Leo Ozoemena

In this essay, we aim to show that African ways of being with each other can help develop a concept of the human being that reflects our experience better. African modes of communal living and related humanist theories will be brought in to show how being from body to body is lived concretely. Parenting comes in to show the advantages of African forms of living as it spans across generations. Yet in order to learn from these perspectives, the colonial heritage in Western concepts of the self needs to be considered. Frantz Fanon’s decolonial thought which Judith Butler utilises to highlight the significance of social bonds for the subject opens up more relational ways of conceptualising our place in the world. The bodily dimension of the relational self will be explored by way of the phenomenological concept of intercorporeality.