African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

[Akyeame Kwame]

Sûr la Philosophie Africaine/ African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
Paulin Hountondji
(First published 1977)



African philosophy today

It should not now be necessary to linger over my third point: African philosophy may now be undergoing its first decisive transformation under our very eyes. To understand the meaning of this proposition, it is necessary to bear in mind, first, that African philosophy exists; second, that it is different from what it is thought to be (that is, from what ethnological literature has said it is for so long).

The present theoretical transformation, which is rich in the most unsuspected promise, must therefore consist in a recognition of what philosophy is not and a vigorous denunciation of earlier illusions concerning the historical mode of existence of African philosophy.

Indeed, it is now beginning to be understood that African philosophy is not the supposedly collective, spontaneous, unreflective and implicit world-view with which it has hitherto been confused. It is coming to be accepted that it is not a system of tacit beliefs which are accepted, consciously or unconsciously, by all Africans in general or, more especially, by all the members of a particular ethnic group or a particular African society. It is now recognised that in this sense ‘Bantu philosophy’, ‘Dogon philosophy’, ‘Diola philosophy’, ‘Yoruba philosophy’, ‘Fon philosophy’, ‘Wolof philosophy’, ‘Serer philosophy’, etc. are so many myths invented by the West, that there are no more spontaneous African ‘philosophies’ than there are spontaneous Western, French, German, Belgian or American ‘philosophies’ creating silent unanimities among all Westerns, all the French, all the Germans, etc. African philosophy can exist only in the same mode as European philosophy, ie. through what is called literature.

It is now agreed: African philosophy is African philosophical literature. The only problem, then, is whether this literature must be understood in a narrow sense or whether non-written statements and that long tradition called oral literature should be added to the writings.

This broadening of the concept of literature does not seem, at first sight, to raise any difficulties. Indeed, it might seem that the concept of oral literature should theoretically precede that of written literature, as speech precedes writing. A written text appears to be simply the transcription of a previously oral statement, one that is not supposed to modify the content and scope of that statement at all.

One could even be tempted to enlist, in support of this thesis, the authority of Jacques Derrida – especially the analyses in his celebrated Of Grammatology. One could invoke the way in which this book enlarges the concept of writing, beyond its narrow sense of phonetic, alphabetical writing. Indeed, we know with what vigour Derrida denounces Western ethnocentrism and its celebration of alphabetical writing, ie. essentially European writing, as the universal model of writing. One could be tempted, by way of legitimately reacting against that ethnocentrism, to say that after all speech is also a form of writing and that its finest inventions, passed on orally from father to son and prodigiously preserved in the memory of so-called illiterate peoples, have nothing to envy the archivally transmitted achievements which take the form of material, visible, manipulable documents. After all, oral tradition is already the beginning of writing, since speech, as Derrida has shown, presupposes articulation, phonological contrast and therefore an interplay of differences which are substantially the same as those of writing; moreover, speech, conveyed from father to son without archival support, is possible only through mnemonic techniques which, as aids to memory, play the same objective role as documents or archives.

The argument is attractive, but it merely pushes the problem into the background. After all, if one ignores the classic distinction between speech and writing, if one asserts, as Derrida rightly does, that writing in the ordinary empirical and voluntaristic sense is not more than a mode derived from a form of supra-writing that is also present in speech, there is still the problem of deciding whether these two modes or forms of writing are strictly equivalent, play the same part and fulfil the same function in the history of culture. Derrida never asserts such an equivalence. Even less would he agree to reduce empirical writing to the status of a mere aid to speech, of a mere transcription of an already complete and self-sufficient thought, in short to an insignificant technique deprived of the slightest effect on the content to which it is applied. Far from warranting such an assertion, the author of Of Grammatology expressly warns us against it by identifying it as the central thesis of a specific ideology which he calls logocentrism, an ideology according to which logos, or speech, is the most perfect form of language and writing a mere technique of conservation or memorisation and in which speech is taken to precede writing and, being ‘live’ and ‘full’, to constitute the most spontaneous and reassuring manifestation of life, self-presence, self-consciousness and conscience. For Derrida this logocentrism (or ‘phonocentrism’) is the most ancient and most constant of the illusion of Western civilisation. Personally, I should be inclined to say that it is not so much a specific taint of Western civilisation as a universal prejudice, probably due to the demands of social life as such.

But let us return to our problem after this apparent digression. We were speaking about African philosophy or, more exactly, of what it is not. Having rejected the classical illusion by which it is reduced to a collective, unreflective and implicit system of beliefs, we were saying that it could exist only in the form of explicit discourses, that is to say, above all in the form of a literature. The problem then arose of the meaning to be given to this word ‘literature’, whether it should be reduced to ‘written’ literature (in the usual empirical sense of the word ‘writing’) or whether ‘oral’ literature should be included also. Eventually it became clear that this question envelops another, the question of the respective roles and status of ‘written’ and ‘oral’ literature or, in other words, of writing in the empirical and derivative sense of ‘book writing’ and of writing as pure memorisation (mental writing, as it were).

Having stated the problem in these terms, I should like to risk a hypothesis: oral tradition favours the consolidation of knowledge into dogmatic, intangible systems, whereas archival transmission promotes better the possibility of a critique of knowledge between individuals and from one generation to another. Oral tradition is dominated by the fear of forgetting, or lapses of memory, since memory is here left to its own resources, bereft of external or material support. This forces people to hoard their memories jealously, to recall them constantly, to repeat them continually, accumulating and heaping them up in a global wisdom, simultaneously present, always ready to be applied, perpetually available. In these conditions the mind is too preoccupied with preserving knowledge to find freedom to criticise it. Written tradition, on the contrary, providing a material support, liberates the memory, and permits it to forget its acquisitions, provisionally to reject or question them, because it knows that it can at any moment recapture them if need be. By guaranteeing a permanent record, archives make actual memory superfluous and give full rein to the boldness of the mind.

From this point of view, it is impossible to be satisfied with Levi-Strauss’s distinction between European societies and the so-called illiterate societies and his claims that the former produce a ‘cumulative’, ‘acquisitive’ history, constantly endeavouring to increase their wealth and discoveries, whereas the latter have a passive, ‘cold’, ‘non-cumulative’, ‘non-acquisitive’ history. Strictly speaking, one should reverse the terms of this opposition. The so-called illiterate societies (which, as we have seen, often do possess a form of writing, even in the most empirical sense of the word, but are characterised by the fact that they do not use it as the chief means of transmission and diffusion of knowledge) are compelled to store their inventions and discoveries jealously in their memories, to accumulate and hoard them. Their history is therefore, paradigmatically, cumulative, if this word has any meaning. On the contrary, the history of the West is not directly cumulative but critical: it moves forward not through a mere plurality of knowledge, through the accumulation of discoveries and inventions, but through the periodical questioning of established knowledge, each questioning being a crisis.

But such crises, as we have seen, are founded on the confidence, the assurance, that it will always be possible to retrieve the past if need be, thanks to the visible traces and material landmarks which have been carefully preserved. Nothing is lost: the title-deeds of the positions attacked with critical and iconoclastic verve are safe in the bank.

Such is the real function of (empirical) writing. It leaves the task of conservation to matter (books, documents, archives, etc.) and liberates the mind to make innovations that may shake established ideas and even overthrow them completely.

Now if it is accepted, as we have advocated, that philosophy is history rather than system, a perpetual movement of critique and counter-critique rather than quiet certainty, it is clear that philosophy can flourish and fulfil itself only in a civilisation with writing (in the empirical sense). Purely ‘oral’ writing, on the other hand, without of course entirely prohibiting criticism, tends to contain it within narrow limits and to perpetuate a conservative, traditionalist culture, jealous of its heritage and exclusively concerned to increase it quantitatively, without ever questioning it: a cumulative culture if ever there was one. Philosophy, a critical reflection par excellence, cannot develop fully unless it ‘writes its memoirs’ or ‘keeps a diary’. Again, it would not be impossible as an intellectual activity in an ‘oral’ civilisation, but it would be confined to a specific time and place and would survive in the collective memory only in the impoverished form of a result, a conclusion, cut off from the train of thought that has led to it.

Little by little, we have narrowed down the circle of our definitions. African philosophy, which Tempels and his disciples, as heirs to a long ethnophilosophical tradition originally conceived as a collective, implicit and possibly unconscious world-view, is now beginning to reject the definition which has been foisted on it and to take cognisance of itself as discourse, explicit thinking, as the unfinished history of a many-sided debate. It is beginning to see itself as a specific kind of literature. A number of texts very explicitly bear witness to this revolution. Some of these texts are signed by the Camerounians Eboussi-Boulaga, Towa and N’joh-Mouelle, by the Ghanian Wiredu, by the Kenyan Odera or occasionally by myself, and some are collective manifestos, but that is unimportant. What matters is that all these texts, despite their real divergences, announce and delineate a new theoretical structure in the history of our philosophy.

What we have however attempted to establish in the present discussion is that this definition of African philosophy as a set of explicit discourses produced by African philosophers is only a minimal definition and that, strictly speaking, it is still too broad and needs to be made more accurate by reference to documents, archives, visible traces that exist in the form of empirical writing. In other words, we must be extremely careful about trying in some way to cut off slices of philosophy from our oral literature. We must know that these slices, having been not merely preserved but repeated from father to son and piously transmitted to us across the centuries, without having had to undergo the test of criticism and what one might call tactical forgetting, represent at best the results of a remote process of thinking that has not itself been recorded. These moral tales, didactic legends, aphorisms and proverbs are the expression not of an intellectual quest but at best of its results, not of a philosophy but at most of a wisdom; and it is only in our time that it may prove possible, by transcribing them, to confer upon them the value and status of philosophical documents, that is to say, of texts capable of sustaining free and critical reflection.


By way of conclusion, I would like to put the present analysis in the context of my own previous work. In an article published in 1970 I wrote abruptly, without prior justification: ‘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.’ I was thereby rejecting the ethnological conception of African philosophy, reduced to a collective, unreflective vision of the world. But since then I have often been asked whether the philosophical discourses of our forebears, which did not have the good fortune to be transcribed, are not an integral part of African philosophy – in other words, whether a thought must be written down in black and white in order to deserve the description ‘philosophical’. We are now in a position to answer. The absence of transcription certainly does not intrinsically devalue a philosophical discourse, but it prevents it from integrating itself into a collective theoretical tradition and from taking its place in a history as a reference point capable of orienting future discussion. There may therefore have been African philosophers without an African philosophy, although the converse, as I hope to have shown, is strictly impossible. Thousands of Socrateses could never have given birth to Greek philosophy, however talented they might have been in dialectics. So thousands of philosophers without written words could never have given birth to an African philosophy. Socrates was able to enter the theoretical history of Greece because his disciples or fellow citizens took the time and trouble to write down his thoughts, to discuss, sometimes to criticise and often to distort them. Similarly, we Africans can probably today recover philosophical fragments from our oral literature, but we must bear in mind that so far as authentic philosophy goes, everything begins at the precise moment of transcription, when the memory can rid itself of cumbersome knowledge now entrusted to papyrus and so free itself for the critical activity which is the beginning of philosophy, in the only acceptable sense of the word.

That is not all. We have also tried to establish that African philosophy is inseparable from African science, African scientific research; that it cannot exist as a specific form of literature except in its ordered difference from, and articulation with, scientific literature; that the only fruitful prospect for our philosophy today is to attach itself closely to the destiny of science by integrating itself with the immense movement towards the acquisition of scientific knowledge that is now developing on the continent.

We have shown how this process of acquiring the international scientific heritage conditions the actualisation and, as it were, the reappropriation of our pre-colonial knowledge. In the same way, it is clear that a systematic appropriation of the international philosophical heritage, which is inseparable from that scientific heritage, is absolutely necessary to any reappropriation of our philosophical past and to any reconstitution of our theoretical history. In this sphere our task in complex, our responsibility overwhelming. We must be ambitious for Africa and for ourselves; we must be careful not to nip in the bud the unparalleled promise of our history or to prune it prematurely. We must on the contrary open it up, liberate it. The short circuit of nationalism and pseudo-revolutionary lies has, at best only limited effectiveness. Beyond all facile solutions, beyond all the myths, we must have the courage to make a fresh start.

[Baba Ahmed]

I wonder what is the credentials of this writer; i.e., specifically where was his(?) knowledges acquired and who was his instructors/educators.

I doubt his intended audiences are outside of academia... correct me if wrong.

[Akyeame Kwame]

Originally Posted by Baba Ahmed

I wonder what is the credentials of this writer; i.e., specifically where was his(?) knowledges acquired and who was his instructors/educators.

I doubt his intended audiences are outside of academia... correct me if wrong.

i definitely doubt his audiences are outside of krakkka plantations too...but just an additional resource for anybody interested...

Hountoundji's been on the scene for a while...u might can pull up a profile on the net...stay BlackNificent...

AK

[Baba Ahmed]

Originally Posted by Akyeame Kwame

i definitely doubt his audiences are outside of krakkka plantations too...but just an additional resource for anybody interested...

Hountoundji's been on the scene for a while...u might can pull up a profile on the net...stay BlackNificent...

AK

Thanks for dig'n reason I asked... never an intent to jam.... not one of my "sons."

will do follow up... soon... keep breaking the ices for Black in Blackness!

Baba A.

[Akyeame Kwame]

Originally Posted by Baba Ahmed

Thanks for dig'n reason I asked... never an intent to jam.... not one of my "sons."

will do follow up... soon... keep breaking the ices for Black in Blackness!

Baba A.

no doubt...i don't particularly care for these type high-siddidy books (i say break it down for an Afrikan audience so-as WE can extract what is useful for Our liberation)...but usually u can get something out of these...stay Black2DaNif!!!

AK

[Baba Ahmed]

Originally Posted by Akyeame Kwame

no doubt...i don't particularly care for these type high-siddidy books (i say break it down for an Afrikan audience so-as WE can extract what is useful for Our liberation)...but usually u can get something out of these...stay Black2DaNif!!!

AK

Yeaaaaaaaaaah to the nth!

Useful thangs and truth can b learned from a Devil's commission and omissions. (ha! got anudda one: hi-siddidy)

med ase
Kwame

[Akyeame Kwame]

Originally Posted by Baba Ahmed

Yeaaaaaaaaaah to the nth!

Useful thangs and truth can b learned from a Devil's commission and omissions. (ha! got anudda one: hi-siddidy)

med ase
Kwame

Blacksolutely Baba,

stay BlackNificent!!!

AK