Alexis Kagame

Works

• 1956The Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy of Being

  Kinyarwanda grammar read as an ontology: four categories of being derived from the root -ntu, set against Aristotle’s.

Position

Kagame accepted Tempels’ claim that Bantu peoples have a philosophy, but objected that Tempels had built it on the impressions of a missionary. A philosophy, he argued, must be shown in the structure of a language. In Kinyarwanda the root -ntu, combined with class prefixes, yields four categories of being: umuntu, beings endowed with intelligence (humans, living and dead); ikintu, things without intelligence (animals, plants, objects); ahantu, place and time; and ukuntu, mode or manner. He compared this scheme with Aristotle’s ten categories, and in La philosophie bantu comparée (1976) extended it to other Bantu languages. Paulin Hountondji made Kagame a central example of “ethnophilosophy”: it presents an unconscious, collective and unanimous worldview as philosophy, imposes Aristotelian concepts on grammar and remains, despite its African authorship, within the colonial project begun by Tempels. Others read his work more sympathetically, as an early attempt to do philosophy in and through an African language. His historical work is more contested still. It rested on the traditions of the royal court and presented precolonial Rwanda as a harmonious kingdom under Tutsi rulers; later historians, among them Jan Vansina, questioned its dynastic chronology and its idealised image of the monarchy, and the political use of such histories in the conflicts of the 1950s and later has been discussed critically.

Life & context

Alexis Kagame was born in 1912 at Kiyanza in Rwanda and educated in the Catholic seminaries of Kabgayi and Nyakibanda; he was ordained priest in 1941. As a journalist, poet and collector of the court’s oral traditions – dynastic poetry, genealogies and ritual texts – he became the best-known Rwandan intellectual of the late colonial period and a friend of King Mutara III Rudahigwa. In 1952 a text in which he defended the Rwandan system of clientship drew the displeasure of the Belgian administration, which pressed his bishop to send him to Rome. There he took a doctorate in philosophy at the Gregorian University; the thesis appeared in 1956 as La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être. After independence he was among the first professors of the National University of Rwanda at Butare and taught as a visiting professor at Lubumbashi. He wrote poetry and history in Kinyarwanda and French and translated parts of the Bible. He died in 1981 during a visit to Nairobi.

Further main works

• La poésie dynastique au Rwanda (1951)
• La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’être (1956)
• Introduction aux grands genres lyriques de l’ancien Rwanda (1969)
• Un abrégé de l’ethno-histoire du Rwanda (1972–75)
• La philosophie bantu comparée (1976)