African Culture, Human Ontogenesis Within

Human Ontogenesis

Ontogenesis refers to the development of an individual organism over its life span. African cultures, like other cultures, view human ontogeny from a social perspective. An important assumption with social ontogeny is that cultures write their texts onto the biology of human development. In this way, social ontogeny does not exclude biology, because ontogenesis implicates both biological and cultural evolution. Whereas the human species shares a universal humanity in its genetic code, this commonality plays out into a bewildering diversity of specific individuality (Maquet, 1972) in different cultural contexts (Nsamenang, 2001). In reality, hereditary factors complement a variety of cultural formulas and ecological circumstances to nudge development in some directions, but not others. Accordingly, traditional African families take precautions to ensure spousal compatibility by excluding “shameful diseases” such as mental illness and convulsive seizures in prospective spouses. This is an obvious inclusive-fitness consideration to prevent the lethal consequences of genetic factors in childbearing. In addition, African cultural practices subject pregnant women and their spouses to behavioral taboos that guide sexual intercourse, specific food items, and emotional distress, among others things, in order to promote the health of the unborn child and mother.

Social ontogeny draws on African life journeys to recognize the cultural transformation of the child into a viable member of a particular community through periods of an unbroken circle of existence. As they do so, children gradually and systematically enter into and assume particular levels of personhood, identity, and being. Broadly stated, an African ontogeny recognizes three components of human selfhood (comprising two metaphysical phases), namely, spiritual selfhood and ancestral selfhood and an existential or experiential social selfhood. This view of human ontogeny addresses the concept of the human life cycle that developmental science often invokes but has not yet fully articulated. Thus, an African perspective on human life explicitly posits a circular path to human being.

The circularity derives from a theocentric view of the child as a divine gift. Some societies believe in special divine gifting through the reincarnation of ancestors who lived virtuous lives, though the Ibos of Nigeria believe in reincarnation of ancestors who led evil lives. Spiritual selfhood begins from the moment of incorporating a dead ancestor into the spirit world until that person reincarnates. Ordinarily, there is divine approval of the pregnancy of the majority of children. The experiential self or social selfhood begins at birth and extends to biological death. More accurately, social selfhood begins from the ritual incorporation of the child into the human community through naming. In some societies, “Children are not thought to belong to this world until they have been incorporated into the community of the living through naming” (Nsamenang, 1992, p. 142). Newborns are thought to have “special links with the spirit world.” The ancestral selfhood follows biological death and extends to the ritual initiation of the dead into the [Page 59]spiritual realm. It is difficult to accept the death of children and youth; death is more easily accepted for old people.

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