A Communal solidarity and the challenge of intergenerational punitive system in Africa: The Yoruba experience

Abstract

The transference of qualitative punitive system in Africa to the next generations is challenged by the hegemonic situations created by the Western colonial ‘theory-maker’. The reality of this formal structure promotes individual character of the law which undermines the transformative cultural principles for intergenerational legal justice in Africa. This paper, therefore, examines the communal solidarity system within the Yoruba culture in order to arrive at the socio-legal sustainability discourse for the next generations. The study employs the conceptual, critical and reconstructive methods of philosophy with a view to sustaining communal solidarity for intergenerational punitive system. The findings show that communal solidarity in Yoruba culture goes beyond the formal Eurocentric principles that celebrate individualistic for a coherent interconnection among social structure, law and belief system towards the certitude and trust making for harmonious human well-being and future generations. Also, it promotes a restitutive principle whereby the offender is reconciled to himself, the victim and the community at large, which seals generational bond not only within the family but the community at large. More so, the notion advances a creative and flexible human activity, whereby human beings are amenable to change and deserve integration into the community with the saying that bi a ba fi owo otun na omo eni, a fi t’osi fa’a mora (when a man beats his child with his right hand, he should draw him to himself with his left hand). Therefore, the study constructively addresses the dispensation of justice with legal certainty, legal diversity and social order for maximally advanced and sustained future.