Samuel Oluoch Imbo - An Introduction to African Philosophy

As we near the turn of the century, African philosophy is undergoing turns of its own. This is a unique opportunity to pause, take stock, and articulate with clarity and consistency the direction that will be taken in the future in light of what has gone before. Contemporary African philosophy must come to terms with its history and how that history helps or hinders the encounter with modernity. But because modernity is usually associated with science and Western thought systems, contemporary African intellectuals face what may be called the dilemma of modernity. The French critical theorist Jean Baudrillard aptly captures how this dilemma arises:

Modernity is neither a sociological concept, nor a political concept, nor exactly a historical concept. It is a characteristic mode of civilization which opposes itself to tradition, that is to say, to all other anterior or traditional cultures: confronting the geographic and symbolic diversity of the latter, modernity imposes itself throughout the world as a homogeneous unity, irradiating from the Occident.

Although modernity is desirable, for the African it has always seemed to be something of alien parentage to be understood only in reference to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the cataclysmic changes of this century (changes, we may note, in which Africas agency was minimal or nonexistent). Not only is it foreign, but modernity destroys the traditional cultures with which it comes in contact. Here is Baudrillard again: As the canonical morality of change, it opposes itself to the canonical morality of tradition, but it is nevertheless just as wary of radical change. Baudrillards insight means that for African philosophy the dilemma is how to navigate between its own historical situatedness on the one hand, and on the other its project of decentering modernity in ways that make manifest a plurality of methods of knowledge production. This is the tension between a historical particularity and universalism. If African philosophers and intellectuals are to grapple successfully with the project of modernity, they must bring under suspicion all paradigms of knowledge production and organization that claim to be ahistorical and epistemologically transcendental. The challenge must be made without at the same time lapsing into the paralyzing postmodernist relativism whose clarion call is the incommensurability of discourses. To arrive at the position that the various ways of knowledge production are just so different that one way cannot be understood using the methods of another way is to lapse into the essentialism of, say, an Afrocentrist who responds to the skeptical questioner with Its a black thing you just would not understand. The appropriate response to modernity would not be for African philosophy to replace Eurocentric visions of modernity with Afrocentric ones, but to proceed in a way that allows for transcultural and indeed transnational communication. African philosophy must be wary of repeating the mistakes of Europe. It is therefore imperative that African philosophers come face to face with their practice to root out features that may perpetuate the phase characterized by literature devoted to answering the question, Is there an African philosophy? The concern with identity was concurrent with a phase characterized by debate about what should count as a text and indeed on the intellectual merits of different texts. There are three lessons these phases hold for the future of the practice of African philosophy:

1. A meaningful practice will be wary of anachronism in interpretation, that is, the habit of throwing out as confused or irrational any views that do not fit the scheme of the interpreter.

2. It will avoid giving the false impression of inevitability, as if the thinkers taking part in these debates were a disciplined army marching toward the objective of modern thought.

3. It will be careful about being betrayed by philosophical or other prejudices into an unjust and uncritical treatment of contending views.

The wave of the future will be for African philosophy to turn from the last thirty years preoccupation with definition. Even more importantly, however, African philosophy will have to combine its substantive discussions with vigorous efforts to form alliances with African Americans and feminists who also have been denied or excluded from participation in the history of ideas. It is these connections that will situate African philosophy in the broader context that offers exciting possibilities for the future of our practice.