Thousands of people all over South Africa mixed tears with dance, celebrations with lamentations, over the death of Nelson Mandela. This is how they express culturally the rite of passage from this side to life on the other side, where their ancestors, the wise ones, and the guardians of the people, their rites and their ethical norms are. Now Mandela is there, invisible but plainly present, accompanying the people whose liberation he aided so greatly.

Moments like these make us remember our greatest human ancestry.  We all have our roots in Africa, even though the great majority does not know it or does not give it importance. But it is crucial that we retake our origins, that, in one way or another, are inscribed in our genetic and spiritual code.

I will refer here to aspects of a text I wrote long ago, with the title, “We are All Africans”, that has been realized, in light of the world situation, that has changed.

To start, it is important to denounce the African tragedy: Africa is the continent most forgotten and vandalized by world politics. Only her lands count. They are bought by large world consortiums and by China, to organize immense grain plantations to assure food, not for Africa, but for their countries, or to be sold in the speculative markets. Together, the famous “land grabs”  would cover the whole of France. Today, Africa is a sort of rearview mirror of how in the past, and, still now, we humans can be so inhumane and terrible. The present neo-colonization is more perverse than the colonizations of past centuries.

Without forgetting this tragedy, let us concentrate on the African inheritance that lies within us. There is consensus nowadays among paleontologists and anthropologists that the adventure of hominization began in Africa some seven million years ago. It then accelerated, passing through the homo habilis, erectus, neanderthal… until it reached homo sapiens, some ninety thousand years ago. After being on African soil 4.4 million years, homo sapiens moved to Asia, about sixty thousand years ago; then to Europe, forty thousand years ago; and to the Americas, thirty thousand years ago. That is to say, the majority of human life has been lived in Africa, which is now forgotten and despised.

Africa is not only our geographic place of origin: it is the primitive archetype, the collection of impressions left on the soul of the human being. It was in Africa where the human being developed his first sensations, where his growing neural connections were created (cerebralization), the first thoughts shone, creativity emerged, and the social complexity arose that allowed language and culture to appear. The spirit of Africa is present in all of us.

I see three principal axes of the spirit of Africa that can help us overcome the systemic global crisis we are now experiencing.

The first is Mother Earth, Mother Africa. While spreading out over the vast African spaces, our ancestors entered into profound communion with the Earth, feeling the connection that all things guard with each other: the waters, the mountains, the animals, the woods and the jungles; and the cosmic energies. We need to retake this spirit of the Earth to save Gaia, our Mother and only Common Home.

The second axis is the relational matrix, as anthropologists say. Africans use the word, ubuntu, that means: “I am who I am because I belong to the community” or “I am what I am because of you and you are what you are because of me”. All of us need one another; we are interdependent. What quantum physics and the new cosmology teach about the interdependence of all with all is evidence of the African spirit.

To that community also belong the dead, like Mandela. The dead do not «go» to heaven, because heaven is not a geographic place, but a form of being in this, our world. The dead remain amid the people as counselors and guardians of the sacred traditions.

On the third axis are the rites and celebrations. We admired the fact that an entire day was dedicated to honor Mandela with masses and prayers. Africans feel God in their skin, Westerners in their heads. This is why Africans dance and move their whole body, while we Westerners remain as cold and rigid as broom sticks.

The important experiences of personal, social and seasonal life are celebrated with rites, dances, music and offerings of masks. The masks represent energies that can be beneficial or detrimental. It is in the rituals where the negative and positive forces are balanced and the primacy of good sense over the absurd is celebrated. If we retake the spirit of Africa, the crisis would not have to become a tragedy.

We know that through feasts and rites society restores its relationships, and social cohesion is strengthened. Moreover, work and struggle are not everything. There is also the celebration of life, the rescue of collective memories and the remembering of the victories over the threats we have endured.

I am pleased to offer the personal testimony of Washington Novaes, one of our most brilliant journalists: «Some years ago, in South Africa, Novaes writes, it impressed me that it was enough for three or four Blacks to get together to start to sing and dance with a wide smile. One day, I commented to a young taxi driver: “Your people have suffered and still suffer a lot. Yet, all it takes is for a few people to get together and you are already dancing, singing and laughing. Where does such strength come from?” And he answered me: “With the suffering, we learn that our happiness cannot depend on anything outside of ourselves. It has to be our own only, to be within us”».

Our Afro-descendent population also offers us that form of happiness, that neither capitalism nor consumerism can provide.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Understanding human existence, starting from the theory of complexity, is enriching. It is worth noting that we are complex beings, endowed with a convergence of countless factors, material, biological, energized, spiritual, earthly and cosmic. We possess an outward appearance with which we make others aware we are one of them and that we belong to the universe of the bodies. And we have an interior inhabited by vigorous positive and negative energies that form our psychic individuality. We are carriers of the dimension of the profound where the most important questions exist about the meaning of our journey through this world. These dimensions constantly coexist and interact, influencing each other and molding that which we call the human being.

We must care for everything in us. Otherwise, we lose the equilibrium among the forces of which we are constructed and dehumanize ourselves. In dealing with the topic of caring for the body, we must consciously oppose the dualism that the culture persists in maintaining: on one side, the «body», detached from the spirit, and on the other, the disembodied «spirit». In this way, we lose the unity of human life.

Commercial propaganda exploits this duality, presenting the body not as the totality of the human, but breaking it up; muscles, hands, feet, etc., into its different parts. The principal victims of this fragmentation are women, because the machista vision found refuge in the media world of marketing, using parts of the woman, her breasts, her gender, and other aspects to continue making woman an «object» of consumption by the machista men. We should firmly oppose this cultural distortion.

It is also important to reject the «cult of the body» promoted by the plethora of gymnasiums and other ways of working on the physical person, as if the man/woman-body were a machine stripped of its spirit, that seeks to constantly enlarge the muscles. With this we do not want to detract from the merit of the different types physical exercise, in function of good health and a better integration of mind-body; the massages that renew the body’s vigor and make the vital energies flow, particularly the oriental disciplines such as yoga, that favor a meditative posture of life, or the incentive to maintain a balanced diet, including fasting, either as voluntary asceticism or as a way of better harmonizing the vital energies.

Clothing deserves special consideration. Not only does it have a utilitarian function, to protect us from inclement weather, it also relates to caring for the body, because clothes represent a language, a form of presenting oneself on the stage of life. It is important to take care that clothing expresses a form of being, and that it shows the human and aesthetic profile of a person. This is especially meaningful for a woman, because she has a more intimate relationship with her body and its appearance.

There is nothing more ridiculous and revealing of an anemic spirit than beauty constructed with unnecessary botox and plastic surgeries. From this artificial embellishment has grown a whole industry of cosmetics and slimming practices in clinics and spas that are hardly in service of a more integrated dimension of the body. This is not to say that we must invalidate massages and cosmetics that are important for the skin and for proper embellishment. But there is a beauty appropriate for each age, the enchantment born of the life’s work and the spirit in the physical expression of the human being. No photoshop can displace the rugged beauty of a laborer’s face, sculpted by the harshness of life, the lines etched by suffering. The struggles of so many women who work in the fields, in the city and in the factories have left in their bodies another form of beauty, frequently with an expression of great strength and energy. They speak of real life and not of an artificial and made-up existence. To the contrary, the touched-up photographs of the icons of conventional beauty, almost all shaped by current beauty fashions, barely conceal the artificiality of the figure and the frivolous vanity there revealed.

Everyone is a victim of a culture which does not cultivate the caring appropriate to each phase of life, with its beauty and luminosity, and also with the tell-tale marks of a life lived, that imprinted in the face and body the struggles, the sufferings, the overcoming. Such marks create a singular beauty and a specific luminosity, instead of fixing the persons in the profile of an outdated past.

We care for the body in a positive manner, by returning, with an attitude of synergy and communion with all things, to nature and the Earth, whence we had exiled ourselves centuries ago. This means establishing a biophilic relationship, of love and sensitivity towards the animals, flowers, plants, climates, sceneries and the Earth. When they show her to us from outer space – those beautiful images of the terrestrial globe transmitted by telescopes or space craft — we burst with feelings of reverence, respect and love for our Great Mother, from whose womb we all come. She is small, cosmologically already old, but radiant and full of life.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for the human being-body consists of achieving an equilibrium of self affirmation, without falling into arrogance and rejection of others, and the integration of a major whole, of family, community, the work team and society, without allowing one’s self to be overcrowded and fall into uncritical adhesion. The search for this type of equilibrium is not resolved at once, it must be worked on daily, because it is demanded from us at every moment.  An adequate balance must be found between the two forces that could either tear us apart or integrate us.

Caring for our being-in-the-world also includes our diet: what we eat and drink. It is to make of eating more than an act of nourishment, but a rite of celebration and communion with our fellow diners and with the fruits of the Earth’s generosity. It is to know how to select organic products or those least filled with chemicals. A healthy life results from that, a life that assumes a posture of caution against the eventual diseases that may befall us as a result of the degraded environment.

In this manner the human being-body makes its inner and exterior harmony transparent, as a member of the great community of life

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU