Teodros Kiros - Explorations in African Political Thought: Identity, Community, Ethics

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Identity, Community, Ethics

Edited by
Teodros Kiros

With a Preface by K. Anthony Appiah

Published in 2001 by

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Copyright 2001 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Explorations in African political thought: identity,community, ethics /
[edited by] Teodros Kiros; with a preface by K. Anthony Appiah.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-415-92766-8 (hbk.) ISBN 0-415 92767-6 (pbk.)
1. Political scienceAfrica. I. Kiros, Teodros.
JA84.A33 E96 2000
320'.01dc21 00-032313

I would like to acknowledge the following people for their invaluable help in completing this book: David Gullete for his editorial expertise, George Katsiaficas for his intellectual companionship, John Berg for all his advice in the preparation of the book, and Radhika Khanna for her editorial support. A special thanks to Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University for providing the forum at the Du Bois Institute for the penetrating questions that the Du Bois fellows asked. My wife, May Farhat, an art historian, has helped me in the preparation of this manuscript. A special thanks to her.

When I first began teaching philosophy, as a teaching assistant at the University of Ghana at Legon in the mid-seventies, the materials on African philosophy of which I was aware consisted of four sorts of publications. There were journal articles, in journals like Second Order; there were a few books written by university-trained philosophers, including J. B. Banquah's The Akan Doctrine of God and Willie Abraham's classic The Mind of Africa; there were essays, in English, of political philosophy, by leaders such as Kaunda, Nyerere, and Nkrumah. If you includedas many were inclined to doethnographic materials on the conceptual worlds of various African peoples gathered in works in anthropology and religious studies, you could expand the resources further. (If you were disposed to go and talk to nananom, as we call the elders in Twi, you could gather more from the oral traditions recorded by the anthropologists, and these seemed mostly to be metaphilosophical musings on the question of the existence of "African philosophy.")

So it was with great pleasure that I greeted the publication, nearly twenty years ago, of Kwasi Wiredu's Philosophy and an African Culture and then, not long after, an English translation of Paulin Hountondji's African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. These books struck me as representing a new level of work in professional university-based philosophy: they assumed a conception of the subject that struck me as appealing. There were philosophers with first-rate training and, even more importantly, first-rate ideas, who were wanting to put these tools to work from their African situations while addressing anyoneAfrican or notwho was willing to listen and listening to anyoneAfrican or notfrom whom they thought they might learn.

In the last fifteen years or so, this hopeful trickle has become a fast-flowing stream (if not yet a mighty flood) and African philosophy is now a rich project, contributed to from many directions by scholars with many conceptions of the task but with a shared conviction of the importance and the interest of an African presence in the global discourses of philosophy. In the recent Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy you can read articles on recent African philosophy in French and English and on work in Yoruba epistemology and Akan philosophical psychology. I could not have imagined, as I read Wiredu's book for the first time, that within twenty years, at the turn of the new millennium, a book such as this would be possible. Teodros Kiros has gathered together many well-known scholars in what is now an established field and introduces us also to some newcomers whose work shows its vigor and vitality. The diversity of approaches and of questions reflects the same vigor. Together these essays offer material for fruitful reflection that should interest all thosewherever they make their homewho care to think philosophically about moral and political questions.

K. Anthony Appiah
Professor of Afro-American
Studies and Philosophy
Harvard University

Teodros Kiros

By African philosophy I understand a set of written texts, when available, as well as orally transmitted texts, that deal with the human condition in Africa on which Africans and non-Africans reflect. The human condition in Africa yearns for the attention of philosophers from all over the world. Philosophers are called upon to engage in thought with care, imagination, and critical commitment. These trying times in Africa require intervention by African philosophers.

Africans and non-Africans alike practice African philosophy, as well as Western philosophy, these days. Ethics, aesthetics, sociopolitical philosophy, and theories of knowledge are its most prominent subjects. So, given the range of subdisciplines, the variety of its practitioners, and the disparate theoretical vantage points, it seems unnecessary to locate a single static essence that might define a unique kind of philosophy. It is pointless to seek a totalizing narrative that captures the essential nature of African philosophy. Clearly, there may be certain entrenched habits and time-honored practices, but these can become oppressive and outmoded. These traditions are not the essences of any philosophy. They are merely important stages of people's self-understanding that sediment themselves in practices and habits. Crises in such traditions invite critical philosophical intervention. African philosophers should not shy away from taking positions on urgent moral and political matters that go beyond addressing the internal needs of the body (food, shelter, and clothing) which I discuss below. Ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, superfluous and expensive wars in Ethiopia and Eritrea, the menacing spread of AIDS throughout Africaall should be severely critiqued by philosophers. Money is being squandered on unneeded commodities, pretentious skyscrapers are sprouting up in African capitals for the rising middle class, while millions of Africans are wasting away in huts and tin houses along unpaved, rocky streets. Children of all ages flood street corners, only to be whisked away like flies by the shamelessly well-off. In South Africa and elsewhere, AIDS-infected African bodies are being hidden from the international community, while healthy bodies are laboring away without protection and health benefits in the sweatshops of the African world. These deplorable conditions demand philosophical attention. They are insults to rationality. They need to be written about in public fora and discussed in classrooms.