Some comments on Africanising a philosophy curriculum

Abstract

Students of African philosophy had best beware of two approaches to the subject that have been dismissed as flawed by most philosophers in and of Africa. One has been labelled “ethnophilosophy” because it does nothing more than report passively held beliefs in African cultures, sometimes identified as “traditions”, that are in its most extreme form said to be shared by all the peoples and cultures of Africa. A second flawed approach to African philosophy that has been promoted by the social sciences argues that rationality in the indigenous African context is best exemplified by patently objectively false fables and stories created by their peoples so that they can feel they can understand and influence the forces controlling events that take place in their worlds. Neither of these initiatives provides form or content that is suitable for academic philosophy, and they have been used to characterise the quality of reasoning in Africa’s indigenous cultures as second-rate or insignificant.