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Reflections on African Philosophical Thought as Seen by Europe and Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Bongasu Tanla Kishani*
Affiliation:
École normale supérieure, Bambili, Cameroon

Extract

What should we understand by African philosophical thought if not a philosophy expressed by African thinkers, based on their own experience with the means and within the limits of that experience? A closer inspection will show, however, that this truism calls for rethinking. If we abide by the writings of our contemporary philosophers, African and non-African, who have endeavored to put the essence of African thought into one of the Occidental languages or a Westernized indigenous language, we soon see the perplexity in which we find ourselves when it is a matter of transcribing the systems of thought that are properly African, that resemble no other system of thought and that Africans alone are able to expound and understand. This was for a long time the questionable affirmation of the advocates of Negritude and is still questionable today, because we cannot judge the value of the written formulation of such a system of thought unless we put ourselves into the circumstances in which it was born and in which it lived. Though the existence of a dialectic relationship between a collective consciousness and its formulation as a philosophical system is conceivable, obviously the philosophical thought captured, so to speak, at the source and the oral or written forms in which this thought is preserved and transmitted are two totally different things. To opt for one or the other or for both can involve tasks which many hands share in varying degrees. It is not necessary that a philosopher formulate and express his philosophy in writing or that someone else gather his statements and give them form for his philosophy to be valid and durable. Moreover, although he transmits it orally he never does so with the same words, even if they are always recognizable anmemorable among all others. Platonic, Hegelian and Scholastic philosophies remain themselves whether we write about them or read the works of their founders. Consider Pyrrho, Socrates, Jesus: oral tradition has sufficed to bring their message down through the centuries to us even though they wrote nothing. Why should it not be the same for the oral philosophical traditions of Africa?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Many African languages make this distinction between those who go to church—the children of Cpad: Ve Nyuy yi, and those who stay home: Wir vefo la (Lamnso’)—like some Tikari languages of the Cameroon Grassfields.

2 Placide Tempels, "Bantu Philosophy," Présence Africaine, Paris, p. 21, 1959.

3 Basil Davidson, Africa in History, Caranada Publications, 1974, p. 16.

4 Placide Tempels, op. cit., p. 21.

5 Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy-Myth and Reality, Hutchinson and Co., London, 1983, p.33.

6 Idem. pp. 178-9.

7 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.