Question 5.97

5.97 African culture assigns great importance to the family. How can this model be of interest to the Church and the rest of the world?

In the first place, the African family is built around a common life. For many people, money has a secondary place. My family was poor, but we were still happy and close-knit. In Guinea, the family has remained the primordial cell of society, the place where we learn to be attentive to others and to serve them unostentatiously. I think that Europe and the West must rediscover the meaning of the family by looking at the traditions that Africa never abandoned. On my continent, the family is the melting pot of the values that irrigate the whole culture, the place where customs, wisdom, and moral principles are handed down, the cradle of unconditional love. Without the family, neither society nor the Church exists any more. In a family, the parents transmit the faith. The family lays the foundations on which we construct the building of our life. The family is the little Church where we begin to encounter God, to love him, and to form personal ties with him.

My father taught me great love for the Virgin Mary. I can still see him kneel down on the sand of Ourous to pray the Angelus every day at noon and in the evening. I never forgot those moments when he closed his eyes to give thanks to Mary. I imitated him and recited my prayers to the Mother of Jesus at his side.

Parents are man’s first educators. In a family, man can learn to live and to manifest the presence of God. If Christ is the bond that holds a family together, then it will have an indestructible solidity. In Africa, an important place is reserved for the elderly; the respect due to old people is one of the cornerstones of African society. I think that Europeans do not realize how shocked the peoples of Africa are by how little attention is paid to the elderly in Western countries. This tendency to hide old age and marginalize it is the sign of a worrisome selfishness, heart-lessness, or, more accurately, hard-heartedness. To be sure, old people have all the comfort and the physical care they need. But they lack the warmth, closeness, and human affection of their relatives and friends, who are too busy with the professional obligations, their recreation, and their vacations.

Indeed, the family is a place where man learns to be of service to society. In Africa, the family has never closed in on itself; it takes its place within a larger social fabric. The tribe and the village are generally the natural extension of the family; the tribe conveys the culture, protects and transmits some very ancient traditions. An African proverb says, “It takes a whole village to educate a child.” Everyone receives and, in the same action, participates in the survival of the group; I speak about survival, because nothing is easy. Certainly I am not unaware of the fact that this sense of belonging can be seriously perverted, particularly when some tribes resort to the logic of pride, hatred, and disdain for others.

Nevertheless, nothing replaces the family, where we can understand the depth of giving and of love. I learned from my parents how to give. We were accustomed to receiving visitors, which impressed on me the importance of welcoming and generosity. For my parents, and all the inhabitants of my village, receiving others as guests implied that we were seeking to make them happy. Familial harmony can be the reflection of the harmony of heaven. That is the real treasure of Africa!

Other regions of the world would be in serious danger if they came to lose this “source of giving”. Back in November 1981, in his apostolic exhortation Familiaris consortio, John Paul II felt the urgent need to write that “the situation in which the family finds itself presents positive and negative aspects: the first are a sign of the salvation of Christ operating in the world; the second, a sign of the refusal that man gives to the love of God. On the one hand, in fact, there is a more lively awareness of personal freedom and greater attention to the quality of interpersonal relationships in marriage, to promoting the dignity of women, to responsible procreation, to the education of children. There is also an awareness of the need for the development of interfamily relationships, for reciprocal spiritual and material assistance, the rediscovery of the ecclesial mission proper to the family and its responsibility for the building of a more just society. On the other hand, however, signs are not lacking of a disturbing degradation of some fundamental values: a mistaken theoretical and practical concept of the independence of the spouses in relation to each other; serious misconceptions regarding the relationship of authority between parents and children; the concrete difficulties that the family itself experiences in the transmission of values; the growing number of divorces; the scourge of abortion; the ever more frequent recourse to sterilization; the appearance of a truly contraceptive mentality” (FC 6).

I know that the African family still has magnificent prospects ahead of it. I wish I could be sure that such opportunities existed for European, American, Asian, and Oceanic families, too. The battle to preserve the roots of mankind is perhaps the greatest challenge that our world has faced since its origins.