How African is Philosophy in Africa?

Paulin J. Hountondji

1 Ethno-philosophy

There was a time when ‘African Philosophy’ exclusively meant the system of
thought supposedly shared by all Africans. This generic term was often specied to
apply to a particular region or ethnic group. Thus, after Placide Tempels’s cele-
brated book published soon after World War II on Bantu philosophy (Tempels
1945), a number of works concentrated on the “philosophy of being” of the people
of Rwanda (Kagame 1956), the “dialectics” of the Barundi (Makarakiza 1959), the
“metaphysical thinking” of the Yoruba (Adesanya 1958), the “conception of life”
among the Fon of Dahomey (de Souza 1975), the “moral philosophy” of the Wolof
of Senegal (Sylla 1978), the “conception of old age” among the Fulbe of Guinea,
etc., meaning in each case a system of thought unanimously shared by members of
these ethnic groups. Other works in the same time focused on Africa as a whole,
meaning here Black Africa or sub-Saharan Africa and tried to explore “the depths of
African philosophy” (Mabona 1960, 1963), the “mind of Africa” (Abraham 1962),
African “systems of thought” (Dieterlen and Fortes 1966), African “metaphysical
clearings” (Bahoken 1967), African “religions and philosophy” (Mbiti 1969),
African “religion, spirituality and thought” (Zahan 1970), etc.
Forty-seven years ago or so, I started formulating a harsh criticism against this
kind of research (Hountondji 1970, 1977, 1997). I did this on two grounds. First, I
reproached these works with some kind of “unanimism”, insofar as they assumed a
total unanimity between the members of a given society. I contended that nowhere

Emeritus Professor at the National University of Benin. This is a revised version of a keynote lec-
ture presented at the “2nd African Philosophy World Conference” organised at the University of
Calabar, Nigeria, 12–14 October 2017 on “The State of African Philosophy in Africa Today”

P. J. Hountondji ()
Department of Philosophy, National University of Benin, Cotonou, Benin Republic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2022
J. O. Chimakonam et al. (eds.), Essays on Contemporary Issues in African
Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70436-0_2
28 P. J. Hountondji

in this wide world could be found any society or ethnic group where everyone
agrees with everyone. This, in my view, was an ethnographic prejudice, and we had
to do away with this kind of prejudice in order to (re)discover the internal pluralism
and intellectual diversity of our own societies. Secondly, I reproached this kind of
research as far as it was conducted by African scholars themselves with some kind
of “extroversion” meaning that these works were not intended primarily for African
readers but rst and foremost for a foreign audience.
“Unanimism” was in fact a word used by the French writer Jules Romains in the
early twentieth century with a positive meaning. For Jules Romains, the community
is more than the individual, and the writer should seek rst and foremost to perceive
and express the “unanimous feelings”, the “collective soul” embodied by the city. A
long poem by Romains, La vie unanime (The Unanimous Life) is a long epic poem
which celebrates the evolution towards universal brotherhood in the city. This is
also the central theme in his well-known novel, Les hommes de bonne volonté (The
People of good Will) where the main character, instead of being, an individual is the
community itself, a collectivity of humans coming from diverse horizons to act
together in perfect communion (Romains 1908, 1932–1946).
While coining this word, however, I did not think of Jules Romains at all. To me,
the word could only have a derogative sense as it applied to the same ethnographic
prejudice that considered so-called primitive societies as simple and failed to take
into consideration their real complexity and internal diversity.
On the other hand, extroversion should be understood as another name for exclu-
sion. A careful reading of a book like Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy makes it evident
that this essay, though it is clearly an attempt to rehabilitate the Bantu system of
thought, is not meant nevertheless for a Bantu readership but rst and foremost for
a European public. Sufce it to recall the title of the seventh and last chapter (which
was added in the 1949 edition to the initial six chapters): “Bantu Philosophy and our
Mission to Civilize”. Bantu people are not, therefore, the addressees but just the
subject-matter, the objects of this scholarly discourse. They are, in a way, excluded
from the audience, they are just, so to say, the “talked about”. Whenever the author
says “we”, it means: “we the Europeans” or “we the Westerners”.
It so happens, however, that since Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy and in the wake
of the Belgian missionary, a greater and greater number of African scholars and
intellectuals started doing the same kind of analysis. I contended that these works
by African scholars were not intended primarily for their fellow Africans either but
still for a Western audience. To me, these scholars were extroverted, i.e. externally-
oriented. They considered themselves as spokespersons of their own people address-
ing a Western audience in “defense and illustration”1 of their people’s culture. In my
view, this was clearly a kind of alienation and had to be corrected. It was urgent to
develop the horizontal discussion between African scholars themselves and beyond

1
For a Francophone reader, this is a reminiscence of a celebrated book by Joachim du Bellay in the
sixteenth century, Défense et illustration de la langue française (A Defence and an Illustration of
the French Language), a strong case for the use of French instead of Latin which was considered
at that time as the only acceptable language for scientic and academic use (du Bellay 1549).
How African is Philosophy in Africa? 29

the latter, between African scholars and their people instead of the vertical discus-
sion between individual African scholars and their Western counterparts or the West
as a whole.
How legitimate was this critique? It should be noted rst that anyway, despite the
strong argument against the ethnographic concept of “African philosophy” and the
critique of ethno-philosophy as a whole, works of the same kind have continued to
blossom. It can be assumed, therefore, that they meet a real need within the African
academic community itself and are not just intended for an external audience.
Which means that these works are not as extroverted as I initially asserted but at
least to some extent an African way to meet the Socratic demand: “Know yourself”.
In fact, I clearly recognized, shortly after publishing African Philosophy: Myth and
Reality, that such studies were not only legitimate but absolutely necessary. The
difference, however, is this: to me, these studies belong to a kind of sociology of
collective representations and not to philosophy as such. Philosophy begins at the
very moment when we start questioning and arguing for or against the system of
thought, thus reconstructed. Besides, from a methodological point of view, it would
be a mistake while investigating these collective beliefs to assume that they benet
an overall consensus within the community. They should be considered as the domi-
nant system of beliefs rather than the unique and exclusive one (Hountondji 1982,
1990, 2008).
In other words, I came to admit that no one could deny the existence of collective
systems of thought eventually dominant in a given society. But instead of acclaim-
ing these traditions of thought as our own philosophy or philosophies, I admitted
that we start philosophizing precisely through an intellectual effort to objectivize
them and put them at a distance. To me, philosophy was rst an individual exercise.
No one could hide behind his/her people’s thought and claim to be a philosopher,
but everyone is expected to appreciate and evaluate the intellectual, spiritual, moral
and otherwise legacy inherited from the ancestors. If he/she does it freely and argues
his/her own stance in a rational and responsible way, then he/she can be considered
a philosopher.

2 Philosophy Done by Africans

Based on this, I suggested an alternative concept of “African philosophy”. Instead

of a collective system of thought, it should be viewed quite simply as philosophy
done by Africans. My formulation may have been awkward to some extent since it
seemed to overvalue the act of writing. Instead of stating as I did:
By ‘African philosophy’ I mean a set of texts, specically the set of texts written by Africans
and described as philosophical by their authors themselves,2

2
This was the rst sentence of my 1970 article, “Remarks on contemporary African Philosophy”
which became the rst chapter of the 1977 book under a new title: “An alienated literature”
30 P. J. Hountondji

I should have written:

“By ‘African philosophy’ I mean a set of texts, specically the set of texts produced by
Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves”

…with the implication that oral texts are also included and not just the written ones.
But this is another problem. As a matter of fact, no science or intellectual discipline
can develop without a combination in various degrees and proportions of both
speech and writing. But the outcome is always a set of texts, a form of literature.
Mathematics is a form of literature. So are physics, chemistry, biology, linguistics,
sociology, history, geography, etc. They can be said to exist in a given society if and
only if one can identify in this society the material existence and development of
these specic forms of literature. Likewise, African philosophy means anything that
is an African philosophical literature, i.e. a collection of philosophical discourses,
whether convergent or divergent, produced by individual African philosophers. The
concept of literature, as understood today, is not restricted to written texts but also
includes oral texts. We can, therefore, admit as a working denition of this new
concept: African philosophy equals African philosophical literature, both written
and oral. By so doing, however, we postpone a huge question about the relationship
between speech and writing in the construction and history of philosophy and/or
any other discipline.
This new denition has far-reaching implications. First, it entails a distinction
between Africans and non-Africans. As a consequence, one should carefully distin-
guish, within the abundant literature on “African philosophy”, the writings by
Western Africanists and the writings by Africans. For instance, Tempels’s Bantu
Philosophy is part of Western scholarship about Africa while Kagame’s Philosophie
bantu-rwandaise de l’être (The Philosophy of Being among the Bantu of Rwanda)
is part and parcel of African philosophical literature, though both books analyze the
same culture and are methodologically and theoretically convergent.
Second, no unanimity of any kind is presupposed in African philosophy. It is
assumed instead that the latter is like a many-voices concert in which every singer
plays his/her own part in response to other singers. Internal diversity and pluralism
prevail in this sector of culture as much in Africa as elsewhere. Philosophy is not a
monologue by a given culture facing other cultures but a dialogue, a never-ending
discussion within the community itself.
Third, the new concept allows discussions on the history of African thought or
philosophy, a notion which was just unthinkable in the previous conceptual frame-
work since it took philosophy as a stable and unchangeable system. As a matter of
fact, a number of such histories are available today. All of them were written after
1970, the year of publication of my rst critique of ethno-philosophy. The late
Father Alfons Smet who taught for years in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Théophile Obenga from Congo-Brazzaville who as a disciple of Cheikh Anta Diop
dates back African philosophy from the era of Pharaonic Egypt, Grégoire Biyogo
from Gabon, Tsenay Serequeberhan from Eritrea and some others, all of them are
guided by the idea that African philosophy is a specic kind of literature (Smet
1972, 1975, 1977; Serequeberhan 1991; Biyogo 2006; Obenga 2011).
How African is Philosophy in Africa? 31

Fourth, philosophy done by Africans is not necessarily limited to philosophy

about Africa. A critical appraisal and appropriation of endogenous traditions of
thought is surely a good starting point. But a critical appraisal and appropriation of
exogenous traditions are commendable as well. The new concept makes it possible
and legitimate again for an African philosopher to investigate non-African as well
as African traditions of thought, to deal with universal issues and problems instead
of being condemned to just describing or reconstructing his/her ancestors’ thought.
The critique of ethno-philosophy allows, therefore, a kind of intellectual liberation
and opening up of the intellectual horizon.
Each of these assertions raises new issues, of course. For instance, if African
philosophy is philosophy done by Africans the inevitable question is: who is African
and who is not? Can we deny somebody like Tempels being an African despite the
dozens of years he spent in the Congo and his constant effort to understand the local
people, to study their oral tradition extensively, take sides for them during the ongo-
ing political and social struggle and nally, despite his huge spiritual inuence as
founder of a charismatic movement known as Jamaa (see de Craemer 1977)?
Conversely, how can we claim Kagame’s writings to belong to African scholarship
while asserting at the same time that his work is mainly extroverted and addresses
the same non-African audience as the Belgian missionary’s book, Bantu Philosophy?
Isn’t this distinction based on the fact that Tempels is White and Kagame Black?
And if it is, have we not kept ourselves in a kind of backward racism?
As a matter of fact, the distinction between Africans and non-Africans should by
no means be considered as absolute since there is a continuum between human
races. It is essential, however, from a methodological point of view to distinguish
between Africanist and African scholarship and recognize that in the history of the
social sciences African studies as a discipline was invented by the West. It is essen-
tial, on the other hand, to recognize that a number of Africans have been contribut-
ing so far to the development of Africanism. What I am trying to do therefore is to
get back the works by these African Africanists into the overall scholarly production
by Africans in all disciplines.
There is more, however, that can be done. Not only the African production but
also the non-African production in the eld of African studies and in all other scien-
tic and scholarly elds can be retrieved and used to nurture productive discussions
and debates among Africans today. I plead for a dynamic but lucid and selective
appropriation of the existing intellectual heritage worldwide and at the same time
for a lucid re-appropriation of whatever is valid in our own ancestors’ intellectual
legacy. This appropriation and re-appropriation is our own business. It must be initi-
ated and conducted by the Africans themselves.
32 P. J. Hountondji

3 Conclusion

To conclude in two words: you in Calabar have been doing and are still doing phi-
losophy, not just African philosophy. The same in the philosophy departments of
other universities in Nigeria and elsewhere on the continent, whether in Cameroon
or Gabon, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire,
Senegal, Burkina Faso, etc. All of us have been doing philosophy simply, not just
African philosophy, even when we choose to reect philosophically on African cul-
tures, societies, religions, traditions and other realities. All of us have also been
discussing Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, William James and other doctrines
developed in the West. But we are Africans. As such, we must be careful about these
doctrines and avoid taking them at their face value. We must be careful in particular
about some of the Eurocentric and nonsensical views expressed by some of the
greatest and most celebrated Western thinkers on non-Western peoples and cultures,
some of their statements against which we have been warned again and again by
such authors as Aimé Césaire, Kwasi Wiredu, Emmanuel Eze among others (Césaire
1950; Wiredu 1980; Eze 1997). In other words, we as Africans, in order to really
appropriate the views of Western philosophers and traditions of thought and make
the best prot of them, have rst to deconstruct and contextualize them.
There is more, however. Before even trying to appropriate and re-appropriate the
existing legacy, both endogenous and exogenous, we as Africans should rst open
our eyes and ears to carefully look at what is happening around us and listen to the
rank and le of our people. The real problems are there, the real concerns of the
people. They are not philosophical per se. But they often call for conceptual clari-
cations and analyses which, if systematically and rigorously conducted, are the
proper domains of philosophy.
Last but not least, should African philosophers continue to express their thoughts
in non-African languages? Kwasi Wiredu has very convincingly shown how certain
metaphysical statements which seem to be self-evident as long as they are expressed
in European languages (for instance the idea of truth dened in Latin as “adaequatio
rei et intellectus”) simply become senseless when translated into Akan language. He
carefully distinguishes between tongue-relative or tongue-dependent and tongue-
neutral statements. At an experts’ meeting organized by UNESCO in Nairobi in
June 1980, he presented a paper on “Conceptual Decolonization”. He ended his
speech with a kind of slogan: “Fellow philosophers, let us learn to think in our own
languages!” (Wiredu 1984, 1996).
I very much share the same view as Wiredu. I know it is not easy. Very few
among us would be able to discuss in their mother tongue, for instance, the subtle
distinction between the empirical and the transcendental as viewed by Kant or
Husserl, supposing such a distinction makes sense in their mother tongue. An enor-
mous task lies therefore before us – a task all the more complex as we are not just
expected to rehabilitate our individual mother tongues but also to promote, beyond
the latter, a small number of continental languages likely to facilitate
How African is Philosophy in Africa? 33

inter-comprehension and communication between Africans as much as the European

languages inherited from our colonial past.
Our discussion of African philosophy goes that far. It results in complex prob-
lems of language policy and more generally, the overall question as to how we envi-
sion the future of our continent. Philosophy in Africa will be authentically African
not through a kind of self-imprisonment into a so-called African way of thinking but
through its contribution to the building of intellectual and political self-reliance.

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