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68 Africa Institute of South Africa Mafeje and African Mafeje and African philosophy philosophy Mafeje approached the issue of African philosophy from a ‘combative’ ontology that Africanity had begun to assume in his analysis of the African situation. Mafeje, like the other African scholars engaged in this discipline, had raised the question that had long been raised by those who did not accept the Africans’ humanity: Did Africa have a ‘philosophy’? For Mafeje the question was emotive and even racist. He conceded that while ‘philosophy’ could not be conceived in ‘pre-literate societies’, it was ‘hard’ to imagine a people without some conception of, or ideas about, the meaning of existence, notions of being and its imperatives/logic, as well as the purposes of mankind in the universe. He added that whether these conceptions could be referred to as ‘philosophy’, ‘metaphysics’, ‘cosmologies’, ‘superstition’ or ‘mythologies’ was not of importance but that the question had become part of the problem of our times, nor was it peculiar to philosophical discourse. Hence it was futile to make sharp distinctions between subjects and objects in the process of knowledge creation: ‘All subjects are created in contradiction i.e. we assert ourselves against something and for something.’141 Therefore, Mafeje begun to entangle this question by trying to understand the different philosophical projects that existed among African philosophers and came to the conclusion that there had been two main tendencies in the discourse. One tendency accepted that Africans did not ‘yet’ have a philosophy. This tendency, Mafeje pointed out, referred to ‘philosophy’ as a formal academic discipline ‘with distinctive set of universally agreed upon rules’. But there were enough dissenting voices to this argument to warrant the distinguishing of a second tendency or indeed a ‘movement’ against it. This movement was spearheaded by people of African descent formerly called the ‘Negroes’ in the Diaspora, especially in the New World. It was essentially an expression of a hurt pride by those who had suffered the crushing agony of slavery and the bitter racial humiliation. They were the products, not of African culture, but of Western education. Among these individuals were 69 Mafeje and African philosophy Dani W Nabudere Sylvester Williams, W.E.B. du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey and Edward Blyden. This group was later joined by African students from the continent who studied in the USA and Europe, such as Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, Cheick Anta Diop, and Leopold Sedar Senghor. This group asserted not only the existence of philosophy in Africa, but its origin in Africa. According to Mafeje, it was out of these two tendencies that four schools of philosophy emerged in contemporary Africa. The first was composed of university trained philosophers, such as Kwasi Wiredu and others, whom Mafeje said had been able after independence to establish a discipline in philosophy in Black Africa. He quoted Wiredu as saying: ‘An African may learn philosophy in a Western institution of higher learning abroad or at home and become extremely adroit in philosophical disputation; he may even be able to make original contributions in some branches of philosophy. The fact remains that he would be engaged in Western, not Africa, philosophy ... As far as the main branches of philosophy are concerned, African philosophical ideas might just as well be non-existent. This trend, I suggest, ought to be reversed.’142 Mafeje points out that there was a group of people, including Father Placide Temples who wrote on Bantu Philosophy and Alexis Kagame who wrote a book on the Bantu Philosophy of Rwanda, who were intent on reversing this trend. These writers set a trend that came to be known as ‘ethno-philosophy’, which became the second school of African philosophy but which was contested by the first group of philosophers, namely the Western- trained African philosophers who had been contending with three ‘vexed questions’ relating to the issue of the place of African philosophy, vis-a-vis the Western philosophy. These ‘vexed questions’ were: (a) the philosophic status of ethno-philosophy or folk philosophy; (b) the universality of the Western criteria for judging whether or not a given discourse was philosophy; and (c) whether there could be an equivalence between European and African philosophical concepts, i.e. between concepts that are products of different cultures or cosmologies. Mafeje observed regarding the first point, there appeared to be a ‘prevailing ambiguity’ in that whereas most African academic philosophers welcomed the recognition of unwritten African philosophical ideas, they, at the same time, objected...

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