This essay is a response to a prompt that encouraged students to connect ideas from the book Justice by Michael Sandel with Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and an interdisciplinary unit on the colonial period in Africa. Students were asked to develop a definition of citizenship and support it with information from the two books and a variety of historical sources.

Anonymous 

What is responsibility? And to whom are we responsible to?  Many philosophers have spent much time in trying to come up with clear answers to these questions, but unanimity has not been reached. The two most compelling, rival philosophical theories are: libertarianism and communitarianism. The libertarian theory focuses on individual rights, and suggests that one should only be held responsible for what they consent as Sandel says, “From the stand point of individualism, I’m what myself chooses to be. I may be my father’s biological son but I cannot be held responsible for what he did unless I choose to assume such responsibility.” This clearly leaves no room for the wrongs that one’s ancestors perpetrated in the past. On the other hand, communitarians disagree with libertarianism, and present the idea that we, humans, are storytelling beings and we received our identity from our historical ancestors as Alasdair Macintyre writes, “I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation a variety of doubts, inheritances, expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life. This is, in part, what gives my life its moral particularity.” Communitarians also argue that it is nearly impossible to separate ourselves from our history as Alasdair Macintyre says, “The contrast with the narrative view of the self is clear, for the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I’m born with a past, and to try to cut myself off that past is to deform my present relationships.” Therefore, they strongly claim that this received identity creates not only moral responsibilities and obligations but also priority for some responsibilities over others, meaning that we are first responsible to the people who are closer to us. For instance, we are first responsible to ourselves, families, neighbors, local community, country, and all the way to regarding the people in the world as one community that lives on Earth.

Now this communitarian approach seems more compelling than the libertarian one since we cannot set ourselves apart from the long chain of our history, however, how we can determine which people are closer to us than others is still unclear. For example, people who define citizenship as the place where one is born into argue that we are more responsible to the people in our own country before we bear any responsibility to the people in other countries, just because we were born into that country. But this is not convincing, because being born into a country is just morally arbitrary, and we could be born into a country where we don’t have any ties with the dwellers.  For instance, many Somalis who are born into the Somali region of Ethiopia have their clansmen in Somalia, so why would these people have a responsibility to Ethiopia and its citizens before Somalia, where their people live in. With regard to this, we should be citizens to where the people we share with the same experiences, culture, interest and ideas live and belong, and thus have responsibility to those people. Our responsibility is to stand with them and defend their rights, without violating other’s fundamental rights, regardless of the cost even if we have to sacrifice ourselves, because if they are threatened, we will be threatened in the long run. With regard to this, Africans should first have responsibility to one another and their continent, because they have the same experiences from colonization; many people in the world look down on them because of their color, and their internal affairs are interfered by outside powers.

Firstly, the African people suffered together from the vices of colonization and the inhumane atrocities committed against them by the European colonizers. Many people argue that Europeans came to Africa with the evangelical purpose of disseminating Christianity or having mutual trade interests with the local Africans, but it turned out that many wanted to colonize Africa and its people and loot its resources. They brought their own governments in Africa and implemented their own systems as Achebe depicts in Things Fall Apart, “But apart from the church, the white men had also brought a government. They had built a court where the District Commissioner judged cases in ignorance. He had court messengers who brought men to him for trial.” (1742) This quote invalidates that Europeans came to Africa only for promulgating Christianity or trade interest, because they began distributing the local land to anyone that pleased them as Obeirike said, “The white man’s court has decided that it [a piece of land] should belong to Nnama’s family, who had given much money to the white man’s messengers and interpreter.” In fact, the Europeans dehumanized Africans and treated them with no dignity at all. They imprisoned anyone who questioned about their laws and whipped them incessantly. Achebe writes the following quote to show how the white men who came to Nigeria treated with the local people that did not abide by their ways of behaving, “They [prisoners] were beaten in the prison by the kotma [white men’s soldiers] and made to work every morning clearing the government compound and fetching wood for the white Commissioner and the court messengers.”

The above examples from Things Fall Apart are specifically pertinent to the colonization of Igbo people in Nigeria by the Britain, but it could be argued that most of the Europeans had the same beliefs and intentions about Africans. They all wanted to enslave Africans or extract their resources. To further elucidate this point, let us consider the primary source about the Kikuyu in Kenya, because it perfectly demonstrates that Kikuyu were treated just like the Igbo in Nigeria.  The Kikuyu were told that their land from now on would belong to the British king, as the source says, “This great king is now your king and this land is all his land, though he has said you may live on it as you are his people and he is as your father and you are all his sons” (75). The people did not have any king and all the land was passed to them by their ancestors, however, Britain did not treat them with respect, but rather wanted to extort their land. In addition, Britain set up its own governmental policy in Nairobi and imposed rules and taxes upon the local people, and also banned the traditional meetings of these people, and changed their ways of living as the source says, “The Council [the local elders] met again under the Mugomo tree. There were few, for the new rules of the Pink Cheeks had forbidden big meetings. I looked around at my friends and was sad. Their faces were anxious and their skin was loose on their bones” (100). Just like the Igbo, Britain built schools in the local districts and taught the Bible and limited education, and anyone who turned down its policy would be punished. Now we can see that colonization affected throughout Africa and all Africans suffered from the vices of the white men. Therefore, Africans should have a full responsibility to one another and defend their rights together because they underwent the same horrible situations. If Africans don’t work together and stand together today, colonization could come back just as it came in the 1880’s. And if this happens, they could undergo another worse form of colonization. Yet the only way that Africa could prevent a future colonization is to be unified and act as a single, inseparable community, where everyone is a citizen to the continent and ready to sacrifice themselves for the well-being and the defense of their continent.

Secondly, another very strong experience that should bind all Africans around the world together, despite of where and how they dwell, is the fact that they are looked down by the people in the world. The segregation and discrimination in the United States are ideal examples of how Africans were put down. The black community was regarded as lower class citizens and was not permitted reacting with the white community just because of the arbitrary color of their skin. The better schools, hospitals, restaurants, etc. were only for the whites. How one could be segregated based on their naturally obtained color? What a ridiculous system! Did the whites work for their white color?  More other compelling pieces of evidence that show that Africans were looked down are provided in Things Fall Apart. When European missionaries settled in Africa, Nigeria specifically, they began considering African people as cultureless savages. They ignored the local people’s traditions and beliefs and presented theirs with coercion as Achebe says, “He [the white man] told that they [the Igbo] worshipped false gods, gods of wood and stone” (1483). All these examples show how Africans were denigrated and humiliated. So these shared experiences should bind all Africans together if Africa wants to be safe in the long run. Their similarities are greater than their differences; therefore, all Africans should cooperate and be the backs of one another to be able to defend their traditions and rights.

Thirdly, the African continent as a whole faces common problems since it is one of the few continents in the world with tremendous resources that have not yet been extracted. Unlike Europeans and Americans, Africans are not fully capable of extracting their resources because they do not have the technology and the skills necessary to do so. Therefore, many countries, including Europeans, Asians and Americans, are casting covetous eyes on the continent. Each one of these foreign countries has its own political systems and philosophy and wants to befriend with some African countries so that it could get cheap materials from Africa and send its products back to Africa, where it could find markets. Africa is one of the very few continents that spend excessive money on imports from other continents and do not export many lucrative items because there is not a good trading relation between the African countries. African countries need to set up their own trading system so that they are less dependent on foreign and imports and aid because we do not know what the future may throw to it down the road. Another problem that most of the Africans are disappointed is that their internal affairs are interfered by other powers, Western powers in particular, which pull their continent’s progress down. In Libya for example, after their president was taken down chaos and instability raged the country and many people died. And the hypocrisy in the Libyan situation is that the powers who were promising that they will end dictatorship and bring freedom and equality into Libya brought slaughtering and killing and then walked away. So the African countries should work together relentlessly to provide security to their people and protect from the hypocrisy of the outside powers.

However, some people around the world including even some Africans may not agree that we have to first bear responsibility to Africa, because they believe national responsibility takes over any other kinds of responsibilities. There is not a clear, unanimous definition for global citizenship because people look at the world differently, however, there is still common-ground.  According to an article written by Ron Israel, co-founder of The Global Citizens’ Initiative–an organization that fosters global citizenship—he says, “A global citizen is someone who identifies with being part of an emerging world community and whose actions contribute to building this community’s values and practices.” Bearing Ron’s definition in mind, the world community could be regarded as a single community because today’s modern technology made it possible for people to communicate with different people in distant places very quickly. In this way, we may feel that we are part of the world community; tackling common problems together like global warming, extinction of wild species and fresh water depletion can be ideal examples in which people could cooperate in solving them. However, the problem arises from the second part of Ron’s definition “……whose actions contribute to building this community’s values and practices.” It’s very apparent that the world is dominated by Western influences and thus most of its values are built on Western cultures and ideas driven by secularism, therefore, it is here where global allegiance is difficult. Democracy for example, is regarded as one of the very essence of global values but when it is scrutinized very closely; its roots are deeply planted in Western cultures of secularism. To emphasize, the UN is considered as a neutral organization, but there is no doubt that it a Western organization where Western leaders dictate to weaker nations. To make the world a better planet where everybody is abiding by its rules and contributing its values, the rules and values themselves must be established together mutually by all the nations and ethnicities that dwell in the world, otherwise, how could certain people succeed in coercing others to follow their ways of living and looking at the world?

Finally, one has different responsibilities to different people based on how many interactions, interests and ideas they share with these people. Having responsibility to some people would mean doing whatever possibly one could to protect the rights and dignity of those people. Africans are people who suffered from colonization together, regarded as inferior, and encounter similar problems in their routines. Therefore, they should have the first responsibility to one another and their continent to ease any problems that life throws to them down the road. But we also need to bear in mind that all the people around the world need to sit together and discuss on how they should manage their planet with the exclusion of none.