Marcien Towa

Works

• 1971Essay on the Philosophical Problem in Present-Day Africa

  Short book that rejects the ethnophilosophy of Tempels and Kagame as a description of collective beliefs passed off as philosophy: philosophy begins where a tradition is examined critically, and Africa must appropriate the scientific and philosophical thinking to which Europe owed its power.

• 1971Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude or Servitude?

  Critique of Senghor’s Négritude: by opposing African emotion to European reason, Senghor accepts the colonial image of the African and turns subjection into an identity; a liberating thought would have to reject servitude instead of celebrating difference.

Position

Towa is on the map as one of the founding critics of ethnophilosophy and as the most uncompromising critic of Senghor’s Négritude. In the Essay on the Philosophical Problem in Present-Day Africa (1971) he argued that the works of Tempels and Kagame, and those of their African followers, describe the collective beliefs of a people and call them philosophy: they lend European prestige to traditions without examining them, and confirm the view that Africans think only collectively and in myths. Philosophy, by contrast, begins when a tradition is questioned and judged by reason. The domination of Africa by Europe, he held, was no accident: it rested on Europe’s science and technology and the critical thinking behind them – what he called the secret of Europe’s power – and Africa can free itself only by appropriating that secret, which means transforming itself rather than celebrating what it supposedly always was. In Léopold Sédar Senghor: Négritude or Servitude? (1971) he turned this against Senghor: by opposing African emotion and intuition to European reason, Négritude accepts the colonial image of the African and makes subjection into an identity. Towa did not reject the African past; in L’idée d’une philosophie négro-africaine (1979) he argued that African traditions also contain critical reflection, which philosophy should seek out instead of a collective worldview. Dismas Masolo (1994) and later histories of African philosophy treat him, with Hountondji and Eboussi Boulaga, as part of the core of the critique of ethnophilosophy.

Life & context

Marcien Towa was born on 5 January 1931 in Cameroon, then under French administration. He studied philosophy in France and returned to the independent republic to teach at the University of Yaoundé, where he spent most of his career. His two books of 1971, published by the Éditions CLÉ in Yaoundé, made him one of the main voices in the debate on African philosophy in the 1970s, together with Paulin Hountondji in Dahomey (later Benin) and Fabien Eboussi Boulaga in Cameroon. In 1979 he published L’idée d’une philosophie négro-africaine; his later work dealt with identity, culture and development, and his thesis on identity and transcendence appeared as a book in 2011. He died on 2 July 2014.

Further main works

• Léopold Sédar Senghor : négritude ou servitude ? (1971)
• Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l’Afrique actuelle (1971)
• L’idée d’une philosophie négro-africaine (1979)
• Identité et transcendance (2011)