A Short History of African Philosophy

1. The Historical Perspective

The characterization of Africa’s precolonial indigenous cultures as signi¤cantly ahistorical in character has been dismissed as patently false. The signi¤cance of the word “primitive,” as originally used by non-Africans to type Africa’s cultures, was that those cultures could serve as contemporary exemplars of how human beings had lived in primeval and pristine times, “before” recorded history (Kuper 1988). This false ahistorical stereotype had profound consequences for Africa’s status vis-à-vis philosophy as an international enterprise. “Early” human societies anywhere in the world were not thought to have developed the capacity for the intellectual re®ection de¤nitive of this supposedly sophisticated discipline. Therefore Africa’s indigenous cultures were, in both principle and fact, disquali¤ed from occupying a place in the philosophical arena. The response on the part of many African philosophers, scholars, and intellectuals to this falsely a-historical, as well as deeply offensive, typing of the cognitive signi¤cance of their civilizations has been sustained and vigorous. The fact that these efforts have only recently begun to have recognizable consequences in and on the Western academy would probably be cited by those same individuals as further evidence of how profound the in®uence of this demeaning caricature of Africa’s cultures was on the rest of the world and, in some cases, on Africans themselves. In this introductory chapter, attention will focus primarily upon two signi¤cant sources of philosophical thinking from the African historical context that predate the so-called ‘modern’ era: Egyptian texts that date back as early as 3000 b.c. and a collection of treatises from Abyssinia (a country that consisted essentially of what is today Ethiopia and Eritrea) that were produced during the seventeenth century a.d. 3 1 The Historical Perspective The claim that examples of philosophical texts existed in ancient Egypt is sometimes misleadingly overidenti¤ed with the school of thought that has come to be known as Afrocentrism. And Afrocentrism itself is sometimes unfairly and one-dimensionally typed as an attempt to in®ate the international importance and in®uence of ancient Egyptian culture totally out of proportion to the “scienti¤c” evidence for it. But from both a historical and cultural point of view, the reaf¤rmation of ancient Egypt as an integral part of the African continent constitutes a rejection by Africana1 scholars of those who have used the Saharan and Nubian deserts as a kind of “iron curtain” between the “black” African cultures to their south and the “non-black” (but somehow also “non-white”) peoples to their north (Obenga 1992). At worst, the qualitatively different characteristics of the civilizations thereafter attributed to these two groups are said to have transposed racism from the modern to the ancient world. At best, they are said to disregard the history of the commercial and cultural exchanges that always took place between the peoples of north, west, east, central, and south Africa. It is impossible to characterize all of the literature currently associated with Afrocentrism with a set of simpli¤ed generalizations. Afrocentrism is probably best known in Western scholarship for its arguments that both the form and content of ancient Greek (and, hence, eventually European/ Western) philosophy and science were derived directly from Egyptian civilization (Ben-Jochannan 1994; Diop 1974; James 1954; Obenga 1995). This in turn has generated a concerted response from Western classicists (academics who specialize in Greek and Roman civilization) that the character of Greek thought and civilization was, in these respects, fundamentally different and distinctive from that of their Egyptian counterparts and that consequently no such fundamental linkage or crossover can be established . (Basically, the Greeks are distinguished by their “abstract” and “reasoned” thought, while Egyptian thought is characterized as “regimented ” and “practical” [Lefkowitz 1996; Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996]). Somewhere on the stormy seas that contain these contending forces also lies the work of the American scholar Martin Bernal, whose prospective 8-volume Black Athena (1987–) aims at presenting suf¤cient empirical evidence to establish the importance of ancient intellectual interactions between Greek, Semitic Mediterranean, and African peoples once and for all on an acceptably scienti¤c basis. Although it would be noteworthy poetic justice for a discipline—philosophy —that was once denied to Africa to have in fact originated there, this book will not concentrate on the debate over whether Egyptian culture A Short History of African Philosophy 4 1. I use the term “African” to refer to scholarship that is speci¤cally concerned with the African continent...