RESPECT FOR ELDER
This is the upper most ideology of Africans. Respect is part of the tools that African culture in The African Child (1953), respect is presented in broad sense. Dancing to douga is reversed for celebrated men only; it’s not for just anybody to dance.
The plucking and distribution of oranges is a carefully laid down procedure. Whereby sighting the ripe fruit, it’s plucked by the children but taken to the family head for distribution. Also the family head cuts the first shear during harvest.
COMMUNAL LIFE
There is good atmosphere of friendliness, from Kouroussa to Conakry the child is never short of love, from grand mother, uncles even at Mamou; and his father’s ex-apprentice sees to it that he is comfortable when he traveled with him. Everywhere he goes, he is a welcome visitor. The child explains how visitors come around while they are eating and the mother ensures that the visitors eats not minding up her portion of food.
Also, the circumcision process is also a communal event for age group; the harvest time is not left out of this kind of like. Bayo Ogunjimi and Abdul Rasheed Na’Allah in Introduction to Oral Literature asserts:
In traditional societies, there is spirit of collectivity – this is otherwise called communalism. People do things together. The rhythm of social activities such as naming, circumcision, religion and cultural festival.
The idea of communal life reflects in the novel, in the first eight chapters. A sense of community is suggested by the use of ‘we’ and a continuous tense, in the verb, and in the last four chapters when he is detached from the real village life he lives, and he goes on exile to oversea, he start using ‘I’. In the first eight chapters, he builds it round a recurrent activity such as the ancestral snake and guiding spirit, the goldsmith’s shop, rice harvest, village school, rites of circumcision etc. These constructive elements add up to picture a coherent tradition and community life.
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