What You Should Know About

Contemporary African Philosophy

Debates over the cultural roots of philosophical concepts challenge the Western canon

12th March 2018

Katrin Flikschuh | Professor of Modern Political Theory, Department of
Government, London School of Economics and Political Science
1,591 words
Read time: approx. 8 mins
‘Westerners’ tend to romanticize traditional African beliefs when they treat them as
inherently a-rational; we see ‘African beliefs’ as offering an escape from the
constraints of a rationally disenchanted modern world. But anyone who expects to
find a refuge from rationality in modern African philosophy should stop reading now:
African philosophy is just as critically rational, professional, and institutionalized as
its Western relative.

Anyone who is interested in philosophy in general, has at least two reasons to be

interested in African philosophy. First, African philosophy queries the habitual
universality claims of Western philosophy; second, African philosophy offers insights
into dimensions of human experience made uniquely available through African
metaphysical beliefs and normative commitments.
Below, I shall briefly speak to both these points in the course of reflecting on the rise
of post-independence African philosophy. I shall focus on Anglophone West African
philosophical thinking simply because I am most familiar with it.

___
"Hountondji exposed as unwarranted a number of
Temples’ assumptions, including the assumption that
Africans think collectively rather than individually, and
the assumption that all Africans see nature as infused
with spiritual forces."
___
Ironically, one of the fathers of modern African philosophy was the Belgian
missionary Placide Temples. In 1945, when working in the Congo, Temples
published a book called Bantu Philosophy. In it he set out what he claimed to be the
philosophical world view (!) of the Bantu, by which he meant sub-Saharan peoples in
general. Temples’ position was as radical as it was reactionary: radically, he
affirmed that ‘the Bantu’ had a philosophy, so they could think – this was a novel
thought in the colonial context. At the same time, Temples contended that the Bantu
were not reflectively aware of their philosophical commitments, so they had to have
these set out to them by Temples himself – this would have been much more in line
with colonial policy.
The subtext to Temples’ endeavour was the need to understand local beliefs in
order to more effectively hook Christian doctrine into them. Temples ascribed to the
‘Bantu’ a world-view that was ready-made for completion through Christian doctrine.
In the context of growing pressures for independence in the 1950s, Temples’ work
came under attack by an emerging generation of Western trained African
philosophers.

The most devastating critique came from Paulin Hountondji, a French trained
philosopher and Husserl scholar from Benin. In a series of articles, later collated into
a book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Hountondji exposed as unwarranted a
number of Temples’ assumptions, including the assumption that Africans think
collectively rather than individually, and the assumption that all Africans see nature
as infused with spiritual forces.
Hountondji showed these to be standard Western assumptions about an imaginary
‘African mind’ – they had little to do with actual Bantu thought. Hountondji coined the
term ‘ethnophilosophy’ to denote Temples’ pseudo-philosophical approach to his
methodologically dubious ethnology. Hountondji’s work advanced a further thesis,
namely that there was as yet no such thing as African philosophy. According to
Hountondji, while there was no reason why Africans could not engage in
philosophical thinking, they had been excluded from doing so by the Western
philosophical community, which has historically considered Africans incapable of
reasoned argument. Hence, while it was possible for African philosophy to come into
being, it did not yet exist.

___
"The Kenyan philosopher Oruka Odera argued that
traditional African sages are genuinely philosophical
thinkers working within a distinctively oral and
practice-focused cultural context."
___
Hountondji’s claims over the non-existence of African philosophy drew much
criticism in turn. A common critique charged him with a ‘Eurocentrism’ that brought
to bear a particular conception of philosophy as a methodic and systematic form of
inquiry that aspired to the status of a science. Yet different forms of philosophical
inquiry are conceivable.

The Kenyan philosopher Oruka Odera argued that traditional African sages are
genuinely philosophical thinkers working within a distinctively oral and practice-
focused cultural context. Similarly, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gykeye has
based much of his philosophical writings on traditional Akan proverbs. For Gyekye,
these are orally transmitted nuggets of philosophical insight, which, analysed with
Western philosophical tools, can form the basis of a post-colonial, written
philosophical tradition.

Others defended a position somewhat closer to that of Hountondji. Kwasi Wiredu,

also from Ghana and trained at Oxford in the late 1950s, focuses on the
philosophical analysis of concepts in ordinary language – in his case, his native
Akan. For Wiredu, any natural language is pregnant with philosophical meaning in
virtue of its stock of concepts. While there may not as yet be any systematically
developed Akan theory of truth, for example, nothing stops African thinkers from
constructing such theories on the basis of their analyses of local concepts and
meanings.

To casual Western readers, these methodological debates among African thinkers

often seem pointless: “just do some philosophy – don’t merely talk about doing it”,
they protest. Arguably, this misses the point: debates about the possibility of African
philosophy arose directly from the African encounter with Western philosophical
traditions.

___
"African methodological debates are inherently
related to the broader question of philosophy’s
universality claims: its denial of the capacity for
rational thought to Africans renders dubious many
such claims in the Western tradition."
___
African methodological debates are inherently related to the broader question of
philosophy’s universality claims: its denial of the capacity for rational thought to
Africans renders dubious many such claims in the Western tradition. Engagement
with African philosophical thinking thus forces one to adopt a more critical attitude
towards Western philosophical traditions. More positively, of course, given the
largely oral inheritance from pre-colonial times, Western forms of philosophical
analysis and argument are useful to the development of a modern African
philosophical corpus.

Now one may ask, “Why bother with the modern retrieval of pre-colonial practices
and beliefs? Their large-scale destruction during colonial times is unfortunate, but
the past is the past and it is advisable to adopt a more forward-looking approach.”
According to Kwame Gyekye, one’s past holds the key to one’s future: the Akan
symbol of Sankofa advises a person not to shy away from searching her past for the
seeds of her future. More generally, the belief is widespread that the success of a
post-colonial African revival depends on the reaffirmation, albeit under modern
conditions, of colonially denigrated traditional values and beliefs.

The choice is not between either tradition or modernity – what is needed is a

synthesis of the two. As Wiredu says, ‘the African youth, more or less bereft of the
security of traditional orthodoxies, stands in need of a new philosophy. (…) But what
philosophy should the modern African live by?’ Given this socially engaged
approach to philosophical thinking, it is not surprising that the substantive focus has
lain on conceptions of the person, of community, and of the relation between them.

Here the emphasis of a certain kind of communalism over the Anglo-American focus
on individuality is evident. Once again, those weary of Western modernity may feel
tempted to turn for succour to an imagined African communalism. Once again, this
would be to pursue an imaginary African idyll.

African communalism is by no means shallow – it has considerable metaphysical

depth and depends on underlying ontological commitments about the nature of
personhood that would require a radical reorientation in self-conception to become
accessible to a Westerner steeped in a rather different metaphysical tradition.

___
"To deny that we can just embrace African
conceptions of personhood is not to endorse a form
of philosophical relativism – it is simply to say that a
given conception of personhood can be rationally
intelligible without therefore being culturally
available."
___
The Akan conception of the person, for example, is essentially triadic in ontological
structure, involving the interplay of okra, mogya, and sunsum (which have been
defined by some as fate, personality and blood but they are subject to big debates),
all of which are related, in various complex ways, to communal lineage.

Similarly, work done by the Nigerian philosopher, Ifeyani Menkiti, shows traditional
Igbo conceptions of personhood to include belief in the continued non-physical
existence of ancestors within the constraints of the same spatio-temporal world.

Again, Segun Gbadegesin’s Yoruba inspired account of personal destiny contrasts

with Western conception of free will and personal autonomy.

None of this suggests that African accounts of personhood are somehow less
developed, less rationally grounded, or more traditional than ‘modern’ Western
accounts. To the contrary, and as noted, they have considerable metaphysical
depth. Nor are they rationally inaccessible to the outsider: to deny that we can just
embrace them as a matter of choice is not to endorse a form of philosophical
relativism – it is simply to say that a given conception of personhood can be
rationally intelligible without therefore being culturally available.

But if not culturally available to us, why take a philosophical interest in them? For
one thing, because they are of philosophical interest in themselves: they tell us
about possible ways of being a person. For another thing, just as communal African
conceptions of the person may be culturally unavailable to a ‘Westerner’, so
Western more individualistic conceptions of the person may be culturally unavailable
to many citizens of modern African societies: the latter do not have a monopoly
when it comes to claiming the labels of ‘modernity’.

Engaging with African philosophical conceptions of the person can teach us to

acknowledge that we have no reason to expect members of modern African polities
to embrace Western individualism as a condition of social and political development.

To the contrary, a rather more plausible path to social development lies, as African
thinkers propose, in the critical retrieval and reconceptualization of traditional African
conceptions of person, community, and value.
Image: Ifeyani Menkiti, poet and philosopher at Wellesley College, MA