Bantu Philosophy

Introduction

Placide Tempels, a Belgian Franciscan missionary in Katanga, wrote the book in Dutch; it first appeared in French in Elisabethville (today Lubumbashi) in 1945 and was reissued in 1949 by Présence Africaine in Paris. Tempels claims that Bantu thought rests on a coherent ontology in which being is “vital force”, organised in a hierarchy from God through the ancestors to the living, animals and things. He intended this reconstruction to help missionaries and colonial administrators understand the Baluba and to further the civilising mission. The book is often regarded as the first to speak of an African philosophy as such and shaped the debate for decades; Hountondji later made it the prime example of “ethnophilosophy”.

Connections

Taken up in

• The Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy of Being1956 · Alexis Kagame

Criticized in

• Discourse on Colonialism1950 · Aimé Césaire
• African Religions in Western Scholarship1970 · Okot p’Bitek
• Essay on the Philosophical Problem in Present-Day Africa1971 · Marcien Towa
• Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy1977 · Fabien Eboussi Boulaga
• The Invention of Africa1988 · V. Y. Mudimbe
• Sage Philosophy1990 · Henry Odera Oruka
• In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture1992 · Kwame Anthony Appiah