The Fourth Heritage: How to reconcile Ethnicity, Religion and Colonialism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798893958065)

This is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about the African tribal mind and its interpretation of the world as dominated by Eurocentric ideals.

In a brutally honest and yet reflective writing, Mr. Kirunda offers his critique with a uniquely African perspective. Written in the author's third language-English- this book attempts to use simple yet powerful reasoning to advocate a paradigm shift in the way tropical Africans look at their tribal, religious and European/Colonial heritages. In an analytical and creative style, rare to many African writings, Mr. Kirunda vividly describes his tribal life and the impact his parents had on his worldview. He then offers an unusually cold and intimate analysis of: the cultural confusion within the post-colonial African society, his personal hypothesis of why the Americans, Germans and Japanese are economically and intellectually developed, the two hindrances to development in tropical Africa, and his personal creative proposal 'The Fourth Heritage' as a way to integrate the triple heritages and also solve the two hindrances.

In this third edition, he discusses the subject of 'race' as for many in the West it is what stands for ethnicity. He boldly proposes that the way to solve racial problems has to start with differentiating the issue of 'race' from that of identity or skin color. Left purely to be understood in a scientific way, race is a way for objectively categorizing humanity into clusters, and not a source of identity. As such, race ought not to be used as an organizing principle (like tribes/ethnicity or religions) because whenever it has been used historically, it has led to bad outcomes. He also expands his idea of the Fourth Heritage to discuss Christianity, the world's most dominant religion and the religion of his birth. It's refreshing to read his take on Christianity's origin within the triple heritages of Jewish ethnicity, Judaism and Roman colonial heritage.

Lastly, Mr. Kirunda generalizes his thesis of the Fourth Heritage to accommodate Kantian moral philosophies and offers a thrilling discussion of the scientific account of humanity's origin in East Africa and what that means for our human heritage.