In Central Africa, humor artists remind us that "Africans have become capitalists without capital and nationalists without nation." This popular sense of humor uses laughter to convey how the loss of memory of ancestral values has plunged Africa into a dramatic existential condition, fraught with alienation, estrangement, and petrification of the mind. The crisis we witness in African politics, the failure of economic development, and the widespread social corruption are due to this loss of memory about the meaning of being human. In this chapter, I intend to demonstrate that African tradition offers enough sapiential resources to overcome such a crisis. In this context, I intend to explore a vision of the dignity of the African conception of personhood. I shall use the Bumuntu memory to retrieve such a vision and to bring into relief what in Africa is viewed as the authentic mode of being human. In so doing, I will explore the notions of historical consciousness, historical memory, and cultural memory through the analysis of traditional literature in both its oral and its written sources.

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