The explanation which follows is greatly simplified, in hopes of creating a starting point for the creation of new distinctions which appear not to exist in academic or legal terminology. African solidarity is an ancient social contract, based in its simplest terms on rules for:

• universal sharing according to individual and group needs
• holding successful senior members of society responsible for planning and providing for the well-being of their extended families and communities
• holding junior members of society responsible for recompensing their leaders and benefactors appropriately with services and goods
• respectfully learning from, honoring, and caring for the the elderly

We would like to invite you to join us in thinking about the rules and practices that govern our intimate distribution of goods and services, according to African and industrialized country social customs. We believe that these everyday distribution practices constitute unwritten contracts. We think these contracts need to be defined in writing in order to assist individuals belonging to these two cultures to interact positively, instead of holding each other in quarantine and viewing each other with blame and suspicion. GENSEN's truth, embodied in the structure of Senegal's ecovillage network, is that these contracts can join forces to create new low cost efficiencies while honoring and strengthening the ground rules and values of both system.

Everyday rules for distributing goods and privileges in Africa appear to us to form part of a sacred and coherent social contract governing human behavior from the cradle to the grave. We believe that this contract is largely unrecognized in the industrialized countries, and in international development literature and practice.

Like the everyday rules and good manners governing private property in industrialized countries, African rules for respecting the shared distribution of goods and services are taught and learned from infancy between about four months and five years of age. We master the basics of our culture's distribution contract before we learn to read or write. These intimate unwritten contracts lie below the water line of conscious recognition of the fact that they are contracts. We lack words to describe them, just as some indigenous peoples have no word for "nature," because they are not aware of themselves as existing separately from nature.

The main differences between the African contract and the one governing most of the rest of the world concerns the concept of private ownership, and this difference is most visible in the worlds of everyday objects and of money. In most geographical regions, individual ownership strictly controls the ever-present world of things, food, and money. Not so in most of Africa, where ownership rules are more elastic, or virtual, within a basic understanding that wealth should be shared with everyone, according to a more complex set of rules of entitlement, need, fairness to all. These utopian rules used to apply only within the clan or kinship group, and to those integrating into it. But with globalization, former in- and out-group distinctions are breaking down.

From the African side, individuals from other countries who feel entitled to totally posess private property, hoarding for themselves crucial funds or supplies that others need desperately, may be morally repugnant and possibly sacreligious. Desire to bring them to reason may escalate in demands for money or goods. Foreigners may interpret requests for money and gifts as proof that Africans lack self-respect, are childish or of inferior moral character, not realizing that requests that sound to foreigners like begging form a part of respectful African transactions.

The problems: In business, the rules governing the African and global market distribution contracts often conflict. Members of each culture assume that members of the other share their ground rules, but are either morally deviant or mentally deficient. Both foreigners and Africans label these conflicts "corruption." Africans have deeper issues concerned with social justice, colonialism and continuing foreign exploitation. Moreover in Africa, where family provides more lifelong social security than the formal sector, persons caught in in conflict between family distribution norms and legal distribution norms have little choice but to favor the family.