African community-individual relations are organic like cells to organism

Evidence

The relationship between the living and the dead is comparable to that between cells and the organism to which they belong. Relationships between the individual and the community in African societies are thus considered, as are those between “I” and “us”, the parts and the whole, the Creator and His creatures. All African realities should be read under this aspect. It is not a mixture of roles or the loss of one’s personality and identity, and neither is it a loss of order inside a developing society, as it might seem at first sight. In a society thus made up, there is certainly no place for heroes. Imperialism is not African. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 333

Categorization

• XREF: The cell-organism analogy maps onto Menkiti’s ‘man as part of a whole’ and the organicist social models critiqued by individualist political theory.
• DEFINE: Defines the community-individual relation as biological/structural integration rather than dissolution of identity.