African Bioconservatism and the Challenge of the Transhumanist Technoprogressism

This reflection focuses on the interaction between technoscience in general and the Transhumanist movement in particular on the one hand and African culture today on the other hand. Traditional African culture can be considered as a bioconservative culture, what Tangwa calls eco-bio-communitarianism. However, the ideology underlying the Transhumanist revolution is Technoprogressism with a frantic taste for the artefactual over the natural and the promotion of artificial intelligence. In the face of the Transhumanist movement, can the African still remain bioconservative? In this paper, relying on Godfrey B. Tangwa’s work on the African perspective of bioethics and Jerome Mbih Tosam’s paper which analyses African environmental ethics in view of sustainable development, I would like to suggest a positive interaction between the African bioconservative or prolife attitude and Western Technoprogressism in this era of Transhumanist revolution. Africans, while inevitably opening up to the world, to the Promethean spirit, must be able to preserve the traditional values which constitute the soul of their culture and which participate in the protection of the environment, the protection of life, the protection of human dignity at a time when the world is experiencing an ecological and health crisis under the effects of the omnivorous spirit of research that characterizes Western culture.