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The Ethnophilosophy Debate

The debate began from a book: the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels’s La philosophie bantoue (1945), which reconstructed a Bantu world-view of vital force. Its question, whether a people’s collective thought is a philosophy, was taken up and fought over by African philosophers from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Two answered yes, in their own ways. The Rwandan priest Alexis Kagame (1912–1981), in La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (1956), set out to test Tempels’s reconstruction from inside, as “an autochthonous Bantu African”, with the stress on language and grammar. John S. Mbiti (1931–2019), in African Religions and Philosophy (1969), used the word for something collective: “‘African philosophy’ here refers to the understanding, attitude of mind, logic and perception behind the manner in which African peoples think, act or speak in different situations of life”, and “philosophical systems of different African peoples have not yet been formulated”. He knew the difficulty: “What, therefore, is ‘African Philosophy,’ may not amount to more than simply my own process of philosophizing the items under consideration: but this cannot be helped, and in any case I am by birth an African.” The person in that philosophy is relational: “The individual can only say: ‘I am, because we are; and since we are, therefore I am’” (Ubuntu).

Paulin Hountondji (1942–2024) answered no. Tempels’s book was “an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions, or more simply, if I may coin the word, a work of ‘ethnophilosophy’”, addressed “not … to Africans but to Europeans”. Philosophy is not “a collective and unconscious world-view”: it “consists essentially in the process of analysis itself”, carried on in texts that their authors call philosophical. Its point is liberation, “in the most political sense of the word”, of an ideological discourse into “a truly theoretical discourse which will be indissolubly philosophical and scientific”. Hountondji wrote a study of Anton Wilhelm Amo, born in West Africa, who wrote at Halle a Treatise on the Art of Soberly and Accurately Philosophising (1738); by his definition Amo belongs, though he wrote in Germany.

Marcien Towa (1931–2014) attacked négritude and ethnophilosophy together. Senghor, he wrote, had “fait du Nègre un être si complètement dominé par l’émotion et l’instinct et reconnaît si volontiers l’européanité exclusive de la raison, que l’on peut se demander si son dessein réel est de nier ou de servir l’impérialisme européen”: had made the black man a being so wholly ruled by emotion and instinct, and granted so readily that reason was Europe’s alone, that one may ask whether his real aim was to deny or to serve European imperialism. Towa’s own programme was to master “le principe de la puissance européenne”, the principle of European power, for without it “jamais nous ne pourrons sérieusement secouer le joug de l’impérialisme européen”, we shall never seriously shake off the yoke of European imperialism (Towa, 1971, as quoted).

H. Odera Oruka (1944–1995), in 1972, faulted Tempels’s book and Mbiti’s alike: by making everyone anonymous, such accounts gave, in Gail Presbey’s account, “philosophy without philosophers”. His own answer was to find the philosophers by name (Oral wisdom).