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African Systems of Thought
African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
English (translation)Original French
Hardcover
First published September 1, 1983
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About the author
Paulin J. Hountondji
12 books9 followersPaulin Hountondji is a Beninese philosopher, politician and academic. Since the 1970s he has taught at the Université Nationale du Bénin in Cotonou, where he is Professor of Philosophy. In the early 1990s he briefly served as Minister of Education and Minister for Culture and Communications in the Government of Benin
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 25, 2016
This is an awful book and I wish I could get my money back. This is nothing more than a collegiate attempt of a colonized mind to give undue and unworthy credit to thieves, rapists, and destroyers for what his ancestors created. Shame on this book.
It only took my 20 pages to realize how horrid this epistle of self-hate and misinformation truly was.
Do not waste you time or money on this
It only took my 20 pages to realize how horrid this epistle of self-hate and misinformation truly was.
Do not waste you time or money on this
January 4, 2025
A obra "Sobre a Filosofia Africana" do professor Paulin Hountondji oferece um profundo convite para desconstruirmos um ideal, reforçado por estudiosas/os europeus, de que existe uma única forma de "ser" e de "pensar" africana. Além disso, o livro é um testemunho de que, a partir do rigor científico, do acolhimento ao pensar plural e das críticas ao saber produzido por acadêmicos africanos, é possível sim seguir com um ideal de filosofia africana.
O livro está organizado em duas partes. Na primeira, o autor apresenta um conjunto de críticas rigorosas à lente eurocêntrica da filosofia africana, que frequentemente simplifica e generaliza a diversidade dos pensamentos filosóficos existentes na África. A partir de uma análise ferrenha ao trabalho de Placide Tempels em "A Filosofia Bantu", que propõe uma visão homogeneizadora e muitas vezes romantizada das culturas africanas, tratando crenças e práticas tradicionais como se fossem uma filosofia unificada, Hountondji reforça a necessidade de um discurso filosófico crítico e rigoroso dentro do continente. Ele defende uma abordagem mais analítica e metodológica, que reconhece a complexidade e a variedade das tradições filosóficas africanas.
A segunda parte do livro apresenta uma análise de pensadores a partir dessa perspectiva de uma filosofia plural e analítica, com a intenção de traçar um caminho para a história da filosofia africana.
Filosoficamente, a obra apresenta um confronto entre o universal e o particular, e Hountondji evita uma resolução clara, pois essa é uma tensão que anima o que é considerado filosófico. A fonte do particular é invariavelmente africana, enquanto o universal é ostensivamente definido como ocidental. Essa equação abre a possibilidade de um relativismo evidente que deve ser repudiado. Isso é particularmente verdadeiro devido à dimensão transcendente do pensamento de Hountondji. De fato, a filosofia transcende as limitações do particular.
Como um não filósofo de carteirinha e interessado pelo saber, garanto que o livro não é fácil de ser processado. Porém, em uma era de teorização decolonial, Hountondji é um convite para criarmos pensamentos além do que é pregado como o sujeito normativo.
A seguir, listarei alguns trechos que me chamaram a atenção na obra:
"Um dos mais perversos efeitos do discurso etnofilosófico é que seres humanos de carne são transformados em objetos abstratos de discussão".
"Não se pode deixar de reconhecer que, em algum nível, a própria tradição é plural e sempre oferece um vasto leque de possibilidades, o que por sua vez obriga o indivíduo a sempre se determinar, confrontando-o assim, repetidamente, a uma responsabilidade incontornável".
"Há duas maneiras de se perder: por segregação confinada no particular, ou por diluição no universal". Aimé Césaire.
"Qualquer estrutura, quando considerada independentemente de sua finalidade, nos apresenta seu aspecto estático. Se, em seguida, considerarmos que essa estrutura está destinada a ter um fim, quando estruturalmente orientada para agir ou para ser utilizada em vista de um certo objetivo, nesse caso, ela nos apresentará seu aspecto dinâmico".
"O colonizador civiliza, mas somente com a condição de ele mesmo se reumanizar, de reencontrar a sua alma".
"É necessário tomar partido: todo projeto teórico análogo, toda tentativa de sistematizar a visão de mundo de um povo dominado destina-se necessariamente a um público estrangeiro e visa alimentar um debate ideológico centrado em outro lugar - em outra localização geográfica, nas classes dominantes da sociedade dominadora".
"Porque a Europa nunca esperou de nós, no plano cultural, outra coisa além de oferecer-lhes nossas civilizações como um espetáculo e alienar-nos num diálogo fictício com ela, à revelia dos nossos próprios povos".
"É preciso reaprender a pensar".
"A filosofia é uma história, e não um sistema, um processo essencialmente aberto, uma investigação inquieta e inacabada, não um saber fechado".
"A história não procede por evolução contínua, mas por saltos e sobressaltos, por revoluções sucessivas. De modo que não segue um caminho linear, mas o que se poderia chamar de caminho dialético, em outros termos, ela não tem um aspecto contínuo, mas descontínuo".
"O uso dogmático da razão sem crítica leva apenas a afirmações sem fundamento, às quais se podem opor outras igualmente semelhantes, que conduzem ao ceticismo".
"Não há desenvolvimento das antigas doutrinas em direção às novas, mas sim o envolvimento dos antigos pensamentos pelos novos".
"A ideia é sempre um produto do pensamento humano, um produto da atividade espiritual, inseparável da atividade material, dos indivíduos".
"Deus desconhece o passado e o futuro, que são as formas temporais da ausência".
"Exigir que um pensador se contente em reafirmar as crenças de seu povo ou de seu grupo social é proibi-lo de pensar livremente e condená-lo, a longo prazo, à asfixia intelectual".
"O que importa não é o papel, é o pensamento". Kwame Nkrumah.
"A pluralidade das crenças e escolhas teóricas não impede a adesão a um mesmo ideal político. Para fundamentar essa adesão, basta que ambos os lados tenham interesses comuns a defender, interesses nacionais, no caso da luta anticolonial".
"O tradicionalismo deve ser entendido como a valorização exclusiva de um esquema simplificado, superficial e imaginário da tradição cultural".
"Uma cultura nunca é uma coisa inerente, mas uma invenção perpétua, um debate constante entre pessoas acorrentadas a um mesmo destino e desejosas todas de tornar esse destino o melhor possível. O que precisamos entender é que em nenhuma sociedade todos jamais estão de acordo entre si".
O livro está organizado em duas partes. Na primeira, o autor apresenta um conjunto de críticas rigorosas à lente eurocêntrica da filosofia africana, que frequentemente simplifica e generaliza a diversidade dos pensamentos filosóficos existentes na África. A partir de uma análise ferrenha ao trabalho de Placide Tempels em "A Filosofia Bantu", que propõe uma visão homogeneizadora e muitas vezes romantizada das culturas africanas, tratando crenças e práticas tradicionais como se fossem uma filosofia unificada, Hountondji reforça a necessidade de um discurso filosófico crítico e rigoroso dentro do continente. Ele defende uma abordagem mais analítica e metodológica, que reconhece a complexidade e a variedade das tradições filosóficas africanas.
A segunda parte do livro apresenta uma análise de pensadores a partir dessa perspectiva de uma filosofia plural e analítica, com a intenção de traçar um caminho para a história da filosofia africana.
Filosoficamente, a obra apresenta um confronto entre o universal e o particular, e Hountondji evita uma resolução clara, pois essa é uma tensão que anima o que é considerado filosófico. A fonte do particular é invariavelmente africana, enquanto o universal é ostensivamente definido como ocidental. Essa equação abre a possibilidade de um relativismo evidente que deve ser repudiado. Isso é particularmente verdadeiro devido à dimensão transcendente do pensamento de Hountondji. De fato, a filosofia transcende as limitações do particular.
Como um não filósofo de carteirinha e interessado pelo saber, garanto que o livro não é fácil de ser processado. Porém, em uma era de teorização decolonial, Hountondji é um convite para criarmos pensamentos além do que é pregado como o sujeito normativo.
A seguir, listarei alguns trechos que me chamaram a atenção na obra:
"Um dos mais perversos efeitos do discurso etnofilosófico é que seres humanos de carne são transformados em objetos abstratos de discussão".
"Não se pode deixar de reconhecer que, em algum nível, a própria tradição é plural e sempre oferece um vasto leque de possibilidades, o que por sua vez obriga o indivíduo a sempre se determinar, confrontando-o assim, repetidamente, a uma responsabilidade incontornável".
"Há duas maneiras de se perder: por segregação confinada no particular, ou por diluição no universal". Aimé Césaire.
"Qualquer estrutura, quando considerada independentemente de sua finalidade, nos apresenta seu aspecto estático. Se, em seguida, considerarmos que essa estrutura está destinada a ter um fim, quando estruturalmente orientada para agir ou para ser utilizada em vista de um certo objetivo, nesse caso, ela nos apresentará seu aspecto dinâmico".
"O colonizador civiliza, mas somente com a condição de ele mesmo se reumanizar, de reencontrar a sua alma".
"É necessário tomar partido: todo projeto teórico análogo, toda tentativa de sistematizar a visão de mundo de um povo dominado destina-se necessariamente a um público estrangeiro e visa alimentar um debate ideológico centrado em outro lugar - em outra localização geográfica, nas classes dominantes da sociedade dominadora".
"Porque a Europa nunca esperou de nós, no plano cultural, outra coisa além de oferecer-lhes nossas civilizações como um espetáculo e alienar-nos num diálogo fictício com ela, à revelia dos nossos próprios povos".
"É preciso reaprender a pensar".
"A filosofia é uma história, e não um sistema, um processo essencialmente aberto, uma investigação inquieta e inacabada, não um saber fechado".
"A história não procede por evolução contínua, mas por saltos e sobressaltos, por revoluções sucessivas. De modo que não segue um caminho linear, mas o que se poderia chamar de caminho dialético, em outros termos, ela não tem um aspecto contínuo, mas descontínuo".
"O uso dogmático da razão sem crítica leva apenas a afirmações sem fundamento, às quais se podem opor outras igualmente semelhantes, que conduzem ao ceticismo".
"Não há desenvolvimento das antigas doutrinas em direção às novas, mas sim o envolvimento dos antigos pensamentos pelos novos".
"A ideia é sempre um produto do pensamento humano, um produto da atividade espiritual, inseparável da atividade material, dos indivíduos".
"Deus desconhece o passado e o futuro, que são as formas temporais da ausência".
"Exigir que um pensador se contente em reafirmar as crenças de seu povo ou de seu grupo social é proibi-lo de pensar livremente e condená-lo, a longo prazo, à asfixia intelectual".
"O que importa não é o papel, é o pensamento". Kwame Nkrumah.
"A pluralidade das crenças e escolhas teóricas não impede a adesão a um mesmo ideal político. Para fundamentar essa adesão, basta que ambos os lados tenham interesses comuns a defender, interesses nacionais, no caso da luta anticolonial".
"O tradicionalismo deve ser entendido como a valorização exclusiva de um esquema simplificado, superficial e imaginário da tradição cultural".
"Uma cultura nunca é uma coisa inerente, mas uma invenção perpétua, um debate constante entre pessoas acorrentadas a um mesmo destino e desejosas todas de tornar esse destino o melhor possível. O que precisamos entender é que em nenhuma sociedade todos jamais estão de acordo entre si".
September 2, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #African Literature
It was 2013. I spent 2013 to 2016, deep researching African Literature for a multi-volume translation. That is when I met this work, and it felt unlike any of the fiction I had been immersing myself in. Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (along with the broader African Systems of Thought project) is not just a book—it is a frontal attack on the way African thought had been appropriated, simplified, and romanticised by both colonial anthropologists and African intellectuals themselves.
Hountondji critiques what he calls “ethnophilosophy”—the idea that African philosophy is nothing more than a collective worldview frozen in proverbs, myths, or communal traditions. Against this, he argues that philosophy must be written, argued, and critical. Philosophy, for him, is not “the wisdom of the tribe” but the rigorous and contestable work of individual thinkers. This bold stance challenged dominant currents of thought in the 1970s, especially against Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy, which claimed African philosophy was a collective essence.
Reading Hountondji after novels like Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross or Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born was a shock. Those novels used narrative to critique corruption, neo-colonialism, and disillusionment. Hountondji, on the other hand, was dismantling the very frameworks through which Africa was being thought about. Where Soyinka’s Aké celebrated Yoruba childhood memory and Okri’s Famished Road danced with myth, Hountondji called for critical distance from myth itself, insisting that philosophy cannot remain at the level of cultural folklore.
Comparatively, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power feels raw, psychological, almost metaphysical in its exploration of identity and trauma. Hountondji provides the scaffolding—an insistence that intellectual work in Africa should be no less rigorous, no less “philosophical” than its Western counterparts. In a way, both texts resist the flattening gaze of colonial epistemologies, but through different registers: Head through narrative breakdown and Hountondji through polemical critique.
What struck me most was the sheer courage of the book. Hountondji risks alienating even fellow African intellectuals by rejecting the comfort of “authentic African essence”. He calls for the emergence of professional philosophers in Africa who write, publish, and debate—thereby situating Africa not as an exception, but as a participant in universal philosophical discourse. His insistence echoes Achebe’s stance in literature: to claim equal space, not a folkloric niche.
Looking back, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality shaped how I approached African fiction during those years. It reminded me to not simply read folklore or myth as “philosophy” in disguise, but to notice the tensions, the critiques, and the fractures. Ngũgĩ’s struggle with language politics, Soyinka’s satire of colonial schools, and Pepetela’s utopian contradictions all became more layered when filtered through Hountondji’s critique.
If one were to compare, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude project reads as the poetic opposite—celebrating a unique African essence. Hountondji instead dismantles this celebratory essentialism, demanding intellectual seriousness. Where Senghor speaks of “emotion as African, reason as European”, Hountondji dismantles such binaries altogether.
The myth in the title refers to the mythologising of African thought as frozen tradition; the reality is the demand for African philosophers to take their place in history as active, critical, modern thinkers. For anyone deep in African literature, this book provides a compass, a reminder not to confuse symbolic resonance with philosophical rigour.
Reading it in the middle of my African literature binge felt like stepping from river to rock—suddenly firm ground, hard questions, no romantic haze. And that shift was necessary.
It was 2013. I spent 2013 to 2016, deep researching African Literature for a multi-volume translation. That is when I met this work, and it felt unlike any of the fiction I had been immersing myself in. Hountondji’s African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (along with the broader African Systems of Thought project) is not just a book—it is a frontal attack on the way African thought had been appropriated, simplified, and romanticised by both colonial anthropologists and African intellectuals themselves.
Hountondji critiques what he calls “ethnophilosophy”—the idea that African philosophy is nothing more than a collective worldview frozen in proverbs, myths, or communal traditions. Against this, he argues that philosophy must be written, argued, and critical. Philosophy, for him, is not “the wisdom of the tribe” but the rigorous and contestable work of individual thinkers. This bold stance challenged dominant currents of thought in the 1970s, especially against Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy, which claimed African philosophy was a collective essence.
Reading Hountondji after novels like Ngũgĩ’s Devil on the Cross or Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born was a shock. Those novels used narrative to critique corruption, neo-colonialism, and disillusionment. Hountondji, on the other hand, was dismantling the very frameworks through which Africa was being thought about. Where Soyinka’s Aké celebrated Yoruba childhood memory and Okri’s Famished Road danced with myth, Hountondji called for critical distance from myth itself, insisting that philosophy cannot remain at the level of cultural folklore.
Comparatively, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power feels raw, psychological, almost metaphysical in its exploration of identity and trauma. Hountondji provides the scaffolding—an insistence that intellectual work in Africa should be no less rigorous, no less “philosophical” than its Western counterparts. In a way, both texts resist the flattening gaze of colonial epistemologies, but through different registers: Head through narrative breakdown and Hountondji through polemical critique.
What struck me most was the sheer courage of the book. Hountondji risks alienating even fellow African intellectuals by rejecting the comfort of “authentic African essence”. He calls for the emergence of professional philosophers in Africa who write, publish, and debate—thereby situating Africa not as an exception, but as a participant in universal philosophical discourse. His insistence echoes Achebe’s stance in literature: to claim equal space, not a folkloric niche.
Looking back, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality shaped how I approached African fiction during those years. It reminded me to not simply read folklore or myth as “philosophy” in disguise, but to notice the tensions, the critiques, and the fractures. Ngũgĩ’s struggle with language politics, Soyinka’s satire of colonial schools, and Pepetela’s utopian contradictions all became more layered when filtered through Hountondji’s critique.
If one were to compare, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Negritude project reads as the poetic opposite—celebrating a unique African essence. Hountondji instead dismantles this celebratory essentialism, demanding intellectual seriousness. Where Senghor speaks of “emotion as African, reason as European”, Hountondji dismantles such binaries altogether.
The myth in the title refers to the mythologising of African thought as frozen tradition; the reality is the demand for African philosophers to take their place in history as active, critical, modern thinkers. For anyone deep in African literature, this book provides a compass, a reminder not to confuse symbolic resonance with philosophical rigour.
Reading it in the middle of my African literature binge felt like stepping from river to rock—suddenly firm ground, hard questions, no romantic haze. And that shift was necessary.
June 2, 2025
Recueil d'articles et de conférences de Paulin Hountondji, penseur et philosophe africain.
Un livre essentiel malheureusement difficilement trouvable en France (acheté au Bénin mais vu sur cairn.info) qui nous enjoint à sortir de cette vision essentialisée de la "civilisation africaine" réduite à une pensée collective et unanime à tous les peuples africains, intuitive, mythique et en opposition au sur-matérialisme et individualisme de LA civilisation occidentale ; civilisation africaine traditionnelle et immuable dont les principes de vie sont acceptés par tous (car l'Homme africain n'a pas de vision propre, ne débat jamais et ne remet jamais rien en question bien sûr).
Vision malheureusement entretenue par ce que Hountondji qualifie d'"ethnonologues" qui, suivant les traces d'un missionnaire blanc belge (Tempels, auteur de "la Philosophie Bantoue") souhaitant fournir des clés de compréhension aux missionnaires et colons pour civiliser ces "primitifs" en théorisant sur la vision intuitive des bantous (résumée à toute l'Afrique, sachant que le terme bantou est en soit un gros fourre-tout), se sont mis à produire une littérature "philosophique", destinée à tout le monde sauf aux concernés, dans le but de redorer l'image du continent auprès de leurs homologues occidentaux (tout discours dissident à cette vision étant une trahison à "l'africanité").
S'ajoute aussi une analyse sur l'œuvre de Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) dont les écrits souvent interprétés comme un système figé traduisent une pensée évolutive et non exempt de remises en question de l'auteur, en dépit des réserves sur certaines de ses positions qui ont pu enfermer l'Afrique dans une vision qui n'est pas étrangère à sa chute.
Un peu moins apprécié l'analyse sur Amo, philosophe d'origine ghanéenne du 18e siècle mais dont la conclusion est une véritable invitation à l'action... Tout comme la vision offerte sur le pluralisme et l'acculturation inhérente à toute société.
Un must-read pour éviter les écueils aujourd'hui toujours d'actualité qui enferment et figent les évolutions et potentiels débats sur la création d'une philisophie propre au continent africain.
Un livre essentiel malheureusement difficilement trouvable en France (acheté au Bénin mais vu sur cairn.info) qui nous enjoint à sortir de cette vision essentialisée de la "civilisation africaine" réduite à une pensée collective et unanime à tous les peuples africains, intuitive, mythique et en opposition au sur-matérialisme et individualisme de LA civilisation occidentale ; civilisation africaine traditionnelle et immuable dont les principes de vie sont acceptés par tous (car l'Homme africain n'a pas de vision propre, ne débat jamais et ne remet jamais rien en question bien sûr).
Vision malheureusement entretenue par ce que Hountondji qualifie d'"ethnonologues" qui, suivant les traces d'un missionnaire blanc belge (Tempels, auteur de "la Philosophie Bantoue") souhaitant fournir des clés de compréhension aux missionnaires et colons pour civiliser ces "primitifs" en théorisant sur la vision intuitive des bantous (résumée à toute l'Afrique, sachant que le terme bantou est en soit un gros fourre-tout), se sont mis à produire une littérature "philosophique", destinée à tout le monde sauf aux concernés, dans le but de redorer l'image du continent auprès de leurs homologues occidentaux (tout discours dissident à cette vision étant une trahison à "l'africanité").
S'ajoute aussi une analyse sur l'œuvre de Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) dont les écrits souvent interprétés comme un système figé traduisent une pensée évolutive et non exempt de remises en question de l'auteur, en dépit des réserves sur certaines de ses positions qui ont pu enfermer l'Afrique dans une vision qui n'est pas étrangère à sa chute.
Un peu moins apprécié l'analyse sur Amo, philosophe d'origine ghanéenne du 18e siècle mais dont la conclusion est une véritable invitation à l'action... Tout comme la vision offerte sur le pluralisme et l'acculturation inhérente à toute société.
Un must-read pour éviter les écueils aujourd'hui toujours d'actualité qui enferment et figent les évolutions et potentiels débats sur la création d'une philisophie propre au continent africain.
April 29, 2020
This is a masterful study of African philosophy and “ethnophilosophy.” Anyone interested in African philosophy, metaphilosophy, colonialism/post-colonialism, anthropology, and/ or Marxism (/Nkrumaism) should read portions of this book if not the whole thing.
October 6, 2025
Os primeiro ensaios são realmente bons. Gosto da visão insiciva do autor. De qualquer forma, ele não é muito propositivo e, nesse sentido, acaba perdendo muito para o Oruka.
July 22, 2013
This is my book from Benin for the Read The World challenge. I ordered it because I fancied a change from post-colonial fiction, and then regretted it almost immediately; I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about philosophy as a discipline.
Actually, though, I found it interesting and it really did make a nice change. It was first published, as Sur la “philosophie africaine”, in 1976, and is largely framed as a response to earlier works in the field. So it provides an interesting window into a discussion I knew nothing about.
Obviously it’s a narrow window, entirely shaped by Hountondji’s framing, and I don’t have the knowledge to judge how fair and accurate his presentation is. But it still offers an insight into something that would otherwise have passed me by.
The tradition he is arguing with is a kind of ethnological idea of philosophy, where for example, Bantu cultural ideas about death and morality and what have you were investigated, arranged into a system, and then presented as ‘Bantu philosophy’. Hountondji argues that this is not only a misapplication of the word ‘philosophy’ but a damaging one. Rather, ‘African philosophy’ should refer to philosophical works written by Africans; the same thing, in fact, as philosophy from anywhere else.
I was very much predisposed to agree with this argument: so much so that I felt the need to step back every so often and play devil’s advocate. Not because I had any long-standing opinions about African philosophy, of which I was completely ignorant, but because I have a long-standing peeve about the vague, hand-wavy way people use the word ‘philosophy’. It’s rather like ‘poetry’ in that respect.
Still, you can understand the impulse that led people to things like ‘Bantu philosophy’. Given the context of colonialism, there is/was a value in any assertion that Africans are capable of interesting thought that is distinct from that brought by colonialists and worthy of study in its own right.
Whereas if you insist on the narrow definition of philosophy, then there is almost no African philosophical tradition; certainly very little ‘authentically African’ philosophy that precedes or is separate from the stuff brought over by Europeans. That’s just an artefact of an oral society. It’s perfectly possible to do philosophy without writing it down — it was good enough for Socrates — but it doesn’t survive; we only know about Socrates because of Plato.
But things like ‘Bantu philosophy’ are a bad solution to that problem. Firstly, because it perpetuates the idea that Africa is so exotic/primitive/whatever that all our approach to it must be through an ethnographic lens, just as African sculptures end up in a different museum to the Picassos and Modiglianis that they inspired.
One result of that is that it strips away any sense of individual creativity: those African sculptures get labelled with a tribe and a place, and not the name of the individual sculptor. Similarly, ‘folktales’ get stripped down to a simple one-page version based on what the researcher thinks is the kernel, and both the name and the creativity of the individual storyteller get lost. Which of course is pretty much the opposite of how we treat poets, artists and philosophers in our own culture, where if anything we are overly obsessed with the idea of individual genius.
And lastly, the very process of taking a lot of different sources — traditional stories, received opinion, religious ideas — and systematising them into a coherent philosophy is itself pretty dubious. Hountondji argues, I think correctly, that the systematiser is imposing his own ideas far more than he is revealing something which is there already.
All this stuff is no doubt old news to people in the field, but I found it interesting to read about.
In the second half of the book, Hountondji looks at some case studies. I have to admit, I skipped over most of the stuff about Anton-Wilhelm Amo: he’s an interesting figure, an African from what is now Ghana who somehow ended up teaching philosophy in German universities in the 1730s, but his surviving dissertations are minor contributions to the debate between the vitalists and the mechanists; I have no idea what that means, and frankly I don’t care enough about C18th philosophy to try to make sense of it.
But I did read Hountondji’s analyses of Kwame Nkrumah’s thought, which was rather more interesting, not least for some second-hand insight into another set of arguments about which I was ignorant: about class, colonialism, capitalism, Africanism and so on.
Actually, though, I found it interesting and it really did make a nice change. It was first published, as Sur la “philosophie africaine”, in 1976, and is largely framed as a response to earlier works in the field. So it provides an interesting window into a discussion I knew nothing about.
Obviously it’s a narrow window, entirely shaped by Hountondji’s framing, and I don’t have the knowledge to judge how fair and accurate his presentation is. But it still offers an insight into something that would otherwise have passed me by.
The tradition he is arguing with is a kind of ethnological idea of philosophy, where for example, Bantu cultural ideas about death and morality and what have you were investigated, arranged into a system, and then presented as ‘Bantu philosophy’. Hountondji argues that this is not only a misapplication of the word ‘philosophy’ but a damaging one. Rather, ‘African philosophy’ should refer to philosophical works written by Africans; the same thing, in fact, as philosophy from anywhere else.
I was very much predisposed to agree with this argument: so much so that I felt the need to step back every so often and play devil’s advocate. Not because I had any long-standing opinions about African philosophy, of which I was completely ignorant, but because I have a long-standing peeve about the vague, hand-wavy way people use the word ‘philosophy’. It’s rather like ‘poetry’ in that respect.
Still, you can understand the impulse that led people to things like ‘Bantu philosophy’. Given the context of colonialism, there is/was a value in any assertion that Africans are capable of interesting thought that is distinct from that brought by colonialists and worthy of study in its own right.
Whereas if you insist on the narrow definition of philosophy, then there is almost no African philosophical tradition; certainly very little ‘authentically African’ philosophy that precedes or is separate from the stuff brought over by Europeans. That’s just an artefact of an oral society. It’s perfectly possible to do philosophy without writing it down — it was good enough for Socrates — but it doesn’t survive; we only know about Socrates because of Plato.
But things like ‘Bantu philosophy’ are a bad solution to that problem. Firstly, because it perpetuates the idea that Africa is so exotic/primitive/whatever that all our approach to it must be through an ethnographic lens, just as African sculptures end up in a different museum to the Picassos and Modiglianis that they inspired.
One result of that is that it strips away any sense of individual creativity: those African sculptures get labelled with a tribe and a place, and not the name of the individual sculptor. Similarly, ‘folktales’ get stripped down to a simple one-page version based on what the researcher thinks is the kernel, and both the name and the creativity of the individual storyteller get lost. Which of course is pretty much the opposite of how we treat poets, artists and philosophers in our own culture, where if anything we are overly obsessed with the idea of individual genius.
And lastly, the very process of taking a lot of different sources — traditional stories, received opinion, religious ideas — and systematising them into a coherent philosophy is itself pretty dubious. Hountondji argues, I think correctly, that the systematiser is imposing his own ideas far more than he is revealing something which is there already.
All this stuff is no doubt old news to people in the field, but I found it interesting to read about.
In the second half of the book, Hountondji looks at some case studies. I have to admit, I skipped over most of the stuff about Anton-Wilhelm Amo: he’s an interesting figure, an African from what is now Ghana who somehow ended up teaching philosophy in German universities in the 1730s, but his surviving dissertations are minor contributions to the debate between the vitalists and the mechanists; I have no idea what that means, and frankly I don’t care enough about C18th philosophy to try to make sense of it.
But I did read Hountondji’s analyses of Kwame Nkrumah’s thought, which was rather more interesting, not least for some second-hand insight into another set of arguments about which I was ignorant: about class, colonialism, capitalism, Africanism and so on.
May 28, 2016
I have never read anything that I've agreed/disagreed with back/forth so much.
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