An introductionto African culture - its literatures, arts,and values.

This book charts technological developments from an African ethical perspective. It explores the idea that while certain technologies have benefited Africans, the fact that these technologies were designed and produced in and for a different setting leads to conflicts with African ethical values. Written in a simple and engaging style, the authors apply an African ethical lens to themes such as: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, the moral status of technology, technology and sexual relations, and bioethics and technology.

Herbert Hoover, the 31st U.S. president once said "children are our most valuable resource." Similarly, Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa underscores the need for a society to place the needs of its children at the highest rung of its priority. He argued that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children." In the same vein, children are inducted into the processes of society through the family. The family is, therefore, the most foundational institution; the center of the human society. When the family contains all standards and regularity of completeness, it is a pulsating structure that recreates and reproduces life. Strong families guarantee strong communities bound together by cultural principles, interpersonal bonds, shared history, interests and goals. Strong families transmit shared knowledge which enables the community to reproduce and sustain itself through its own children. Therefore, for a social group to exist through time it has to strengthen its concept of family. Furthermore, every society aims to inculcate social abilities and competencies that are essential for preparing young people for full responsibility in that society. The idea is to nurture, socialize and prepare them for the tasks ahead. Sensible people socialize their children using stories that carry their cultural values and historical memories. They seek to reproduce themselves in their children. They want their children to stand on their shoulders and be able to see beyond the horizons that they themselves were not able to see. They seek to pass on the button of social responsibility, continuity and dignity to their children, their future, in order to ensure that their humanity thrives forever. Reimagining the African American Family through African Cultural Values and Structures reengages and redefines modern day conversations about the family. It is a search for principles, models, examples from African culture that may be used in the reconstruction and restoration of African and African American families.

This book discusses differences between African and American culture, to help prevent cultural miscommunications which might poison or ruin relationships between Africans and Americans. I am lucky to have lived in both Africa and America, and I feel priviledged and obliged to share my views and experiences with others.

This notwithstanding, over the years, the African culture in all its manifestations became the bulls eye for attack especially during the Atlantic Slave Trade, Colonialism, Racism. During these periods, Europe dealt coup de grace to the African personality, to his is-ness, by destroying the African cultural values. They disrespected African peculiarities, languages enriched with traditions of centuries, parables, many of them the quintessence of family and national histories; modes of thought, influenced more or less by local circumstances, local poetry which reveals the profundity of African literary wizardry. A lot of these were altered against the background that the African in all his susceptibilities is an inferior race and that it is needful to give him a foreign model beacon to emulate and follow. In our time of globalization, bringing about a new sweep of changes on the African cultural values, a more careful, historically grounded interpretation of the cultural changes occurring on the continent is, therefore, needed and for it to be useful, it should enable us to transcend the narrow and narrowing parameters that currently dominate the discourse on the processes and structures of change occurring in contemporary Africa. This piece is a great accomplishment by African scholars to do a grounded hermeneutics of the structures of changes taking place in Africa. The different chapters are the fruits of the 2018 International Conference of the Association for the Promotion of African Studies (APAS). The authors, like artists, combine originality with insightful imagination. They have carefully treated the historical, conceptual, basic and substantive issues in cultural change in Africa. Their coherent, systematic and encyclopedic approaches have the capacity to expand the intellectual and professional horizon of its readers.