Abstract

This chapter focused on some of the pertinent questions in African ethics such as: What is the status of African ethics today? What is the basis of African ethics? Do African ethics practitioners have any contribution to the wider discourse of intercultural philosophy? These three pertinent questions clearly guided this chapter. In an attempt to address the first question, I made a cursory survey of the current debates on the status and place of African ethics today. In particular, I made the discovery that African ethics is suffering from distortions especially by African ethics practitioners who are non-Africans by descent such as Thaddeus Metz and others. In my attempt to answer the second question, I exposed some of Metz’s fallacies with regard to this subject matter, one of which is that African ethics do not need religion to authenticate them. In answering the third question, I sought to show that the failure by African ethicists of non-African descent to recognize and valorize African ethics as a competitive discipline was tantamount to epistemic genocide meant to disadvantage indigenous African ethicists, ensuring that they are denied the opportunity to engage in intercultural debates under the banner of intercultural philosophy.