It is easy to exclude, mislead and exploit people who are illiterate, or incapable of reading and writing. This is because of the limited nature of their access to information and knowledge which is a basis for civic participation, democratic engagement and informed decision-making. This is where illiteracy becomes an enemy to be fought will all our possible means.
Making education subservient to the formative needs of the entirety of the human person as a culturally rooted being who lives in society is restoring its true meaning. Consideration of internal migration in the country is also crucial in education delivery and content as it anticipates how other cultures are intermixing, others left behind, and others affecting each other.
Culturelessness is irreparable, as tradition dies. Tradition, coming from Latin ‘traditio’ means ‘to hand-over’ or ‘to pass on’. There will be nothing to hand over in a few generations to come if our young people have no cultural roots that they identify with and have an envious and proud sentiment for.
Researchers express concern particularly on the negative impacts of the modern technologies – especially now with the capacities of AI being only partially known – on behavioural and psychological health, and on cognitive capacities, such as decision making and critical thinking.
Among experts there are agitations regarding limitations of effective human control and unpredictability of the AI systems.
It is baffling and scary even to scientists themselves that AI tools can solve problems beyond what they were trained for by the human programmers, and even further applying problem solving models that humans do not recognize and cannot understand.
It is time we shed out these cultural beliefs that get in the way of actual wellness and health and face the vulnerability of being unwell as a life reality. This makes it easy to be helped. The good thing is we have professionals in the country, but they can only be fully utilized if people are set free from the cultural ties that make them see their actual vulnerability as a threat to their public image.
Maternal health is the cornerstone of early childhood development, which begins at conception. Families and communities must prioritize the care of pregnant women through early antenatal consultations, adequate nutrition, prevention of gender-based violence, and protection of their physical and emotional wellbeing.
rom our cultural philosophies, at least shared across the people of African origin, both those within the continent and those in diaspora, the sense of community is deep and strong; as the Ubuntu philosophy for example says “I am because we are.”
When young people are taught that this is our way of life they grow with a reflection to own this new sense of being as a backdrop and a springboard from which they bounce as well as make sense of their life.
What happened to the African values which have set grounds for what we regard as our social morals? Do they still stand as ideals to measure ourselves by? If yes, do we still communicate that to our generations? There are wars today in many African countries, and most of these countries have deep knowledge of conflict resolution in their cultural wisdom, and have riddles, jokes and adages communicating a whole wide range of interesting ideas about peace. If culture does not inform our deeper convictions about human values the discontinuity is a dangerous black hole.
Poetry is beyond rhymes and play of words, it is an art that enables poets to express carefully deeper thoughts and meaningful mental constructions which simple conversational words cannot present sufficiently. It is an art because we enjoy its richness especially as it informs both the society about itself and the outside world, and the world about itself and in relation to that particular society, respectively, in an inward and outward dynamic.
With language as the vehicle and safeguard for the treasures in poetry, it follows that when a language is polluted, there will be repercussions in the poetry of that language, and in the understanding of the corpus of poetry that has lived generations before such pollutions. Dynamics of languages are diverse and are often irreversible if appropriate action is not taken.
he case of Mbye Otabenga (c. 1883-1916), now popular as “Ota Benga,” a Congolese young man from the Mbuti indigenous forest people, who was put in the zoo in America, is not isolated from the deep-rooted and widespread oppression and suppression of people of different races by the Caucasians of Europe and America, who at the time dominated science, trade, media, and publications.
The degrading oppression of people of African origin who have been referred to by colour ‘black,’ a hugely controversial and widely unacceptable taxonomy, has for centuries been given both reason and justification meaning by manipulating science in favour of the pervading oppressive idea.
Abuse of the internet can be in a diverse spectrum, diversified into consumption as well feeding of the internet with materials. In terms of consumption, it can be considered an abuse of the internet when its potentials are not put to full use, or are redirected into the opposite of the good it can achieve. On the other hand each of us can unknowingly be contributing abusively to the internet. There are of course many people whose project is just that, as they profit from it. We can however learn how to minimize this negative contribution to the internet as regular people.