African Philosophy
AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
Many of the greatest thinkers of the modern era,
including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas
Jefferson, considered Africans and their descendants to
be so intellectually handicapped as to make them
philosophical invalids, incapable of moral and scientific
reasoning. Thus, prior to the twentieth century, the idea
of African Philosophy was, for most educated Europeans
and Americans, an oxymoron (Eze 1997, pp. 4–5).
Moreover, the notion of African philosophy was
provocative (in a way that the notion of British or French
or German or Chinese philosophy was not) because the
cultures of sub-Sahara Africa had no indigenous written
languages in which issues were traditionally discussed
and examined. Other than the Egyptians and Ethiopians,
most African cultures developed a written script only in
response to Islamic and European influences. Following
the model of European and North American philosophy,
one group of contemporary African philosophers has
contended that philosophy requires a tradition of written
communication, and that African cultures must evolve
beyond traditional conceptions expressed in oral forms if
they are to develop the levels of critical exchange
required for sophisticated scientific and philosophical
activities (Wiredu in Mosley 1995, pp. 160–169;
Hountoundji 1983, p. 106). But others have argued that
African philosophy should be sought in the values,
categories, and assumptions that are implicit in the
language, rituals, and beliefs of traditional African
cultures. In this view, African philosophy is a form of
ethnophilosophy—such as ethnobiology and
ethnopharmacology—one of the many subject areas of
ethnology.
African Philosophy as
Ethnophilosophy
One of the principal sources of African ethnophilosophy
was the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl
(1857–1939). Levy-Bruhl taught at the Sorbonne from
1896 to 1927 and was one of the leading ethnologists of
his era. He argued that the primary concepts, causal
relationships, and modes of reasoning used by nonEuropean people were not the result of scripts developed
through academic exercises to conform to the laws of
Aristotelian logic. Rather, they were "collective
representations" inculcated during rites and rituals as a
result of intense affective and psychomotor experiences.
The concepts of non-European people were felt rather
than understood, mystical rather intellectual, and
mediated relationships between both physical and
nonphysical modes of being. Every event had not only a
physical but a "mystical" significance, and the
connections between physical and mystical realities were
governed by "laws of participation" that transcended the
laws of logic that structured thought in European
cultures. In contrast to the law of the excluded middle
and the law of noncontradiction, these "laws of
participation" allowed things to be both themselves and
something else, to be "here" and not here, and to exist
both in the present and in the future. Medicine, magic,
witchcraft, divination, and communication with the dead
were made possible through mystical forces
apprehended through "laws of participation" that could
not be reduced to "rational explanations" structured by
the laws of logic.
In Bantu Philosophy (1945), Father Placide Tempels
proposed to articulate the structure of reality implicit in
traditional African culture. For Tempels, the basic
difference between European and African views of reality
was ontological. Whereas the basic constituents of reality
in European civilization tended to be things with fixed
natures (atoms, minds, bodies), the basic constituents of
reality in traditional African cultures were dynamic forces.
These forces were organized hierarchically into divine,
celestial, terrestrial, animal, plant, mineral (including fire,
water, and air), and human forces. Good and evil were
made manifest in the use of these forces to amplify or
diminish the vitality of human beings. Through medicine,
witchcraft, sorcery, and divination, certain individuals
were able to manipulate these forces to the benefit or
detriment of their communities.
Temple's analysis reflected in many respects the SapirWhorf thesis that the structure of a culture's language
shapes the way that culture structures reality. In his book
Whorf argued that the structure of Native-American
languages such as Hopi gave rise to an ontology of fields
and forces, whereas the structure of Indo-European
languages gave rise to an ontology of discrete things.
From this point of view, philosophical principles were
implicit in the structure of the language, beliefs, and
practices of a culture, whether or not they were stated
explicitly by any member of that culture. Tempel's
analysis was extended and refined by Father Alexis
Kagame of Rwanda and by the Belgian ethnographer
Jahnhein Janz.
In his influential book, African Religions and Philosophy
(1969), Professor John Mbiti elaborated the view that
implicit in African cultures were different concepts of
causality, time, and personhood. Every event had both a
physical and a spiritual cause, traceable to the influence
of a continuum of spiritual beings (consisting of the living,
the ancestral dead, deities, and God). Key to
understanding this African metaphysic was a concept of
time that consisted of an endless past (the Zamani ), a
living present (the Sasa ), and a truncated future that
returned to the past. Those who had recently died
continue to interact with the living for as long as they
were remembered, and then they too returned to the
Zamani.
One of the major expressions of philosophy as ethnology
was negritude, a principal exponent of which was
Leopold Senghor. Senghor argued that Africans have a
distinctive approach to reality in which knowledge is
based on emotion rather than logic, where the arts are
privileged over the sciences, and where sensual
participation is encouraged over cerebral analysis. For
Senghor, the European analyzes reality from an objective
distance whereas the African embraces reality by
participating in it aesthetically and spiritually. This
difference between African and European cultures was,
for Senghor, physiologically based and inherited
(Senghor 1962). However, for Aime Cesaire, the other
principal exponent of negritude, though the differences
between African and European cultures were real, they
resulted primarily from historical circumstances rather
than biological differences (Arnold 1981, p. 37).
Whether biologically, culturally, or historically determined,
many have claimed that the African contribution to
civilization was invaluable because it was unique and
peculiar to Africans. Nationalists in Africa and in the
diaspora—Edward Blyden, Martin Delany, Alexander
Crummell, Ndabaningi Sithole, Kwame Nkrumah, Alex
Quaison-Sackey, and Leopold Senghor—denied that the
African was a degenerate form of the European, and
instead held that Africans as a race embodied capacities
and potentialities that were different from but equal to
those of Europeans. Pan-African nationalists typically
held that abolition of the slave trade, slavery, colonialism,
and the return of Africans in the diaspora to Africa would
reverse the paralyzing effect of European imperialism and
make it possible for Africans to develop their peculiar
contributions to the evolution of civilization. Africans who
chose to remain in the diaspora nonetheless had an
obligation to focus inward to develop their peculiar
talents so as to address their peculiar problems, rather
than looking to Europe for ideas and solutions. From a
nationalist perspective, African philosophy should be
concerned with articulating those factors that distinguish
the African worldview. This orientation rejects the
European Enlightenment focus on universal standards of
reason, religion, and political development, relative to
which every other culture was to be measured. Among
European philosophers, it drew its support from Johann
Herder, who championed a kind of cultural pluralism that
encouraged each race or ethnic group to develop a
national character that reflected its peculiar linguistic,
historical, and cultural heritage.
Criticisms of African Ethnophilosophy
Many critics of ethnophilosophy deny that the basis of
African philosophy should be sought in the structure of
traditional African culture, and tend to favor the more
universalist outlook of the European Enlightenment. For
Kwasi Wiredu, the development of philosophy in Africa
should parallel the development of philosophy in Europe,
and traditional African thought should not be considered
the principal source of contemporary African philosophy
any more than traditional European thought (of the Celtic
and Nordic variety) is considered the primary source of
contemporary European philosophy. Wiredu is critical of
the tendency to preserve traditional beliefs and practices
even when they have little rational justification or
practical utility. He stresses the need to develop written
modes of communication, arguing that literacy is a
necessary condition of the transition from a prescientific
to a scientific world view. In his view, it is likely that
literacy will have as great an impact on the oral cultures
of Africa as it had on the oral cultures of premodern
Europe.
The fight against colonialism in Africa gave rise to many
activists—such as Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda,
Sekou Toure, and Leopold Senghor—who used
philosophy for political purposes. But for the critics of
ethnophilosophy, postcolonial philosophy in Africa is the
era of the professional philosopher, whose interests have
been formatively shaped by training in the European
philosophical tradition. For the professional philosopher,
just because something may have developed by
Europeans is no argument against its proving useful for
Africans. African philosophers have a pivotal
responsibility to domesticate the products of European
thought into materials usable by Africans both on the
continent and in the diaspora.
But defenders of the professionalization of contemporary
African philosophy are also critical of the tendency to
automatically reject traditional African institutions and
beliefs in favor of modern European ones. A central
function of postcolonial African philosophy should be
"conceptual decolonization," which means avoiding or
reversing the unexamined assimilation of European ideas
by African people. The necessity of a decolonization of
the African mind derives from the imposition on Africa of
foreign conceptual schemes through the mediums of
language, religion, and politics. Wiredu, along with
Kwame Gyekye (1995, 1997), Marcien Towa, and others,
stress that the professional African philosopher must be
prepared to utilize indigenous sources of wisdom when
they offer viable insights and options. Only by the critical
assessment of both modern and traditional sources will
Africa develop cultural variants that are not the result of
the indiscriminate acceptance of either.
Thus, Wiredu defends professional African philosophers
from the charge of inauthenticity, and challenges them
with two important responsibilities: domesticating
European ideas and adapting them to African needs; and
reconstructing traditional African ideas so they are
relevant to contemporary problems. With his colleague,
Kwame Gyekye, the procedure he suggests for
domesticating European ideas is that of translating
European ideas into an indigenous African language. If an
issue addressed in European languages (e.g., the mind-
body problem) makes no sense when translated into
one's indigenous African language, then it is likely to be
an issue that is peculiar to its European origins, and may
produce more problems than it solves when applied
within the African context. But one must recognize that
this test of relevancy is problematic. For given the
multiplicity of languages in Africa, even within a single
modern nation state, it is questionable whether what
does not make sense in one African language (e.g., Akan,
Ga) will also not make sense in other African languages
(e.g., Xhosa, Zulu). And what of Africans in the diaspora,
whose indigenous language is English or French or
Portuguese?
Unamism
One of the chief criticisms of the ethnophilosophical
approach to African Philosophy is its tendency to treat
African cultures as if they all must have some essential
feature in common. Paulin Hountoundji (1983, 2002)
rejects the contention that there is some unarticulated
collective philosophy imbedded within folk beliefs that all
Africans adhere to, a view he calls "unamism." Too often,
he argues, ethnophilosophers intentionally or
unintentionally reconstruct traditional beliefs according to
categories provided by Europeans to advance European
interests. Thus, Hountoundji claims, Tempels' analysis
was made in order to help European colonialists devise
better ways to rule the Bantu people. The intent was to
benefit not Africans, but Europeans. Likewise, it was
European racists who characterized Africans as being
ruled by their emotions, incapable of logical thought or
the ability to effectively plan for the future. Valorizing
these traits as definitive of traditional African cultures
simply plays into the hands of the racists. In contrast,
Hountoundji argues that African philosophy must be a
critical literature produced by Africans for Africans. And
philosophy, like science, must be a process of continual
self-examination and critical reflection that requires a
tradition of literacy. Only if ideas are recorded can energy
be focused on assessing them rather than merely
recalling them (Hountoundji 1983).
Approaches to African Philosophy
Whereas Wiredu and Hountoundji construe literacy as
essential to the practice of African philosophy, others
such as Odera Oruka (1990), Kwame Gyekye, and J. O.
Sodipo insist that active engagement in critical reflection
on the beliefs and practices of one's culture is a
requirement sufficient for that culture to have a tradition
of philosophy. From their perspective, African sages that
critically reflect on the assumptions of their culture are
just as much philosophers as was Socrates. Thus, one
may legitimately consider proverbs to be the result of
critical reflection in traditional African thought, their
purpose being to provide, not a scripted system of
abstract rules, but a situational model to guide concrete
action. If one follows the orientation of traditional
thought, Godwin Sogolo argues, the point of African
philosophy would be more to guide people in how they
should interact with the world rather than to provide them
with a true understanding of it. Odera Oruka's
conversations with Luo sages, Hallen and Sodipo's
(1986) conversations with Yoruba Babalawo, and Marcel
Griaule's conversations with Ogotemmeli show them to
be individuals with levels of critical wisdom comparable
to that of Socrates.
the nationalist-ideological approach
Another approach to African philosophy may be
characterized as nationalist-ideological, hermeneutical,
or liberationist. Its exponents would include Tsenay
Serequeberhan, Franz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius
Nyerere, Amical Cabral, W. E. B. Dubois, Chubba
Okadigbo, and Wamba Dia Wamba. In this approach,
philosophy takes the lived experience of African people
as its starting point, and the lived experience of most
Africans revolves around a struggle to cope with the
omnipresent effects of European colonialism and
neocolonialism. As such, the principle objective of African
philosophy must be how to achieve liberation from the
injuries imposed by European imperialism. Traditional
beliefs are not valuable in themselves, but have merit in
modern Africa only to the extent that they contribute to
this end. A focus on the past as the source of authenticity
diverts attention from the regressive nature of many
beliefs and practices, and detracts from a critical posture
that evaluates all practices, both traditional and modern,
of both African and European origin, relative to their
contribution to the liberation of Africa. African philosophy
must address the fact that many traditional leaders were
installed by European imperialists as mere mouthpieces
of colonial rule, and many contemporary African leaders
have remained neocolonial puppets, even as they have
appropriated the symbols of traditional Africa with the
power of the modern state.
In addressing the question of liberation, a central
question for many African philosophers is the relative
importance of race versus class. Many see race to be as
or more important than class in the struggle for African
liberation, and they doubt whether the white proletariat
will abandon the privileges of white supremacy in order to
form a united front with people of color. A case in point is
the apartheid regime of South Africans, where poor
whites who considered themselves Africans nonetheless
insisted on privileges over black Africans. Even when race
is secondary, the effects of colonial rule continue to
divide Africans along tribal lines. Thus where Africans
have replaced Europeans in neocolonial states, it is often
tribal differences among Africans that is a source of
current problems. As Kwame Gyekye (1997) points out,
loyalty to family and tribal affiliations tends to breed
nepotism, graft, and corruption when fostered by
neocolonial ties. For Franz Fanon, racism was simply a
way of justifying oppression by insisting on the inferiority
of the oppressed. Africans would gain a sense of agency,
he argued, only when, through struggle, they overcame
the false separations of race and tribe introduced by
colonialism. Africans must devise, through their own
initiative, the means to liberate themselves (Fanon 1963).
Cabral argued that this would require urban intellectuals
to "return to the source" and form alliances with the
agricultural peasantry in the fight for freedom from
colonialism and neocolonialism. (Cabral 1979)
afrocentrism
Afrocentricism is built around the claim that Black Africa's
contributions to world culture have been denied in order
to further a racist agenda. Afrocentrists take as their
patron Cheik Anta Diop, who argued that Egypt was an
African culture, and its achievements in science,
mathematics, architecture, and philosophy were the basis
for the flowering of classical Greek civilization. That the
ancient Egyptians were black Africans was freely
acknowledged in the ancient world but was denied and
misrepresented by modern Europeans in order to justify
racism, slavery, and colonialism. Diop uses language,
rituals, and practices to trace the origins of the major
sub-Saharan African cultures to ancient Egyptian
civilization. As such, he denies that Africans are
"naturally" more oriented towards the arts than to
science and technology. Rather, he claims that European
imperialism in the modern era impoverished Africa's
resources and stifled it's scientific, technological, and
political development. The imposition by Europe of a
patriarchal ethical and social structure on an African
orientation that was traditionally matriarchal further
distorted Africa's social and political development.
the problem with race
Kwame Appiah has mounted a sustained attack on the
view that African philosophy should express the peculiar
orientation of the African race. He argues in In My
Father's House (1992) that, before their contact with
Europeans beginning in the fifteenth century, people on
the African continent did not view themselves as
members of the same race. The notion of the African
race was invented by Europeans to justify a generic form
of continental oppression. Moreover, Appiah has argued
that people should reject the notion of race because
there is no biological or cultural basis for dividing
humankind into races: there is more variation, he claims,
both biologically and culturally, among those
characterized as Africans than there is between the
average African and European. Thus, the Pan-African
ideal of uniting all members of the African race, both on
the continent and in the diaspora, is flawed and is itself a
form of "intrinsic racism." (Appiah 1992, p. 17) Attempts
to identify some set of traits as the essence of the African
race are misguided, whether the intent is to denigrate or
valorize.
Appiah's views reflect a trend, since the end of WWII, of
rejecting racism by rejecting the existence of races.
However, within biology and anthropology this orientation
is highly contentious. Many, including Diop, reject racial
essentialism and racism but insist nonetheless that there
are legitimate grounds for recognizing the existence of
races. That Africa is the source of all humankind is one
explanation for the huge range of variation among its
people, who are moreover united by a history of super
exploitation and denigration.
the feminist perspective
European philosophy has typically assumed that the
interest of males represents the interest of the species,
just as it has assumed that European philosophy is the
standard for judging all other attempts to do philosophy.
Thus, given similar histories of struggling against
domination, many feminist philosophers have shared with
Africans and African Americans an interest in
deconstructing traditional philosophical methods and
assumptions so as to expose implicit agendas of
domination. Ifa Amadiume (1997) has elaborated Diop's
contention that precolonial Africa was primarily
matriarchal, but moves beyond Diop to stress the
advantages of small political units such as the family and
village over large political units such as nations and
empires. Other African feminists not only deny that
traditional African societies followed the European
paradigm of privileging men over women but also
consider patriarchy and matriarchy to be European
categories imposed to configure Africa on a European
standard.
Africa has had its biggest cultural impact on the direction
of contemporary European culture, not in the sciences,
but in the arts. African sculpture, painting, music, and
dance have radically influenced the development of
modern European art forms and aesthetic values. But
traditional African art forms have differed from modern
European art forms in several important respects.
Modern art is often displayed in museums as objects to
be viewed, not touched. But traditional African art played
functional roles in addressing practical realities, and
Beauty resided as much in what something did as in how
it looked. Music and dance were activities to be
participated in, not simply perceived from a distance, and
they provided individuals with a model of how to situate
themselves in a world in which they played an active role
in creating.
The American feminist Sandra Harding has stressed the
similarity between the struggle of Africans and the
struggle of women against European male hegemony.
Other American feminists have argued that values implicit
in Africa's practice of the arts may help to develop a
better appreciation of the ingredients of the ethical life
and reinforce orientations that enhance people's ability to
live together. In much of the European philosophical
tradition, ethics involves the attempt to articulate
principles that should guide and justify the choices one
makes. But Cynthia Willett (1995) and Kathleen Higgins
(1991) have attempted to ground ethical relationships in
the music and dance traditions of the African aesthetic
rather than in principles deriving from rational choice or
compassionate care. In a similar vein stressing the
importance of the aesthetic orientation in African
philosophy, Richard Bell (2002) proposes that African
philosophy should be conceived as embodied in narrative
icons rather than verbal texts. These developments show
how African philosophy should not be considered the
exclusive domain of men, that it need not take science as
its principal exemplar, and that one need not be African in
order to address issues of central importance in African
philosophy.
The domination of African states by repressive regimes of
colonial and neocolonial tyrants has institutionalized
violence throughout Africa and its diaspora. The Truth
and Reconciliation tribunals of South Africa have provided
a novel process for achieving justice. This approach
recognizes that the purpose of seeking the truth
concerning violence against the people is to seek
atonement and reconciliation; and that this is something
that is as much needed in dealing with crimes of Africans
against Africans as in crimes of Europeans against
Africans.
See also Aristotelianism; Enlightenment; Feminist
Philosophy; Harding, Sandra; Herder, Johann Gottfried;
Hermeneutics; Hume, David; Jefferson, Thomas; Kant,
Immanuel; Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien; Mind-Body Problem;
Multiculturalism; Racism; Socrates.
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Albert Mosley (2005)