Fabien Eboussi Boulaga

Dzieła

• 1977La crise du Muntu. Authenticité africaine et philosophie (Kryzys Muntu. Afrykańska autentyczność i filozofia)

  Krytyka etnofilozofii jako retoryki, która zabiega o uznanie europejskich czytelników i myli obyczaje z teorią; Eboussi Boulaga pyta, jak ludzie, których świat sensu złamała kolonizacja, mogą myśleć i działać sami z siebie i dla siebie, wychodząc od swojej konkretnej sytuacji.

• 1981Christianisme sans fétiche. Révélation et domination (Chrześcijaństwo bez fetyszu. Objawienie i panowanie)

  Krytyka chrześcijaństwa przyniesionego przez misje jako dyskursu panowania, który utrzymywał afrykańskich konwertytów w zależności; Eboussi Boulaga proponuje powrót do postaci Chrystusa jako wzoru ludzkiego życia, uwolnionej od tego, co stało się fetyszami.

Stanowisko

Eboussi Boulaga is on the map as one of the chief critics of ethnophilosophy, alongside Paulin Hountondji and Marcien Towa, and as a thinker of the situation that colonial rule left behind. “La crise du Muntu” (1977) – the Muntu is the human being of the Bantu languages – describes the condition of people whose world of meaning collapsed under colonisation, and the resulting crisis of the humanities in Africa. Ethnophilosophy, from Tempels’ “Bantu Philosophy” onwards, confuses customs with theory and is a rhetoric addressed to European readers to win recognition – a recognition that cannot end an unequal situation because it depends on those who profit from it. Unlike Hountondji, he did not orient philosophy in Africa chiefly towards science: what ethnophilosophy represses, he wrote, is the “non-philosophical”, the concrete situation that drives the desire for philosophy, and its aim is to exist on its own account and for itself, according to an order that rules out violence and arbitrariness. “Christianisme sans fétiche” (1981) criticised missionary Christianity as revelation turned into domination and proposed to take up the figure of Christ as a model of human life. His later political writings examined the national conferences of the early 1990s as moments of democratic hope, and the politics of Cameroon. N. Ajari (2015) reads his ethical and existential interpretation of African traditions as an alternative to Hountondji’s scientism; Achille Mbembe and Nadia Yala Kisukidi place his work in the project of “writing the world from Africa”.

Życie i kontekst

Fabien Eboussi Boulaga was born on 17 January 1934 in Bafia in French Cameroon. After the minor seminary at Akono he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1955 and was ordained priest in 1969; he studied theology in Lyon and later took doctorates in philosophy and in letters. In 1968 he published “Le Bantou problématique” in Présence Africaine, a critique of the Bantu philosophy of the missionary Placide Tempels. He taught in Abidjan and at the University of Yaoundé, and in 1980 he left the Society of Jesus. From 1994 he taught at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé. In the 1990s he followed the national conferences of the democratisation period and the politics of Cameroon in books and articles, and in 2006 he co-edited with Alain Didier Olinga a volume in which African intellectuals reflect on the genocide in Rwanda. He died in Yaoundé on 13 October 2018.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Le Bantou problématique (Présence Africaine, 1968)
• À contretemps. L’enjeu de Dieu en Afrique (1992)
• Les conférences nationales en Afrique noire. Une affaire à suivre (1993)
• La démocratie de transit au Cameroun (1997)
• Lignes de résistance (1999)
• L’affaire de la philosophie africaine. Au-delà des querelles (2011)