ACCULTURATION SUMMIT – BOSTON 2018: WELCOME ADDRESS BY HIS MAJESTY CHOUA KEMAJOU VINCENT – CHAIRMAN OF THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE – BOSTON AUGUST 04, 2018
Your Excellency the Representative of the Governor of the State of Massachusetts
Your Excellencies the diplomats here present
Honorable mayors,
Dear counterparts, traditional leaders,
Dear nationals of different world communities,
Dear promoters and passionate actors of the cultural world
Dear students, researchers and educational leaders
Actors of the media,
We are gathered in Boston for the 2nd International Summit on Acculturation and I would like to acknowledge the sacrifice that each of you has made to be here.
I am pleased that this topic that has haunted my thoughts for the past decade is now being exposed on an international level. Now it remains for us to hope that once it has been sifted by the sagacity of brilliant minds from here and elsewhere, that the phenomenon of acculturation begins to lose ground to the progression of endogenous cultures.
It must be said, we are here to nourish the foundations and prepare the weapons for a fight that will engage generations.
It will not be a question of entering into any form of combat that divides peoples, but rather, to carry out a work of convergence for the research of the identification of the personality for each people, to invite them to go back to draw from their own roots, to the source, what is necessary and essential to the blooming of human beings in general. This initiative is for us the manifestation of the concerns that we have towards the young generations; they to whom we will pass the baton; they however great victims of the Globalization! We will have missed our mission if we have to disappear tomorrow, leaving behind us men and women without reference points. While we are still alive, we must allow our people and especially our youth to know who they are? Where do they come from? And what are their values!
Many of us have noticed a progressive devaluation of our traditional values and an almost total lack of knowledge of the elementary parts of our traditions by our children, even those living on the land. During my many trips around the world, the situation has become even worse in the diaspora: children totally cut off from their roots and whose offspring will have no chance of returning one day to the land of their forefathers if nothing is done!
I am tempted to say that it is the entire black people in particular who are suffering today, because the consequences are measured on a daily basis, and have unfortunately lasted for hundreds of years, placing entire generations in cycles of alienating reproduction.
This is the reason why at the end of the cultural and historical event of NZOUH BI’GOUP which took place in Bazou on April 16, 2016, I had taken the decision to make the problem of the loss of cultural values my main fight. I had at the time launched an appeal to my elites so that they come to my aid to try to restore fundamental traditional values of the kingdom for which I am responsible while adapting it to modernism.
Professor Mekep DJOUSSE Luc from Harvard University (a high dignitary of the Bazou notability) had answered present and surrounded himself with the living forces to hold the torch. I thank them warmly. A 1st summit on acculturation took place in Boston (USA) on July 16, 2016 and the first milestones of this long struggle were placed. It was truly about laying the first stones that should serve as a foundation for the construction of a solid building that can contain the redeemed and the survivors of acculturation.
While Africa is the repository of knowledge thousands of years old, and all the research carried out shows that the great doctrines of the West and elsewhere have their foundations in philosophical schools and Egyptian-Nubian circles of thought, through multiple teachings, it is now obvious that black people are strongly affected by acculturation and its consequences.
Beyond the cultural consequences, the social dimension of acculturation is a real phenomenon that is not limited to our villages or counties, but is shared throughout Africa and even the entire world. The surveys conducted by the project team demonstrate this sufficiently. To hope for a massive adhesion, it was therefore necessary to involve as many actors as possible and to launch the reflection at the global level. This is what justifies the new orientations and the programming of a new meeting on Acculturation whose theme this year is “fighting and preventing the acculturation of peoples”. It is in this perspective of globalization, that the traditional chieftaincies have mobilized in Cameroon and Togo, together with other actors of the World, for a new meeting on Acculturation.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I cannot end these remarks without paying a vibrant tribute to the Djousse couple (Luc and Sylvie) for all the deployment that made this meeting possible. In spite of their always busy schedule, they succeeded in the challenge of this organization which allowed us in one week to travel across America from Florida to Massachusetts. I congratulate my royal Amazon Mabigoup Mbeugon SIWE Julienne for the supervision and the experience that she put at the service of the organization team. May the whole of this organization team also find here my gratitude.
I hope that this conference will be as committed and fruitful as the previous one.
Thank you to all the delegations that came from all over the world. Thank you for the interest that everyone has shown in this summit.
I thank you for your attention.
