- Length
- 240 pagesEvans, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Indiana University Press, 2nd ed. 1996
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
African Philosophy: Myth and Reality
The book that named ethnophilosophy and argued that celebrating a collective African worldview concedes exactly what colonialism claimed. Its author was accused of measuring Africa by European standards, spent twenty years answering the charge, and never withdrew the central point.
- Date
- 1977
- Author
- Paulin J. Hountondji
- Region
- Benin and Paris
- Language
- French
- 1983 English, Henri Evans The standard version; second edition 1996 with a new preface, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 13 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 32 years
The most influential and most resented book in African philosophy, whose author spent the following two decades qualifying it.
What the book says
An attack on a whole genre, by an African philosopher arguing that its defenders had accepted the terms of the insult they meant to refute. The genre is what Hountondji names ethnophilosophy: the enterprise of describing the implicit worldview of a people and presenting it as their philosophy - Tempels on the Bantu, Kagame on Rwandan ontology, Mbiti on African religions. His objection is not that these accounts are inaccurate but that they misdescribe what philosophy is. A collective, unwritten, unanimous worldview held by everyone and disputed by nobody is precisely what philosophy is not; philosophy is a literature, made of texts written by individuals who argue with each other and can be wrong. To claim that Africa has a philosophy in the ethnophilosophical sense is to concede that Africans do not do the thing Europeans do, and to ask for credit for a consolation prize. His positive definition is deliberately austere: African philosophy is the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors - a body of work in progress rather than a heritage to be excavated.
What it argues
That philosophy is a practice rather than a possession, and that the search for an African philosophy already in existence is looking for the wrong kind of thing. Hountondji's definition - texts by Africans that their authors call philosophical - has been called minimal and is meant to be: it makes African philosophy something being produced now, by identifiable people who can disagree, rather than a patrimony that a researcher discovers and a people passively holds. Behind this is an argument about audience. Ethnophilosophy, he observes, is written in European languages and published in Europe, addressed to Europeans, about Africans who cannot read it - so the discourse that claims to speak for African thought is not part of any African conversation. The remedy is not authenticity but the building of actual scientific and philosophical communities in Africa, which occupied his later work.
What it answered
Bantu Philosophy 1945Placide Tempels
Tempels and the tradition descending from him, including its African practitioners - Kagame, Mbiti, and the philosophical wing of négritude. He is careful that the criticism is not of Africans defending Africa but of a form that defeats its own purpose: Senghor's claim that emotion is African as reason is Greek was intended as praise and repeats the distinction Europe had used to justify everything.
What answered it
Sage Philosophy 1990H. Odera Oruka
Oruka, with a method rather than an argument; Wiredu, who accepts the critique and rejects the implication that African philosophy must be conducted in European terms; and a large body of work accusing Hountondji of Eurocentrism - of adopting a definition of philosophy that guarantees Africa had none until Africans went to European universities. His reply is that the alternative definition guarantees Africa a philosophy on condition that nobody in it ever argued, which is a worse bargain.
How it argues
By close reading of the ethnophilosophical texts, taking each seriously enough to show precisely what it does. The tone is polemical and controlled, and the argument turns repeatedly on who is being addressed - which is the book's most original move, since it shifts the question from what a text says about Africa to what a text does in the situation it was written for. The essays were composed separately and the book repeats itself.
The moment
Hountondji was Beninois, trained at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris under Althusser and Derrida, and returned to a continent whose new universities were debating what an African curriculum should contain. He served as a minister in Benin's government after the fall of the Marxist-Leninist regime and spent his career arguing that Africa's problem was not a lack of tradition but a lack of infrastructure - libraries, journals, laboratories, the means by which knowledge is produced rather than described.
How it travelled
As the pivot of the field. Any survey of African philosophy is organised around this debate, and the terms Hountondji supplied - ethnophilosophy, unanimism - are used by everyone including those who reject his position. The book also travelled into postcolonial theory and into the wider argument about indigenous knowledge, where the same question recurs: whether recovering a tradition affirms a people or freezes them.
The strongest objection
That the definition does the work of an argument and imports the standard it should be defending. If philosophy just is written texts by individuals, then oral traditions are excluded by stipulation, and the conclusion that Africa's philosophical history begins with the colonial university follows from the definition rather than from any investigation. Oruka's response is the sharpest form of this: he went and found individual thinkers who argue and disagree and do not write, which shows the criterion was doing the excluding. Hountondji later conceded a good deal - the 1996 preface places his critique of Tempels in a wider setting and qualifies his endorsement of Césaire - without abandoning the claim that a philosophy nobody disputes is not one.
Why read it
The title essay and the chapter on Tempels, which together are the argument and are short, forceful and unusually well written for polemic. Read the 1996 preface too; watching a philosopher revisit his own attack twenty years on is instructive, and it is where the position becomes defensible rather than merely bracing.
- First printed
- 1977
- First in English
- 1983
- Digitised
- No
The 1996 second English edition's preface is essential: Hountondji places his critique of Tempels in a wider setting, qualifies his acceptance of Césaire's attack, and revises his view of what the debate accomplished.
Henri Evans' English of 1983 is the standard and is in copyright, as is the French.
Where it stands
Live and central. The dispute has not been settled and the positions have refined: nobody now defends unanimism, and few accept the austere definition, and most work in African philosophy occupies ground staked out by trying to get past both.
On quoting this book
In copyright in French and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the definition is Eurocentric is the standing charge and has been made from every direction. Whether Hountondji's later qualifications amount to a retreat or a development divides his readers. Whether the emphasis on infrastructure - his later theme - follows from this book or replaces it is argued. And whether the debate itself, conducted largely in French and English in European publishing houses, illustrates his own point about audience is an irony his critics have not failed to notice.