The first question you have to answer before you can do African philosophy is whether it exists.
Which is already a trap, because nobody asks “does European philosophy exist?” before diving into Kant. But here we are.
*(this is the fundamental asymmetry of global philosophy. The West gets to just do it. Everyone else has to prove they can).
The question “is there an African philosophy?” was not asked by Africans. It was forced on them by a European tradition that, from Hegel forward, had declared the continent philosophically barren. Hegel said Africa had “no history, no movement, no development” and was “no historical part of the World.” If you have no history, you certainly have no philosophy. The discipline’s first task was therefore to answer a question that should have been absurd from the start.
The Colonial Frame
The earliest works claiming to describe African philosophy were not written by Africans. They were written by European missionaries and anthropologists trying to make sense of the belief systems they encountered. The most famous of these was Placide Tempels, a Franciscan missionary working among the Luba people in the Belgian Congo. In 1945 he published Bantu Philosophy (originally in Dutch as Bantoe-Filosofie), and it changed everything.
Tempels argued that the Bantu peoples had a coherent ontological system organized around the concept of “vital force” (force vitale). Force, not being, was the primary category. To exist was to be a force, to participate in a hierarchy of forces stretching from God through the ancestors to the living and down to animals and objects. Everything that happened (illness, misfortune, death) was understood as a diminution or interference with vital force.
The book was immediately controversial. Some African intellectuals (Senghor, Alioune Diop) embraced it as evidence that African thought was systematic and philosophical. Others saw it differently. Cesaire accused Tempels of contributing to the French mission civilisatrice. The final chapter of Tempels’ book was titled “Bantu Philosophy and Our Mission to Civilize.” He was not writing for Africans. He was writing for colonials and missionaries, explaining how to use an understanding of Bantu ontology to more effectively convert and control its holders.
(this is the original sin of African philosophy. The first book in the field was a colonial tool).
The Critique of Ethnophilosophy
In the 1970s, a Beninese philosopher named Paulin Hountondji dropped a bomb on the whole enterprise. His book African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (originally published in French in 1976, translated to English in 1983) argued that what Tempels and his followers had produced was not philosophy at all. It was “ethnophilosophy.” A hybrid discipline that used ethnographic methods to describe collective worldviews, then labeled them philosophy.
Hountondji’s critique had several layers. First, philosophy is an individual, critical, written activity. A collective worldview (even a coherent one) is not philosophy until someone subjects it to critical examination and puts their name on the result. Second, ethnophilosophy assumed unanimity. It treated “Bantu thought” as a single, unified system that all Bantu people shared, which erased difference, debate, and dissent. Third, it was an epistemological extraversion. It was written for European audiences, using European categories, to prove to Europeans that Africans had a philosophy. It was not an organic contribution to a living philosophical conversation.
Hountondji’s conclusion was stark. “African philosophy” as practiced by the ethnophilosophers did not yet exist. It was a myth. Actual African philosophy would have to be created through rigorous, critical, individual work that engaged with the full theoretical heritage of philosophy as a global discipline.
(this made Hountondji very popular and also very hated. People called him a Eurocentric sellout. But his critique was too sharp to ignore).
The Four Trends
The Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka stepped into this chaos with a clarifying framework. In his 1978 essay “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy,” he identified four distinct approaches:
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Ethnophilosophy. The Tempelsian approach. Treated collective worldviews as philosophy. Oruka was critical of this but recognized it as a historical reality.
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Nationalist-Ideological Philosophy. The works of African statesmen and independence leaders who articulated political philosophies grounded in African traditions. Nkrumah’s consciencism, Nyerere’s ujamaa, Senghor’s negritude. These were attempts to build political programs on philosophical foundations.
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Professional Philosophy. The universalist approach taken by academically trained philosophers (Wiredu, Hountondji, Bodunrin) who insisted that African philosophy must use the same methods and standards as philosophy anywhere else. This was the dominant position in Anglophone African philosophy departments.
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Philosophic Sagacity. Oruka’s own contribution. The idea that there were individual thinkers in traditional African communities who engaged in critical, reflective philosophy independently of any academic training. These “philosophic sages” proved that philosophy existed in Africa before colonization and continued to exist outside universities.
(Oruka was the rare philosopher who created a whole subfield *and named the framework for understanding it. Not bad for a Kenyan working out of Nairobi).*
Why the Meta-Question Matters
The debate about what counts as African philosophy might seem academic in the worst sense. But it has real stakes. If only written, individual, academic work counts, then pre-colonial African thought is excluded by definition. If collective worldviews count, then philosophy collapses into anthropology. If the standard is “whatever critical reflection is done by or within Africa,” then the question becomes empirical. Show me the thinkers.
This is not a debate that has been settled. It rages on, and every African philosopher has to position themselves within it. The position you take determines what you study, how you study it, and who you read.
(welcome to African philosophy. Before you even start, you have to fight about what “starting” means).
References
- Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of History (1824). The source of the “no history” claim.
- Tempels, Placide. Bantu Philosophy (1945/1959 English translation by Colin King).
- Hountondji, Paulin. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1976 French/1983 English, Indiana University Press).
- Oruka, H. Odera. “Four Trends in Current African Philosophy” (1978). In Philosophy in the Present Situation of Africa, ed. Alwin Diemer.
- Oruka, H. Odera, ed. Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy (1991, ACTS Press).
- Masolo, D.A. African Philosophy in Search of Identity (1994, Indiana University Press).
- Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988, Indiana University Press).