African culture refers to the sum total of the African ways of life, it includes within its limits their social values, African religions, marriage practices, music, dance and drama, ways of cooking, funeral practices, language values, widow inheritance, extended family system, dressing code and manners.

African culture also covers the economic functioning of the society and political management through chiefs' chiefdoms like the one of the Ethiopia up to 1974. Hence African Culture embodies all the cherished values of different societies in Africa. Similarly African culture broadens its meaning to include arts, and crafts, artifacts literature and other intellectual expressions of a particular society. These include African stories, Poems, idioms, songs, games and sports aimed at preserving the cultural heritage of African Societies.

The clear meaning of African culture involves all the cultural values of the Turkana, Yao, Akamba, Karamoja, Masai, and Dinka, Hausa, Bemba, Congolese, Baganda Kikuyu, Bagisu, Langi Acholi Zulu and Swazi among ethers. Including how they dress, survive, languages and how they spend their leisure activities e.g. wrestling, board game.
African culture like politics is not static and its never static but dynamic the young the culture, the young the society the older the society (ancient socialized to richer their cultural values)

However considerable values of African culture have been eroded. Most important are the norms, customs, cultural institutions like Chiefdoms, Kingdoms, monarchies, arts, literature. Much of their content has been replaced with western values. As of now African culture is experiencing a cultural shock (a feeling of Confusion end anxiety caused by contact with another culture)

Idi Amin taking some African coffee with bread. One of his achievements was that of promoting African culture by banning mini skirts.

The cultural tyranny of a Eurocentric world culture that was imposed on Africa during the colonial period has largely withstood the fairly tame assaults launched against it by independent African governments and African writers. In the fields of language policy, education and even literature only limited efforts have been made so far towards cultural liberation.

One of the obstacles to cultural liberation has been an excessive emphasis on the part of writers and scholars on political and economic liberation as processes in themselves, divorced from the struggle for cultural independence. Much of the earlier literature on modernization in Africa concentrated on political development, and too readily assumed that the road to political development lay through Westernization. Political development was envisaged in terms of building institutions comparable to those of Western systems.

More recently there has grown up a new rival literature based on the concept of dependency, in which the whole concept of development has been either rejected or drastically redefined. Where it has been redefined, development is now conceived in terms of a progressive reduction in economic dependence. Some of the works by Samir Amin, Johan Galtung, Walter Rodney and Colin Leys belong to this new genre of developmental literature. Perhaps the most sustained application of this radical perspective to an African country is Colin Leys' study of underdevelopment in Kenya.'

Although some writers have emphasized economic decolonization, cultural decolonization is more fundamental than many have assumed. Mental and intellectual dependency, a lack of readiness to break loose from the metropolitan power, and a compulsive urge to imitate and emulate the West are factors that have on the whole had grave economic and political consequences for societies which are still unwilling to take drastic decisions for their own transformation; they are also phenomena with deep cultural causes. In the words of that pre-eminent apostle of cultural liberation, Leopold Sedar Senghor:

'Cultural imperialism as we too often forget, is the most dangerous form of colonialism. It obscures awareness'

The lack of political will for an economic transformation may in part be due to a state of mental and cultural dependency. According to Senghor, much will depend on Africa's writers: "Our renaissance will be more the work of African writers and artists than of politicians. We have seen from experience that there can be no political liberation without cultural liberation.

Another obstacle to cultural liberation has been the confusion of the concept of modernization with Westernization. In fact, retraditionalization of African culture can take modernizing forms, especially if it becomes an aspect of decolonization.

Retraditionalization does not mean returning Africa to what it was before the Europeans came. In hard assessment, it would be suicidal for Africa to attempt such a backward leap. But a move towards renewed respect for indigenous ways and the conquest of cultural self-contempt may be the minimal conditions for cultural decolonization.

Amilcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissau freedom fighter, pointed out that the African Westernized elite led the struggle for political independence because, having experienced Western education, it was the sector which most rapidly became aware of the need to win freedom from foreign domination. But this elite was culturally alienated and therefore fell victim to a neo-colonialist mentality and it therefore needed to be 'reborn'. Cabral's solution to the problem of the rebirth of the elite was to return "to the source', to the culture of the mass of the people.

Colonialism was short-lived, lasting only about 70 years in most of Africa, and the colonial social structure and European culture affected the rural masses very little. 'Repressed, persecuted, humiliated, betrayed by certain social groups who have compromised with the foreign power, culture took refuge in the villages, in the forests, and in the spirits of the victims of domination. The culturally alienated elite must repossess much of the culture of the villages in order to achieve identification with the masses, understand their needs and problems and mobilize them for social and economic development.

Almost every African state has a long way to go on the road to cultural emancipation, to adopt a language policy of relevance to African culture, to transform its educational system, to develop literature and arts of relevant kinds, as well as to pursue an ideology which puts a premium on autonomy and to build a political system which gives weight to the culturally more authentic peasants. What has been achieved so far in the realm of Africa's cultural emancipation?