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This is Philosophy Bytes with me, David.
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Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
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What is Africana philosophy? Why do philosophers now use this term and where did it come from? Does it just refer to philosophy that takes place in Africa? Chike Jeffers of Dalhousie University explains.
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Chike Jeffers, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
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We're talking today about Africana philosophy. What is Africana philosophy, and why is it Africana philosophy and not African philosophy?
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Great question. Africana philosophy is a larger category within which African philosophy can be seen as one component. The term Africana philosophy comes about after another term, Africana Studies, had already been in use. There was at Cornell University, an Africana studies program, part of the general explosion of black studies programs at U.S. universities. And the use of the term Africana Studies was part of the attempt to. To be very clear about covering not just African American life, but also African, Afro, Caribbean and other places. And so how we then find this term becoming now specified in relation to philosophy. So Lucius Outlaw, a pioneering African American philosopher, he organized a conference, funnily enough, in the year of my birth, 1982. He had been at a number of conferences in the US in the 1970s that are seen, in retrospect as really important for developing African American philosophy as a tradition. But he had also visited Africa, met some of the philosophers, doing important work over there. And so he tried to bring these groups together at this conference in 1982. It's aiming to gather together what's going on in African philosophy, what's going on in African American philosophy and anywhere else within what we call the African diaspora.
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So it covers African American philosophy, it covers Afro Caribbean philosophy and other African diasporas, and it covers the entire continent of Africa. Can you give us an idea of the range of traditions and communities that Africana philosophy covers?
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Yeah, it covers traditions on the continent. And when we think of recorded traditions, that is, when we think of philosophy as it has been set down in writing, that takes us back as a starting point to ancient Egyptian philosophy. There in Africa, you have one of the two first births of writing roughly simultaneous, because it's in the fourth millennium BCE that we have the emergence of writing in both Mesopotamia and Egypt. You know, that's where we go back to when thinking of what's been done in writing. But when one considers that a majority of African cultures we could say were until the 19th to 20th century, oral cultures, cultures without writing, that therefore presses the issue of what we can say about philosophy, apart from writing, that's a very important part of Africana philosophy, the search for an attempt to identify that which is philosophical within oral cultures.
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So I can see that's a major challenge. If some of these ideas are passed from generation to generation, not on paper, but orally, that must pose particular problems in trying to excavate the philosophy.
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Yes, there's been a lot of debate about that. There were philosophers in the 20th century, professional African philosophers, who in fact argued that trying to look to the past, trying to look to oral culture specifically for philosophy, was a mistake, that it was sometimes a matter of dressing up anthropological descriptions of African cultures as philosophy. But in terms of those who have argued that it is indeed possible and in fact, relatively easy to access the philosophical ideas of these oral cultures, it's useful to take the example of Kwame Jeche, Ghanaian philosopher. He published a book in 1987, an essay on African Philosophical thought, in which he looked at his own Akan culture and focused on proverbs and showed pretty convincingly that proverbs can often carry very weighty philosophical claims within them. And one of the points that he made is that for those that worry that this is an anthropological description of culture rather than the production of philosophy, which the critic might say, the production of philosophy has to do with individual minds, not with a whole culture. And to this cecce pointed out that we can indeed imagine that there were individual minds who came up with the philosophical claims embedded in these prover. The fact that we don't know these people's names, the fact that these statements became sort of communal property, doesn't rob them of their philosophical significance.
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You've talked about ancient Egypt. That's obviously philosophy emerging from the north of the continent. Are there distinctive differences between north, south, east and west?
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Geography is particularly interesting to consider in relation to the writing traditions of the continent. As we've mentioned already, there's ancient Egyptian thought in the northeast part of the continent. Connected to Egypt is the ancient Ethiopian tradition. Once we get into the common era and by the 4th century AD Ethiopia has become officially Christian, we get more and more writings beginning from around that time. It's important to note that the Abuna, the head of the Ethiopian church, traditionally was sent to Ethiopia from Egypt. You know, a Coptic leader who would come down to be the head of the Ethiopian church. And obviously, people often, when they think of ancient Egypt, they detach it from the rest of Africa. That's one problem that people have when trying to conceptualize African philosophy. They Sometimes don't even think about ancient Egypt because of this way of pulling Egypt outside of the continent. And one of the ways in which we can see that that's an illegitimate way to position ancient Egyptian philosophy. Not that it shouldn't be related to traditions outside the continent, like, for example, Mesopotamian thought. But when you consider the connection between Egypt and Ethiopia, you see that these writing traditions affect each other. And of course, people tend not to pretend that Ethiopia isn't part of Africa. So, you know, the other interesting thing to mention is the writing traditions that come about in Africa before European colonialism as a result of the spread of Islam. That's when you really get, for example, West Africa being an important part of the writing traditions of the continent. Eventually you also have writings in languages like Swahili on the eastern coast of Africa.
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So if you were dividing it into time periods, you've got ancient Egyptian, the arrival of Christianity, the arrival of Islam. Are those two further important delineation points, and are there others?
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I think that they are important delineation points precisely because we are talking about how we can find philosophy. If we take a broad view that there's philosophy in both written and oral traditions, then there is this question of how do we break things up temporally? And the point you made that we could speak of ancient Egypt and we can also speak of the arrival of Christianity in Ethiopia, we can speak of the arrival of Islam on the continent. It's important to point those out precisely because of the way writing traditions are associated with those two Abrahamic faiths. Then naturally, what we can pose as a hugely important moment coming after those is the beginning of the slave trade and then European colonization of Africa. That, of course, is what brings us to the point, by the time we get to the 20th century, where now all of the cultures of Africa have been introduced to writing. It's at that point the entire continent has become part of what I call the sphere of writing cultures. I've actually played around with calling it the scribosphere, you know. So there's the tragic fact that Africa becomes fully part of the sphere of writing cultures, of the scribosphere, under the very painful and destructive forces of slavery and colonialism.
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I was going to ask you about that because you've described this very long period in time, this vast geography.
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Yes.
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And I'm interested to know what, if anything, what issues, what problems ties this all together. And I'm guessing that that at least in the past few hundred years, that slavery and discrimination is an essential part of that, yes.
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There are the questions of what to do about slavery and colonialism. Those are themes that, once you get to whatever we want to call modern Africana philosophy, are inescapable themes in a way. You can also, though, see them as part of a larger question of what to do with European thought, what to do about the coming together under very oppressive circumstances of African and European thought. Right. And there's this dominance that Europe has over the world as we get to the 19th and the 20th century. That means that whatever traditions you're talking about, you have people grappling with what to make of the ideas that have come from Europe, questions of what to say about modern science as developed by Europeans. You know, there are these important questions about how you hang on to non European traditions in the face of the European imperial reorganization of the world.
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You talk about European imperialism. But of course, in philosophy, traditionally, people draw this, I guess, slightly arbitrary distinction between Anglo American philosophy and continental philosophy. And Anglo American philosophy is concerned a great deal with conceptual analysis. Continental philosophy, there's a tradition of being more interested in history and in narrative. Where does Africana philosophy fit into that? Or is there a separate category for Africana philosophy?
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That's a great question. To the extent that you can see these two traditions of the analytic versus the continental, there are absolutely ways in which you see that reflected in Africana philosophy. And that has a lot to do with the particular colonizers that have reshaped Africa, foremost among them being the British and the French. And so because of that, you have people like Kwazi Woredu from Ghana, who studies at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle. And so therefore is naturally being drawn into this Anglophone analytic tradition. You also have people like Paulant Ntonji of Benin, and he studies in France with Louis Althusser. His dissertation is on Husserl, for example. Right. Just to use those two examples, you can see how there's going to be ways in which they naturally fit into the two sides of the divide. The interesting thing is that there are so many similarities between the two of them that can't be reduced to anything about their European training. But really is, I think, a matter of their identities as African philosophers in the 20th century. So these are two of the philosophers who raised important challenges about what it means to try and look for philosophy and oral traditions. They expressed forms of skepticism about that. And yet also, as their careers go on, I think you actually see a swing in both of them towards saying, okay, there might be ways of looking to oral traditions for philosophy that we disapprove of. But modern African philosophy does need to in some way involve the investigation of our oral traditions. And so we see them both coming around to a positive view after sort of their negative critique of previous attempts to find philosophy and oral traditions. That is, I think, a product of their status as African philosophers, apart from the stylistic differences that we can see coming out of their different training in the British versus the French traditions.
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You've talked about the influence from Britain and from France going back to Africa. I wonder what European philosophy, American philosophy, has to learn from Africana philosophy.
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It's a great question, and one easy answer, I think, is. Is insofar as all philosophers have good reason to engage in metaphilosophy, that is, philosophical inquiry about the nature of philosophy itself. Then there's this way in which African philosophy, as it becomes a distinctive tradition of writing in the 20th century, poses methodological and conceptual questions about the nature of philosophy. Precisely because of this issue, what is philosophy? Can we only look to traditions of writing for philosophy? What does it mean to look for philosophy in oral cultures? That very debate forced a kind of metaphilosophical bent to the development of African philosophy in the 20th century in such a way that anybody in the world who's at all interested in thinking about what philosophy is has great reason to take seriously Africana philosophy as a tradition.
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CK Jeffers, thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you.
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You've been listening to Philosophy Bites. This episode was made in association with the Institute of Philosophy and supported by the Ideas Workshop, part of Open Society Foundations. For more Philosophy bites, go to philosophybytes.com.