Abstract

MBALLA, Louis Valentin. Understanding the concept of community in the traditional black-African universe. Estud. Asia Áfr. [online]. 2020, vol.55, n.2, pp.295-324.  Epub Aug 14, 2020. ISSN 2448-654X.  https://doi.org/10.24201/eaa.v55i2.2488.

This article seeks to build a framework for understanding the community reality in traditional sub-Saharan Africa. The background of the community concept’s epistemological content shows that the existing contributions vary, depending on each author’s analytic parameters. Any understanding of the community reality in black Africa needs to be based on the socioanthropological variables of the black-African universe: the individual, the family, the clan, the tribe/ethnicity, and the ancestral religions. By analyzing these variables, the author concludes that it is necessary to keep a distance from the current state-centric paradigm and to rethink approaches to community organization in traditional sub-Saharan Africa, in all its diversity and complementarity.

Keywords : community; black African; family; clan; tribe/ethnicity.