Penetrating History and Africanity for Social Ethics

At the beginning of this book I promised that I would situate the arguments of this chapter within the context of Africanity to frame some dimensions of our discourse through the mediating and contestable concept of an intellectual identity. I made the promise because this chapter began as an invitation (challenge) to think the re/construction of Africa's greatness in ways that take Africanity seriously. The following is what sometimes happens to the process of researching and writing a book. Organizers of a major conference invite you to give a keynote address that apparently fits with your current project. But there is always a catch! They request that you enlarge your thought to include their theme. This is what happened to me in 2015, and the request was not merely a catalytic incident in the evolution of this chapter, but a scholarly, postcolonial factor that had to be incorporated into the difficult and risky task of discerning paths to national social transformation. I was invited to give the keynote address of the 2016 Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora (TOFAC) to be held in Nigeria. This encounter, this request to reckon with Africanity as an intellectual identity in the task of thinking about transforming Nigeria's social ethics—more precisely Nigeria's socioethical identity—shaped the ideas you are about to read in this chapter. The organizers of TOFAC define Africanity in this way: