Review of Dokman, F., & Cornelli, E. M. (Eds.). (2022). Beyond Bantu Philosophy: Contextualizing Placide Tempels's Initiative in African Thought. London and New York: Routledge.

This article examines and analyses Biko’s contribution to the liberation struggle in South Africa from the perspective of politics and religion. Through his leading participation in Black Consciousness Movement and Black Theology Project, Biko has not only influenced the direction of the liberation agenda, but he has also left a legacy that if the liberated and democratic South Africa were to follow, this country would be a much better place for all to live in. In fact, the continent as a (...) whole through its endeavours in the African Union underpinned by the African Renaissance philosophy would go a long way in forging unity among the continent’s nation states. Biko’s legacy covers among other things identity, human dignity, education, research, health and job creation. This article will have far reaching implications for the relations between the democratic state and the church in South Africa, more so that there has been such a lack of the church’s prophecy for the past 25 years. (shrink)

In the West, it is widely believed that, since Africans lack an emotional experience with romanticism and transcendentalism, they do not possess the philosophical prerequisites necessary to protect wilderness. However, the West’s disdain for African systems of thought has precluded examination of customary African views of wilderness. Examination of ethnographic reports on Kenya’s Highland Bantu reveals a complex view of phenomena that the West generally associates with wilderness. For the Bantu, wilderness is an extension of human living space, and through (...) concerted social action rather than individual initiative, it is, or at least can be, dominated by society. Wildlife is unnatural and alienated from human society, which is natural. Because wilderness is, consequently, understood to be fearsome and hostile, it is not a place that can provide inspiration or self-actualization. Almost all forests have a special spiritual relationship with humankind, and some trees have a special relationship with God. Althoughtraditional Bantu thought is contrary to a concept of wilderness as conserved, managed space filled with tourists and recreators, it does embrace a concept of wilderness as wildlands. The Bantu have gone to considerable length to develop an approach to wilderness that minimizes individual contact while requiring association with wilderness as a social activity. Population growth and want of vocational opportunities continue to thrust Highland Bantu into wilderness as a fundamental and traditional survival technique. (shrink)

The principle of individual medical confidentiality is one of the moral principles that Africa inherited unquestioningly from the West as part of Western medicine. The HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa has reduced the relevance of the principle of individual medical confidentiality. Individual medical confidentiality has especially presented challenges for practitioners among the Bantu communities that are well known for their social inter-connectedness and the way they value their extended family relations. Individual confidentiality has raised several unforeseen problems for persons living (...) with HIV/AIDS, ranging from stigma and isolation to feelings of dejection as it drives them away from their families as a way of trying to keep information about their conditions confidential. The involvement of family members in treatment decisions is in line with the philosophy of Ubuntu and serves to respect patients’ and families’ autonomy while at the same time benefiting the individual patient. (shrink)

Ce livre prend prétexte sur l'énigme Tempels pour exposer la complexité de la philosophie de ceux qui avaient été considérés, à tort, comme ne parlant pas les langues abstraites, mais plutôt ontologiques : les Africains des langues bantu. L'originalité de ce livre ne réside pas tant dans sa démarche phénoménologique, mais dans le fait qu'en passant par la procédure des questions disputées, dans la suite de la tradition issue de Saint Thomas d'Aquin, il réorganise "la lecture et l'écriture de la (...) philosophie africaine contemporaine à partir d'un fond culturel religieux qui l'insère dans la tradition chrétienne". Il révèle un dialogue instructif et heuristique entre philosophie, théologie et politique en Afrique contemporaine, particulièrement au Congo, où s'enchevêtrent les questions philosophiques, religieuses et politiques aux prises avec plusieurs visages de la violence : violence totalitaire, violence de l'imaginaire et du fétichisme, violence prédatrice des ressources et des corps. [...] En somme, Prince Kaumba Lufunda nous conduit, à partir des questions disputées sur la philosphie africaine, nées à partir de l'oeuvre de Placide Tempels, aux larges de la philosophie chrétienne africaine qui croise les préoccupations religieuses, culturelles, politiques, humanistes et même écologiques." (Extraits de l'Avant-propos d'Emmanuel Banywesize)"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Although 1994 is popularly represented as a year of major transition from an oppressive society to a democratic one in South African history, it did not mark the end of White Supremacy but instead its evolution from one constitutional form into another. This is because the so-called “right of conquest” remains affirmed in South Africa by the much celebrated constitution Act 108 of 1996. Since the early 90s, Ubuntu has been employed by the elite parties involved in the “negotiations” for (...) the transition to the “new” South Africa, to justify the new society. This perverse employment of Ubuntu has been largely supported with the aid of sophistic academic posturing by the largely white academic establishment in South Africa and its network of international allies. Using African philosophical hermeneutics as a method, we will ground another interpretation of Ubuntu which stems from two interrelated roots. The first root is a firm understanding of and engagement with the Bantu languages and cultures which are its primordial philosophical basis on the one hand. The second is the study of the history of Ubuntu as lived and living philosophy responding to the challenge of the conquest of the indigenous people in the unjust wars of colonisation. Towards this end we will draw from the experience of Ubuntu -inspired movements in the history of the wars of resistance and the struggle for liberation ongoing since 1652. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethnophilosophy, Comparative Philosophy, Pragmatism:Toward a Philosophy of EthnoscapesThorsten Botz-Bornstein, Associate ResearcherIn this essay I would like to reflect on the place of philosophy within a "globalized" world and reconsider its status as a phenomenon that is potentially linked to a "local" culture. Whenever we question the authority of "general" truths and we look for ways of integrating "local discourses" into the overall construction called "global philosophy," we come across (...) the old idea of "ethnophilosophy." Far from suggesting ethnophilosophy as a model for the philosophy of the future, I intend to rethink certain themes of ethnophilosophy and contrast them with disciplines such as "comparative philosophy" and pragmatism. I will sketch an approach that I believe to be appropriate for the development of philosophy in times of globalization.One of the negative undertones of the term "globalization" is that it is seen as a uniformizing and flattening power that eliminates existing cultural differences. On the other hand, there is an important side effect of globalization represented by those movements acting against it, stressing the importance of "localization" or "regionalization." Ethnophilosophy, in spite of its outdated origin and its potential dangers, remains interesting as an intellectual model as long as it is not formulated in a radical fashion. When it is formulated in a radical fashion it has to face the reproach of relativism and of enclosing itself in a cultural sphere that it declares to be inaccessible to others.Ethnophilosophy: A Renaissance?Ethnophilosophy was developed in Africa in the 1960s, although its origin can be traced back to a book on Bantu philosophy by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels. In this book, published in 1946, Tempels tried to conclude with the view that primitive peoples have neither ontology nor logic and are unable to recognize the nature of being or even of reality as such. Tempels was looking for an ontology colored by "local" cultural components but also by language,1 and he made a serious attempt to build a philosophical system based on Bantu thought.What followed were endless controversies about the nature of African philosophy that made of "ethnophilosophy" a stream of thought much richer than its name might allow one to suppose. A part of its stimulating power can perhaps be traced to the ambiguity of Tempels' approach: on the one hand it could easily be dismissed as paternalism or the attempt to force African philosophy into the straightjacket of European concepts, while on the other hand the expressed desire to give "ethnic" [End Page 153] philosophy a new role within the international hierarchy of the philosophies was immensely attractive. Be that as it may, Tempels' book became the real manifest of "ethnophilosophy."Another point at issue that spurned internal ethnophilosophical discussions was the question whether African philosophy is advanced by an entire people (that is, by a collective) or by individual philosophers. This question (which does not arise in Tempels' book) was first taken up by the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji,2 who claimed that ethnophilosophy is no philosophy at all because it remains indifferent toward individually critical, that is, typically philosophical, approaches. Related debates touch upon fundamental questions concerning the meaning of "collective thinking" or the nature of philosophy as such.3However subtle the points may be that emerge from these discussions, for the outside observer ethnophilosophy appears to be a kind of anthropology (whose premises it continues to share) with an incorporated interest in metaphysical questions. Its opposite is "conventional" Western philosophy, which persistently explores truth with the help of a single, individual mind, aiming at the crystallization of a truth relevant for everybody. What matters for ethnophilosophy is the truth brought forward by a certain way of life of a group of people that can be found on the "inside" of a culture and that can exist independently of any considerations of those things that exist on the outside. Ethnophilosophy is radical in the sense that it not only aims to reestablish, through its opposition to the all-intruding "international" philosophy, its own philosophy within the borders of a certain nation; going much further than many of today's opponents of globalization would dare to go, ethnophilosophy thinks of philosophy... (shrink)

The article aims to delve into the ethical dimension of Ubuntu philosophy, which is an African philosophy that reverberates in other cultures and in various forms, thus exemplifying its universality and universalizability. In this dimension, it tries to re-examine the notion of ethics in relation to morals/morality, including “is” and “ought”, with reference to the human person. Moreover, Ubuntu philosophy is articulated and communicated in the maxim that is an essential component inthe lived experiences of the Bantu-speaking African community: “A (...) person is a person through other persons.” With this, the article integrates some related European and Asian philosophies, considering the fact that Ubuntu philosophy endures as it is tenaciously upheld and edified alongside its implications. (shrink)

Introduction -- The historical phase -- Western discourse on Africa -- Egyptology : an African response to western discourse -- Afrocentricity -- African philosophy's ethnophilosophy -- Tempels on Bantu philosophy -- African religions and philosophy -- Horton on African and western thought systems -- General critiques -- Professional approach to African philosophy -- Ethnophilosophy and professional philosophy -- The myth and reality of African philosophy -- Traditional thought and modern philosophy in africa -- On Wiredu's truth as opinion -- Philosophic (...) sagacity --Sage philosophy and philosophic sagacity -- Relevance of sagacious reasoning -- Keita's objections -- Tthree ways of approaching philosophic sagacity -- Masolo on philosophic sagacity -- Odera Oruka's mission in African philosophy -- Nationalist-ideological philosophy -- Nationalist-ideological philosophy and ethnophilosophy -- Consciencism : philosophy and ideology for decolonisation -- Ujamaa : the basis of African socialism -- African socialism and the federal system in postcolonial Africa -- African philosophical hermeneutics -- Universalism and particularism -- Hermeneutical orientation in African philosophy. (shrink)

The essay explicates Aimé Césaire’s contribution to the discipline of African philosophy, which ironically, is unknown to many scholars within African philosophy, especially in Anglophone Africa. In his Return to my Native Land, Césaire introduced two new concepts: “négritude” and “return”. These would later turn out to be crucial to the discourse on African identity and African philosophy. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire raised two very closely related objections against Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy. His first dissatisfaction was that Tempels (...) merely followed Lévy-Bruhl and his adherents by proposing another point of view in support of the misguided theory of the prelogical. Secondly, in so doing, his aim was nothing more than to make a presentation of an argument insupport of European imperialism and colonialism. His Discourse on Colonialism, therefore, set the ground for later criticisms that were levelled against ethnophilosophy as an approach to African philosophy. Keywords: Négritude, Return, Thingification, Ethnophilosophy, Philosophic sagacity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guest Editor's Introduction:The Time of Africana PhilosophyOmedi OchiengAfricana philosophy is in the main a philosophy of the present. Many will demur and with good reason. In the first place, in worrying about the definition and animating energies of Africana philosophers, Africana philosophers have looked to the past to furnish answers to the former, and to the future to motivate its orientation to the latter. For Lucius Outlaw, for example, (...) writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Africana philosophy is a third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bring organizing oversight to various efforts of philosophizing—that is, activities of reflective, critical thinking and articulation and aesthetic expression—engaged in by persons and peoples African and of African descent who were and are indigenous residents of continental Africa and residents of the many African Diasporas worldwide" (2017, first paragraph).If, then, on the one hand, Outlaw's definition points to the past to make intelligible the contours of Africana philosophy—"persons and peoples... of African descent"—it is to the end of mobilizing toward the future. "In all cases," he argues, "the point of much of [Africana] philosophizings has been to confer meaningful orderings on individual and shared living and on natural and social worlds while resolving recurrent, emergent, and radically disruptive challenges to existence so as to survive, endure, and flourish across successive generations." It is striking, for all that, though, that he makes sure to insist on Africana philosophizing, the verb, rather than philosophy, the noun. For Outlaw, "the name [Africana philosophy] does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system, method, or tradition" (2017). Rather, it is primarily a philosophizing, a doing. Where, then, the past and the future are invoked to give Africana philosophy its shape and contours, the doing of Africana philosophy—practices of the moment, of the present—are revealed to be its constitutive marrow.In the history of Africana philosophy few encounters clarify its present stakes as much as the bitter debate that erupted in post-independence African philosophy over whether there could be said to be an African philosophy. For the protagonists and other commentators, those debates seemed overwhelmingly to be fights about the past—specifically, over the [End Page 1] existence of African philosophy in the precolonial past. Those who came to be identified as ethnophilosophers held that worldviews of precolonial African societies constituted coherent systems of thought worthy of the name "philosophy." They were vehemently opposed by those who insisted on a universalist standpoint, led by the redoubtable Beninois Paulin Hountondji. These philosophers argued that those bent on the task of recuperating traditional worldviews were doing anthropology, not philosophy.At first glance, then, it would seem that these debates have little to tell us about the present of African philosophy. Indeed, there is overwhelming weariness among African philosophers regarding the pitched and factionalized disputations that tore through the discipline in the immediate post-independence era. And yet the view that these debates are now passé, relics and distractions from an immature era of a fledgling discipline, cannot account for their stakes; why precisely they were so rancorous, and why, even today, they occasion simmering tensions and embittered eruptions among African philosophers. Ethnophilosophers, after all, were not intent on recuperating the epistemes of traditional African societies out of sheer curiosity. Rather, they were intervening in deeply contested sociopolitical cleavages of their time.Alexis Kagame, for example, is renowned within the field of African philosophy as one of the most prominent ethnophilosophers to have emerged in the mid-twentieth century. His explication of the ontology of the Bantu, as revealed in Bantu languages, ought to be seen as all of a piece with his position as the central court historian and political theorist of the Kingdom of Rwanda. As historian Claudine Vidal (1991) established, Kagame's influential scholarship had as one of its primary goals the justification of a constitutional monarchy. Indeed, half a century after his writings, Rwandese leaders who came to power in the wake of the 1990s genocide would seize on his portrayal of precolonial Rwanda as a pastoral social formation and his testimony to the existence of a Greater Rwanda in justifying their political and... (shrink)

Review of Janz, B. B. (2023). African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition: The Space of Thought. London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.

Les Enjeux du discours philosophique pour l'Afrique est consacré non pas à l'ethnophilosophie, mais à l'orientation africaine en philosophie ou de la philosophie qui se déploie sous des talents et plumes aussi riches que contradictoires : Placide Tempels, John Mbiti et Alexis Kagame, Nkrumah, Paulin Hountondji, Eboussi Boulaga, Marcien Towa, Niamkey Koffi, Abdou Touré, Yacouba Konaté, Jean-Godefroy Bidima, Augustin Dibi, etc. Ce n'est pas un ouvrage de "philosophie africaine", si l'adjonction de l'épithète africaine devrait trahir la philosophie qui, depuis Platon, (...) est universelle et ses "vérités" indépendantes des limitations géographiques, raciales et nationales. L'Afrique a, certes, ses limites dans tous les sens du substantif, mais la vocation trans-territoriale du discours philosophique demeure. Elle s'incarne dans le pari que prend Les enjeux du discours philosophique pour l'Afrique de redire, dans les termes de la théorie critique, de l'espace africain ce qu'il garderait sous un double voile d'ignorance et d'opulence. Il s'agit des défis rapportés aux langues, aux savoirs et aux orphelins du savoir, aux pouvoirs et aux orphelins du pouvoir, aux sous-développements et aux démocraties du même ordre, aux idéologies, etc. (shrink)

Explores some steps toward non-assimilative encounters in the "global village.".

Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to remedy this situation, fully launching a (...) new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian "essence" and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of "border crossings.". (shrink)

Bourdieu’s thought is disturbing. Provocative. Scandalous even, at least for those who do not easily tolerate the unmitigated truth about the social. Nonetheless his ideas, among the most important and innovative of our time, are here to stay. This thought has taken form in the course of a career and through works on diverse subjects that have constructed a far-reaching analytical model of social life, which the author calls more readily an anthropology rather than a sociology. In their totality, they (...) constitute today an original and powerful proposal to explain human practices. In the face of criticisms commonly leveled at Bourdieu’s thought (notably the charge that it reduces everything to a single schematic model), it is important to identify the spirit of his enterprise. Early on, it is true, his thought drew on a few fundamental concepts—the trilogy habitus, field (champ), practice (pratique)—to which it constantly returned, and followed a clearly defined trajectory. At the same time, however, he continually reformulated, adapted, and refined his analytical model, depending on the operations to which he subjected new objects of inquiry. The regenerative and transformative force of his thought was supported by two convictions. First, that there being nothing more vain than theory for theory’s sake, it is preferable that theoretical production originate in the study of concrete and occasionally very specific cases. Second, that in order to escape stereotypical classifications, boundaries separating disciplines are best transgressed, thereby favoring new constructions of the object of inquiry. (shrink)

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

A discussão sobre a existência ou não da Filosofia Africana, associada à negação do direito à Filosofia caracterizou seis décadas: 1940-2000. A necessidade de apagar o espectro que as representações ocidentais (europeias) atribuem à África foi, de certa forma, respondida com várias publicações. O presente artigo pretende mostrar que existiram, também, pensadores individuais, preciamente no antigo Kôngo.

The article aims to delve into the ethical dimension of Ubuntu philosophy, which is an African philosophy that reverberates in other cultures and in various forms, thus exemplifying its universality and universalizability. In this dimension, it tries to re-examine the notion of ethics in relation to morals/morality, including “is” and “ought”, with reference to the human person. Moreover, Ubuntu philosophy is articulated and communicated in the maxim that is an essential component inthe lived experiences of the Bantu-speaking African community: “A (...) person is a person through other persons.” With this, the article integrates some related European and Asian philosophies, considering the fact that Ubuntu philosophy endures as it is tenaciously upheld and edified alongside its implications. (shrink)

Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy has largely been met with hostility from African philosophers. Whilst Tempels intended to show that the Bantu were not only capable of thinking, but also that they had a distinct and coherent philosophy of their own, his project seems to have achieved exactly the opposite. Temples’ project sought to expose the racism of thinkers such as Lucien Levy-Bruhl, thereby raising the African to the same status as the Westerner. However, his efforts have been rejected for a (...) number of reasons ranging from the view that it is a theory of magic, freely generalized to the Bantu, to the accusation that his project fails to speak on behalf of the oppressed Bantu and furthermore, that he is overly obsessed with finding the African difference at the cost of reason. In this paper, I seek to argue that a neglected critique of Tempels is one that has to do with the basis of his philosophical racialism. I seek to show that at the root of Bantu Philosophy is racialism grounded in the same assumptions as those made by Levy-Bruhl. I seek to argue that the categories that Tempels creates for Bantu thought do not simply seek to articulate a genuine difference from Western categories. The Bantu categories are coined as inferior, incoherent, inarticulate, illogical, and mystified. I argue that it is for reasons of philosophical racialism that Tempels urges his Western audience to overthrow their logical and articulable systems if they ever want to understand the Bantu system of thought. (shrink)

Ubuntu is a Bantu term meaning humanity. It is also a philosophical and ethical system of thought, from which definitions of humanness, togetherness, and social politics of difference arise. Devi Dee Mucina is a Black Indigenous Ubuntu man. In Ubuntu Relational Love, he uses Ubuntu oratures as tools to address the impacts of Euro-colonialism while regenerating relational Ubuntu governance structures. Called "millet granaries" to reflect the nourishing and sustaining nature of Indigenous knowledges, and written as letters addressed to his mother, (...) father, and children, Mucina's oratures take up questions of geopolitics, social justice, and resistance. Working through personal and historical legacies of dispossession and oppression, he challenges the fragmentation of Indigenous families and cultures and decolonizes impositions of white supremacy and masculinity. Drawing on anti-racist, African feminist, and Ubuntu theories and critically influenced by Indigenous masculinities scholarship in Canada, Ubuntu Relational Love is a powerful and engaging book. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Life and Works Where is Kagame's Philosophy to be Found? Bantu Philosophy: Placide Tempels and Alexis Kagame Bantu Philosophy: Its Divisions Bantu Philosophy and Aristotelian‐Thomistic Philosophy.

Ever since the publication of Placide Tempel's epoch-making work Bantu Philosophy, African philosophers have worked to dispel the myth that there is no metaphysics in Africa.

ABSTRACT The concept of vital force in African philosophy received its first full articulation in Placide Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy and has evolved over time from the ontological dimension of a universal actuation and energizing principle to an element of mind, notably in the work of Kwame Gyekye. In this essay, I present the concept of vital force and trace its evolution from the time of its first full articulation by Tempels up to its identification with spirit, or mind, in Gyekye’s (...) thought. I try to defend the thesis that the concept of vital force can ground the notion of mood that takes a pivotal position in the twenty-first century philosophy of consolationism. I adopt an analytical and constructive method in this paper. (shrink)