The GOBATA blog has been dormant since my last posting in December 2013 on Nelson Mandela. This has been owing to two reasons: my partial paralysis as a writer in the face of so many overwhelming events around the globe that require tearful comment and the fact that, by the time I summoned the energy to write, the generous hosts of this blog, Emil Mondua and Dibussi Tande, had napped a bit and someone else had taken over the website and I found myself unable to access my own blog! I am so happy that they have fought so hard and restored the status quo ante and I can now make this posting with the promise never to stop writing as long as I can still write.
On the global landscape, Africa is badly off in many respects but not in all respects. Some human values have been better preserved and respected in African cultures than in any other culture. As the world continues to evolve in the process of globalization towards closer shared and more unified values, it is important that human values preserved and practiced within African cultures be not thrown in the garbage cans and replaced with the values, practices and preferences of the powerful, predatory, proselytizing cultures of the world. That would be a great loss and a pity for humanity as a whole. International legislation and regulation will increasingly regulate human behaviours and practices in many domains around the globe and it is critically important that all cultural perspectives be taken into consideration in formulating such laws and regulations so that we may not end up with a system whose ‘globality’ and ‘internationality’ are mere euphemisms for the arbitrary will and idiosyncratic preferences of erstwhile or current colonial masters.
I have earlier related on this site about the 30th International Congress on Occupational Health in Cancun, Mexico, in March 2012 and the work of revising and updating the Code of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH), in which an Africa working group, committed to making the African voice heard and an African perspective taken into consideration, has been involved. Kindly find here attached, a first publication of that group in the journal Occupational Health Southern Africa of September/October 2013, Volume 19, Number 5. Download LL_AfricanGrp_PW_AfricanPerspectivesEthicalCode_Publ1015
Gobata, Yaounde, Cameroon, 07/05/2014
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