Philosophy, literature
and the re-invention of Africaii
Michael Andindilile
University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Received 7 January, 2015; Accepted 25 April 2016
Africa has been a victim of misrepresentation since the advent of colonialism. This paper, which is
largely based on textual analysis, examines how African philosophy and literature intersect in an
attempt to bring about a better understanding of Africa in both the West and Africa itself. The study
argues that the intersection of literature and philosophy in African literary discourse we witness is an
inevitable consequence of the historical events (including colonialism) that conspired to condemn the
continent—as a body—to subjection in the Western world of thought, and the response that this reality
solicited from Africans facing the challenges of the Western engineered modernity. The study examines
the writing of some of the pioneering modern African writers who have tried to undermine ideas
propagated by philosophers such as Hegel—in a typical Eurocentric tradition—to undermine Africa, a
continent they hardly understood. The objective is to show that through literature, African writers were
able to reveal more about African thought than what has been readily acknowledged.
Key words: Africa, African literature, African philosophy, intersection, African discourse.
NTRODUCTION
From the outset, the study makes reference to two
Africas: the one the West helped to create which has
been a subject of a lot of controversy and
misinterpretation, and the one that could be called the
real-for lack of a better word-Africa that exists outside the
Western conception, and an Africa that still remains least
understood. This distinction is vital in understanding the
premise upon which this article is based because many
of the problems that arise in the study of Africa through
various disciplines-including philosophy and literature, the
focus of this article- expose the knowledge gaps,
arguably, on the basis of these two Africas, the kind of
knowledge they represent, and the challenge they raise
for those seeking to reconcile the two to end up with a
harmonious whole. The concept of the two Africas can
be traced to colonialism and the colonial mentality that
made many Europeans interpret Africa from a certain
perspective, oblivious to the reality within and amongst
Africans themselves. In this regard, Mudimbe (1985:175
to 176) succinctly observes that the “history of knowledge
in Africa and about Africa appears deformed and
disjointed” mainly because of “its own origin and
development” since the “discourse which witnesses to
Africa‟s knowledge” talks about “unknown societies
[largely] without their own „texts‟”. Indeed, for the most
part the input from the Africans themselves had for a long
time remained absent from the discourse on the created
Africa. Eventually, what emerges is two scenarios of how other people perceive Africans (that is, outsiders looking
in), and how Africans view themselves (insiders looking at
themselves). This article builds on the debates on Africa,
with particular reference to the two “Africas”—one
invented and imagined and other the actual one that
survives regardless of the misconceptions and
denigration of the West.
The challenge African intellectuals such as writers,
philosophers, and even politicians have faced since the
mid-twentieth century appears to revolve around making
the real Africa—the Africa that is least understood—
become known to the outside world in an attempt to
correct the largely distorted Western ideas associated
with the created Africa. As such, the article argues that
the intersection of literature and philosophy in African
literary discourse appears to be an inevitable
consequence of the historical events that conspired to
condemn the continent—as a body—to subjection in the
Western world of thought, and the response that this
reality solicited from Africans facing the challenges of the
Western engineered modernity.
To situate the article‟s argument, Friedrich Wilhelm
Hegel‟s (1899) The Philosophy of History, offers some
interesting nineteenth century views on Africans. Though
the view is esoteric, too reductive, and does not entirely
and categorically represent all Western thought, what it
does is present a problematic scenario for Africa
representative of slanted Eurocentric thought. Hegel in
this regard has been chosen since such „lofty‟ thinking
might not be casually dismissed as wishful thinking.
Moreover, Hegel has been chosen because of what he
represents in Western thought. In the Philosophy of
History Hegel notes:
The Peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend,
for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite
give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our
ideas—the category of Universality. In Negro life the
characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not
yet attained the realization of any substantial objective
existence—as for example, God, or Law—in which the
interest of man‟s volition is involved and in which he
realizes his own being. This distinction between himself
as an individual and the universality of his essential
being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness
of his existence has not yet attained; so that the
Knowledge of an absolute Being, and Other and a Higher
than his individual self, is entirely wanting. The Negro […]
exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and
untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of
reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we
would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing
harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of
character (1899: 93).
Despite his misgivings about “Africa”, Hegel does
acknowledge in this quotation the “difficult to
comprehend” the African character. This admission also
hints at the unknown to the West, at the very least.
However, before relating what he says to the primary
theme of this article, it is worth further considering what
else Hegel says about Africa. After dismissing Africa
primarily Sub-Saharan Africa for what appears to be an
issue of inconvenience—as not worth “to mention […]
again” because the continent “is no historical part of the
world” with “no movement or development to exhibit,”
Hegel further notes:
Historical movements in [Africa]—that is in its northern
part—belong to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage
displayed there and important transitionary phase of
civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to
Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the
passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its
Western phase, but it does not belong to the African
Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the
Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the
conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented
here only as on the threshold of World‟s History (1899:
99).
Experts in philosophy would argue that Hegel did define
the terms under which he made these misconceived
notions about Africa, and here he, in fact, desperately
and painstakingly explains why the northern the part of
the African continent should not belong to the archetypal
African world. From these two quotations, we can see the
kind of atmosphere African intellectuals found themselves
in at the turn of the twentieth century.
Hegel is an interesting reference point here not
because he was right—far from it because even his
strongest adherents would not admit so, but because
Hegel signified how the West generally perceived Africa
at an intellectual level as literary works of the imperial
adventure novels of the time promoting the similar ideas,
values and ideals which can easily be dismissed as
simply fiction. Indeed, Hegel‟s philosophical views on
Africa hints at the core of the attitudes of nineteenthcentury Europe toward what Westerners generally
deemed as their understanding of Africa as influenced by
Eurocentric thought. These attitudes and beliefs pushed
African intellectuals—philosophers, writers and other likeminded people—towards aesthetics and philosophy
aimed at presenting the side of the ignored part of Africa.
Wole Soyinka‟s singling out Hegel in his 1986 Nobel
Literature Prize speech when he became the first Black
African, the award demonstrates how profoundly such
Eurocentric thought has haunted Africa. In his lecture
aptly titled “This Past Must Address Its Present”, Soyinka
cited part of the first quotation presented earlier as his
“favourite example” to explain how in Hegel “Eurocentric
racism evidently found a formidable intellectual basis”.
Soyinka (1986) insisted that he mentioned this “banal
untruthfulness” because of the continued belief today
amongst “those who insist that the pinnacle of man‟s
intellectual thirst is the capacity to project this universality
in the direction of a Super-Other.” Soyinka‟s remarks
serve as a timely reminder that even today, the concept
of two Africas—the one we believe we know and the one
we do not fully know—persist, with a dire need to
reconcile the two.
It is in this apparent paradox that the relationship
between philosophy and literature in the African context
is being examined in this text-based qualitative analysis.
The texts included in this study are only a fraction that
could be used as textual evidence; moreover, they have
been purposively selected because of what they
represent as interventionist texts in the discourse on
Africa. The sampled texts are primarily from some parts
of Sub-Saharan Africa because of how contentious the
representation of this region has been in Eurocentric
thought as epitomised by Hegel‟s postulations. Moreover,
the texts were largely authored by Africans writing
sensibilities. This does not mean that Africans writing
within settler codes such as Gordimer (1974), could not
have been included in the discussion since, as her novel
The Conservationist demonstrates she has also been
influenced by the African landscape and belief system.
Indeed, this is true when one considers the integration of
the “amatongo” (ancestor worship) belief system in the
novel.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines philosophy as a
“[c]ritical examination of the rational grounds of our most
fundamental beliefs and logical analysis of the basic
concepts employed in the expression of such beliefs.”
This definition rather than the one for aesthetics or the
philosophy of literature, which focuses on the art itself
helps to show the relationship between the broad
discipline of philosophy and not just the esoteric part that
centres only on the aesthetics, for example, dealing with
questions of what constitutes art and literature in the
African context. As philosophical inquiry has been central
in the intellectual history of many civilisations, can we
confidently assert that a “critical examination of the
rational ground of [Africa‟s] most fundamental beliefs and
logical analys[e]s” had been employed in the colonial
Western conception of sub-Saharan Africa? Recent
developments in philosophy, and what early modern
African literatures help to illustrate indicate otherwise.
Oruka‟s (1991) „Sage Philosophy‟ , is one such case in
point. This article does not intend to go into a detailed
discussion of their ideas but to sample some of the views
to illuminate on the contentious issues surrounding the
two “Africas”.
Sub-Saharan Africa, which Hegel inadvertently singled
out for denigration, has slightly over ten percent of the
world‟s population. In this region, there are more than
one thousand ethnic groups with diverse beliefs and
cultural systems. Despite what has been said about
Andindilile 129
these peoples, they continue to exist within their own
world view and their own interpretation of Truth and
Being. Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin (1989) refer to this
scenario as the “Empire writ[ing] back” in the book of the
same title. This writing back is an inevitable consequence
of the conflict between the created and the real Africa,
and how they are antagonistically projected. In this
regard, African writers and philosophers have attempted
in post-colonial discourse since the mid-twentieth century
to “reclaim the past” and make known to the world the
history and philosophy of the African peoples hitherto
largely ignored or misunderstood in Western discourse as
part of the Western attempt to define “the other,” or to
use Hegel‟s words, to make the “Unhistorical” “Historical”
in addition to revealing the developed African spirit.
Soyinka would insist that a tiger does not have to
announce its “tigritude” but pounces, but in the overall
scheme of things, African writers and philosophers found
themselves in a situation where they had to do something
about the Africa they were told they lived in.
The intersection between African literatures and
philosophy is valid for two reasons: first, African literary
works offer opportunities for learning about African
philosophy; second, since African philosophy has
remained contestable in the sense of the created Africa,
Africa needs modern philosophers to articulate what
constitutes African philosophy or to provide insights on
philosophy in Africa. It is not enough to read about
philosophy in Africa in the works of fiction; the philosophy
also needs articulation by the professionals. The
implication is that there were two concurrent forces
developing more or less simultaneously—first generation
modern African writers writing about the history, beliefs,
attitudes and practices of their own people, and first
generation modern African philosophers trying to show
how African philosophy has existed in different African
societies.
As part of these efforts, African writers begin a process
of interpreting and recording the African thought in
modern African (1988) fiction, especially considering that
the text that Mudimbe refers to has for the most part
remained oral in most of the sub-Saharan societies.
Orality is one aspect that defines a swathe of territory
dubbed “terra incognita” (Gerard 1990:19). It suited
Hegel and his philosophising to exclude the northern part
with its known and documented civilisation from the
southern part that he so blatantly denigrates. Joseph
Conrad‟s (1900; 1995) Heart of Darkness also focuses on
this part of the African continent. The northern part and
Ethiopia, with its known written culture would not fit into
this modicum. In this challenge of re-writing the past and
reclaiming the philosophy of African peoples, African
writers and philosophers in their respective fields help to
re-define the African peoples‟ identities because both
groups share the post-colonial concerns of operating on
the margins of the centre of Western discourse. As amatter of fact, Eze (1997) identifies “the brutal encounter
of the African world with European modernity” as “single
most important factor that drives” “(post) colonial African
philosophy,” “an encounter epitomized in the colonial
phenomenon” (4). The “brutal encounter” is another
feature that African literatures and philosophy share.
Indeed, the scars of this brutal encounter have
permeated every fabric of the African continent and have
spared no discipline. In other words, the brutal encounter
in itself has provided a framework through which African
writers and philosophers operate.
Before many people in earnest started reading about
modern African philosophy from the writings of the
professionals, some of the first generation modern
African writers such as Chinua Achebe, one of the
foremost African writers, had produced literary works
such as Things Fall Apart, an archetypal African novel,
published in 1958 and Arrow of God published in 1964
that highlight the African social dispensation and belief
systems in fact readers find the latter novel too
anthropological for a work of fiction. There are many
other pre-Achebe non-fiction works that also presented
ideas about the African social dispensation and
cosmology, but these do not fit into the scope of this
discussion. Achebe‟s inaugural novel Things Fall Apart
demonstrates that African traditional societies had law
and order and belief in the Supreme Deity. In fact, the
novel also counters the portrayal of Africa in books by
Western ethnologists and historians as—according to
African philosopher Onyewuenyi (1991: 31)—“Africa of
the savage Africans who did nothing, developed nothing,
or created nothing historical”.
What Western writers generally chose to include and
ignore in the created Africa, especially in the colonial
discourse, had a lot to do with biased perceptions with
their root in racialism. To counter some of the racist
portrayals of Western literatures such as Rider Haggard‟s
King Solomon’s Mines (1977), Joseph Conrad‟s Heart of
Darkness and Joyce Cary‟s Mister Johnson (1951),
Achebe and other African writers did not only present
Africa from a more sympathetic and much more realistic
outlook but also opted to emphasise aspects of the
African socio-economic and cultural dispensation in their
representation of Africa what many colonial European
writers had de-emphasised or misinterpreted in their
created Africa. This counter-approach is significant
because in Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness (1995), for
example, as Achebe aptly points out in “Racism in Heart
of Darkness” deliberately avoids giving the Africans a
language and only does so in a spot where they confirm
their cannibalistic nature.
Similarly, Cary‟s Mister Johnson creates a romantic
hero who passes for an African, who fails to reflect the
Nigerian character. For example, in Things Fall Apart, a
novel about what some people would call a clash of
African and European cultures in the advent of
colonialism, a British District Commissioner observes that
in “many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization
to different parts of Africa,” he has learned that it was
beneath his position to attend to “undignified details” such
as “cutting a hanged man from the tree” because such an
act “would give the natives a poor opinion of him”
(Achebe, 1958: 179). And naturally, in the book […] he
planned to write he would stress that point. […] The story
of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged
himself would make interesting reading. One could
almost write an entire chapter on him. Perhaps not a
whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.
There was so much else to include, and one must be firm
in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of
the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the
Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
The District Commissioner ironically can be reduce into
a paragraph material which Achebe has used for an
entire novel, hence giving his audience limited access to
information on Africa. Thus for Achebe, instead of turning
this people‟s history and wellbeing into a “footnote” in
history as many Western writers had done, he writes an
entire novel detailing the African way of life, sensibility,
spirituality and intellectualism, something that is even
more apparent particularly in Arrow of God projecting
more or less a similar period as Things Fall Apart. Neither
does Achebe romanticise the social dispensation of the
Igbo cosmology since the narrator also raises concern
over the questionable slaying of Ikemefuna as a sacrifice
to the gods and the throwing away of twins in the evil
forest. The suicide the passage refers to comes after the
protagonist‟s return to his clan only to find that “things
have fallen apart” since the advent of colonialism has put
a knife on the centre that held his society together. The
first question this raises in relation to this novel is: If,
indeed, sub-Saharan Africa did not have “Law,” why then
does Umuofia banish Okonkwo from his clan for seven
years as punishment for breaking the code of his
society‟s values? The second is: where does one situate
Igbo metaphysics if the Igbo did not have a belief system
of note? These rhetorical questions simply undermine
what Hegel and other Eurocentric scholars professed
about Africa on the “Unhistorical” dimensions as the
continent with its rich heritage has never been tabula
rasa.
Achebe‟s maiden and archetypal African Anglophone
novel also presents pre-colonial traditional beliefs,
attitudes and practices, and a social dispensation that
survived mostly through oral tradition. Though not a
philosopher, Achebe manages to record not only his
people‟s history and anthropology, but also their
philosophy. By representing his people‟s traditional
beliefs, attitudes and practices with fidelity, Achebe
manages to underline the philosophy inherent in the Igbo
cosmos. The belief system of the Igbo brings to light the
personal god, chi, progressing to a supreme deity, the130 Int. J. English Lit.
matter of fact, Eze (1997) identifies “the brutal encounter
of the African world with European modernity” as “single
most important factor that drives” “(post) colonial African
philosophy,” “an encounter epitomized in the colonial
phenomenon” (4). The “brutal encounter” is another
feature that African literatures and philosophy share.
Indeed, the scars of this brutal encounter have
permeated every fabric of the African continent and have
spared no discipline. In other words, the brutal encounter
in itself has provided a framework through which African
writers and philosophers operate.
Before many people in earnest started reading about
modern African philosophy from the writings of the
professionals, some of the first generation modern
African writers such as Chinua Achebe, one of the
foremost African writers, had produced literary works
such as Things Fall Apart, an archetypal African novel,
published in 1958 and Arrow of God published in 1964
that highlight the African social dispensation and belief
systems in fact readers find the latter novel too
anthropological for a work of fiction. There are many
other pre-Achebe non-fiction works that also presented
ideas about the African social dispensation and
cosmology, but these do not fit into the scope of this
discussion. Achebe‟s inaugural novel Things Fall Apart
demonstrates that African traditional societies had law
and order and belief in the Supreme Deity. In fact, the
novel also counters the portrayal of Africa in books by
Western ethnologists and historians as—according to
African philosopher Onyewuenyi (1991: 31)—“Africa of
the savage Africans who did nothing, developed nothing,
or created nothing historical”.
What Western writers generally chose to include and
ignore in the created Africa, especially in the colonial
discourse, had a lot to do with biased perceptions with
their root in racialism. To counter some of the racist
portrayals of Western literatures such as Rider Haggard‟s
King Solomon’s Mines (1977), Joseph Conrad‟s Heart of
Darkness and Joyce Cary‟s Mister Johnson (1951),
Achebe and other African writers did not only present
Africa from a more sympathetic and much more realistic
outlook but also opted to emphasise aspects of the
African socio-economic and cultural dispensation in their
representation of Africa what many colonial European
writers had de-emphasised or misinterpreted in their
created Africa. This counter-approach is significant
because in Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness (1995), for
example, as Achebe aptly points out in “Racism in Heart
of Darkness” deliberately avoids giving the Africans a
language and only does so in a spot where they confirm
their cannibalistic nature.
Similarly, Cary‟s Mister Johnson creates a romantic
hero who passes for an African, who fails to reflect the
Nigerian character. For example, in Things Fall Apart, a
novel about what some people would call a clash of
African and European cultures in the advent of
colonialism, a British District Commissioner observes that
in “many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization
to different parts of Africa,” he has learned that it was
beneath his position to attend to “undignified details” such
as “cutting a hanged man from the tree” because such an
act “would give the natives a poor opinion of him”
(Achebe, 1958: 179). And naturally, in the book […] he
planned to write he would stress that point. […] The story
of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged
himself would make interesting reading. One could
almost write an entire chapter on him. Perhaps not a
whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.
There was so much else to include, and one must be firm
in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of
the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the
Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
The District Commissioner ironically can be reduce into
a paragraph material which Achebe has used for an
entire novel, hence giving his audience limited access to
information on Africa. Thus for Achebe, instead of turning
this people‟s history and wellbeing into a “footnote” in
history as many Western writers had done, he writes an
entire novel detailing the African way of life, sensibility,
spirituality and intellectualism, something that is even
more apparent particularly in Arrow of God projecting
more or less a similar period as Things Fall Apart. Neither
does Achebe romanticise the social dispensation of the
Igbo cosmology since the narrator also raises concern
over the questionable slaying of Ikemefuna as a sacrifice
to the gods and the throwing away of twins in the evil
forest. The suicide the passage refers to comes after the
protagonist‟s return to his clan only to find that “things
have fallen apart” since the advent of colonialism has put
a knife on the centre that held his society together. The
first question this raises in relation to this novel is: If,
indeed, sub-Saharan Africa did not have “Law,” why then
does Umuofia banish Okonkwo from his clan for seven
years as punishment for breaking the code of his
society‟s values? The second is: where does one situate
Igbo metaphysics if the Igbo did not have a belief system
of note? These rhetorical questions simply undermine
what Hegel and other Eurocentric scholars professed
about Africa on the “Unhistorical” dimensions as the
continent with its rich heritage has never been tabula
rasa.
Achebe‟s maiden and archetypal African Anglophone
novel also presents pre-colonial traditional beliefs,
attitudes and practices, and a social dispensation that
survived mostly through oral tradition. Though not a
philosopher, Achebe manages to record not only his
people‟s history and anthropology, but also their
philosophy. By representing his people‟s traditional
beliefs, attitudes and practices with fidelity, Achebe
manages to underline the philosophy inherent in the Igbo
cosmos. The belief system of the Igbo brings to light the
personal god, chi, progressing to a supreme deity, thebenevolent creator, Chukwu, who created the visible
universe (uwa). Achebe‟s fiction could be classified as
part of fictions seeking to reclaim Africa‟s past and offer
perspectives that would otherwise be dismissed as
inconsequential or given superficial treatment in
Eurocentric representation. More significantly, this work
of fiction—though not necessarily a historical account in
the real sense of the word—manages to reveal the
profoundly religious nature of the Igbo people and how
they interpreted truth and being.
These traditional beliefs, attitudes and practices of
African peoples that found their way into African modern
fictions did not occur by accident. They are ready-made
materials that African writers found appropriate from their
respective society. In this regard, Mbiti (1970)—a
pioneering historian of African philosophy—underscores
the centrality of the traditional beliefs, attitudes and
practices of African peoples, arguing that ignoring their
deeply religious nature “can only lead to a lack of
understanding African behaviour and problems” and
religion constitutes “the strongest element in traditional
background” that “exerts probably the greatest influence
upon the thinking and living of the people concerned”:
1. Mbiti defines African philosophy as “the understanding,
attitude of mind, logic and perception behind the manner
in which African peoples think, act or speak in different
situations of life”
2. Mbiti‟s conception, hints at the presence of African
philosophy in these traditional African societies since time
immemorial.
In fact, his definition can be used to refer to what Achebe
and other African writers produce as reflections of the
philosophy of the people they represent in their fiction.
As Onyewuenyi (1991) points out in “Is there an African
Philosophy?”, “we can and should talk about African
philosophy, because the African culture has its own way
of establishing order” and has “its own view of life,” “the
starting point of philosophy” (38). Because these
traditional societies had ready-made materials in terms of
traditional thought and belief, prominent African writers
such as Soyinka depends on Yoruba, Achebe on Igbo
and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong‟o, an African writer from Kenya in
East Africa, on Gikuyu metaphysics to explore in their
fiction the thinking of their people and to make sense of
their social dispensation and cosmology. The fact that
they found “complete” ready-made materials in their
society, representing their people‟s cosmology and social
dispensation attests to the existence of a complex way of
life that Hegel and many of his like-minded Eurocentric
scholars and philosophers had failed to appreciate.
Ngũgĩ‟s The River Between, a novel published in 1965
representing the conflict that ensued as Christianity
encroached upon the traditions and beliefs of the Gikuyu
in Kenya, also illustrates how the African languages bear
Andindilile 131
testimony to the pre-colonial existence of traditional
beliefs, attitudes and practices. After all, in the
nomenclature of the African peoples, missionaries did
find ready-made concepts that apply to the conception of
Truth, Being, and Providence. The River Between shows
that the Gikuyu believed in the Supreme Deity, Murungu,
the same name used to refer to the Judeo-Christian God
in Gikuyu. For example, the novel talks about the big
Mugumo tree, a religious symbol in traditional religion, as
a “mysterious” and “holy and awesome,” “ancient,” “a
sacred tree,” “a tree of Murungu” (God) (Ngũgĩ, 1965:
29). When referring to the Gikuyu religious practices,
Waiyaki the novel‟s protagonist considers the “ignorance
of his people” who worshipped “Murungu, Mwenenyaga,
Ngai” the Gikuyu deity whom the “unerring white man had
called […] the prince of darkness” (Ngũgĩ 29). And yet
these same names also refer to the Creator
(“Mwenenyaga”) or God (“Ngai” or “Murungu”) in the local
Gikuyu language. In a Gikuyu song deliberately published
in Gikuyu in the novel written in English “Ngai”—the
denigrated local deity—also refers to Lord Jesus Christ.
The interest here is not to liken Christianity to the Gikuyu
traditional belief, but to highlight the pre-Christian
existence of the Gikuyu cosmology that allowed the
locals to describe the natural order of the universe and
make sense of it as they lived in harmony with their
environment. In other words, at the level of conception,
many of the early European philosophers generally
ignored the metaphysics of the Africans, which in
retrospect could have helped them understand Africans,
and hence help fill their knowledge gaps with empirical
evidence. Instead, they had pandered to the
commonplace Eurocentric beliefs seeking to dismiss
Africa as “Unhistorical” when the opposite is actually true.
Because these traditional beliefs, attitudes and
practices, as well as linguistic nuances regarding African
thought existed in African traditional societies, both the
African writers and African philosophers draw from the
same pool of oral literary traditions and belief system. In
fact, Irere (2001), argues that “there is an obvious sense
in which oral literature can be considered to be the „true‟
literature” (31) primarily because it remains the most
widely spread form of expression through which African
sensibilities are most readily attuned. Indeed, it remains
the most dominant mode of expression that continues
defining and redefining African ways of life beyond the
esoteric view of elitist discourse. Indeed, much of the
African knowledge and thought, which writers and
philosophers exploit in their bid to both understand
African thought and espouse African philosophy, are
encoded in the oral traditions of the African peoples in
which traditional African philosophy also resides. These
are the basic raw materials for their ideas and expression
of African sensibilities. In Sub-Saharan Africa, these have
largely been passed on through the word of mouth,
hence making orality centrifugal to understanding African.ways of life.
Oruka (1990) notes that the absence of written records
regarding the past philosophical activity of many Africans
should not “limit the sources from which we could detect
traces of such activities” (60). Hence both African writers
and philosophers in their own way have tapped into the
mine of knowledge that the oral traditions engender as
part of their attempts to come up with interpretations that
reflect the African spirit and thought. In the process,
these African writers and philosophers attempt to
Africanise knowledge and thought. To do so, as
Mudimbe (1988) points out in The Invention of Africa,
“they have to first think about the form, the content, and
the style of „Africanising‟ knowledge” and how to integrate
“traditional systems of thought and their possible relation
to the normative genre of knowledge” (x). After all, these
beliefs help us to understand something about the real
Africa.
In an ironical twist of fate, modern African philosophy
has benefited from the pioneering writing of Father
Placide Tempels (1965), whose interpretation of the
Baluba culture in Bantu Philosophy initially published in
1945 exposed the limits of classical approaches to the
study of African ethnography, local rationalities and
African philosophy. For the first time, a European
philosopher referring to traditional African thought as
“Bantu Philosophy”. Actually this “Bantu philosophy” is a
misnomer and should only read Baluba Philosophy as he
only studied one ethnic group and there are diverse
ethnicities and belief systems within the continent albeit
with some commonalities. This qualification is vital as in
Africa there is a multiplicity of cultures and belief systems
that cannot be reduced into just one philosophy. Usually
it is this reductive approach to the diverse cultures of the
African peoples that has also resulted into the lumping all
its subcultures into a unitary whole without divergences.
What is significant here, however, is that Tempels‟
intervention treats “Bantu Philosophy” as an intellectual
product rather than as “savage mentality” or “primitive
thought” hitherto common terms among many of the
Western anthropologists. In this regard, Tempels explains:
“Behaviour can be neither universal nor permanent
unless it is based upon a concatenation of ideas, a logical
system of thought, a complete positive philosophy of the
universe, of man and of the things which surround him, of
existence, life, death and the life beyond” (Tempels,
1945; 1965, 19). Tempels bears testimony to the
existence of philosophy in African traditional societies.
Although Tempels‟ project was geared towards “civilising”
Africans, something critics have not hesitated to pounce
on, he does something that many of his counterparts in
the West tended to ignore—alerting the West to the
ignored and much maligned philosophy of ethnic and
indigenous African groups.
And yet, considering the gulf between Western
philosophy whose terms have been used to analyse the
created Africa and African philosophy which tries to deal
with the fundamental question of epistemology in the real
Africa, much depends on the role African philosophers
play in propagating what Mudimbe calls “African gnosis”
when examining the extent to which one can talk of an
“African knowledge” (Mudimbe, 1985:, 149). The concern
in this study, however, is not questioning whether there is
African knowledge but how African philosophers and
writers have attempted to reclaim that knowledge to
dispel the unfair marginalisation of Africa in the world of
knowledge. In fact, thanks to the efforts of many African
philosophers, an African philosophy, seen from an
Afrocentric perspective, has been established in African
scholarship. This situation is different from the midtwentieth century when both African literature and African
philosophy appeared non-existent in Western discourse
and early modern writers had to struggle to bring to light
something that was there for all and sundry to see and
learn in the sub-Saharan oral African traditions that could
have rendered new meaning and insights on Africa had
the Europeans had the patience to stop and listen
carefully. Although Leo Frobenius, a German explorer
and ethnologist wandered throughout Africa at the
beginning of the twentieth century, he read Pigafetta and
Portuguese traveller‟s reports, hence neglecting listening
to the Africans themselves. His writings with Douglas
Fox—African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa—
introduce some African traditional tales and epic into
European literature. However, they do not go far enough
in bridging the knowledge gaps in Africa. In other words,
more listening to the stories of Africans themselves could
have helped to fill the European knowledge void.
The „void‟ created by colonialism and its dismissive
approach to indigenous African thought posed challenges
to Africans of diverse backgrounds. Indeed, Africans
found themselves in situations where they had to find
new meaning about life and modernity. Inevitably
philosophers, including non-professionals, emerged. The
non-professionals—political leaders—appear to have
developed what can be called a “practical philosophy”
aimed at finding meaning for their people emerging from
the trauma of colonialism. These non-professionals
include Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (in West Africa),
Sedar Senghor of Senegal (also in West Africa) who did
study some philosophy, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia (in
Central Africa) and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (in East
Africa) fondly called Mwalimu (Teacher) in his homeland.
Nyerere, a former president of Tanzania, espoused
Ujamaa, an African philosophy that emphasised the
family, or community, as the driving force of African
socialism; Kaunda, the former president of Zambia,
promoted a brand of African Humanism, which
emphasised man‟s potential to help others overcome “the
animal in man.” The African statesmen embraced
philosophy because they had to think about helping their
people find new meaning after the colonialism trauma. As @@Wiredu (1980) notes, these leaders had to find answers
to questions concerning the suitable socio-political
organisation system to catalyse development undermined
by colonialism, in addition to restoring national cultural
identity condemned as barbaric3
under colonialism. Like
in literature, Kaunda and Nyerere found ready-made
materials in the traditions and beliefs of their own people,
which they integrated in their philosophies as they
charted their political course.
Africanising African knowledge, however, remains
tricky considering that the end product has to make
sense in the modern world. As a result, Wiredi (1980)
explains, there is a need to distinguish between
philosophy in Africa “as folk thought preserved in oral
traditions” and African philosophy as “critical, individual
reflections, using modern logical and conceptual
techniques” (ix). He stresses this distinction to avoid
“some unfortunate consequences” (ix), which may prompt
some, particularly in the West to dismiss the former as
lacking seriousness without the support of the latter. The
synthesis of the two, then, can help balance the “MetaAfrican Philosophy” with “modern philosophical thinking”
in a bid to advance the modern African philosophical
tradition (xi-xii). Wiredu also sees “a third possible
sense” in which African individuals, mostly in villages, farremoved from modern intellectual influences who
possess “critical and original philosophical reflections”
“distinct from repetitions of the folk ideas of their people”
(37), which unfortunately remain outside the structured
philosophical tradition since no one records these ideas.
These undocumented views, in fact, represent some of
the dilemmas facing the development of African
philosophy that represents the real Africa. After all, lack
of a written record does not mean absence of an
indigenous African thought; overlooking this mine of
knowledge found in practically every traditional African
society entails ignoring a large chunk of what constitutes
African knowledge and philosophy. In the West,
unfortunately, they can only work with what has been
published, whether in literature or in philosophy. For
Africa, written records do not paint the whole picture. Still,
those African writers who have bothered to represent
Africa in their works of philosophy have helped to
illustrate that there is a lot that the West did not know
about on Africa in terms of African philosophy and African
societies primarily because of their mission was to bring
“light” to an already condemned “dark continent”, hence
missing out on the rich knowledge spread out all over the
continent.
It is evident that, in the process of redefining African
history and philosophy, African writers and philosophers
need one another because literature remains one of the
modes through which the West, whose discourse they
3
In this section, I benefit from Kwasi Wiredu’s insights on early African
philosophy presented in his Philosophy and the African Culture (Bloomington
and Indiana: Indiana UP, 1966) 145
Andindilile 133
have been trying to counter for many generations, and
African themselves can learn about the continent‟s
history, philosophy and religion. The efforts of both the
African writers and African philosophies may in the long
run help to synthesise the Africa the West helped to
create and the real Africa that exists regardless of the
way the West perceives it, so that we may eventually
have a better understanding of Africa.
On the other hand, there is also a need to acknowledge
Africa‟s complicity in the paradox of the created Africa,
the dilemma that has been effectively captured in
Soyinka‟s (2003) play Death of the King’s Horseman.
Soyinka claims that this play “is based on events which
took place in Oyo, ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946”
as that “year, the lives of Elesin (Olori Elesin), his son,
and the Colonial District Officer intertwined with
disastrous results set out in the play.” In the play, Elesin,
the king‟s horseman, destined to accompany the dead
king, the Alaafin of Oyo, on a journey to the land of the
dead must through his sheer will-power commit ritual
suicide as part of the rite of passage to the larger world of
the ancestors, which in Yoruba metaphysics links the
world of the living and that of the dead. On the eve of his
death, however, the king‟s horseman chooses to marry a
young bride, in fact, his son‟s fiancée. Eventually, in the
defining moment he does not die as his will fails him and
the British officer intervenes. To atone for his family and
save his community from an inevitable collapse, Olunde,
the horseman‟s eldest heir who has returned from
medical studies abroad to bury his father, dies in his
stead. In the dénouement of the play, when the women of
the market unveil corpse of the son, the King‟s horseman
breaks his neck with chains and dies, hence taking with
him an unnecessary life of his son. This death scene
highlights the futile attempts for by the British Colonial
Officer, Pilkins, who—because he cannot ignore this
barbarity of the custom— intervenes at the precise
moment of the Horseman‟s intended transition in an
attempt to save his life. By the time the plays ends, he
realises that instead of saving a life, he has precipitated
two deaths. Hence he laments:
O god!
Can I be blamed for doing justice?
Is kindness my crime?
I was trying to save a life—
And I have caused a double death.
Man only understands the good he does into himself,
When he acts for others,
Good is turned into evil; evil is turned into good!
Although the Elesin attempts to blame the white man for
his own failure, Soyinka deliberately changes the original
story to make the horseman complicit in his own death
(as evidenced by his taking a young bride). As Moore
(1980) observes, by letting the Elesin marry a young
bride on the eve of his death — hence becoming acollaborator in his own doom—Soyinka “leads the
audience away from sterile clichés about „culture conflict‟
towards a more subtle understanding of the event,
turning it into a critique of the whole process by which
Africans consented to their undermining of their vision of
the world” (emphasis added). What is not lost in this
presentation is the way African, in this case Yoruba,
metaphysics are pivotal to not only determining an
African way of life but also understanding the complex
issues they face as well. Moreover, being complicit in the
creation of a contestable Africa does not preclude the
African cosmology, which render meaning to the actions
of Elesin and Olunde. It is this long-established African
belief system and knowledge that help to understand
African wellbeing so long neglected in the created Africa.
Conclusion
Although this study cannot claim to be exhaustive in its
analysis of the issues pertaining to the intersection
between literature and philosophy in the grappling with
issues relating to Africa, it does raise some issues that
illuminates to the ongoing debate on Africa, particular by
considering how the two “Africas” pose challenges to
understanding the continent and the multiplicities of its
peoples and cultures. The analysis demonstrates how
both philosophy and literature have been fields of
contestations in the discourse about Africa. It also shows
how both literature and philosophy unite in debunking the
often myopic, reductive and grossly biased Eurocentric
thoughts about the much maligned Africa to bring about a
new consciousness and a new understanding about
Africa.
Generally, stereotypes about Africa witnessed in the
imperial adventure novels in the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth century that denigrated Africa
and its peoples were consistent with the mainstream
elevated thoughts of Europeans as embodied in Hegel‟s
Philosophy of History and other similar writings. Though
changes have occurred and much has been learned
about Africa from both African philosophers and modern
African writers, there is still a lot that needs to be done
before bridging the gap between the created Africa—a
relic of colonialism and what it engenders—and the real
Africa that continues to thrive regards of any negative
reasoning about Africa and stereotyping. This means
there is still a lot that ought to be done to make the real
Africa visible to the rest of the world. In this regard,
African writers and philosophers should continue
ensuring that the real Africa does not get swallowed by
the created Africa in their attempt to bridge the
knowledge gap; otherwise, they will, like the Elesin, remain
complicit in bringing death to their peoples‟ ways of life
and African perception of Truth and Being.
Conflict of Interests
The author has not declared any conflict of interests.
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1
A common expression in colonial discourse that Chinua Achebe and other
African writers often oppose in their non-fiction.
ii A shorter version of this paper was presented at the joint Philosophical
Society and English Association Symposium “Philosophy and Literature:
Intersections” in New York, USA
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