African Philosophy Cannot Be a Thing

Consider, for instance, a person who lives in a society where the people are yet to understand the basic elements of the universe—how the universe was formed and what the universe was formed from. I am inclined to say that the basic wonder of this person would be to investigate this. And this is the condition that we find the early Western philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Consider another instance: In this society, resources are scarce, and since there are no laid down moral rules, people don’t know how to conduct themselves and this affects how the resources are being used and shared. Simply put, this society is in a state of war of all against all since everyone is trying to survive and the only way to survive is to fight and keep the resources for yourself (and, maybe, your offspring, too). I suspect that the point of wonder, for a rational mind in that society, would be how to bring the people of that society together to converge on some basic moral and political principle that could lead to a welfare state and flourishing lives for its people.

Lastly, consider another society. In this society, the people with social powers are racist, and they subjugate people who don’t have the same phenotype. This subjugation manifests itself in the sort of social well-being the different groups (the racist and the other group) can acquire. It would be unkind, in some way, to expect that the content of the subjugated group’s wonder should not be tied to their oppression. The point I am making here is that one’s situation—perhaps, to put it clearly, ‘our’ situation—determines the sort of things or events one might wonder about.

In a recent article in this journal, Darius Dauda Angwa missed this point about African philosophy when he attempted to answer the question ‘What is African Philosophy?’. Sadly, it seems to me that Angwa failed to respond to this question by offering a concept of African philosophy. What I see in Angwa’s essay is a rehash of the conceptual definitions that some philosophers have tried to give ‘African philosophy’. In his article, Angwa wrote that:

Angwa’s point here is an interesting one, but it strikes me as odd. It strikes me as odd for three reasons. First, there seems to be an apparent contradiction in Angwa’s claim. Just after the quote above, (in another paragraph) Angwa writes that ‘The content of philosophy in Africa ought to reflect the concerns of Africans’. Then he named-dropped some philosophers and philosophies such as Mao’s Marxism and Adam Smith’s interpretations of capitalism. I take it that Angwa is saying that these philosophies speak to the situated awareness of the philosophers who conceptualized them. But interestingly, Angwa’s concession here contradicts the quote above that asks people concerned about the question of what an ‘African philosophy’ is to neglect such question and just do philosophy. Angwa simply neglects the condition of situated awareness in philosophical inquiries when it comes to inquiries having to do with conceptual questions that define an African philosophy but granted the same situated awareness when it comes to the questions and topics that define Western philosophy.

The second point is only an attempt to drive home the first point: Angwa seems to be neglecting an important point of the history around ‘academic’ African philosophy and that is what leads him to a contradiction. Academic African philosophy is reactionary. It started as a reaction to Western philosophers (and I do hate to call them ‘philosophers’) such as Levy Bruhl, Kant, Hume, etc.., who often claim that ‘Africans can’t think’. Faced with these derogatory remarks, academic African philosophy started concerning itself with questions of whether an African philosophy exists; if it exists, what is it; who, and how African philosophy must be done for it to exist if it is not yet in existence. The situation around academic African philosophers at the time required them to investigate the situation that racist Western philosophers put them. Importantly, also, today people still assign lesser credibility to African philosophy than they do to what might be called Western philosophy. So, it might be a little bit disdainful to insist that Africans concerned with the meta-philosophic nature of an ‘African philosophy’ desist from doing so.

I have been calling it ‘academic African philosophy’ to gesture at the fact that it is inconceivable for me that a group of people would live together for more than 1500 years, and they didn’t wonder, ask questions, or try to solve the problems they encounter in their social lives. And this, we must note, definitely counts as a way of doing philosophy. For what is philosophy when it is reduced to contextualization alone that does nothing to affect our daily lives? I, in fact, think using the term ‘African philosophy’ broadly and not reducing it to ‘academic African philosophy’ reinforces the racist and colonial beliefs that since they weren’t written, Africans have no philosophy or a way of thinking before Western incursions. This, outrightly, is some sort of clusterfuck that only the West enjoy because it allows them to sit at the upper side of the socially constructed hierarchy.

Lastly, it also strikes me as odd how, to some extent, Angwa’s effort to depict current African philosophy as philosophically uncritical might have deluded him from not seeing (not to talk about understanding) the now vast contents of philosophy in Africa that reflects and centres the concerns of Africans. I, in fact, think it is a disservice to the effort Angwa might even be making—which is that the content of philosophy in Africa ought to reflect the concerns of Africans and desist from metaphilosophical investigations of what constitutes an African philosophy. It, for instance, neglects the copacetic philosophical works that many African philosophers such as  Ajume Wingo have done to demystify the issues around contemporary liberal democracies. It also neglects Ikuenobe Polycarp’s work on African communitarianism. It also neglects the fine philosophical work that Abraham Tobi is doing on appreciative silencing in communicative exchanges. It even neglects my own recent effort to show how an African ethical model can inform alternative justifications for altruism. There are many names I could mention, but I am going to stop here since mentioning all the names of people doing these sorts of important work would require, possibly, a writing of eight-sized font that runs for more than a hundred pages.