Section 7: TRACK 7
The Contributions of Africa
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Track 7: Contributions of Africa
The people of Africa have been heavily affected by Europeans. Nevertheless, many of them are still deeply rooted in their distinctive culture. This has given them astonishing capacity of survival through exploitation and slavery. Both in Africa and in the diaspora it continues to express a wisdom we great significance for all. Its distinctiveness and power need clarification and fuller recognition.
Other Tracks in this Section
- Track 1: Can Whitehead’s Cosmology Contribute to Hindu and Jain Thought?
- Track 2: Sikh Values for an Ecological Civilization
- Track 3: How Does Buddhist Nondual Process Thought Respond to the Global Crisis?
- Track 4: Confucian Thought and Whitehead
- Track 5: Thinking Independently in the Tradition of Classical Greece
- Track 6: The Contributions of Indigenous Wisdom
Track Heads
Toni Bond Leonard
For almost twenty years, Toni Bond Leonard has worked tirelessly to make the voices of Black women heard around what she calls the “very essence of who we are as women” – our reproductive and sexual health. The co-founder and former President/CEO of Black Women for Reproductive Justice, Ms. Bond Leonard’s life work has been to create a society where Black women are healthy, have healthy families, and live in healthy communities. In 1994, Ms. Bond Leonard was one of the twelve Black women who coined the phrase, Reproductive Justice, which laid the groundwork for a whole new framework to advance reproductive health and rights. That new framework has forever changed the way women’s activists have come to understand when and where women of color enter the women’s movement and their significance in creating change and formulating social and political analyses.
Ms. Bond Leonard has been a student of the indigenous African religion known as Ifá, since 2006. She embraces both Ifá, the religion of her African ancestors and Christianity, the religion of her mother and maternal and paternal grandmothers. “There is much that indigenous African spirituality can teach us about how to right our current ecological imbalance as a civilization and how to create a world that is ecologically sustainable, says Bond Leonard”
Ms. Bond Leonard is currently completing M.A in Theology with a focus on Theology and Ethics at Claremont School of Theology (CST) and will begin her Ph.D. studies in the Religion, Ethics & Society program at CST in the Fall of 2015.
Suggested Resources
Links to Section-related books and media for pre-conference preparation include:
