information technology which tends to change life styles and expectations, and hence behaviour. Also, a large part of culture is learned behaviour common to a given society and this acts like a template in the sense that it shapes behaviour and consciousness in that particular society from one generation to the next. [1] The influence of culture In South Africa the influence of culture on technological innovation and deployment is profound and complex, but evidence of this is often only visible to those who search for it. I suspect that most people only become aware of these influences when they are at the receiving end of designs based on ill-conceived population stereotypes. For us as practitioners, the development of a unique South African HCI perspective should begin from the recognition that users are cultural beings, and for this reason, HCI researchers and practitioners need to pay attention to the processes of acculturation [2], enculturation[3] and formation of cultural identities (sometimes multiple identities!) under globalisation pressures.

South African society is shaped by indigenous socio-economic forces and cultural practices as much as it is by globalisation forces. Computer users are not a homogeneous group and for that reason, it is important to acknowledge and understand the role played by human factors, not only in the design of software for diverse user groups, but also in our efforts to build a healthy ICT industry that can enrich people's economic, social, cultural, and political lives. There is no doubt that ICT, as one of the major drivers of globalisation, plays a significant role in hastening change, particularly in terms of hastening acculturation from an indigenous cultural system towards that of individualism. We know that ICT is both a product of change and an agent of change, in the developed world and also in developing countries. HCI practitioners should therefore understand how these technologies (whether device, interface or the institution represented by the technology) might enhance or undermine the indigenous cultural systems of society. In his address at the African Renaissance conference [5], Professor Ali A. Mazrui [4] emphasised that culture is relevant for development in all spheres of society because of seven key functions: Culture functions as lenses of perception - it influences how people view themselves and their environment. It serves as a spring of motivation - what people respond to as incentives or disincentives for certain patterns of behaviour is a phenomenon which is greatly influenced by culture. Comment: The work ethic is often a product of cultural configurations. Is the work ethic in Africa cultivated or stifled by culture? Culture provides a standard of judgment. What is right or wrong, what is virtuous or evil, what is beautiful or ugly are all greatly conditioned by culture. Culture forms the basis of socio-economic stratification. Rank, caste, and class are all profoundly conditioned, if not created, by culture. Culture is a means of communication - it provides all sorts of nuances in communication and intimation. But above all culture provides language in the literal sense of the legacy of words and lexicon. Comment: Can any country approximate first rank technological and economic development if it relies overwhelmingly on foreign languages for its discourse on development and transformation? Will Africa ever effectively take off when it is held hostage so tightly to the languages of its former imperial powers? Culture defines and influences production and consumption. Cultures differ widely in productivity, not only in Africa but the world as a whole. Culture is a basis of identity - it is crucial in defining the "we" and "they" and marking the frontiers of solidarity. Comment: How can development tap into the complexities of identity to achieve results? And how do differences between men and women affect issues of identity? When one considers the issues of science and technology, it is this complex configuration of cultural functions that the African Renaissance has to respond to. When we face the developmental challenges of the future, we must understand that for South Africa "development" inevitably means "modernisation", but without dependency on a legacy of foreign aid, resources and products. At the recent World Economic

Forum Deputy President Jacob Zuma again emphasised that Africa needs investments, not handouts. How to become self-sufficient without either sacrificing indigenous values, or alienating your allies, is one of the key issues the African Renaissance has to deal with. As Professor Mazrui points out, " modernisation is change that is compatible with the present stage of human knowledge, which seeks to comprehend the legacy of the past, which is sensitive to the needs of the future, and which is increasingly aware of its global context." [5] This is the positive interpretation of modernisation. Development of indigenous skills and values are at the core of the African Renaissance. Again we must ask, where does culture enter into this? If development equals modernisation without dependency, there is no doubt about the relevance of the African Renaissance in so far as it aims to stimulate the regeneration of indigenous values. African culture is central to this process of reducing dependency in the dialectic of modernisation. To date, most researchers have relied on Geert Hofstede's (1997) dimensions of culture to help analyse and describe cultural variables in a particular region, community or nation. In most countries, as Hofstede points out, a dominant culture exists and it should be possible to identify the characteristics of such a culture to determine how we should design our technological artefacts to suit the majority of users. This might be true for some countries, but, due to the dramatic socio-economic changes we experience at present, South Africa does not have one dominant culture that is so mature and powerful that it can absorb different cultures and also be enriched in the process. As in many other "multicultural" environments, we find different groups of people with different religions, race, and ethnicity and they all speak different languages. Several cultural forces are in evidence and these forces are constantly in flux, for reasons that should best be explained by anthropologists and sociologists. This has a dramatic effect on the development of a globally competitive and nationally relevant ICT industry in our country. The history of information technology development elsewhere in the world is repeating itself in South Africa. For the vast majority of IT practitioners in South Africa, the field of HCI is very obscure and far removed from their everyday work and interests. The prevailing approach to application development is still characterised by the application of engineering techniques to technical problems, without much, if any, attention to human factors. As elsewhere in the world, this results in poor application usability, poor user performance, low productivity levels, and users' dependence on support and training. The realisation of the importance of a user-centred approach in software design has not yet filtered through to the South African IT community. Combined with the lack of attention to cultural differences, this has far-reaching implications for empowerment of the disadvantaged masses, for education and training, and for economic development. Seen against the background of South Africa's social and political conditions, it seems that even poor usability can be blamed on factors like linguistic, cultural, literacy and economic diversity. These realities can in turn be located within an historical context, for example the legacy of apartheid education that has now forced South Africa into trying to catch up with the competency bases of developed countries. In South Africa, as in most developing countries, a digital divide exists between the technological "haves" and "have nots". Of course this is not a new idea, and worldwide it is generally recognised that for the "haves", computer-based commerce and dynamic networked communication is not only possible but also essential. Also in South Africa this community has eagerly adopted ICTs and moved beyond e-mail and the web; we are seeing signs of new electronic communities that are evolving from the convergence of domains and technologies. For example, young people are finding it more and more difficult to distinguish between the use of handheld devices (PDAs, cell phones, MP3 players, etc.) for entertainment, work or communication. People's attitudes toward new devices are changing rapidly as they discover new benefits and it is generally assumed that these devices will have great personal or social value, and therefore inevitably result in cultural paradigm shifts. Signs of this paradigm shift are becoming more evident by the day; the population that could potentially use and benefit from information technology, seems to grow culturally, economically and educationally more diverse. Particularly for the "have nots" the situation is very different. Users from these communities have

different expectations of technology. These expectations are coloured by their frame of reference, educational level, cultural prejudices, career expectations, income, and many other variables that are very poorly understood by software developers, nor accommodated within current design practices in South Africa. Avoiding technological determinism Seen from from a human factors point of view, traditional designers and most developers of new technology have been making too many assumptions for too long about user prejudices and preferences in the adoption of innovations. We find that they either ignore these perspectives entirely, or they over-compensate. We find such assumptions about the prejudices and preferences in a particular region or community in the form of ideas about colour associations, how messages should be structured, forms of address and honorifics, preferences for "ethnic" designs, and many more. This emphasises the importance of understanding the differences and also the similarities through the eyes of those who should benefit from the product. Without this understanding, the marketplace will impose a "one size fits all" attitude on South African users. This will inevitably result in excluding various sectors of society from access to, and benefiting from information technology. Without proper understanding of the cultural variables involved, new media and communication devices threaten to expand, rather than resolve, the divide between haves and have nots. Many IT missionaries envision the development of an information infrastructure that can enrich people's economic, social, cultural, and political lives. For such an infrastructure, or, in fact, many other applications of computer and network technologies, to be successful, requires solutions to all these issues: how to build effective and appropriate human-centred systems. The time has come to focus more on designing active information spaces that exploit the humanisation potential made possible by information technology, and thereby avoid technological determinism. To avoid elitist, exclusionary and discriminatory practices, ICT practitioners should focus more on designing interactive information environments that will facilitate access, learning and empowerment, and in so doing, exploit the new cultural and work representations for all, leveraged by information technology. Appropriately designed systems should not only acknowledge our unique South African characteristics, but should also help to open the doors to collaboration and integration with the international community. Avoiding imitation When we consider the urgent need for HCI education in South Africa, we are also faced with the challenge of closer cooperation between industry and academia. In developing countries there is often a tendency to regard countries that are seen as technologically and economically more advanced, as the source of superior ideas and values - an attitude that might be described as a "technological halo effect". But what is good for one country or one user is not necessarily good for another - "imported" doesn't necessarily equate with "better" and is often an insult to the skills and capabilities of local practitioners. We therefore need avoid the obsolete tendency to simply transplant so-called tried and tested methods and products. We need to develop our own resources and strengthen our own competence. The impact of software design The cultural diversity of South African society has important implications for software as far as user-centred design is concerned. For example, under normal circumstances the user and task analysis techniques offered by HCI provide adequate information about users and their work. However, these techniques are inadequate when a large number of cultural variables must be examined. To cope with cultural diversity and still ensure optimum performance, a designer needs to know about a wider range of factors that will affect a person's work and social behaviour in a technological environment. This implies that the South African HCI practitioner cannot function effectively without including ethnographic techniques in his or her toolbox. For example, we must be careful not to relegate users' perceptual idiosyncrasies and varying cognitive strategies to simple "user preferences" that have no real technical merit. Since perceptions affect behaviour, we must determine to what extent this will affect the intended functionality and usability for this class of

user. This question must be extended to a consideration of the impact of the system on the quality of the user's work life. HCI advocates familiarity with the users' task domain. Users' computer-mediated tasks are embedded in their work, and their work is embedded in their work culture. This implies that in multicultural environments analysts need to do more than "standard HCI practice" to understand these broader domains. Common HCI practice is typically concerned with integrating diverse sources of information. It is common to hear advice such as "know thy users, for they are not you," and to study the users' information- or task flow. As praiseworthy as it is to be sensitive to, and have a respect for the users as skilled and competent members of their cultures, analysts should be careful not to claim that they "learned the user's job well enough to do it myself". This is an obvious fallacy - no matter how much you feel yourself part of the user's culture - the mere fact that you are the analyst or designer automatically creates an ideological and cultural distance between you and the user. A cultural orientation (perhaps more correctly an ethnographic orientation) is therefore a logical approach to contextual analyses in multicultural environments. This approach emphasises the users' competence in a dialogic setting with members of other disciplines. In this sense, users are not only competent members within their own cultures - they are also competent interpreters of their own and of others' cultures. The aim of participatory design has always been to encourage direct work with users, as well as sharing knowledge elicitation and decision-making. An ethnographic orientation extends this approach through its concern that artefacts and interpretations from the users' domain be understandable and verifiable by the users and that HCI professionals consider whether HCI usage of the users' materials or knowledge might be contrary to the users' wishes or interests. Current work on multiculturalism in HCI In response to the situation sketched at the beginning of this article, we now need to ask: South African is a multicultural country, but what makes us different from countries like Brazil or India, or even the USA, and do we have something to offer the international HCI community? What are the variables of culture that seem to have an effect on the way people assimilate technology and how do these variables differ from other countries, if at all? If we know these variables, how should they be incorporated into our analysis, design and development techniques? It appears that users in multicultural environments are often very resilient and more likely to make allowances for software that does not quite represent their own cultural values. Does this mean that we need to pay less attention to "localisation"? To what extent can we rely on the results of multicultural studies in other countries? In a bold initiative, South African practitioners have started to tackle some of these issues, and we will report on the progress at the CHI 2002 Development Consortium: Web usability in a multicultural environment. Lizette deWet, Pieter Blignaut & Andries Burger (University of the Free State) have found that South African web site developers should take cognizance of the fact that Afrikaans-speaking people find it easier to search for information in Afrikaans (in contrast to English). It is suggested, however, that there is no need to translate web sites into an African language. Carina de Villiers and Arcilia Masoeu have done similar work on visual and other representational issues. Customization of interfaces for different cultural groups. Diane Norton's results suggest that customized user interfaces may not be necessary for users of the same computer based systems in South African businesses due to shared representations. Empowerment of semi-literate users. Edwin Blake's research and development project aimed to provide semiliterate animal trackers in nature reserves with a hand-held device to gather complex data on animal behavior. Trackers are experts in their own right and have access to very sophisticated and complex information about the environment. This knowledge is not available to the wider community, mainly because of the barrier of illiteracy. They benefit from greater recognition, while the wider community gains from

access to the knowledge of the trackers on animal behavior. The system has become a successful commercial product with a number of applications. Using digital technology to archive and access cultural treasures. Gary Marsden, Katherine Malan and Edwin Blake (University of Cape Town) showed that to understand the environment in which African art is created, it is essential to build systems which present uncertain data about scarce and valuable resources in a meaningful way. Africa also has unique problems in distribution of information, which makes it essential to create interfaces for the widest possible range of distribution. There are unique challenges in creating, and providing access to, a database of African cultural artifacts. Such an archive will serve not only as a store, but also as a way in which some of the African artwork stored in foreign museums can at least be virtually repatriated. It will also serve as an educational tool for sharing artwork across the continent. There is a great potential for Africa to present its rich culture to the rest of the world and to recapture (in digital form at least) those artifacts which are currently housed in museums outside our borders. The future of HCI Education, Research, and Practice in Southern Africa. Paula Kotze's (University of South Africa) study emphasizes that, while the limits of technology seem endless, the real limits of scientific and economic growth lies in humankind's ability to absorb and apply new information and technology. The human-computer interface can contribute to the successful impact of information and technology on society by making it accessible and usable by the wider population. In Southern Africa this population is characterized by a multiplicity of ethnic, cultural, language, education, economic, and other backgrounds. A concerted effort by all role players is required to draw together of all forces within the fields of academia, research and industry to ensure the successful integration of HCI and it related principles and approaches. Visual literacy. In this fascinating study, Marion Walton, Vera Vukovic & Gary Marsden (University of Cape Town) question western cultural assumptions underpinning the web's evolving navigational conventions, and investigate to what extent certain communities (like university students) command the currently dominant Western conventions. Many previous studies originate from a concern with the 'export' of software to culturally different contexts, and consequently focus on the relatively crude practicalities of "internationalization" and "localization". This study particularly investigates an understanding of visual communication beyond the individual icon, at the level of the complex, culturally-relevant combination of both representational (iconic) and non-iconic elements of screen designs. Conclusion We see cultural factors at work in the design of interactive software primarily in intra- and intercultural and class differences in the use of abstractions and generalisations, where such generalisations are required to successfully use applications. We also see it in cultural variants based on differences in "locus of control" (i.e. internal or external) and in visual literacy which includes the understanding of colours and symbols, and the role of ethnicity, class, gender and age in the design of visual communication. To a greater or lesser degree all of these factors may be predictors of individual task performance. If usercentred design does not include a cultural dimension, we in South Africa will remain at the receiving end of foreign computing developments. Software needs to reflect and acknowledge our diversity and it must accommodate the true needs of our upcoming generations. South African HCI practitioners and their international collaborators should be encouraged to give high priority to all projects aimed at addressing the bigger problem of eradicating elitist, exclusionary and discriminatory practices in the South African ICT industry, and even worse, in products inherited or acquired from other countries. All of our energies should be focuses on promoting products that facilitate access, learning and empowerment, and in so doing, exploit the new cultural and work representations for all, leveraged by information technology. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------References Bourges-Waldegg, P. and Scrivener, S.A.R. Meaning, the central issue in cross-cultural HCI design. Interacting with Computers. 9, 1998, 287-309. Hofstede, Geert. 1997. Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill, New York.

Masoeu, A. & de Villiers, C. 2001. Web usability in a multicultural environment: a concern for young South African web users? Proceedings of CHI-SA 2001, Pretoria. Muller, Michael J. 2000. Ethnocritical Heuristics for HCI Work with Users and Other Stakeholders. http://iris.informatik.gu.se/conference/iris18/iris1844.htm Onibere, E.A., Morgan ,S., Busang, E.M., Mpoeleng, D. Human Computer Interface Design for a multicultural and multi-lingual English speaking country - Botswana. Interacting with Computers. 13, 2001, 497512. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------[1] http://carla.acad.umn.edu/culture.html [2] Acculturation is the process by which individuals from a minority culture assimilate into the majority culture. [3] Enculturation is the process by which we become cultural beings. [4] Professor Mazrui is Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities, State University of New York. [5] Address at the African Renaissance conference in London, November 1999.