UNDERSTANDING AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

1 UNDERSTANDING AFRICANPHILOSOPHYThis page intentionally left CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH TOClassical and Contemporary IssuesRICHARD YORK AND LONDONP ublished in 2002 byRoutledge29 West 35th StreetNew York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain byRoutledge11 New Fetter LaneLondon EC4P 4 EERoutledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002 by RoutledgeAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized inanyform or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system,without permission in writing from the and typography: Jack Donner10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY /Richard 0-203-80074-5 Master e-book ISBNISBN 0-203-80077-X (Adobe eReader Format)ISBN 0-415-93936-4 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-415-93937-2 (pbk.)

2 To mywife and children,Barbara, Jonathan, & Rebecca:you have given megreat joy in lifeThis page intentionally left blank. contents Preface x Acknowledgments xviii1. UNDERSTANDING Another Culture 1 UNDERSTANDING Others and Ourselves A Procedure from an Aesthetic Point of View Found in Translation 2. Foundations of Modern AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY 21 Ethnophilosophy and the Negritude Movement Critical, Scientific PHILOSOPHY Sage PHILOSOPHY 3. Liberation and postcolonial AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY 36 AFRICAN Humanism and Socialism postcolonial AFRICAN Thought The Question of Race 4. AFRICAN Moral PHILOSOPHY I: Community and Justice 58 Persons, Individualism, and Communalism Suffering and Injustice Poverty and Human Development 5. AFRICAN Moral PHILOSOPHY II: Truth and Reconciliation 83 Linking Communalism, Ubuntu, and Restorative Justice UNDERSTANDING the Grammar of Justice after Apartheid Not All Storytelling Heals : Criticisms of the TRC Process Justice and Political Transformation 6.

3 Narrative in AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY : Orality and Icons 106 The Philosophical Significance of Oral Narratives Rational Dialogue, Democracy, and the Village Palaver Finding Pictures and Fictitious Narratives Surprising Iconic Forms and the Aesthetic Consciousness Revisited 7. Some Concluding Remarks 132 Notes 136 Bibliography 171 Index 181viiiUNDERSTANDING AFRICAN PHILOSOPHYS eriously to study another way of life is necessarily to extend our own. Peter Winch prefaceThis book reflects many years of engagement with the philosophical andanthropological discussions about UNDERSTANDING another culture in this casethe other culture is Africa. This is combined with over twenty-five years ofteaching and research on aesthetics and AFRICAN philosophies. What is at issueis how one who is not an AFRICAN can go about UNDERSTANDING what is nowcalled AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY , and furthermore to communicate that understandingto largely non- AFRICAN readers.

4 Africa, of course, does not have a single cul-ture that is to be understood. It is a large and diverse and sometimes enigmaticcontinent with a diversity of cultures. There is not what could be called a philosophical tradition that can be traced back very far historically in mostof the continent. So the issues in UNDERSTANDING cultures and philosophies are of Africa like Egypt and ancient Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia andEritrea) have long traditions of written history and civilizations older thanGreek civilization; they also have a philosophical and religious literature ofconsiderable interest. But what are now known as the sub-Saharan nationstates, those largely carved out by a few European countries in 1884 for theconvenience of their colonizing interests, reflect larger regional cultures andtraditions than their boundaries suggest. These regional cultures were brokenup and destroyed (or at least radically altered) primarily by the European andIslamic incursions going back some 500 years.

5 The slave trade, introduction ofnew diseases, forced colonization, foreign language and religious impositions,and alien administration threw most of the continent into social, religious, polit-ical, and cultural confusion. Some of these regional cultures once had greatcivilizations and Kingdoms but a minimum of texts survived to record theirideas and What remains of them are fragmentary pictures:icons from ritual life, histories of smaller communities passed on orally, someforms of governance preserved in village life, a few written records, judicialjudgments, clerical texts, and a rich and a diverse artistic heritage. Most impor-tant, however, is a reflective memory carried forward for generations of a peo-ple whose dignity and way of life simply would not die. In these picturesmany common elements of the cultures do emerge and from these a largermosaic of Africa s past has been reconstructed.

6 A true recovery, however, ofthese regional cultures and traditional forms of life, of a precolonial Africa, isextremely problematic and this is made even more problematic by the natureof developments in the postcolonial experience. With respect to approaching issues in AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY all of this pointsto the fact that such an enterprise is a fairly recent phenomenon largely aproduct of Western and indigenous study and reflections during the twentiethcentury. It is not that the peoples of Africa have not had the kinds of reflec-tions about the meaning of life or how they came into being. Nor have theygiven less consideration to the ordering of their life in communities, to fairnessand justice, or to the meaning of suffering and love than have other are all concerns and interests in human life that are the very stuff ofphilosophical reflection.

7 In most of the subcontinent of Africa, however, whatattention was given to such reflections in the first half of the twentieth centurymust be credited largely to Western social anthropologists. During the secondhalf of the twentieth century, Africans and their philosophical reflections havebeen brought into dialogue with others who have longer histories of This cross-cultural dialogue is itself central to UNDERSTANDING Africanphilosophy. The cross-cultural nature for UNDERSTANDING its PHILOSOPHY is ofparticular importance because of the radical one might say even traumatic interface that Africa has had with European culture and with Wittgenstein remarked in the Philosophical Investigations: thework of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular pur-pose. The following reminders are here assembled for the purpose of under-standing AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY : that as a non- AFRICAN approaching AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY we must begin withthose issues central to cross-cultural UNDERSTANDING itself.

8 Central to ourthesis here is that PHILOSOPHY is a product of an aesthetic consciousness andthat those issues that are genuinely philosophical arise from the very pro-cess of our seeing and experiencing the world in which we live; that is, PHILOSOPHY itself arises from and must be understood within an aestheticpoint of view. Both the notions of aesthetic consciousness and an aestheticpoint of view will be discussed at length in chapters 1 and 6. that AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY is currently in the process of formation by anactive group of academic philosophers, critical theorists, and writers(almost all of whom are themselves Africans) who are refining its methodsof reflections, the range of its concerns, and the particularity of its prob-lems at this moment in time. Their discussions are of inherent and univer-sal philosophical interest. that current AFRICAN philosophers understand their particular task, becauseof the recent history of their continent, to be necessarily one of dialogue PHILOSOPHY itself is understood in the time-honored way as a conversation ever clarifying and critically refining its reflections of the issues at hand.

9 PREFACExi furthermore, that as a conversation, the UNDERSTANDING desired of AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY must be a two-way conversation, that is, those discoveries madelistening to their internal conversation must not just be heard but also seenas being of value to non-Africans engaged in the conversation with Africanphilosophy. because AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY is in the process of formation involving alarger intellectual community than just professional philosophers, atten-tion must be given to such factors that are expressive of AFRICAN s ordinaryforms of life, , through their orature, their traditional forms of gover-nance, their fictional literature, and their arts. These are all forms of thenarrative self-expression of Africans, and much that is within them are ofcritical significance to UNDERSTANDING AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY . The specific con-cept of narrative in AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY and its value for cross-culturalunderstanding will surface often and be developed in several ways through-out the is here called cross-cultural UNDERSTANDING is itself a kind of compara-tive or interdisciplinary PHILOSOPHY a PHILOSOPHY that draws on different dis-ciplines in order to position the reader to see and thus be in a position tounderstand the other s world.

10 In this seeing, however, my hope is that theconcept of other dissolves, or at least recedes in significance, in the under-standing. To engage the AFRICAN reality requires that we see multiple aspects ofthat reality through the eyes of Africans themselves through the eyes of itsphilosophers, historians, writers, and artists those who provide us with a criti-cal perspective on the lived experiences of Africans. Some have called thiskind of PHILOSOPHY , which bears the imprint of the AFRICAN reality engaging thenon- AFRICAN UNDERSTANDING of it, postcolonial Wittgenstein, as with many postcolonial thinkers, linear thinking givesway to disruptions in our ordinary patterns of thought hesitations, new begin-nings, imaginative reconstruals are always the order of the day. Most impor-tant, however, is his recommendation that we stop thinking and start look-ing By this we shift the emphasis of our critical approach from a rationalistic, or meta-theoretical one to an aesthetic one; we extend ourvision to overcome aspect blindness an inability to see what is in front ofour noses or hear what is clearly auditory.