The African philosophers you’ve never quoted

Africa had little time to breathe between the departure of the colonisers and the arrival of global capitalism.

So, even as its thinkers tried to forge a black identity based on an African worldview, modernity begged for newer answers, too.

But a dialogue between philosophies of the East and the West would be possible only when African thought gained acceptance as a legitimate philosophy and was not dismissed as religion — a predicament shared by thinkers from Korea, Japan, India and China, each of these nations being home to many schools of thought.

In order to promote a wider understanding of African and Asian philosophies in an intellectual community that takes Western thought based on reason as the foundational parameter for any school of philosophy, the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association (AAPA) began to hold a series of conferences.

The first one was held in Cairo in 1978 and the AAPA Congress 2010 will be held in Mumbai  from October 20-23, in collaboration with the Indian Philosophic Congress.

“African countries were colonies. The colonisers considered their subjects as brutes, with no culture and no philosophy. They looked at native wisdom as religion and theology that need not be taken seriously. Even when we talk of Asia, Western philosophers confuse religion with philosophy,” says Prof Shubhada Joshi, head of the philosophy department, Mumbai University.

Between the two, even as Asian philosophies have received more exposure, African philosophy is still popularly perceived as arcane and mystic. In the meantime, the African understanding of the human being as Ubuntu — “I am what I am because of who we all are” — an individual who is indivisibly connected to a collective, has gained in popularity, with statesmen like Bill Clinton citing it as an alternative basis for organising society.

African philosophy has diverse strands, from the Sage Philosophy of community elders, to contemporary theories that challenge racist Western philosophical thought and explore the meaning of ‘blackness’ in the modern world.
Confronted by cultural repression under colonialism, African thinkers developed the philosophy of ‘Negritude’, a literary and ideological movement developed by francophone African intellectuals in the 1930s, which sought solidarity in a common black identity to fight the oppressors.

“A lot of western philosophy is racist; it pertains to the western white male. So initially, African philosophy was reactive. It began by asserting Negritude. It was African philosophy that properly problematised issues of race for the first time,” says Dr Kanchana Mahadevan, professor at the department of philosophy, Mumbai University.

African Sage Philosophy was first made popular by the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka, who created a rational and critical foundation for concepts passed down by African communities. These included ideas such as the nature of the supreme being, the concept of the person, the meaning of freedom, equality, death, and belief in the afterlife.

Oruka wanted to counter three claims: that philosophy requires literacy and oral traditions don’t qualify; that African sages do not engage in reason-driven philosophic thought; and that African traditions discourage individual critical thought.

“Most African philosophy was contained in parables and folklore. The philosophers had to extract the philosophy from it. We require a strong theoretical foundation for the philosophy, for only then will attitudes change,” says Sharmila Virkar, head of department of philosophy, SK Somaiya College of Arts, Science and Commerce.

These philosophies have shaped national constitutions and policies, and continue to provide responses to the various crises plaguing Africa. They are reflected in the South African interim constitution which emphasises “a need for Ubuntu, but not for victimisation.”

Another example is how in many countries, the idea of ‘unanimity’ led to the acceptance of one-party systems post independence, with opposition politics being denounced as both unAfrican and anti-nationalist.

This theme of the AAPA Congress this year is ‘Moulding Individual and Corporate Life towards Social Solidarity and Progress’.

For the details of the conference, visit www.indianphilosophicalcongress.in