African Philosophies

The radical rejection of the approach inaugurated by Bantu Philosophy came in the early 1970s from some African philosophers who characterized it as "ethno-philosophy," that is, a systematization of ethnological traits presented as philosophy. Paulin Hountondji and Marcien Towa are famous critics of the idea of a philosophy defined as the worldview of an ethnic group or a whole continent, arguing that philosophy is not the expression of a culture but the very possibility of stepping out of that culture and the unexamined collective opinions it carries in order to develop individual and critical thinking: folk wisdom expressed through proverbs cannot be considered the equivalent of philosophical argumentation, and one cannot speak of African philosophy in the absence of a written tradition because in oral cultures the function of memorizing is so demanding that it makes critical distance impossible. Hountondji also made the point that equating philosophy and culture would mean that everybody shares the same view in a society where unanimity would be a value; consequently, the political danger of legitimizing authoritarianism in the name of philosophical consensus could hardly be avoided. Thus traditionalism could be valued even when oppressive—to women, for example, when it comes to practices such as female circumcision.

The criticism of "ethno-philosophy" has been denounced as accepting an exclusivist Western notion of philosophy that fails to comprehend the challenge African and other speculative traditions present to this view.

For Odera Oruka, beyond the controversy about philosophy lies the task of establishing a program of research in African sagacity. Individual sages—such as the Dogon Ogotemmēli—have always existed in the different African societies, and these sages can explain, question, and often criticize the elements of the culture, not simply regurgitate them. Such sages are also living today, and their thoughts must be acknowledged and recorded as part of the African philosophical library at large. Another way out of the debate about the meaning of philosophy is for contemporary African philosophers to call for a critical approach to African cultures, not to excavate their latent philosophical content but to illuminate the African context and experience and the task ahead: philosophizing in matters pertinent to the African peoples. Thus Kwasi Wiredu insists on an African orientation in philosophy that would mean conceptual decolonization. The simple test of using African languages to examine concepts such as reality, being, truth, justice, God, self, and reason would be a crucial step toward such a conceptual decolonization.