Abstract

The debate about the existence of African Philosophy is gradually fading into history as it is being overtaken by the question of the relevance of philosophy to the social, economic and political malaise bedeviling the African States. Currently, the unmasking of the masquerades of cultural imposition from the West is aggressively taking the center stage. In this new wave of recuperative consciousness, practitioners and researchers of academic philosophy in Africa should be propagating and orchestrating the sustained teaching of African virtue ethics and character training principles in the primary and secondary schools and even beyond. This is with a view to bringing about the re-awakening of African cultural values in the formative years of the youths for constructive social engagements. The way to achieve this objective is to exhume the cultural ethical values by which pristine African societies maintained moral equilibrium, social harmony, and public trust in pre-colonial times and make these part of the school curriculum. There is no gainsaying the fact that a causal link exists between the moral bankruptcies in modern African societies infused by colonial cultural imposition and the lack of well developed, integrated and sustained character training in schools. “Zu dar sachen!” “Back to the things themselves!” is a phenomenological maxim. When a people are confused and find themselves in social, economic, political quagmire and moral debacle, the conventional wisdom is to return to their original lifeways to recapture their historical essence. Thus, as political leaders battle the scourge of official corruption which has assumed epidemic proportions in several African states, taking virtue philosophy to the schools has become a compelling imperative in the emerging African world order.