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Academic philosophy in Anglophone Africa arose in a conservative yet turbulent intellectual climate. Conservative because philosophical paradigms in the English-language academy derived principally from the analytic tradition , which provided for a comparatively more narrow conception of the discipline than its European Continental counterparts. Turbulent because of the competing claims about what could constitute the sources of African philosophy as advocated by Africanists and African intellectuals from a diverse variety of disciplinary and vocational backgrounds—social anthropology , missionary and religious scholarship, and academic philosophy. Placide Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy was originally published in French ([1949] 1959) and was intended for a Francophone readership. But these are not suf¤cient reasons to overlook the effects on an Anglophone African readership of its later publication (1959) in English-language translation. That Africans of a Bantu origin were said to explain and perceive the world as expressions of “vital forces” was found to be, at least initially, a satisfactorily radical alternative to Western mechanism. This “vital force” approach was shortly thereafter popularized in a fashionably lyrical, artistic, and best-selling English-language translation of Muntu (1961), written by the German scholar Janheinz Jahn. To adapt this more speci¤cally aesthetic dimension to the “vital force” approach, Jahn also drew heavily upon the theory of Negritude as expressed and propounded by Aimé Césaire (1972) and Leopold Sedar Senghor (1971). But Tempels and Jahn share a view of the African intellect that, once it was better appreciated for its negative consequences, particularly where philosophy is concerned, has been enough to cause many African intellectuals to reject it as ethnocentric and even derogatory of the African mentality generally. For Africans themselves are said, by Tempels, for example, to be incapable of articulating the 13 2 Twentieth-Century Origins “views”8 reported by these studies, views on the basis of which Africans purportedly perceive and understand the world. Africans are said to live in a world that is fundamentally symbolic and ritualized in character. These two terribly overworked terms are meant to convey the point that Africa’s indigenous peoples express their beliefs and values most directly by means of symbolic and ritualized behavior (socalled rites, rituals, masquerades) rather than with discursive verbal statements . The closest such cultures come to any sort of systematic verbalization is said to be found in their myths and proverbs. More often than not, of course, this makes the participation of the alien academic ¤eldworker, who is professionally trained to decode (interpolate the meanings of) such behavior (symbolic and ritual), myths, and proverbs indispensable to any scholarly intercultural exercise; without their active participation there could be no studies of the African mentality written in the systematic, re-®ective, critical, and discursive manner that is taken to be conventional by Western paradigms of scholarship. Perhaps the most positive enduring heritage of these studies is their rudimentary efforts to link their theses to key concepts in the Bantu languages said to be fundamentally expressive of this culture’s worldview.9 This characterization of African peoples as having only limited verbal articulateness was dramatically challenged in 1965 by the English-language translation of yet another widely read (and still enduringly popular) text of Francophone origin, Conversations with Ogotemmeli, as recorded and edited by the anthropologist Marcel Griaule. This book purports to report a series of discussions with a Dogon elder in which he comprehensively and systematically decodes, in a clear and discursive manner, much of Dogon symbolism , ritual, and myth! With regard to the development of African philosophy generally as an independent discipline, one important and enduring consequence of Griaule ’s Ogotemmeli is that it did not provide a Dogon replication of Tempels’s “vital force” ontology. The hierarchical, yet uni¤ed and somehow uniform , metaphysical structure to the universe—as well as its organizing principles—Ogotemmeli outlined argues in a convincing manner for the diversity of Africa’s indigenous systems of thought. That Ogotemmeli, without any formal training in the conventional Western sense (indeed, he had undergone no modern education and spoke no Western language), is able to do this in so compelling a manner so went against the grain of previous studies in and of African thought that there were published inA Short History of African Philosophy 14 8. The English-language technical/specialized vocabulary/terminology dating from this period used by foreign scholars to characterize things related to the African intellect has for long been a subject meriting more detailed study in its own right. 9. African philosopher Alexis Kagame’s...

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