Africa and the Imperative of Philosophy: A Skeptical Consideration

Abstract

The African Studies Association in 1984 gave Paulin Hountondji a share in the Melville Herskovits award for the most significant Africanist publication for the previous year. The selection of Hountondji's book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), suggests, logically, that the Association believes the book to be a significant contribution to African Studies. One might go even a step further and conclude that it indicates the Association's concurrence with the main premises and the general philosophical orientation of the author's arguments. This paper outlines some serious questions Hountondji and his fellow philosophers raise about what one's attitude to the African past should be and what criteria should dictate the course of development on the African continent. Hountondji is perhaps the best known of the “professional philosophers.” As one would expect, each of the philosophers perceives the issues that will be raised in this discussion from a different perspective, even when they agree broadly on the critique of ethnophilosophy; Hountondji has nevertheless emerged as the most articulate and representative in this regard, to the extent that his book has earned the title, “the ‘bible’ of anti—ethnophilosophers” (Mudimbe, 1985: 199). The focus of this essay will accordingly be on this important work, with occasional references, of course, to those of others, in particular the Ghanaian Kwasi Wiredu. This strategy has the attraction of straddling the divide between Anglophone and Francophone manifestations of the new philosophical attitudes. To best understand what grounds there might be for objections to certain of the philosophers' positions, it is expedient that one isolate the several targets of their disparagement. Chief of these is ethnophilosophy, which Hountondji (1983: 34) defines as “an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions.” This includes the works of all those who like Placide Tempels, Alexis Kagame, John Mbiti, and other ethnologists have attempted to articulate African philosophies or systems of thought. Another target is African cultures or traditions themselves, as distinct from whatever the ethnophilosophers or ethnologists might correctly or mistakenly have made of them.