In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 An alienated literature* To Nunayon-Herve There are two ways of losing oneself: through fragmentation in the particular or dilution in the 'universal'. AIME CESAlRE, Lettre aMaurice Thorez (1956) By 'African philosophy' I mean a set of texts, specifically the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves. Let us note that this definition begs no question, since the meaning of the qualifier 'philosophical' is irrelevant - as is, indeed, the cogency of the qualification. All that matters is the fact of the qualification itself, the deliberate recourse to the word philosophy, and whatever meaning that word may have. In other words, we are concerned solely with the philosophical intention of the authors, not with the degree of its effective realization, which cannot easily be assessed. So for us African philosophy is a body of literature whose existence is undeniable, a bibliography which has grown constantly over the last thirty years or so. The limited aims of these few remarks are to circumscribe this literature, to define its main themes, to show what its problematic has been so far and to call it into question. These aims will have been achieved if we succeed in convincing our African readers that African philosophy does not lie where we have long been seeking it, in some mysterious corner of our supposedly immutable soul, a collective and unconscious world-view which it is incumbent on us to study and revive, but that our philosophy consists essentially in the process of analysis itself, in that very discourse through which we have been doggedly attempting to define ourselves - a discourse, therefore, which we must recognize as ideological and which it is now up to us to liberate, in the most political sense of the word, in order to equip ourselves with a truly theoretical discourse which will be indissolubly philosophical and scientific.1 * An article written for UNESCO in 1969 and published in Diogene, no. 71 (1970), under the title 'Remarques sur la philosophie africaine contemporaine'. The original text has not been significantly modified. 34 Arguments Archeology: Western 'ethnophilosophy' A forerunner of 'African philosophy": Tempels. This Belgian missionary 's Bantu Philosophy still passes today, in the eyes of some, for a classic of 'African philosophy'.2 In fact, it is an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions, or more simply, if I may coin the word, a work of 'ethnophilosophy'. It need concern us here only inasmuch as some African philosophers have themselves made reference to it in their efforts to reconstruct, in the wake of the Belgian writer, a specifically African philosophy. Indeed, Bantu Philosophy did open the floodgates to a deluge of essays which aimed to reconstruct a particular Weltanschauung, a specific world-view commonly attributed to all Africans, abstracted from history and change and, moreover, philosophical, through an interpretation of the customs and traditions, proverbs and institutions - in short, various data - concerning the cultural life ofAfrican peoples. One can readily discern Tempels' motives. At first sight they appear to be generous, since he had set out to correct a certain image of the black man disseminated by Levy-Bruhl and his school, to srow that the African Weltanschauung could not be reduced to that celebrated 'primitive mentality' which was supposed to be insensitive to contradiction, indifferent to the elementary laws of logic, proof against the laws of experience and so forth, but that it rested, in fact, on a systematic conception of the universe which, however different it might be from the Western system of thought, equally deserved the name of 'philosophy'. At first sight, then, Tempels' object appeared to be to rehabilitate the black man and his culture and to redeem them from the contempt from which they had suffered until then. But on closer scrutiny the ambiguity of the enterprise is obvious. It is clear that it is not addressed to Africans but to Europeans, and particularly to two categories of Europeans: colonials and missionaries .3 In this respect the seventh and last chapter bears an eloquent title: 'Bantu philosophy and our mission to civilize'. In effect, we are back to square one: Africans are, as usual, excluded from the discussion, and Bantu philosophy is a mere pretext for learned disquisitions among Europeans. The black man continues to be the very opposite of an interlocutor; he remains a topic, a voiceless face under private investigation, an object to be defined and not the subject of a possible discourse.4 [18.118.145.114] Project MUSE...

Share