African Philosophy, Second Edition: Myth and Reality

3 African philosophy, myth and reality

3 African philosophy, myth and reality* I must emphasize that my thenle is African philosophy, myth and reality, whereas one might have expected the conventional formula, myth or reality? I am not asking whether it exists, whether it is a myth or a reality. I observe that it does exist, by the same right and in the same mode as all the philosophies of the world: in the form of a literature. I shall try to account for this misunderstood reality, deliberately ignored or suppressed even by those who produce it and who, in producing it, believe that they are merely reproducing a pre-existing thought through it: through the insubstantiality of a transparent discourse, of a fluid, compliant ether whose only function is to transmit light. My working hypothesis is that such suppression cannot be innocent: this discursive selfdeception serves to conceal something else, and this apparent selfobliteration of the subject aims at camouflaging its massive omnipresence, its convulsive effort to root in reality this fiction filled with itself. Tremendous censorship of a shameful text, which presents itself as impossibly transparent and almost non-existent but which also claims for its object (African pseudo-philosophy) the privilege ofhaving always existed, outside any explicit formulation. I therefore invert the relation: that which exists, that which is incontrovertibly given is that literature. As for the object it claims to restore, it is at most a way ofspeaking, a verbal invention, a muthos. When I speak ofAfrican philosophy I mean that literature, and I try to understand why it has so far made such strenuous efforts to hide behind the screen, all the more opaque for being imaginary, of an implicit 'philosophy' conceived as an unthinking, spontaneous, collective system of thought, common to all Africans or at least to * This is a rewritten and updated version ofa lecture 'stammered' at the University ofNairobi on 5 November 1973, at the invitation of the Philosophical Association of Kenya, under the title 'African philosophy, myth and reality' (cf. Thought and Practice, vol. I, no. 2, Nairobi, 1974, pp. 1-16). The same lecture was delivered at Cotonou on 20 December 1973 and at Porto-Novo on 10 January 1974, under the sponsorship of the National Commission for Philosophy of Dahomey. 56 Arguments all members severally, past, present and future, ofsuch-and-such an African ethnic group. I try to understand why most African authors, when trying to engage with philosophy, have so far thought it necessary to project the misunderstood reality of their own discourse on to such palpable fiction. Let us therefore tackle the problem at a higher level. What is in question here, substantially, is the idea ofphilosophy, or rather, of African philosophy. More accurately, the problem is whether the word 'philosophy', when qualified by the word 'African', tJlust retain its habitual meaning, or whether the simple addition of an adjective necessarily changes the meaning of the substantive. What is in question, then, is the universality of the word 'philosophy' throughout its possible geographical applications. My own view is that this universality must be preserved - not because philosophy must necessarily develop the same themes or even ask the same questions from one country or continent to another, but because these differences of content are meaningful precisely and only as differences of content, which, as such, refer back to the essential unity of a single discipline, of a single style of inquiry. The present chapter will therefore endeavour to develop the conclusions of the first two. In particular, it will attempt to show, first, that the phrase 'African philosophy', in the enormous literature that has been devoted to the problem, has so far been the subject only of mythological exploitation and, second, that it is nevertheless possible to retrieve it and apply it to something else: not to the fiction of a collective system of thought, but to a set of philosophical discourses and texts. I shall try to evince the existence of such texts and to determine both the limits and essential configurations, or general orientations, of African philosophical literature. The popular concept ofAfrican philosophy Tempels' work will again serve us as a reference. l We will not summarize or comment upon it again but will simply recall the author's idea of philosophy, the meaning of the word 'philosophy' in the phrase 'Bantu philosophy'. More than once Tempels emphasizes that this philosophy is experienced but not thought and that its practitioners are, at best, only dimly conscious of it: [3.15.3...