A CRITICAL TAKE ON THE DEBATE ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
Abstract
The contemporary debate on African philosophy took off from a derogatory standpoint. It was a response to the racially discriminatory claims made by European philosophers and anthropologists against Africans on the supposed inability of Africans to engage in sublime thinking. Numerous European scholars wrote extensively about the supposed intellectual inferiority of the African race. The peak came with the publication of Bantu Philosophy by Placid Tempels in 1946. Tempels admitted that indeed, there was immanent philosophy in African worldview. However, it was unknown to be the African mind. It required the Western mind to make it known to the world and to Africans. Numerous African scholars reacted to him, many toeing the line of ethno-philosophy he claimed Africans had, albeit unknowingly. Most of the African scholars missed the fundamental question of the position of African in the development of the formal philosophic enterprise. This work runs a detailed critique of these reactions from the backdrop of the copiously attested foundational role of Africans in the establishment of philosophy as a formal enterprise.
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