Work · African & Africana Philosophy
Essay on the Philosophical Problem in Present-Day Africa
Short book that rejects the ethnophilosophy of Tempels and Kagame as a description of collective beliefs passed off as philosophy: philosophy begins where a tradition is examined critically, and Africa must appropriate the scientific and philosophical thinking to which Europe owed its power.
Introduction
Marcien Towa’s “Essai sur la problématique philosophique dans l’Afrique actuelle” appeared in 1971 with the Éditions CLÉ in Yaoundé, in a series of short books for a wide readership. It asks what philosophy can be in an Africa that has lived through colonial domination. Towa rejects the answer of ethnophilosophy, from Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy and Kagame’s study of Rwandan ontology to their African successors: describing the collective worldview of a people and calling it philosophy confuses myth with thought and repeats the colonial image of Africans as people who do not reflect critically on their traditions. Philosophy begins when a tradition is questioned. Europe’s domination rested on its science and technology and on the critical thinking behind them; to become free, Africa must appropriate this power and so transform itself, even at the cost of breaking with parts of its past. The book is one of the founding texts of the critique of ethnophilosophy, together with Paulin Hountondji’s essays.
Connections
Criticizes
- Bantu Philosophy1945 · Placide Tempels
- The Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy of Being1956 · Alexis Kagame
More works by Marcien Towa
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