African Philosophy

Philosophy from a whole continent and its diaspora — written, oral, and argued. The field's modern history turns on one debate: is there a communal "African" philosophy embedded in languages and proverbs, or is philosophy done by individuals, with Africa simply the place? Between ethnophilosophy and its critics, and from ubuntu to négritude, the tradition has made that question itself philosophical.

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the African diaspora

Era

Oral antiquity; named field from the 1940s

Key Figures

Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Gyekye, Léopold Senghor

Core Texts

Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), Philosophy and an African Culture (Wiredu)

Origins & Development

• Philosophical argument in Africa long predates the modern field — in Egyptian thought, Ethiopian rational theology (Zera Yacob's seventeenth-century Hatata), and the oral wisdom of sage traditions.
• The ethnophilosophy school opens with Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy (published in French in 1949): a communal worldview, it claimed, underlies Bantu languages and customs.
• Alexis Kagame's Bantu-Rwandese systematics extend the approach; Senghor's négritude gives it a poetic-political face.
• The 1970s reaction is decisive: Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy insists philosophy is individual, critical, and literature-argument — not collective worldview.
• Wiredu's conceptual decolonization sets the modern agenda: purge borrowed categories that do no work in African languages.

Central Ideas

• Personhood as achieved: in many Akan and other traditions, personhood is a moral status earned through community, not a given of biology.
• Ubuntu: "a person is a person through other persons" — the southern African communitarian ethic with its own concept page.
• Consensus politics: Wiredu's non-party polity by consultation, drawn from traditional practice.
• Sage philosophy: Henry Odera Oruka's project of recording rigorous first-person philosophizing by Kenyan sages — a third way between ethnophilosophy and its critics.
• Decolonization of mind: from African thought to ujaama socialism, the tradition theorizes freedom after political independence.

Schools & Key Figures

• Ethnophilosophy: Tempels, Kagame, and John Mbiti's theistic framework.
• Professional-universalist critics: Hountondji, Mudimbe (the "invention of Africa"), and Bodunrin.
• Constructivists: Gyekye's moderate communitarianism, Wiredu's consensual democracy, Mogobe Ramose's ubuntu jurisprudence.
• Diaspora line: Du Bois, Fanon, and Afrocentrism (Molefi Asante) — gathered under the "Africana" umbrella.

Influence & Reception

• Africana philosophy is now a recognized field with its own encyclopedia coverage and societies worldwide.
• Ubuntu entered post-apartheid South African constitutional debate and global business ethics.
• Decolonization arguments from African philosophy shaped Latin American decolonial theory and intercultural philosophy.

Connections

• Concepts: African ethics, ubuntu, négritude.
• Liberation politics: Amílcar Cabral and the theorists of anti-colonial struggle.
• Adjacent tradition: Islamic philosophy in North and West Africa — Timbuktu's manuscript culture belongs to both worlds.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Africana Philosophy.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: African Philosophy.
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Hunhu/Ubuntu in Southern African Thought.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: African Sage Philosophy.