The purpose of the paper is to articulate the ties which bind the structure of everyday life, disaster and disaster policy making and, in the process, explore the extent to which the notion of culture can be brought to bear on the analysis of disaster management. The paper will draw from a distinction between an all-encompassing notion of culture and a mundane one to argue that each poses special challenges to policy making in disaster management such that the failure to take the differences seriously may account for some of the problems faced by top-down measures designed to deal with disaster situations in African setting.