African Philosophy: The State of its Historiography

Abstract

Departing from Charles Taylor’s statement that philosophy is inescapably historical, the paper tries to examine several attempts to write the history of African philosophy. It notes that contrary to the experience of many other regional philosophies there is yet no comprehensive history of African philosophy which takes full account of its the different spectrums and periods. A good number of authors who have tried to recount the history of African philosophy have dwelt only on aspects or periods of that philosophy thus precluding the advantage of presenting African philosophy as a coherent whole. An examination of the weakness and the strong points of some of these works leads to the assertion of the necessity of comprehensive history of African philosophy, as well as a weighing of the possible reasons why no serious attempt have been made in that direction. Writing such a work will be the last complement of the History of Africa.

The pivotal importance of history in the philosophic engagement was given an early imprimatur by Aristotle himself. In the first book of the Metaphysics, before setting out on a critique of Plato, his master, Aristotle went out of his way to survey all the known attempts before him at finding the underlying causes of reality, convinced that ‘to go over their views … will be of profit to the present inquiry, for we shall either find another kind of cause, or be more convinced of the correctness of those which we now maintain’ (983b, 1–5). The Stagirite went on to outline the opinions of his predecessors, systematically pinpointing their loopholes and their strengths, and by so doing setting the tone for reinventing the tasks again. In his De Civitate Dei, Augustine of Hippo made a historical review of Italian and Ionian philosophers, through Socrates, Aristippus and Antisthenes before settling on Plato as his guide in the inquiry about the end of man and how to attain it (BK VIII, ch. 1–7). In so doing, Augustine was positioning himself and his task within a larger tradition of thinking. To think historical in the philosophical enterprise is thus to place oneself in a position of relevance, which in turn involves understanding and self-understanding. According to H.-G. Gadamer's Truth and Method, understanding entails moving into a place, carving out a niche, within the occurring tradition (cf. Krueger 1984: 88). This taking of position counters the idea of the untainted, completely neutral observer, for we all thus become active participants. To pretend otherwise will be to fall headlong once again into the pitfalls or the occupational hazards of philosophy – the repeated attempt to ‘have an understanding of things which is entirely contemporary,’ which in Western philosophy was most recently exemplified by the now discredited attempt by logical positivists to make a completely fresh start in philosophy.

To castigate the view of thinkers of the ilk of logical positivists does not thereby mean that one is endorsing the diametrically opposed view championed by G.W. Hegel that philosophy and its history are interchangeable. Such a position would no doubt sit very uncomfortably on the pages of contemporary African philosophy whose tradition, according to Kwasi Wiredu (1991: 157), is still in the making and which, if it has not really been made cannot be written; and again if already written, contains such wide divergence of opinion and practice that one would really wonder whether the different authors are presenting the philosophy of the same tradition.

We rather take as more plausible and more germane to African philosophy Charles Taylor's defense of the historicity of philosophy. For Taylor, the necessity of the history of philosophy hinges on the usual forgetfulness of models or the organizing principles of societies. According to him, thinkers very often arrive at principles of social organization which with time and familiarity come to be taken as paradigmatic, needing no questioning. Such principles are usually percolated in customs, institutions and traditions, giving rise to dominant interpretations and practices which members of a society take without question as the way things are and are supposed to be.¹ This transformation which Taylor alludes to is akin to the idea of non-philosophy in Theophilus Okere's work. For Okere (1983: 83), real philosophy is always hermeneutical interpretation by the individual of the symbols of his culture. But results of such interpretations often become the common property of the society in which case it becomes non-philosophy, constituting a base for yet another individual reflection that gives rise to new philosophy. There is thus an inescapable dialectic between philosophy and non-philosophy.

According to Taylor (1984: 21), for philosophy to arise from the situation in which the original model or organizing principle has been forgotten requires the reversal of the forgetfulness of the original philosophy:

Instead of just living in them and taking their implicit construal of things as they are, we have to understand how they have come to be, how they came to embed a certain view of things. In other words, in order to undo the forgetting, we have to articulate for ourselves how it happened, to become aware of the way a picture slid from the status of discovery to that of inarticulate assumption, a fact too obvious to mention. But that means a genetic account; and one which retrieves the formulations through which the embedding in practice took place. Freeing ourselves from the presumption of uniqueness requires uncovering the origins. That is why philosophy is inescapably historical.

Alasdair MacIntyre does not subscribe to this functional idea of the historicity of philosophy. Coming very close to such philosophers of history as G.W.F. Hegel and R.G. Collingwood he declares the history of philosophy to be the sovereign part of philosophy, for the apparently simple reason that the achievement of philosophy must be judged by its history.

If there is any modicum of truth in what we are saying above, it means that African philosophy is in dire need of recounting its history. But there are special problems attendant on this historiography (Oguejiofor, 2003): the question of continuity of the tradition; the question of the reference of the term Africa; the question of selection of what to include in such a history and what not to include. Such problems are, of course, not alien to other traditions. MacIntyre (1984: 33), for instance, debunks the phony continuity that is supposed to be intrinsic in the history of Western philosophy:

In some large degree the sense of continuity that so many standard histories of philosophy provide is illusory and depends upon the adroit, although doubtless unconscious, use of a series of devices designed to mask difference, to bridge discontinuity and to conceal unintelligibility.

For MacIntyre, the crucial question is in fact whether the right type of history, which by deduction must both unmask the phony continuity and be able to in a sovereign style judge the results of philosophy, has been written. For African philosophy, there are many other more fundamental and crucial issues at stake in the task of outlining a comprehensive history of African philosophy. It would appear that the problems associated with the task have conspired to bedevil any attempt to write such history. Thus while African philosophy claims equal standing with other philosophic traditions, while it demands the same attention and respect accorded to many other traditions, it is pertinent to note this lacuna that is no longer found in some other regional philosophies.² As recently as 1972, A.J. Smet regretted his failure to find works on the history of African philosophy in his attempt to gather a bibliography of African philosophy. Still one cannot but recall that one exception existed even then: Jahnheinz Jahn's Muntu, published in 1958. Muntu is essentially a study of five essays: those of Tempels, Griaule, Dieterlen, Deren and Kagame. As Smet (1980: 12) noted, only two of these works, namely those of Tempels and Kagame, really harbor actual philosophic pretensions. Jahn concluded that there is African philosophy which does not contradict the conception of the world mediated by contemporary science. He has since been recognized as ‘the first historian of African philosophy’ (Masolo, 1994: 37).

From the early 1970, Claude Sumner began the publication of his now famous series, Ethiopian Philosophy, which included the following works: The Book of Wise Philosophers (1974); The Treatise of Zaera Yaqob and Waldat Heywat (1976 and 1978); The Physiologue (1981); The Life and Maxims of Skendes (1981). Sumner edited and presented these works which span centuries (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries) of Ethiopian written philosophy. Historically, the rediscovery of these works constitutes a veritable debunking of the claim in some quarters that African philosophy started with Placide Tempels. Still, a pointer to the state of academia in some African departments of philosophy is that almost twenty years after Sumner published his volumes, the late C.B. Okolo (1993: 27) of the University of Nigeria, after distinguishing between professional and non-professional philosophy, assigned the beginning of African philosophy to the period of literate tradition in Africa, ‘in recent times, definitely after the second world war.’

In his book Épiphanies de la philosophie africaine et afro-américaine, J. Kinyongo (1989) traces mainly the history of the debate on the existence and essence of African philosophy. Kinyongo is perhaps the first historian of African philosophy to recognize the synthetic link between African and Afro-American philosophy, bringing the two under the same umbrella of his book. This practice has hitherto been championed by anthologies (more on this later). Kinyongo makes a detour into periodization including Ancient Egyptian and Nubian philosophy; Coptic-Islamic African philosophy which includes Ethiopian philosophy. There is also the philosophy of deported Africans in Europe, containing just one figure: Anton William Amo. Even though the main focus of the book is contemporary African philosophy, Kinyongo decries the lack of systematization of the pre-contemporary part of African philosophy, a lacuna which is also present in contemporary African philosophy but which his book attempts to fill. However the thinkers presented as contemporary African thinkers are not representative enough. The author selects mostly Francophone thinkers with the sole exception of Kwame Nkrumah. Among those loudly absent are the late Odera Oruka, Julius Nyerere and Peter Bodunrin.

Christian Neugebauer's Einführung in die Afrikanische Philosophie (1989) made some attempts to counter the imbalance in Kinyongo's book. But again the trend seems this time to be too much in favour of English speaking African thinkers. That is why B.F. Oguah, Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu loom very large in the book which in any case is only peripherally historical. Neugebauer takes Akan philosophy as a sample of ethnophilosophy. He then gives a handful of pages to Ethiopian philosophy before going on to the section on African socialism of Nkrumah, Nyerere and Senghor. Kwasi Wiredu is the one contemporary thinker given full attention, a full chapter.

Because the historiography of African philosophy has not yet established any canon of past philosophic figures, epochs and movement, there appears to be uncomfortable disagreement about the beginning of the history of African philosophy. Two practices are up in contention: the one that goes as far back as ancient Egypt as the beginning of African philosophy, and the other which disavows ancient Egyptian thinking as part of African philosophy. The former can be further sub-divided into those in the company of G. James whose main aim is to give the lie to the vaunted originality of Greek philosophy. In this company one must count L. Keita, Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophile Obenga and Innocent Onyewuenyi. Usually these authors do not go deep enough into Egyptian philosophy to make a critical, reflected history possible. Instead, their efforts appear to be focused more on polemics than in erudition, and thus one comes out with the questioning feeling of where the philosophy of ancient Egypt is really to be found.

An author who stands above such superficiality is Mubabinge Bilolo. Bilolo published his three volume study of Egyptian philosophy in 1986, discussing in detail different philosophic movements, schools, epochs and their influences. J. Allen's work, Genesis in Egypt (1988), and his essay on the philosophy of Akhenaton (Allen, 1989) also help to fill the gap of presenting the real philosophic content of Egyptian philosophy. But Allen's works also support, though obliquely and of course less polemically, the view that Egyptian philosophy helped to shape Greek philosophy, especially with regard to the term logos. The Egyptian god Ptah is conceptualized as the intellectual principle that informs the material with the intellectual. Thanks to him, the will of living things work to transform their environment; and also again, through it the creative will ‘acted upon the original raw material of the Monad to produce the world’ primordially (Allen, 1988: 46). Molefi Kete Asante's slim volume The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten (2000) combines the dual task of outlining a history of Egyptian philosophy and providing some modicum of insight into the content of this philosophy. But Asante's book has a clear Afrocentrist intention, and contains a good dose of the polemic that has almost become a trademark of that movement.

It is noticeable that most of the above-named authors concentrate only on single epochs or periods of African philosophic history. Hardly any takes as his field of research the whole horizon of African philosophy, extending as far back as Ancient Egypt and coming up to contemporary times. The merit of Maduakolam Osuagwu's work on the history of African philosophy is that it tries to obviate this weakness. He is arguably the most prolific writer in this area with the following books already published: African Historical Reconstruction: A Methodological Option for African Studies (1999); A Contemporary History of African Philosophy (1999) and Early Medieval History of African Philosophy (2001).

It can be an object of debate whether Osuagwu intended to write a contemporary history of African philosophy or a history of contemporary African philosophy, but if one were to judge from the content of the book, one would easily agree that the latter is the case. With these separate publications, he tries to straddle all the periods he delineated in African philosophy. The first of these books is not very helpful in presenting the philosophic content of Egyptian thought, a task which the author could have done with the help of the works of M. Bilolo and J. Allen. Osuagwu spends many pages in discussing the views of other writers about the status of Egyptian philosophy, including those of Olela, Keita, Obenga and Onyewuenyi, especially about whether Egyptian Philosophy is part of African philosophy and whether Greek philosophy was influenced by ancient Egypt. Such a weakness was avoided in his Contemporary History of African Philosophy. Though concentrating extensively on issues of method he devotes many pages to discussing different opinions about current African philosophy. Like Kinyongo, he includes a wide section on Afro-American philosophy. But unlike him, he straddles with equal ease both Francophone and Anglophone African thinkers, not making any significant distinction in their philosophic output, in keeping with his declared aim: ‘our selection is pan-Africanist rather than nationalistic, without neglecting the national identities of authors and doctrines as the case be’ (Osuagwu, 1999: 23–24).

By publishing his researches in different books, Osuagwu avoids the question of the connection between different epochs/periods of African philosophy, an issue which A.G.A. Bello (1998: 8) highlighted shortly before Osuagwu started publishing his works. Osuagwu's project apes the same periodization that has become very standard in the history of Western philosophy. One discomfort with this is that the demarcation of periods in history is not merely a matter of convenience. It is not just enough to follow the lines traced by another tradition of philosophical historiography. But apparently this practice is settling in a good number of historians of African philosophy as we see in African Philosophy Down the Ages by Francis Ogunmodede which has virtually the same demarcations of time as Osuagwu: Ancient Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary Periods. It is not that we can or should avoid Western influences on the history of African philosophy. The point is that in so far as the project of philosophizing harbors an undertone of the question of African identity, unnecessary aping of the West creates ambivalence in so far as the designation of period in history involves actual experiences and events. The crucial issue is whether we are also heirs to the experience that created the same periods in Western tradition. We cannot for instance talk of the Renaissance or Reformation with regard to African history if we neither shared the rebirth or the reform with reference to which the epochs were named. An authentic history of African philosophy has thus the imperative of aligning its periodization with the general history of Africa instead of doing so with the neatly cleared roads of the history of Western philosophy.

Ogunmodede's book is the product of a conference, and the themes that were chosen independently by the presenters were then grouped into the clear and distinct epoch of Western philosophy. For the Graeco-Roman period there were essays on Tertulian, Origen and Augustine. One notices the absence of Clement of Alexandria, a very important thinker of the epoch. Again, Onyewuenyi's essay on the Egyptian origin of Greek philosophy is all that touches on the Greeks in a period that is supposed to be Graeco-Roman in character.

In 1999, Pieter Boele van Hensbroek published a rare example of a history of a branch of African philosophy. The book, Political Discourses in African Thought: 1860 to the Present, goes beyond the usual simple designation of African political philosophy as the nationalist ideological current of Nkrumah, Nyerere, Senghor, Azikiwe, Awolowo, etc.³ It surveys the whole panorama of African political thought, and comes up with three models of thought around which the discussions are built: the modernization model, the identity model and the liberation model. In each case Boele van Hensbroek traces the beginnings of such political discourses from the start of colonialism. The book is an extensive work that gathers most shades of opinion into its wide embrace. The author discovers common grounds or foundations which make these opinions aspects of the same philosophic tradition. Among such grounds are their bi-polar (‘we’ and ‘they’) structure and the presence of a ‘myth’ in each of the models (the ‘myths’ of modernity, authenticity and liberation). He inveighs against bi-polarity, and describes overcoming it as an important aspect of the decolonization of African thought. Again, while bi-polarity simplifies our thought, it fails to encourage proper appreciation of the enormity of problems on the ground. On the question of democracy for instance bi-polarity creates the impression that only one problem should be resolved in order to make democracy work in Africa. This type of simplification thus becomes a veritable albatross. Hence,

In order to address the pertinent questions concerning democracy in diverse African contexts and to search for creative solutions, it is required to overcome the bi-polar logic that is inherent in the models of thought that have dominated African political thought in the last one hundred and fifty years. (Boele van Hensbroek, 1999: 215)

There are other works that seek to provide a synthetic rather than a chronological presentation of African philosophy. But they can also be said to be historical in so far as they often push back to the origin of contemporary African philosophy and then trace the development of philosophic discourse. The erudite work of the Congolese V.Y. Mudimbe belongs to this genre. The Invention of Africa traces the origin of present African episteme squarely on the interplay between Western conceptions – stored in Western libraries – and African later reactions to these creations of the Other. This belies the fundamental lack of originality of the discourse we can call contemporary African philosophy. In the words of Dismas Masolo (1994: 2):

Mudimbe destroys the bases of present discourse as part of Western epistemological assumptions about the standard of rationality. The irony is that he presents no alternatives to Africans. Like most of the powerful structuralist philosophers who have influenced him, Mudimbe gives a brilliant structural historiography of African culture to the present day. His reliance on Michael Foucault places him in the same untenable position as other poststructuralist thinkers who attempt to deconstruct their own episteme.

It would perhaps be fair to suppose that one aim of Masolo's book is to fill the gap left by Mudimbe's work. Barry Hallen (2001) describes Masolo's African Philosophy in Search of Identity as ‘the first truly comprehensive and detailed history of African philosophy.’ Masolo traces the root of Negritude in the Harlem Renaissance which in itself is a reaction to centuries of degradation of blacks by Europeans. The vicious negation of the worth of Africans leads to its raucous assertion, and thus arose Negritude, Bantu Philosophy by Placide Tempels as well as Kagame's Philosophie Bantu Rwandaise de l’être, sage philosophy and in turn the archaeology of all these in the work of Valentin Mudimbe. Masolo (1994: 251) ends with a strong and telling conclusion which underlines the importance of history:

Debate and the desire to get our concepts properly understood are two vehicles of intellectual inquiry that have helped in the establishment of philosophy as a special intellectual activity; and we have no reason to exempt African philosophy from them. Such intellectual inquiry is, however, possible only where we will all be open to the historical processes affecting and conditioning our needs, experiences, and general historical choices. This move towards a new culture is inevitable, and many African intellectuals, especially in philosophy, need to shed the antiquarian complex that is suffocating progress in many aspects of their thinking.

One does not see how Masolo's book, acclaimed as the first comprehensive history of African philosophy, should begin with the Negritude movement and its inspiration in the Harlem Renaissance. Masolo's work has the credit of bringing to bare how the discourses are direct consequences of the African predicament, even though he does not show clearly enough how that predicament, especially psychological trauma underpins most of the products of the reflection of contemporary African philosophers.⁴ But by searching for the root of contemporary African philosophy in Harlem Renaissance, Masolo's work strengthens the unity between African and Afro-American philosophy.

Of the works that seek historico-thematic synthesis, Hallen's Short History of African Philosophy (2001) is especially interesting. Hallen declares that most of the themes in his book have been discussed by Masolo. But his book is more comprehensive and more historical, making less of his personal opinion than Masolo, and adding a whole chapter on African political philosophy. However, the work is really a history of contemporary African philosophy, contrary to its presentations. It pays an altogether too fleeting attention to the claims of ancient Egyptian philosophy as part of the corpus of African philosophy, and pretends that that claim is seriously challenged by some streams of contemporary African philosophic workers. In the words of Hallen (2001: 12):

A second point relates to the importance African scholars themselves attach to the reintegration of Egyptian civilization with Africa's overall cultural heritage. African scholars who specialize in Africa South of the Sahara, the so-called black Africa, would be deeply offended by any intimation that the intellectual reclamation of Egypt is an attempt to bolster, to upgrade, the cultural sophistication of their own indigenous cultures by associating them with ‘mighty’ and ‘glorious’ Egypt. In fact these other cultures have their own integrity and have no need of an Egyptian connection to elevate the status of their civilization.

Such sentiment alluded to by Hallen does not belong to the mainstream and seems to have gradually slipped to the status of eccentricity. There are some who would gladly proclaim that Egypt is not part of Africa, but they are now few and far between among African scholars.⁵ Still it is not surprising that Hallen pays little attention to earlier parts of the history of African philosophy. To his credit, he clearly specifies his aim of presenting a history of academic philosophy in Anglophone Africa. The question that such methodic delineation raises is whether contemporary African philosophy can or should really be separated along colonial language lines. When one thinks of the general influence of the works of Tempels who published in Dutch, and that of such African thinkers as P.J. Hountondji, H. Odera Oruka, K. Nkrumah, L.S. Senghor and J. Nyerere whose echo criss-crosses all colonial language divides in Africa, it becomes difficult to see how the distinction of contemporary African philosophy along colonial language lines could be tenable. Still all in all, Hallen's work as a brief work of synthesis is an advance on Masolo's even though his clear pretension to a comprehensive history of African philosophy should have precluded the fleeting treatment he gives to Egyptian philosophy and Ethiopian philosophy. Again, this aim should also have prevented the balkanization of African philosophy on the basis of language.

Let us end this survey by highlighting how the historical anthologies are furtively shaping positions and influencing former conviction in African philosophy. Probably on account of the absence of the type of systematization that has happened in some other regional philosophies, a great deal of African philosophical writing issues in the form of anthologies. These usually publish independently written and most often already published essays. The underlying principles of choice of such essays often carry important even though tacit messages for the history of African philosophy.

Teodros Kiros’ Explorations in African Political Thought (2001) contains ten essays some of which are discussions of particular philosophers while others dwell on more general themes. It is significant that the volume includes a chapter on Zera Yaqob written by Kiros himself and another chapter by George Katsiaficas on Ibn Khaldun. This is to our knowledge one of the first times the famous Tunisian philosopher of history has been included in a volume on African philosophy. The status of African Islamic philosophy has always remained problematic in African philosophy. Theophile Obenga includes a section on Islamic philosophers in his suggested periodization of the history of African philosophy. But over time this suggestion appears to have slipped into oblivion. For those who understand African philosophy to really mean philosophy in so-called Black Africa, Islamic philosophy of North Africa would have no page in the history of African philosophy. On the other hand those who have a more descriptive understanding of the discipline would include all shades of philosophy that have flourished in the continent. It is mainly thanks to this later conception that Egyptian philosophy, North African Christian Fathers, and also the Islamic thinkers of North Africa can consistently form part of a really comprehensive history of African philosophy. This of course raises the issue of links between epochs and ideas but we have seen that this is not so determinant in philosophic historiography.

Kiros’ inclusion of Ibn Khaldun in a corpus on African political thought takes an unequivocal stand between the two contending positions. It is remarkable however that the essay appears to set the Islamic tradition against Western attitudes and history, castigating, for instance, Arnold Toynbee's placing of Khaldun within the background of the Western viewpoint that modern history began with the Renaissance. Katsiaficas also enumerates a series of Islamic authors whose thoughts fertilized the mind of Ibn Khaldun, in an effort to debunk the denigrating eulogy of Toynbee that Khaldun was ‘the sole point of light’ of Islam. It is thus to Islam that Katsiaficas accords praise for the universalist streak in Khaldun's thought:

It is to Ibn Khaldun's credit that, unlike Hegel and so many other philosophers, he did not elevate his own group above others and thereby succumb to ethnocentrisms. To this day, the universalistic dimension of Islam, legendary from the transformation of Malcolm X because of his encounters with non racist whites during his pilgrimage to Mecca, contributes to its status as the world's fastest-growing religion. (Kiros, 2001: 65)

Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze's inclusion of M. Wahba's paper ‘Contemporary Moslem Philosophies in North Africa’ in his anthology African Philosophy may appear to be mere tokenism, but it is a significant departure from normal practice and poses the question of how wide a comprehensive history of African philosophy should extend.

The position of ancient Egyptian philosophy in the history of African philosophy is also being gradually reshaped by anthologies on African philosophy. Fred L. Hord and Jonathan Scot Lee (1995) group the essays in their anthology on black philosophy into three regions: Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The section on Africa is prefaced by two small works from Egyptian philosophy: ‘The Declaration of Innocence’ and ‘The Teaching of Ptahhotep’ (ibid., 21–31). In the same way, Albert G. Mosley's African Philosophy includes the essay ‘“Instruction of Any” and Moral Philosophy’ of David James in the section on ethnophilosophy, and before all these, Christian Neugebauer's Philosophie, Ideologie und Gesellschaft in Afrika ironically ends with M. Bilolo's essay on classical Egyptian philosophy.

From the foregoing, it can easily be said that almost forty years after A. J. Smet failed to find works on the history of African philosophy, there are now a spate of books and a good number of articles contending for attention in this area. These are often written from widely differing perspectives portraying divergent views on African philosophy itself. True to the best tradition of philosophy this fact, far from being negative, is a tribute to the vibrancy of contemporary African philosophy. The works appear to be structured in such a way as to avoid tackling headlong the enormous issues attendant on the presentation of a truly comprehensive history of African philosophy. But given the link between African philosophy and the quest for African humanity and identity, it goes without saying that the task of writing different comprehensive histories of African philosophy is long overdue. Writing such a history will be the last complement of the history of Africa.