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Philosophy in Africa

The Egyptian instructions call themselves sbꜣyt, “teaching”; Zera Yacob’s Ge’ez treatise is a ḥatäta, an “inquiry”. In Akan, wisdom is nyansa, which N. K. Dzobo derives from words meaning “that which is obtained and is never exhausted”, a lesson learned from experience that lasts, and the proverb holds that “wisdom is not in the head of one person” (nyansa nni onipa baako ti mu): in Kwame Gyekye’s reading, no one may take their own position as final, but must expect it to be weighed by others. In Yoruba, wisdom is ọgbọ́n and knowledge ìmọ̀, and the Ifá corpus is “an inexhaustible repository of knowledge” (Imo aimo tan, in M. A. Makinde’s words). Where the Greek word itself arrived, it came through Arabic: Swahili falsafa, beside hekima and busara for wisdom, themselves Arabic loans, and the Ge’ez Book of the Wise Philosophers, whose falāsfā is a loan.

African philosophers sorted their own field. H. Odera Oruka, in “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy” (1978), named ethnophilosophy, philosophic sagacity, nationalist-ideological philosophy and professional philosophy, and later added two more. Paulin Hountondji put the phrase itself in quotation marks, Sur la « philosophie africaine » (English 1983), and defined African philosophy as “a set of texts, specifically, the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves”.

Augustine in North Africa is on The schools and the universities; Ibn Khaldūn in the Maghreb is on Philosophy in the Islamic world.

Where no translator is named, the English is rendered from the original.

The lines

The instructions — Egyptian teaching: Ptahhotep’s fair speech and maat, Merikare’s craftsman in speech, Amenemope’s teaching for life, the man who argues with his ba.
Ethiopia — the Book of the Wise Philosophers, “a light of inquiry”, and Zera Yacob’s Hatata: reason against “the doctrine of men”.
The scholars of the Sahel — Timbuktu and Sokoto: Ahmad Baba, logic as the instrument, the dan Fodios, Nana Asma’u on women seeking knowledge.
Oral wisdom — proverbs, the Ifá corpus and its babaláwo, Oruka’s sages, Sophie Oluwole, and the dispute over whether oral thought can criticise itself.
Négritude and the nationalists — Senghor’s two kinds of reason, Nkrumah’s philosophy as an instrument, Nyerere, and Diop’s Egypt as Africa’s antiquity.
The ethnophilosophy debate — Kagame and Mbiti on a collective philosophy, Hountondji and Towa against it, Oruka’s “philosophy without philosophers”, and Amo.
After the debate — Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation, Gyekye, Mudimbe, Ramose and ubuntu, Souleymane Bachir Diagne on the ink of the scholars.