- Length
- 128 pagesPrésence Africaine, English edition, 1959
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Bantu Philosophy
A missionary's account of Bantu ontology that founded a discipline and was then repudiated by most of the people in it. Its author wanted to convert the people he described, said so, and produced a book that African philosophers have been arguing with for eighty years.
- Date
- 1945
- Author
- Placide Tempels
- Region
- Belgian Congo
- Language
- Dutch
- 1959 English, Colin King From the French rather than the Dutch; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Refuted — Its central claim is generally held to have failed
- Years to the reply
- 32 years
Treated by some as the book that made African philosophy a subject and by others as the clearest case of what colonial scholarship did to it; both parties agree it started the argument.
What the book says
A short book by a Belgian Franciscan missionary claiming that the people among whom he worked possessed a coherent ontology, and that European missionaries had failed because they had never bothered to find out what it was. Tempels' central claim is that where European thought begins from being, Bantu thought begins from force: to be is to be a vital force, capable of increasing or diminishing, and every other category follows. A person is a force among forces, ranked in a hierarchy running from God through the ancestors and the elders to the living, and then to animals, plants and minerals. Causation is the interaction of forces. Wisdom is knowing how forces act on one another. Good is whatever strengthens vital force and evil is whatever weakens it, which makes the ethics intelligible in a way that reading it as a list of taboos never could. Tempels states his purpose without embarrassment: a missionary who does not understand this is talking past the people he addresses, and the book is offered as the instrument that will let evangelisation finally take.
What it argues
That there is a systematic African ontology and that its organising concept is force rather than being. Tempels' method is to take the practices a European observer would record as superstition - protective medicines, funeral rites, the authority of elders, the significance of a chief's health - and show that they follow from a single premise nobody had stated because everybody assumed it. If beings are forces that can be strengthened or weakened, then acting on another person's force is possible, the ancestors remain active participants rather than memories, and the ranking of persons is not social convention but a fact about the world. The claim that most offended and most attracted his readers was that this constitutes a philosophy: not a set of beliefs but a coherent metaphysics, implicit, unwritten, and held in common.
What answered it
Almost everyone, in incompatible directions. Senghor and Alioune Diop welcomed it as confirming that Africa had a metaphysics of its own, and Présence Africaine published it; Césaire and Fanon attacked it as part of the colonial apparatus, a description produced to make people easier to convert; Kagame extended the project with far better linguistic grounding; Okot p'Bitek attacked the generalisation and the imported Supreme Being; and Hountondji gave the genre the name that stuck. Recent work has complicated the picture again by examining Tempels' own conflicts with the Church and the colonial state.
How it argues
By exposition rather than by evidence. Tempels reports what he takes Bantu thought to be, illustrates it from practices he had observed, and organises it into a system - and there are almost no named informants, no recorded conversations and no acknowledgement that anyone he describes might disagree with anyone else. The book reads as a report from an authority, which is what it was written as, and the absence of any Bantu voice in a book about Bantu philosophy is the criticism that has proved impossible to answer.
The moment
The Belgian Congo in the early 1940s, in a colonial system that ranked among the harshest in Africa, with Tempels working in Katanga among the Baluba. He was a Flemish Franciscan whose politics were unusual for a missionary - he clashed with the colonial administration - and whose theology was unorthodox enough to get him into trouble with the Vatican and eventually exiled from the colony for a period. He later founded a charismatic movement, the Jamaa, in which African and European members were meant to meet as equals.
How it travelled
Fast, in French, and into a debate its author did not anticipate. Présence Africaine put it in front of the francophone African intelligentsia in Paris at exactly the moment they were formulating négritude, and it became a reference point for both sides of the question whether African thought is distinctive or whether saying so is a trap. Almost every subsequent work in African philosophy positions itself in relation to it, which is a strange kind of importance for a book most of them reject.
The strongest objection
That the book's purpose contaminates its findings, and that Tempels says so himself. He wrote it to make evangelisation effective: understanding Bantu ontology would let missionaries pitch Christianity as the fulfilment of what the Baluba already believed. A description produced in order to convert its subjects is not a neutral description, and the specific shape of Tempels' account - a hierarchy of forces with God at the top, ready to be completed by the Gospel - is exactly what that purpose would generate. Césaire's version was blunter: the book teaches colonists to leave African souls alone while continuing to take everything else. Hountondji's is structural: the unanimism attributes to Africans a collective mind that would be an insult if attributed to anyone else.
Why read it
As a document, and knowing what it is. It is short and clear, and reading it explains why the argument that followed took the shape it did - including why some African intellectuals embraced it. Read it with Hountondji, and preferably with p'Bitek's short demolition; the book alone gives no idea of what is wrong with it.
- First printed
- 1945
- First in English
- 1959
- Digitised
- Partial
The publishing history is tangled: journal serialisation, a French translation, a Dutch book, and the Présence Africaine edition of 1949 that carried it to francophone Africa. Alioune Diop's press promoted it; Tempels himself later fell out with the Church over the Jamaa movement he founded.
The English of 1959 is from the French rather than the Dutch, at two removes from the original.
Where it stands
Refuted as scholarship and permanent as a landmark - one of very few entries in this section given that standing. Nobody now defends the unanimism, the method or the evidential basis; the book is read as the origin of a discipline and as a case study in what colonial knowledge production looked like when it was well-intentioned.
On quoting this book
In copyright, and the text exists in several versions at different removes from the original. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Tempels should be credited with founding African philosophy as a discipline or blamed for founding it badly is argued in every survey of the field. Whether his own conflicts with the Church and the colonial administration mitigate the reading of him as a colonial functionary is a live recent question, and Hountondji himself later said his critique needed placing in a wider setting. And whether anything survives the demolition - whether the description of vital force corresponds to anything, however badly established - divides African philosophers to this day.