Ifeanyi Menkiti

Works

• 1984Person and Community in African Traditional Thought

  A person is not born but made: personhood is attained in community and can be achieved more or less fully.

Position

Menkiti’s essay “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought”, published in Richard A. Wright’s anthology African Philosophy: An Introduction (cited mostly from the third edition of 1984), became one of the most discussed texts of African philosophy. Against what he saw as the Western view, in which a person is defined by features such as rationality or memory that an individual has alone, he argued that in African thought the community comes first, both in fact and in the definition of a person. He took up Mbiti’s formula “I am, because we are” and drew the consequence: personhood is not given at birth but attained, through ritual incorporation and through living up to one’s obligations. It comes in degrees; children are not yet persons in the full sense, the elders are more fully persons, and the recently dead remain persons for a time. Kwame Gyekye objected that this “radical” communitarianism leaves no room for individual rights and for criticism of the community, and proposed a “moderate communitarianism” in which personhood belongs to every human being while moral excellence is achieved. Later writers such as Bernard Matolino and Thaddeus Metz asked whether Menkiti described a metaphysical or a moral concept of the person. In a later essay, “On the Normative Conception of a Person”, Menkiti clarified that his concern was the moral achievement of personhood.

Life & context

Ifeanyi Anthony Menkiti was born in 1940 in Onitsha in south-eastern Nigeria. He came to the United States in 1961, graduated from Pomona College in 1964 and studied journalism at Columbia and philosophy at New York University. At Harvard he wrote a dissertation on collective responsibility under John Rawls and took his doctorate in 1974. He began teaching at Wellesley College in 1973 and stayed there until he retired in 2014. Menkiti was also a poet; his collections include Affirmations and The Jubilation of Falling Bodies. In 2006 he bought the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the oldest poetry bookshops in the United States, to save it from closure, and in 2012 set up a foundation to support it. He died in 2019.

Further main works

• On the Normative Conception of a Person (essay, in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu)