In this chapter, the authors trace the epistemic challenge initiated by colonialism as part of its civilizing and modernizing missions, and the epistemological violence that undermined Africa’s knowledge systems. The chapter argues that the anticolonial and decolonization efforts have been more programmatic without pushing the boundary of decolonizing the epistemic basis of colonialism. The chapter then contends that decolonizing resistance can best be captured in the form of a reversed epistemic process that not only excavates Africa’s knowledge forms, Africanizes other (...) available knowledges, but more importantly generates an epistemological framework that establishes and reinforces a combative alternative Afrocentric mythology that subverts the existing Eurocentric mythology. Such an alternative myth constitutes a new vision of the African continent and all it can achieve outside of the grip of Eurocentric epistemic hegemony. (shrink)

What does it imply for Nigerian philosophers to conscientiously and engagingly reflect on Nigeria as a place of philosophy and as a dynamic plural context of socioeconomic, political, cultural and ethnic problems? Any answer to this question automatically constitutes the opening salvo to the reflection on the evolution of a Nigerian tradition of philosophy and philosophizing. This book represents such an initial salvo in in its attempt to hammer out the conditions for the possibility of a Nigerian tradition of philosophy (...) by placing that endeavor in between the triadic challenges of the Nigerian political economy, the African philosophical theorizing and the global epistemological hegemony. How do these three dynamics condition the evolution and functional relevance of the philosophical enterprise in Nigeria? How have Nigerian philosophers responded to them? What is Nigerian philosophy? How can there be a "Nigerian" philosophy when there are no Nigerians? This book is also an attempt to contribute to the trajectory of philosophy education in Nigeria within the context of a postcolonial educational system and university dynamics that stultifies the role of the intellectuals in development. From Plato to Wiredu, from Bodunrin to Bourdieu, and from Heidegger and Nietzsche to Fanon, Mignolo and Santos, the book traces a trajectory of dynamics rethinking of existing paradigms and epistemological assumptions that could enable a robust evolution of a Nigerian tradition of philosophy that possesses sufficient clout to confront its historicity and its place in Nigeria's development impasse. (shrink)

This volume investigates alternative epistemological pathways by which knowledge production in Africa can proceed. The contributors, using different intellectual dynamics, explore the existing epistemological dominance of the West—from architecture to gender discourse, from environmental management to democratic governance—and offer distinct and unique arguments that challenge the denigration of the different and differing modes of knowing that the West considered “barbaric” and “primitive.” This volume therefore constitutes a minimal gesture that further contributes to the ongoing discourse on alternative modes of knowing (...) in Africa. (shrink)

In this essay I deploy Sartre's phenomenology of the gaze as the foil to demonstrate the cultural and philosophical movement from ethnology to ethnophilosophy that produces a specific conception of Africa. The violence of the Western gaze on Africa led several ethnological and anthropological excavations of Africa's cultural beingness, and the eventual creation of ethnophilosophical reason. Despite the obvious limitations of ethnophilosophy, I argue in this essay for a conception of cultural agency around which we can properly understand “Africa” as (...) a meaningful site, a territorial imaginary that is far from the ethnophilosophical imagination, but not too far. Ethnophilosophy serves as the platform around which we can commence a reconstruction of an African self that is sufficiently recuperated, through false memory and historical reinvention, to return the gaze and renegotiate its freedom. (shrink)

This handbook investigates the current state and future possibilities of African Philosophy, as a discipline and as a practice, vis-à-vis the challenge of African development and Africa’s place in a globalized, neoliberal capitalist economy. The volume offers a comprehensive survey of the philosophical enterprise in Africa, especially with reference to current discourses, arguments and new issues—feminism and gender, terrorism and fundamentalism, sexuality, development, identity, pedagogy and multidisciplinarity, etc.—that are significant for understanding how Africa can resume its arrested march towards decolonization (...) and liberation. (shrink)

This essay deploys the existence of epistemic vices in the trajectory of Western philosophy to map the erasures and complicities that accompanied the emergence of contemporary African philosophy (CAP1). It argues that the complicity of CAP1 in the hyperspecialization and academic self‐absorption that marked the professionalization of Western philosophy, makes it difficult to attend to the conditions for its own possibility. CAP1 arguably needs to make a critical turn into critical African philosophy (CAP2), understood as a metatheoretical and metaphilosophical framework (...) for an internal transformation that is emancipatory. CAP2 is envisioned, first, as a critique of postcoloniality that rehumanizes the autonomous African subject; and, second, as an ethicopolitical project that explores the cracks between philosophy as theoretical practice and philosophy as praxis in opening up the spaces for postcolonial emancipation. The essay identifies three conditions that instigate the emancipatory possibility of philosophizing on the continent: the spatial/platial, demosophic, and political. (shrink)

This essay tries to place the humanities in Africa squarely within the process of articulating an “agonistic imaginary” that is crucial in creating an African modernity. The humanities, in spite of the growing crisis in African university curricula , could and should serve as an intellectual catalyst towards the creation of a pedagogical atmosphere. Such an atmosphere is necessary for conceptualising an imaginary around which an African modern existence can emerge. In the words of Aloni , a humanistic education will (...) therefore serve as “a formative and self-defining process that is driven by a natural need for self-actualization.” It must be “facilitated by reliance on inner motivation, self-respect, self-regulation, stimulating environment and supportive and dialogical human relations.”. (shrink)

Resignifying the Universal: Critical Commentary on the Postcolonial African Identity and Development The dimension of the debate on the relation between the universal and the particular in African philosophy has been skewed in favour of the universalists who argued that the condition for the possibility of an African conception of philosophy cannot be achieved outside the "universal' idea of the philosophical enterprise. In this sense, the ethno-philosophical project and its attempt to rescue the idea of an African past necessary for (...) the reconstruction of an African postcolonial identity and development becomes a futile one. A recent commentator even argues that works concerning African identity are now totally irrelevant and misguided. In this essay, I will be arguing, on the contrary, that the universalist's argument, much like its critique of ethno-philosophical reason, mistakes the nature, significance and necessity of such a resistance identity that the ethno-philosophical project promises. I will also argue that the fabrication of such an identity facilitates the avoidance of an uncritical submersion in the universal as well as a proper conception of an African development. This, furthermore, is the only avenue by which the imperialistic ontological space of universal humanism, in which most universalistic claims are rooted, can be made more polygonal and mutually beneficial for alternative cultural particulars. (shrink)

The dimension of the debate on the relation between the universal and the particular in African philosophy has been skewed in favor of the universalists who argued that the condition for the possibility of an African conception of philosophy cannot be achieved outside the “universal” idea of the philosophical enterprise. In this sense, the ethnophilosophical project and its attempt to rescue the idea of an African past necessary for the reconstruction of an African postcolonial identity and development become futile. A (...) recent commentator even argues that works concerning African identity are now totally irrelevant and misguided. In this essay, I will be arguing, on the contrary, that the universalists’ argument, much like its critique of ethnophilosophical reason, mistakes the nature, significance, and necessity of such a “resistance identity” that the ethnophilosophical project promises. I will also argue that the fabrication of such an identity facilitates the avoidance of an uncritical submersion in the universal as well as a proper conception of an African development. This, furthermore, is the only avenue by which the imperialistic ontological space of universal humanism, in which most universalist claims are rooted, can be made more polygonal and mutually beneficial for alternative cultural particulars. (shrink)