African Philosophies

While Egyptian and Islamic components of African philosophy are now being researched, showing the historical depth of the intellectual tradition of speculation on the continent and questioning the received view that African cultures are naturally and essentially oral, the beginning of African philosophy as a discipline and an aspect of contemporary scholarship on Africa came after World War II. The publication in 1945 of Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy (in Dutch; it was translated into French in 1949 and English in 1959) was a crucial moment in this process, and so was the publication in 1948 of Griaule's Conversations with Ogotemmēli.

Both works represented a break from the colonial negation of African cultures. Ethnologists such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had characterized the Africans' approach to reality as prelogical and magical, therefore foreign to any systematic view and organized philosophy; his concept of "primitive mentality" epitomized the face of anthropology as a science of the "other," which justified the "mission" of colonialism to bring civilization and rational thinking to people who were devoid of both. Bantu Philosophy showed a different face of anthropology as it affirmed, beyond the cultural traits, customs, and behaviors studied by ethnographers, the existence of a systematic "philosophy" that gives meaning and coherence to these cultural features. African philosophy as a discipline continuing, questioning, or criticizing the fundamental approach of Bantu Philosophy was born at that time, when Tempels's book was acclaimed by African and European scholars as doing justice to an African tradition of speculative thought.