How Not to Compare African Traditional Thought with Western Thought

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

ManyWesterners been puzzled by the virtual ubiquity of gods and spirits in traditional African explanations of things. Robin Horton, the Western anthropologist, has suggested that this failure of understanding is partly attributable to the fact that many Western anthropologists have been unfamiliar with the theoretical thinking of their own culture.l I would like to suggest that a much more significant reason is that they also been unfamiliar with the folk thought of their own culture. Western societies, too, passed through a stage of addiction to spiritistic explanations of phenomena. What is more, significant residues of this tradition remain a basic part of the mental makeup of a large mass of the less sophisticated sections of Western populations. More importantly still, elements of the spiritistic outlook are, in fact, deeply embedded in the philosophical thought of many contemporary Westerners: philosophers and even scientists. Obviously, it is a matter of first-rate philosophical importance to distinguish between traditional, that is, prescientific, spiritistic thought and modern scientific thought by means of clearly articulated criteria. It is also of anthropological and psychological interest to try to understand how traditional modes of thought function in the total context of life in a traditional society. Since African societies are among the closest approximations in the modern world to societies in the pre-scientific stage of intellectual development, the interest anthropologists shown in African thought is understandable. Unfortunately, instead of seeing the non-scientific characteristics of African traditional thought as typifying traditional thought in general, Westerners tended to take them as defining a peculiarly African way of thinking. The ill effects of this mistake been considerable. It is the basic non-scientific, spiritistic tendencies of African thought, rather than its genuinely dis-