A Response to Jos Chipenda Smangaliso Mkhatshwa Deputy Minister of Education, RSA I am honoured to respond to Rev. Chipenda's well thought-out address. The speaker is by his own admission a true internationalist, but one who is stubbornly rooted in his African culture. This makes perfect sense to me because we are all steeped in our cultures from the cradle to the grave.
Culture is an important part of what it means to be a human being.
It is about our consciousness, our beliefs, our values, our attitudes and dispositions which are embedded deeply in our identity as human beings. Whilst I am in broad agreement with the main thrust of Rev. Chipenda's argumentation, nonetheless I thought he lost a golden opportunity to raise more sharply the potentially dangerous phenomenon of globalisation. The G8 countries are presently setting the agenda for the world. A new financial imperialism attempts to level off cultural identities or tries to recreate other nations in their own image by sheer control or by ruthless monopolisation of resources. It is inevitable that tensions between national and international global cultures will get worse.