Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness: An Epistemology

Towards Afrikology and a new philosophy

91 Dani W Nabudere Towards Afrikology and Towards Afrikology and a new philosophy In trying to answer the question as to whether an African philosophy exists, Diop points out that in the Western classical sense of the term, philosophical thought must bear out at least two fundamental criteria: it must be conscious of itself, of its own existence as a thought; and it must have accomplished, to a sufficient degree, the separation of myth from concept. He points out that even according to those criteria, it is difficult how the second criterion could be applied; and dealing with the question in the way Western philosophic discourse looks at it, one has to understand that the geographic term ‘Africa’ includes Pharaonic Egypt and the rest of black Africa. He points out: Vis-à-vis Black Africa, Egypt has played the same role that the Greco-Latin civilisation has played vis-à-vis the West. A European specialist, in any domain of the humanities, would be ill advised to conduct any scientific work if he cut himself off from the Greco-Latin past. Similarly, the African cultural facts will only find their profound meaning and their coherence in reference to Egypt. We can build a body of disciplines in the humanities only by legitimising and systemising the return to Egypt: in the course of this account, we will see that only the Egyptian facts allow us to find, here and there, the common denominator of the remnants of thought, a connection between the African cosmogonies in the process of fossilisation. [Diop 1974: 309] From this, Diop proceeds to argue that because Egyptian philosophical thought sheds new light on that of black Africa, and even of Greece - the Cradle of classical philosophy - it becomes necessary to summarise it first, ‘in order to bring better into focus, subsequently, its often unsuspected articulations, in other words, its loans.’ Diop adds that this manner of presenting the facts, by respecting the chronology of their genesis and their true historical connections, ‘is the most scientific way of tracing the evolution of philosophical thought and of characterising its African variant’ and origin [1974: 309–310]. 92 Africa Institute of South Africa Afrikology, philosophy and wholeness: An epistemology Following this methodology, Diop goes back to the very origin of Egyptian ‘cosmogony’ from the pyramid texts of about 2600 BC to the period of the relationship between Egyptian and the Greek Platonic cosmogonies. He does this by analysing Plato’s book Timaeus for its contents, and takes the analysis through the relationship between Aristotle’s physics and the Egyptian cosmogonies. He ends this tracement with proposed perspectives of a research agenda for a new philosophy ‘that reconciles man with himself’ [1974: 309–376]. In the presentations made here, the authors have tried to trace some of these investigations of Diop and have placed them in dialogue with the Western philosophic thought. At each point of this chronological investigation, Diop tried to introduce inner African philosophies of these periods to demonstrate their linkages to the Egyptian philosophies and diversions from them. He goes further, and in chapter 18 he reveals Greek vocabulary that has its origins in the languages of black African, as well as what he calls an inventory of Negro-African roots in classical Greek language because, through his study of linguistics, he notes that the Greek language had adopted some words that were neither Indo-European nor Semitic. To prove the point, he observes: We know with certainty that Pythagoras, who spent 22 years in Egypt in order to be initiated by Egyptian priests, Plato and Eudoxus (13 years), Democritus (five years), and many others received their training in the Pharaonic language, which was that of the priests, their teachers, all the more so because in those periods the insignificance of Greece, in all domains, rendered the necessity for the Egyptian priests to learn Greek absurd. [1974: 377] Diop continues to note that Strabo acknowledges that several Egyptian works were translated into Greek and that these works had become commonplace, and that Eudoxus, in particular, had done several translations of this kind. He observes further that these facts were so obvious to the Greeks themselves that Diodorus of Sicily, from antiquity, tried to establish a list of Greek words of Egyptian origin. Because of this extensive Greek activity, ‘the Egyptians were already warning against the deformations and the obfuscations that these translations would ultimately engender’ [1974: 378]. In order to get rid of these obfuscations, Diop proposes a method for...