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Oral Wisdom

Much of Africa’s thought was carried by speech: in proverbs, in recited corpora such as the Yoruba Ifá, and in the sayings of individual sages. Whether it is philosophy, and how it can be done, became a question for African philosophers themselves.

The proverbs say what wisdom is like. In Akan, “wisdom is not gold dust that it should be tied up and put away”, and “no one ties up a wisdom-bag, and takes it and puts it away in a box and comes and stands in the courtyard and says, ‘Explain the matter to me’” (tr. Rattray). The Spider, Ananse, once gathered all the wisdom of the world and shut it in a gourd; the gourd broke, “and men came and picked up what each could carry away”. In Ewe, “knowledge is like a baobab tree; no one person can embrace it with both arms”. And the Akan “one head does not go into council” rests on “wisdom is not in the head of one person”: in Gyekye’s reading, “one should not, or cannot, regard one’s own intellectual position as final or unassailable or beyond criticism, but must expect it to be evaluated by others”.

Ifá is a corpus of divination verses kept by the babaláwo, which Wande Abimbola renders “father of the secrets”. “The Yoruba people themselves regard Ifa as the great authority on their mythology, history and philosophy. Indeed, Ifa can be regarded as the unwritten text-book of Yoruba culture.” Its point is destiny: Ifá “was a witness to everyman’s choice of destiny. Therefore it is necessary to go to him always to find out the true path of one’s destiny.” It is done by long learning: the corpus has 256 odù, each with many verses, and training is “a startling example of an indigenous African pre-literate academic system”, ten to twenty years before initiation and at least five after. “One gets a great poem of Ifa only in return for another great poem of Ifa.”

H. Odera Oruka went to living individuals. Against “folk sages”, who recount what their community believes, he set philosophic sages, who take what Gail Presbey calls “a critical, evaluative stance toward them”, and his method was interview: “We are seeking to unsheathe, through constant contacts and discussions with those concerned, the elaborate philosophical views and reasons from the living traditional Kenyan thinkers and sages” (1975). The point, in Presbey’s account, was that Kenyans might “evaluate and be able to justify their cultural practices”. Others answered that the criteria themselves were the question. For Ndaba, the ideal of “an individual, explicit, critical and self-critical ratiocinative consciousness” is “a Western notion”.

Sophie Oluwole (1935–2018) turned to Ifá itself. “Many Ifa texts are treatises on science, religion, philosophy, mathematics, law, politics, education, poetry, sociology, etc. This means that Ifa oral corpus is the people’s philosophy, in its classical conception. In plain language, the Babalawo are traditional Yoruba philosophers. … They are not philosophers in the narrow sense of academic philosophers, which my colleague and I are” (Socrates and Ọ̀rúnmìlà, 2014). To Kwasi Wiredu’s warning that one does not learn a people’s philosophy from “aged peasants or fetish priests”, she answered that Socrates “left behind no written work” and was “an aged poor Peasant”, “yet he was acknowledged the best philosopher of his time”. She held Oruka’s definition so narrow that his own sages would fail it, and called “continual engagement in debates about the existence of African philosophy … an intellectual vice”: “a comparison of African Philosophy and Western Philosophy is best treated as a dialogue rather than as a debate”. A verse of Ifá she cites: “Wisdom is like a road that goes in different directions. Therefore, nobody can be its only and absolute custodian.”

Whether oral thought can criticise itself is the dispute. Hountondji held that in oral cultures “the mind is too preoccupied with preserving knowledge to find the freedom to criticize it”. Souleymane Bachir Diagne answered that orality “too involves intertextuality … In this way orality returns on itself, becoming a critical reworking of its own stories”. Hountondji, in 2002, found his earlier rejection of collective thought “excessive”.