African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

Introduction

A collection of essays by the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, published in French in 1976 (Sur la « philosophie africaine ») and in English in 1983. Its main target is what Hountondji called “ethnophilosophy”: attempts, from Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy to the Rwandan Alexis Kagame, to reconstruct the supposedly shared worldview of a whole people and present it as their philosophy. Such projects, he argues, treat Africans as bearers of an unconscious collective system and are addressed to a European audience. Philosophy is instead a body of explicit, argued texts open to criticism – and needs a scientific culture of its own. Critics accused him of Eurocentrism and elitism, and the book set off a long debate in African philosophy.

Connections

Criticizes

• The Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy of Being1956 · Alexis Kagame
• Consciencism1964 · Kwame Nkrumah
• Négritude and Humanism (Liberté I)1964 · Léopold Sédar Senghor

Taken up in

• The Invention of Africa1988 · V. Y. Mudimbe
• In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture1992 · Kwame Anthony Appiah

Answered in

• An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme1987 · Kwame Gyekye
• Sage Philosophy1990 · Henry Odera Oruka