The principle of communality can be defined as the ability of a community-based worldview, consciousness, behavioral model, socio-political norms and relations to spread at all levels of complexity of society, including, albeit in a modified and sometimes even distorted form, sociologically supra - and extra-communal levels. As a core organizing principle, communality has a direct impact on all subsystems of African society at all levels of its existence throughout history. This is what can explain to a great extent the specifics of African culture, African civilization. It also makes sense to look for the roots of the peculiarity of the historical process in sub-Saharan Africa in its implementation of the principle of communality.

Keywords: sub-Saharan Africa, community, community, tradition, culture, society, worldview, history.

Before considering what communality is and what its role is in the culture and history of sub-Saharan Africa, it is necessary to determine whether it is appropriate to refer to a single "historical, cultural and socio-political tradition of sub-Saharan Africa". Obviously, this view is justified to the extent that a single "African culture" is a reality, since each culture has a unique tradition; in a certain sense, a cultural tradition is a culture in its dynamic - sociohistorical - aspect. In turn, the validity of this view, in my opinion, is determined each time by the scale of a particular study. Indeed, when comparing African cultures of any historical period, one can undoubtedly see significant differences between them. Nevertheless, there are certainly important similarities that make it possible to combine them on different geographical scales: a separate polity (if we consider, as a rule, multiethnic and multicultural pre-colonial, colonial and modern states), a region (contrasting the cultures of West and East Africa, the Sahel and the Congo basin, savanna and rainforest, etc.) and, finally, the entire sub-Saharan Africa as a whole cultural area that differs from non-African areas (see, for example: [Sow et al., 1977; Distinctive Characteristics..., 1985; Bondarenko, 1997 (2); Bondarenko et al., 2010] 1). As the Nigerian anthropologist, S. S., has so elegantly put it. Ajayi, the concept of "African culture"refers to distinctive cultural elements inherent in Africa that do not exist among the British or Chinese" [Ajayi S. A., 2005, p.36].

During the colonial period, the belief in the reality of a unified African culture served as the basis for such powerful ideological concepts, as well as related scientific theories, as pan-Africanism and Negritude. In our time, the postulate of the unity of African culture plays the same role in the cultural ideology of afrocentrism and the scientific school formed on its basis (see, for example: [Asante, 1990; Asante, 2003; Asante, 2007; Howe, 1999, p. 230-239; Reinhardt, 2008; Fenderson, 2010]). All these

1 L. Frobsnius [Frobcnius, 1898; Frobcnius, 1923; Frobcnius, 1933] was a scientist who was at the origin of the socio-cultural zoning of sub-Saharan Africa. However, his mysticism-infused approach is far from the modern understanding of science.

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theories / ideologies sought to draw a strong link between Africans and the black inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, and therefore argued that African culture was transported across the Atlantic by black slaves and, despite everything, always remained common to all those whose roots are in Africa. It is significant that many outstanding thinkers of this direction (in particular, E. Blyden, W. Dubois, M. Garvey, E. Sezer, M. Asante) were born outside of Russia - in the USA or the West Indies.

Some scholars write not only about "African culture", but also about" African civilization", thereby trying to give the concept of African culture a dynamic dimension and express the idea of its continuity throughout history from antiquity to the present day. A particularly strong tradition of this approach has developed in French-language literature under the direct influence of the Negroes ' ideologues L. S. Senghor and E. Sezaire. In particular, the outstanding Senegalese historian S. A. Diop "was the first African with a university education to support the idea of the unity and antiquity of African civilization" [Vaillant, 2006, p. 294, p. 1; Diop C. A., 1955; Diop C. A., 1967; Bâ, 1995].

In a less ideologized way, African civilization is also the object of research by Africanists who were formed within the framework of other intellectual and scientific traditions (for example: [Bondarenko, 1997 (2); Fyle, 1999-2001; Nikitin, 2005; Ajayi S. A., 2005; African Civilization..., 2006]). As a rule, these authors emphasize that sub-Saharan Africa is not just a territory where cultures have some common fundamental features, but also a space of historically and socio-culturally specific ways of development. At the same time, they write about both local (separate "high cultures") and regional "African civilizations" (Makeh, 1974; Kobishchanov, 1985; Onwuejeogwu et al., 2000; Connah, 2001 ; Ehret, 2002; Lye, 2002). Naturally, the relationship between the concepts of "African civilization" and "African civilizations" is the same as between "African culture" and "African cultures". The analogy suggests itself: both in everyday speech and in scientific texts, we do not see any contradiction in this, depending on the situation, we talk about "French (English, Spanish, etc.) culture "and about " European culture", "European" (or "Western") civilization: a choice it depends on what we want to emphasize at the moment - the uniqueness of individual European cultures or the similarity between them. In other words, what matters is the level of generalization, the scale of analysis. Any such scale is valid if it is adequate to the scientific task facing the scientist in a particular study.

In addition to the question of the spatial scale of the study, the question of its temporal coverage is also important. As you know, cultural tradition is not static, its variability and continuity reflect the variability and continuity over time in culture and society. At the same time, the socio-cultural history of Africa clearly shows that if there really is a transformation of the existing culture, and not the formation of a new one on the basis of the old one, the primary foundations of culture are preserved, despite all the changes. Due to self-development or changes provoked by external influence, culture can take new forms in all its spheres, but these forms retain essential continuity from their predecessors. As M. Herskovits wrote, "since taking into account all relevant factors is one of the fundamental principles of the scientific method, the cultural foundation on which changes occurred and the place of established tradition in developing responses to innovation should be fully taken into account" [Herskovits, 1962, p.7].2
2 Herskovitz was probably the first well-known scholar to base his concept of the sociocultural history of sub-Saharan Africa on the idea of a single cultural tradition that was not only temporal but also spatial, since he argued that this tradition was not lost by Black Americans, but rather was preserved by them and defined them. cultural identity [Herskovits, 1941; Herskovits, 1962]. Note that the discussion between proponents and opponents of this view continues to this day (see: [The African Diaspora..., 2001; Gershenhorn, 2004; Rucker, 2005; Rucker, 2010; Encyclopedia..., 2006, p. 53, 97-98; Jamison, 2008, p. 100-102.]).

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Thus, we emphasize once again the need to take into account the historical dynamics of African culture. In particular, for a long time (in fact, since the first decade of independence of most African states [Ajayi J. F. A., 1969]), there has been a dispute about the place of the colonial period in the history of the continent, and one of the positions in it is to treat it as nothing more than an" episode " (for example: [Herbst, 2000] for an overview of the discussion, see [Austin, 2010, p. 13-15]). In the context of our topic, however, colonialism was an important stage in the history of Africa, as it was under it and thanks to it that the impact of another civilization turned from an external factor in its socio-cultural transformation into an internal one. 3 It was the colonial division of the continent, during which its cultural, political and socio-economic map was radically redrawn, that predetermined the birth of most of the modern African states and nations, with all their distinctiveness. As for the current historical moment of intensive globalization, internal and external factors of transformation are so intertwined that their breeding is seen as artificial and does not contribute to the analysis of phenomena.

So, although different grounds may be chosen for the periodization of the history of Africa, for the purposes of this work, its division into pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial eras seems justified and meaningful. The first was a time when internal factors dominated the composition and development of African culture and its traditions. The second was characterized by the interiorization of external influence and its transformation into the primary source of many changes, while the peculiarity of the modern era is determined by the actual continuity of internal and external factors that guide the development of Africa in all spheres.

Of course, the Africa that attracted the great travelers of the XV-XIX centuries is a thing of the past. However, those tourists are wrong (and not only them) who, when they see cars, newspapers and computers in Africa, are disappointed, thinking that "the real Africa is no longer there". Despite all the colossal changes that took place in the colonial and post-colonial periods of history, the cultures of Africa still retain their identity, remaining essentially African cultures. This means that outside of visible innovations, they are still based on their long-standing foundations. In my opinion, this is the source of many of the problems that the Black Continent is currently facing, since these foundations have not been sufficiently compatible with the requirements of the modern world, into which Africa was forcibly drawn and which was first dominated by industrial, and now is dominated by post-industrial culture. At the same time, thanks to the same socio-cultural foundations, Africa remained Africa, and did not turn into a "branch" of Europe, despite the direct and in many respects strong influence from its side during the colonial period [Bondarenko, 1995(2); Bondarenko, 2005].

I consider the principle of community to be the most important and unchangeable foundation of almost all societies and cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, and therefore forming the foundation of a single African historical, cultural, and socio-political tradition. In my understanding, it consists in the ability of community-based worldviews, consciousness, behavioral models, socio-political norms and relations to spread at all levels of social organization, including supra - and extra-communal ones. Communality thus follows from, but is in no way limited to, the fact that, in Africa, the community has always been and remains a basic institution.-

3 In the pre-colonial period, not only European but also Arab influence on African societies remained external in most cases: only on the coast of the Indian Ocean and nearby islands did the synthetic Afro-Arab Swahili culture develop (Zhukov, 1983; Hurrciz, 1985; Allen, 1993; Horton and Middlcton, 2000; Middlcton, 2004). In addition, the only significant example of intsriorization of initially external influence before the second half of the XIX century is the Portuguese possessions of the early modern period in the south and west of the continent.

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It is the core of social life, which has developed an authentic (so-called traditional) worldview and spirituality of Africans.

Past and present communities in Africa have shown a wide variety of types and forms, from local groups to territorial neighborhoods. The most widespread community consists of large families, which in turn are divided into households, since it meets the conditions for manual slash-and-burn farming, which has long been the economic basis of most African societies. In a single large family, kinship and territorial ties are combined by definition (Olderogge, 1975), and in a heterogeneous community consisting of several large families, the situation is even more complex.

There are two variants of such a community. The former is represented, for example, by the Nigerian Bini, the peoples of Central Cameroon, and the Shona of Zimbabwe (Bradbury, 1973; McCulloch et al., 1954, p. 160; Ksenofontova, 1970). There, large families that make up a community are considered related to each other, and therefore kinship ties prevail over territorial ones in the community as a whole. Another option is when large families in a community do not maintain kinship relations (as in the West African Bambara and Songhai [Paque, 1954, p.53-54; Rouch, 1954, p. 43]). In this situation, at the community level, territorial ties prevail over kinship ties. In a sociological sense, this means that the principle of community is not identical to the principle of kinship, even if the formulation and expression in kinship categories of a variety of relations, including political ones that go beyond the community, is inherent in African culture [Diop T. 1958-1959, p. 16; Armstrong, 1960, p.38].4
As a result of long and sharp discussions, 5 the view of the community as the oldest and almost universally widespread form of social organization in pre-industrial societies, starting with the societies of early primitive hunter-gatherers, was established (for example: Murdock and Wilson, 1972; Kabo, 1986; Butinov, 2000, pp. 75-93). In Africa, the community has lived through all historical epochs. In pre-colonial times, socio-political evolution, which consisted primarily in the formation and development of complex (i.e., supracommunal levels of socio-political integration) societies in most of the continent, did not lead to the undermining of the fundamental socio-cultural role of the community. On the contrary, most often the community served as a" matrix", a" model " for the socio-political institutions that grew above it(Bondarenko, 1996 (2); Bondarenko, 2004).

Nor was the community destroyed by the much more rapid and dramatic changes of the colonial era. In particular, almost all attempts of the colonialists to impose private ownership of land, which implies the right of its free sale, failed (which, as world history shows, leads to the collapse of the community [Bondarenko, 2006, p. 71-72]). The only exception was the introduction of the Mailo system6 in Buganda (Balezin, 1986, p. 118), the core of the British Uganda protectorate. This unique phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa was undoubtedly possible because the pre-colonial kingdom of Buganda was already developing the prerequisites for the emergence of a private economy.

4 Also see, for example: Kabcrry, 1959, p. 373; Tardits, 1980, p. 753-754; Tymowski, 1985, p. 187-188; Ray, 1991, p. 205; Skalnik, 1996, p.92; Bondarenko, 2006, p. 103]. A vivid example of how Africans understand and express unrelated relationships in terms of kinship is the phenomenon of "ship brotherhood". During the slave trade, Africans who arrived in the New World on the same ship often began to consider ssbs as relatives and perform corresponding duties towards each other, and the name of the ship became a common name for all members of the pseudo-related group [Dridzo, 1995; Mustakccm, 2007; Popov, 2009]. Currently, fictitious kinship relationships can be established between Africans who, fleeing from "hot spots", lived in the same refugee camp for a long time [Swigart, 2001, p. 6, 16].

5 In particular, for discussions in British functionalist and structuralist social anthropology and in Soviet Marxist ethnography, see, for example: [Bromlsky, 1981, pp. 181-185; Nikishsnkov, 1986, pp. 133-139; Girenko, 2000; Rsshstov, 2000; Artemova, 2009, pp. 102-109].

6 "Mailo" - a corruption of the English mile, i.e. "mile": the size of plots transferred to private ownership was calculated in square miles.

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property rights, including land ownership (Mukwaya, 1953). In general, private property in the political and economic sense was unknown to Africans. They believed that the land belonged to their ancestors. As a result, Africans were convinced of their special, but not proprietary, connection with the land: people and land were perceived as fundamentally inseparable from each other, since the living formed an indissoluble unity with the spirits of their ancestors. In the end, the community became an integral part of colonial society, without which colonial exploitation could not be effective, and perhaps even possible, at least on this scale (Meillassoux, 1991).

Today, more than half a century after the independence of most African countries, despite the increase in urban migration, the majority of the continent's population is still rural, and therefore communal. The coexistence of community and State is one of the typical and important features of the socio-political structure of many modern African countries. Moreover, we should rather talk about their coexistence, rather than organic joint evolution, since the state, at least in its current form, appeared in Africa not as a result of internal processes, but through artificial planting and implementation at the end of the XIX-XX centuries.

The decline of the community is linked to the emergence of capitalism (see, for example, Kamen 2000, pp. 126-137). Consequently, on the one hand, the ongoing coexistence of the community and modern economic, social, political and cultural elements indicates the internal eclecticism of African societies, which must be considered as an important result of the disruption of their self-development due to European colonization. On the other hand, Africa has preserved its socio-cultural identity to this day precisely because the community does not just continue to exist, but remains a fundamental institution that determines the role of communality as a basic principle that is embodied not only in itself, but also in a broader, complex society. The indestructibility of the community throughout African history with all its perturbations shows that today it is not a relic, not a fragment of the past, but the most significant expression of the deep essence of African civilization as a communal civilization: let me repeat that communality as a socio-cultural foundation, although it follows from the fact of the temporal and spatial universality of the institution of community in sub-Saharan Africa, not reduced to it. In short, communality can be described as a basic principle of private and public life in African society, organizing it in all spheres and at all levels, including those that go far beyond the community.

Communality is not the same as collectivism, since most types of communities common in Africa combine the rights of the community as a whole and the individual family to the same means of production, including cultivated land. It is characteristic that all attempts to establish a post-colonial society based on the ideas of "African socialism" were unsuccessful. One of the main reasons for this was that, with all the diversity of these ideas in the interpretation of various ideologues (k. Nkrumah in Ghana, A. Sekou Toure in Guinea, and the Tanzanian J. Nyerere et al.) were united in a key aspect: the African peasant, a member of the community and a representative of the largest social group in the country, is supposedly a "socialist by nature", as the narodniks said about the Russian peasant a century earlier, the intellectual predecessors of these African leaders [Khoros, 1973]; see: [Brockway, 1963, p. 18-36; Mohiddin, 1981, p. 65-94; Metz, 1982, p. 380-384; Idahosa, 2005, p. 2236-2237]. That is, these ideologues ignored the dualistic nature of the community, exaggerating the role of the collectivist principle in it and underestimating the importance of the individualistic principle.

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As soon as the peasant was deprived by the state of incentives to work for the benefit of himself and his family, agriculture - the basis of the national economy-fell into a deep crisis, which, in turn, significantly contributed to the general crisis of the socio-political system. In particular, in Tanzania, newly formed villages (ujamaa) showed their economic inefficiency less than a decade after the beginning of the social experiment - by the second half of the 1970s [Lofchie, 1978; Coulson, 1979, p. 158-172; Freyhold, 1979; Hyden, 1980, p. 119-123; Mwakikagile, 2006, p. 61 ff.; Mkenda, 2010; Shivji, 2010].

Naturally, the African "modal personality"7 corresponds to the communal social reality in which it was formed. For an African, society is not an individual, but rather the "measure of all things", the center of the universe, and the principle of its existence is the similarity of everything to everything and, consequently, of each person to each [Bondarenko, 1997 (1); Sledzevsky, 2006]. Therefore, in the minds of people, the problems, needs and opportunities of society are not a simple sum of the problems, needs and opportunities of its individual members, but are presented as related to the community collective as a whole. This is so because the communal worldview is sociocentric: people perceive their society as the most important element, the focus of the universe (compare with ancient and Modern European anthropocentrism and medieval theocentrism). The sociocentrism of the authentic worldview of Africans stems from their belief that the fate of the universe depends on the will of the ancestral spirits and deities of their people, because they were the ones who once created the world. But their will, good or evil , is nothing but a reaction to the behavior of their descendants, right or wrong.8
In a sociocentric culture, the existence of something is really important, but it is possible only within a wider and clearly defined circle of objects of the same order [Lee, 1953]; in the case of a person, in a collective. Accordingly, ethics - questions of good and evil-becomes a function not of the individual, but of society. In such a society, there is nothing that a member of it can say: "This is my personal business." For example, a person can't

7 " ... defined as the characteristic features that occur most frequently in a social group and are therefore most indicative of its culture "[Haviland et al., 2010, p. 143], and "relate to the central aspects of the personalities of members of society, but are not necessarily inherent in them all" [Wcdcnoja, 2006, p. 1359]. The very concept of "modal personality" was introduced in 1944 by a prominent representative of the ethnopsychological direction in anthropology, K. Dubois [Du Bois, 1944].

8 Accordingly, sociocentric cultures do not know abstract humanism as a recognition of the high value of human life and dignity as such that does not depend on anything: in them, their value depends crucially on whether they are a good member of their society or a criminal or an outsider. The life and dignity of the former are of high value, since such a person is certainly necessary for maintaining the well-being of all compatriots and the existence of the Universe itself: the correct behavior of descendants pacifies the ancestors and inclines them to bestow benefits to all members of society, and allows the world to continue to exist. In addition, because of the fundamental and indissoluble connection between the living and their ancestors, each member of society occupies a special place in its kinship network and can expand it, this is the main common wealth of society, by acquiring offspring. Criminals and outsiders are not given such a high value - in a sociocentric culture, simply belonging to the human race is not enough for this. Criminals lose value due to the fact that their antisocial behavior is perceived as a threat not only to the public, but also to the public. those who were directly targeted by crimes, but first of all-to the general welfare: their unworthy behavior can negatively affect the attitude of their ancestors to all their living descendants. Outsiders are not inherently valuable: "others" cannot be as valuable as "we", because their ancestors, unlike ours, did not participate in the creation of the world, and therefore their descendants cannot significantly influence its fate. It is significant that until the time when the European and Arab slave trade undermined the moral foundations of African societies involved in it as suppliers of human goods, in the vast majority of cases only criminals and outsiders, in particular prisoners of war, could be forcibly enslaved and legally sold (see, for example: [Park, 2000, p. 256-263; Fagc and Tordoff, 2002, p. 267; Pcrbi, 2004, p. 28-68; Bonislawski, 2007, p. 353-354; Lovejoy, 2011]). It is no coincidence that the adoption, i.e. the inclusion of an outsider in the local system of kinship relations, and therefore the establishment of his connection with the ancestors of new relatives, in authentic African culture was considered as a natural, if not the only way to get him membership in this society.

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consider it a very personal question of whether to have children: expanding the family network and making sure that after the death of an individual there will be someone to worship as an ancestor is important for the entire team. Therefore, the refusal to prolong the family line is considered as a fundamentally social act-as a refusal to fulfill a public duty. Traditionally, childless people became outcasts in society, and they were both feared and despised (see, for example, in Beany: [Bradbury, 1965, p.97-98]). It is noteworthy that this attitude has not changed to this day. For example, in many postcolonial African cultures, childless people are still not buried in communal cemeteries or, at least, with the full cycle of funeral rites performed [Fortes, 1978; Ademola, 1982; Ebin, 1982; Silva, 2009; Noret, 2010].

However, contrary to the belief that has been common among Europeans since the first travelers to sub-Saharan Africa, the individual in it is not "absorbed" by the collective, not "dissolved" in it, but has an obvious value of its own. It stems from the idea of the uniqueness not of the individual, but of the place of each person in the universe, his irreplaceability in it and in the community collective as its center. After all, this particular person is the son, brother, father of certain members of the community, a descendant of certain ancestors. The cult of ancestors forms the core of authentic African religions and worldviews, the "ground" of the worldview (see, for example: [Fortes, 1966; Bondarenko, 1996(1); Perspectives on Africa..., 2010, p. 283-322]). As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, an outstanding researcher of African cultures, P. Talbot, emphasized that " no one can hope to appreciate the thoughts and feelings of a black person who does not realize that for him the dead are not dead, but alive with full possession of all their abilities, including memory, and endowed with greater gifts and opportunities than when they we were on earth" (Talbot, 1926, vol. 2, p. 298). Today, throughout Africa, ancestral worship is quite easy to get along with Christianity and Islam in the forms of syncretism and dual religiosity.

Thus, the cult of ancestors dictates as the most important task of the living to maintain proper relations with the spirits of the ancestors, who can either reward their descendants with all the benefits, or destroy the whole world. Therefore, behaviors that have already proven to be safe from the point of view of ancestral reactions, i.e., those that are followed from generation to generation, are always clearly preferred by any new ones; novelty as such is seen as something risky and, therefore, obviously undesirable. Since the course of life is seen as cyclical, in which everything new, in fact, is a repetition of the old 9, society is focused on simple socio-economic and cultural reproduction (thereby giving the community and the principle of communality additional stability and significance). The behavior of any individual member of society seems to inevitably affect everyone, since ancestors are considered both personal (their immediate descendants) and collective (the entire community). Therefore, everyone is important for maintaining the delicate universal balance between the living and the ancestors, and is responsible for it.

The role of the individual in what we call "history" seems very large, because myth - the main form of its perception in authentic, non-written African society-allows for voluntarism by the narrator making changes to the text, gives faith in the possibility of changing the past by intellectual effort (and in this sense myth is actually opposed to history). At the same time, not only all members of the community as individuals, but also the community as a whole are responsible for

9 Thus, even the birth of a child is considered not as a completely new event, but as a reincarnation in the form of an infant of one of the ancestors. Thus, a newborn is not quite a newborn, but someone who was once born, lived and died, and now begins to move again in the same circle of life. The main task of the baby's relatives and other community members is to find out which of the ancestors returned to life in a physical, visible form. Usually, special diviners are invited to do this. Their decision often depends on the choice of a name for the child.

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ancestors, who are also perceived as both individuals and, more importantly, a collective-a host of spirits. Ultimately, communality requires concerted action to maintain universal balance and mutual responsibility for correct behavior [Bondarenko, 1994; Bondarenko, 1996 (1); Bondarenko, 1997 (1)]. The principle of communality, whether expressed in religion, politics, social or economic relations, is based on the interaction of the individual and the collective, and the interests of the latter, although not suppressing the interests of the former, are considered priority [Sow et al., 1977, p. 158-161].

In contrast to Modern European ideas, in authentic African culture, being a person does not mean showing individuality, being different from other members of society, but being like them. This is the only way an African finds and feels his irreplaceability and uniqueness. The exclusivity of a person lies not in the uniqueness of his qualities and traits, but in the originality of his social role and position. The collective that unites the living and their ancestors in the minds of Africans is perceived in communal concepts and categories. Its priority over the individual, therefore, serves as the ideological basis for the existence of the community at all times as the all-encompassing primary foundation of African societies. Just as any person could have access to a piece of land only as a member of the community, so he could be socially complete and well-off only as a worthy, in a certain sense typical, member of the community collective. The principle of communality puts forward as an imperative the likeness of the individual to other members of the collective and behavior within the framework of a generally accepted model. Only based in their thoughts and actions on the recognition of the primacy and supremacy of the collective over the individual as an absolute social norm (which in principle does not imply that it is obligatory to follow it), an African in an authentic culture can recognize himself as a person, only in a collective can he feel truly free.

Once again, communality as a socio-cultural principle is directly related to the fact that the community is a basic, fundamental social institution throughout African history. But communality is broader than community in the sense that as a principle of organizing social life and the foundation of culture, it can fully manifest itself in complex societies, far beyond the community, when the community is either a true "matrix" for building a complex society, or an ideological metaphor that serves as a support for its construction [Bondarenko, 2008, p. 26-30]. Communality became a fundamental socio-cultural principle precisely because it was able to go beyond the community. The deep communality of African culture has found important manifestations in the supra-and extra-communal contexts in general, and in the predominantly self-development of most African societies in the pre-colonial period, and in colonial and post-colonial times, when completely new, genetically unrelated institutions were partly planted and partly grown on local soil. Let us recall that the principle of communality was defined above as the ability of a community-based worldview, consciousness, behavioral model, socio-political norms and relations to spread at all levels of complexity of society, including, albeit in a modified and sometimes even distorted form, sociologically supra - and extra-communal levels.

A very good confirmation of the above is the African city. Sometimes the African civilization is called "rural" or "rural" [Sadous, 1986, p. 80; Strategies for Endogenous Development, 1986, p. 117; Ranger, 1997, p. 277], which is fundamentally incorrect [Bondarenko, 1995(1), p. 283; Saul, 1998, p. 543]. There are at least three historical areas in sub-Saharan Africa where cities flourished long before many new cities were founded across the continent during the colonial period. These are Western Sudan, Upper Guinea and Pober-

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the Indian Ocean Basin (Lvova, 1988; Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1993; Africa's Urban Past, 2000; Connah, 2001). However, " African pre-colonial cities had a distinctly agrarian character, with the majority of the male population regularly going to the fields a couple of miles away. In such cities, agriculture was started on any suitable site and in the city itself" [Fyle, 1999-2001, vol. 1, p. 109-110]. Accordingly, in social terms, these cities were complex compositions of a considerable number of village-like communities, each of which usually occupied a separate block in the city. Thus, the pre-colonial African city was not separated from the village, but, on the contrary, maintained an economic, social and cultural continuum with it. A city and a village were equally unthinkable without a community, and together they formed an internally consistent socio-economic and sociohistorical fabric of pre-colonial African culture [Bondarenko, 1991; Bondarenko, 1995 (3); Bondarenko, 1996 (3)]. The civilization of sub-Saharan Africa is correctly called not "rural" or "rural", but "communal".

Colonialism contributed to the distortion of the communal social composition of "old", "traditional" cities due to the emergence of industry in them and increased migration to them from rural areas, on the one hand, and gave rise to a huge number of "new" cities, primarily large, initially non-communal in social terms and not agrarian in economic terms, on the other. These trends were even more pronounced during the period of independence. Nevertheless, the principle of community persisted in socially transformed old cities and penetrated into new ones, finding various manifestations; sometimes useful for society, sometimes ugly. For example, most urban migrants, especially recent migrants, send part of their earnings to their native villages, and many of them try to go there for holidays or other reasons. In addition, I will mention just two of the many vivid manifestations of community in the city that I have personally observed in a dozen African States. These manifestations are very different, thus showing how large the scope of possible differences between them can be.

In large African cities that serve as centers of attraction for migrants from all over the country, such as Accra, Dar es Salaam, Cotonou, Lagos, Luanda or Lusaka, associations of people from the same region are formed on the initiative of the citizens themselves, whose members are bound by the obligation of mutual assistance. It is noteworthy that these associations are regional, not ethnic: for example, in Dar es Salaam, people from the same multi-ethnic region join the same association, regardless of ethnicity. Even if the natives of the same region and their descendants are not concentrated in a particular area of the city, but are dispersed in it, they tend to seek communication and cooperation with each other.

At the same time, in large cities in Africa, there are areas where, despite differences between them in terms of region of origin, ethnicity and religion, residents consider themselves to form not a random group of neighbors, but a special unit of society. In contrast to the previous example, in this case, people do not seek to preserve their "pre-urban" identity in the new socio-cultural environment, but, on the contrary, adapt the realities of the modern city to their essentially communal consciousness. Moreover, they tear apart the social space of the city, drawing a bold line between "them" and "others" - everyone who lives in other urban areas. They consider their neighborhood "theirs alone" and are convinced that they have every right to regulate all relations in it, including the" mode of stay "and" rules of conduct " of outsiders, whether they are foreigners or residents of "not their own" quarter, often including representatives of the city administration and even police officers. Such areas are found in large cities in South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana, and other countries, but probably the most famous in this regard is the Nigerian Lagos, many of which are located in the same area.,

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including the central areas, which are controlled by gangs of "local boys" (Momoh, 2000; Momoh, 2003) 10.

Thus, communality as a core organizing principle has a direct impact on all subsystems of African society at all levels of its existence throughout history. In my opinion, this is what largely explains the specifics of African culture, African civilization. It also makes sense to look for the roots of the peculiarity of the historical process in sub-Saharan Africa in its implementation of the principle of communality.

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