Journey · 10 stops
African Philosophy
From the vizier’s maxims to the critique of ethnophilosophy – the habit of presenting a whole people’s worldview as its philosophy: who speaks for African thought?
Stops
Stop 1 of 10: Ptahhotep
The oldest text of the journey comes from Egypt. In the “Maxims of Ptahhotep” – attributed to a vizier of the Old Kingdom, probably composed in the Middle Kingdom, from which the oldest copies come – an aged vizier instructs his son: listen before you speak, be just, be modest, for Maat – truth and right order – endures while arrogance passes. Whether this is philosophy or wisdom literature is itself a question the tradition will keep asking of its sources.
Stop 2 of 10: Augustine
Augustine was born in Thagaste in Roman North Africa, in today’s Algeria, and became bishop of Hippo on the same coast. His “Confessions” invented the autobiography of inwardness; his “City of God” the Christian philosophy of history. European thought claimed him as its own, and his African origin was long passed over – a first instance of the question who gets counted where.
Stop 3 of 10: Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti
In Timbuktu, a centre of Islamic learning on the edge of the Sahara, the jurist Ahmad Baba answers questions from the Tuat oasis in 1615: under Islamic law only unbelief, never skin colour, can make a person enslaveable, and the supposed curse on the descendants of Ham has no basis. Like the law of his time, he still held the enslavement of unbelievers to be lawful. Much of this written tradition lies uncatalogued in the manuscript libraries of the region.
Stop 4 of 10: Zera Yacob
In 1630 the Ethiopian scholar Zera Yacob, fleeing religious persecution, hides in a cave and examines all religious claims by the “light of reason”. His “Hatata” concludes that each religion holds its own to be true and that reason must judge between them – and finds that God made men and women equal and that monastic celibacy contradicts nature. Written down in 1667, it would be a rationalism that arose independently of Europe – if it is authentic: since 1920 some scholars have attributed it to the missionary Giusto da Urbino, who supplied the manuscript, and the question is still open.
Stop 5 of 10: Anton Wilhelm Amo
Anton Wilhelm Amo, born on the Gold Coast around 1703, taken from there as a child and given as a “present” to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, became the first African known to have earned a doctorate in philosophy at a European university, and taught philosophy at Halle, Wittenberg and Jena. His dissertation argues against Descartes that the mind does not sense; sensation belongs to the living body. A legal treatise on the rights of Africans in Europe is lost. Around 1747 he returned to West Africa.
Stop 6 of 10: Edward Wilmot Blyden
In the nineteenth century the question becomes political. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies and active in Liberia, argues that Africans have a distinct “African personality” that is neither to be erased by Europe nor ashamed of itself, and that Islam has served Africa better than the Christianity of the colonisers. Pan-Africanism, Négritude and the debates of the twentieth century have their roots here.
Stop 7 of 10: Placide Tempels
In 1945 the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels publishes “Bantu Philosophy”: the Baluba of the Congo, he claims, have an ontology in which being is vital force, and everything exists in a hierarchy of forces. The book was the first to present an African worldview as philosophy – and contested from the start, because it speaks for Africans rather than letting them speak, and in the service of the colonial mission.
Stop 8 of 10: Paulin Hountondji
Paulin Hountondji names the problem: “ethnophilosophy”. Tempels and his African followers present the collective, unanimous worldview of a people as philosophy – but philosophy, Hountondji argues, is individual, written, critical debate, and the myth of unanimity serves to deny Africans exactly that. Odera Oruka’s “sage philosophy” answers by interviewing rural sages: critical individual thought exists in oral cultures too.
Stop 9 of 10: Sophie Oluwole
Sophie Oluwole, the first Nigerian woman to earn a doctorate in philosophy, turns the argument around. The Yoruba Ifá corpus, she argues, contains arguments, not just beliefs; Orunmila, its legendary sage, can be compared with Socrates – both left no writings, both were preserved by pupils. The criterion of writing, she objects to Hountondji, would exclude Socrates too. Oral tradition can be philosophy if one knows how to read it.
Stop 10 of 10: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí asks what else the Western lens has imposed. In “The Invention of Women” she argues that pre-colonial Yoruba society was ordered by seniority, not gender, and that the category “woman” came with colonial rule and Western scholarship – feminism included. Critics dispute her reading of the evidence; her question stands: African philosophy must examine not only its answers but the concepts in which it is asked to give them.
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