The Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy of Being

Introduction

Alexis Kagame wrote the book as his doctoral thesis in philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome; it was published in Brussels in 1956. He accepts the claim of the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels in Bantu Philosophy (1945) that Bantu peoples have a philosophy, but insists that it must be shown in the structure of a language. From the Kinyarwanda root -ntu combined with noun-class prefixes he derives four categories – umuntu (beings with intelligence), ikintu (things), ahantu (place and time) and ukuntu (mode) – and compares them with Aristotle’s ten. Paulin Hountondji later took the book as a central example of “ethnophilosophy”; others read it as an early attempt to do philosophy in and through an African language.

Connections

Builds on

• Bantu Philosophy1945 · Placide Tempels

Criticized in

• Essay on the Philosophical Problem in Present-Day Africa1971 · Marcien Towa
• African Philosophy: Myth and Reality1976 · Paulin Hountondji