Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Muntu in Crisis: African Authenticity and Philosophy
Critique of ethnophilosophy as a rhetoric that seeks the recognition of European readers and confuses customs with theory; Eboussi Boulaga asks how people whose world of meaning colonisation has broken can think and act by and for themselves, starting from their concrete situation.
Introduction
“La crise du Muntu. Authenticité africaine et philosophie” appeared in Paris in 1977 with Présence Africaine, the publisher that had issued Tempels’ “Bantu Philosophy” in French almost three decades earlier; an English translation, “Muntu in Crisis”, appeared later. The title joins two vocabularies: “crisis” and “philosophy” from Europe, “Muntu”, the human being of the Bantu languages, and “authenticity” from the African debates of the time. Eboussi Boulaga starts from defeat: colonisation broke the world of meaning of those it conquered, and the question is with what language they can speak again in their own name. He criticises ethnophilosophy, which reconstructs a collective African worldview from proverbs and customs, as a confusion of custom with theory and as a rhetoric addressed to European readers to obtain recognition – a recognition that cannot end an unequal situation, since it depends on those who profit from it. Philosophy must instead take up what it represses, the “non-philosophical” concrete situation, and serve a project of being self-reliant and self-directed, within an order free of violence and arbitrariness. The book belongs with the works of Hountondji and Towa to the critique of ethnophilosophy of the 1970s, but differs from them in its ethical and existential reading of African traditions (N. Ajari, 2015).
Connections
Criticizes
- Bantu Philosophy1945 · Placide Tempels
More works by Fabien Eboussi Boulaga
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