African and Africana Philosophy

African philosophy is the philosophical thought of Africa and its peoples, and Africana philosophy is the wider field that also includes the thought of people of African descent in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. The written record runs from the wisdom texts of ancient Egypt, through North African Christianity, the Ge'ez literature of Ethiopia and the Arabic scholarship of Timbuktu, to the anti-colonial and academic philosophy of the twentieth century. Alongside the written record stands a much larger oral one, of proverbs, stories and the reflections of individual sages, whose status as philosophy has itself been one of the field's central questions.

The subject matters for two reasons. It contains original work on old questions, such as the relation of reason to religious authority, the nature of the person and the basis of political legitimacy. And it was shaped by an argument. European thinkers of the Enlightenment and after, among them David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Hegel, wrote that Africans lacked reason or history, a view that helped justify the Atlantic slave trade and the Scramble for Africa. Much modern African philosophy began as a reply.

The oldest African texts that can be called philosophical are the instructions, or sebayt, of ancient Egypt: advice from a father or an official to his son on how to live well. The most famous, the Instruction of Ptahhotep, presents itself as the teaching of a vizier of King Djedkare Isesi of the Fifth Dynasty, in the twenty-fifth or twenty-fourth century BCE. The attribution may be a literary device, since the surviving copies, including the Prisse Papyrus now in Paris, date from the Middle Kingdom several centuries later. Its maxims recommend listening before speaking, humility in success, honesty in judgement, self-control before superiors, and kindness to one's wife, and it observes that wisdom can be found among the lowly as well as the great.

Behind these texts lies the idea of maat, which can be translated as truth, justice, balance or right order. Maat was at once the order of the cosmos, the justice the king was bound to uphold, and the conduct expected of each person; after death, the heart was weighed against the feather of Maat. Later texts such as the Tale of the Eloquent Peasant, in which a robbed farmer lectures an official on justice, and the Instruction of Amenemope from the New Kingdom, parts of which closely parallel the biblical Book of Proverbs, show this tradition of moral reflection over two thousand years. Whether such writings count as philosophy or as wisdom literature is debated. So is the claim, made by George G. M. James in Stolen Legacy (1954) and in another form by the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, that Greek philosophy was largely taken from Egypt. Most historians reject the strong version of that claim, while accepting that Greek writers themselves credited Egyptian learning and that Egypt and Greece were in long contact, as the article on ancient Greek philosophy describes.

Under Greek and Roman rule, North Africa produced some of the most influential thinkers of the ancient world. Alexandria was for centuries the largest centre of learning in the Mediterranean, home to the Jewish philosopher Philo, to Christian theologians such as Origen, and later to the mathematician and Platonist Hypatia. Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, was born in Egypt and studied in Alexandria before teaching in Rome. Tertullian, one of the first Christian writers in Latin, came from Carthage.

The greatest of these was Augustine of Hippo, born in 354 at Thagaste, in what is now Algeria, to a Roman-African family of the Roman Empire. After a career as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, Rome and Milan he converted to Christianity, returned to Africa and became bishop of Hippo Regius, where he wrote the Confessions and The City of God and died in 430 as the Vandals besieged the city. His ideas on time, memory, the will and grace shaped medieval Christian philosophy. Whether to treat him as an African philosopher is itself discussed; he wrote in Latin within a Mediterranean culture, but he lived almost all his life in Africa. The tradition continued under Islam: Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in 1332, wrote in the Muqaddimah a theory of the rise and fall of states driven by group solidarity, discussed in Islamic and Jewish philosophy.

Christianity became the religion of the Kingdom of Aksum in the fourth century, and the Ge'ez language of its church became the vehicle of a long literary tradition in Ethiopia. Much of its wisdom literature consists of translations and adaptations of Greek works, often reached through Arabic: the Physiologus, a book of animal lore with moral lessons, the Life and Maxims of Skendes, and the Book of the Wise Philosophers, a collection of sayings attributed to Greek and other sages, adapted from an Arabic source in the early sixteenth century; a scholar named Abba Mikael is usually credited with the work.

The most original Ethiopian philosophical text is the Hatata, or Inquiry, of Zera Yacob. According to the text, he was born in 1599 near Aksum, the son of a poor farmer, and trained in the traditional church schools. Under Emperor Susenyos, who converted to Catholicism under Jesuit influence and persecuted those who resisted, he was accused before the king and fled, living for two years in a cave near the Tekezé river. There he reflected on the claims of Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Muslims and Jews, each of whom said their faith was true and the others false. Since they could not all be right, he concluded, a person must test religious teaching against the reason that God gives to every human being. By this test he accepted a creator, argued from the impossibility of an endless chain of causes, and rejected doctrines he thought contrary to reason, such as the claim that monastic celibacy is better than marriage. He held that all people are equal before God, criticised slavery and argued for the equality of husband and wife. He wrote the Hatata around 1667 at the request of Walda Heywat, the son of his patron, who wrote a second Hatata of his own, more practical and closer to traditional Ethiopian moral teaching, drawing many examples from the Book of the Wise Philosophers.

In 1920 the Italian scholar Carlo Conti Rossini argued that both treatises were forgeries by Giusto d'Urbino, a nineteenth-century Italian missionary who had sent the manuscripts to Europe, and Eugen Mittwoch added linguistic arguments in 1934. The Canadian philosopher Claude Sumner rejected the forgery theory in the 1970s, and most scholars now accept Zera Yacob's authorship, though the debate has not been completely closed.

In the Mali Empire and then the Songhai Empire, Timbuktu grew into one of the great centres of Islamic learning. After the pilgrimage of Mansa Musa in 1324 and under the patronage of Askia Muhammad I around 1500, scholars gathered around the Sankore and other mosques, teaching law, theology, Arabic grammar, logic, astronomy and ethics, and copying and collecting manuscripts. Their thought belongs to the wider world of Islam, but they wrote on local questions, from the conduct of rulers to trade and slavery.

The best known is Ahmad Baba (1556–1627). After Moroccan forces conquered Songhai in 1591, he was taken in chains to Morocco in 1594 with other scholars, and his library was lost. Released after the death of the sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, he returned to Timbuktu and wrote, among more than forty works, a legal opinion on slavery that rejected the idea that dark skin made anyone liable to be enslaved and argued that Muslims of the West African peoples must not be enslaved. A later tradition of reforming scholarship flourished in the Sokoto Caliphate in the nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts survive in the region, and in 2012–13, when armed jihadist groups occupied Timbuktu, librarians smuggled most of them to safety in Bamako.

Anton Wilhelm Amo was born around 1703 near Axim on the Gold Coast, now Ghana, a member of the Nzema people. As a small child he was taken to Amsterdam by the Dutch West India Company and given to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, in the Holy Roman Empire, whose family raised and educated him. He studied at Halle, where in 1729 he defended a disputation on the legal status of Africans in Europe, now lost, and in 1734 received a doctorate in philosophy at Wittenberg with a dissertation on the impassivity of the human mind. In it he argued, against Descartes, that the mind itself does not feel or sense: sensation belongs to the living body, not to the immaterial soul. He also wrote a treatise on logic and the art of philosophising soberly and accurately, and taught at Halle and Jena. Facing growing hostility, he returned to the Gold Coast around 1747 and probably died around 1759 at the Dutch fort of San Sebastian at Shama. Amo was largely forgotten in Europe until the twentieth century, when Ghanaian and German scholars revived his memory as the first African known to have taught philosophy at a European university.

In the 1930s a group of Black students in Paris, among them Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, founded the movement called négritude, a word Césaire coined. In the journal L'Étudiant noir (1935) and in Césaire's long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) they rejected French assimilation and asserted the value of African cultures and of Black identity. Senghor gave négritude a philosophical form, arguing that African ways of knowing were intuitive and participatory where European ones were analytic, a contrast critics found too close to the colonial stereotypes it meant to overturn. In his essay Black Orpheus (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre praised the movement as a necessary but passing stage in a struggle against racism. Senghor went on to serve as the first president of independent Senegal from 1960 to 1980, while the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka mocked the movement by remarking that a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude.

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, was taught by Césaire, fought for Free France in the Second World War, and trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) used phenomenology and psychoanalysis to describe the experience of being a Black man under a white gaze that fixes him as an object, and of colonised people who learn to see themselves through the eyes of the coloniser. Fanon accepted the dignity that négritude sought but refused to locate liberation in a recovered past.

In 1953 he took charge of a psychiatric hospital at Blida in Algeria and soon joined the National Liberation Front in its war against France. The Wretched of the Earth (1961), with a preface by Sartre, argued that colonialism rests on violence and that the colonised regain their humanity by overthrowing it. Its most prophetic chapters warned that after independence a narrow national middle class might simply take the place of the colonisers, a warning many later saw borne out. Fanon died of leukaemia in December 1961, months before Algerian independence. His work became central to anti-colonial movements, to the Black Power movement in the United States and to postcolonial theory, and it links this field to continental philosophy.

The decolonisation of Africa gave philosophy a political task: to find principles for the new states. Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied philosophy in the United States and led Ghana to independence in 1957, set out his answer in Consciencism (1964). Africa, he argued, carried three inheritances, traditional African society, Islam and Euro-Christian culture, and a new philosophy should combine them on the basis of the humanist and egalitarian values of the first, which he thought best realised through a materialist socialism. Critics have noted how quickly this philosophy came to justify a one-party state; Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966.

Julius Nyerere, the first leader of independent Tanganyika, later Tanzania, proposed ujamaa, a Swahili word for familyhood. In an essay of 1962 and in the Arusha Declaration of 1967 he argued that African socialism should grow not from class struggle but from the extended family, in which everyone works, everyone shares, and no one exploits another. The policy led to the grouping of rural people into collective villages, increasingly by compulsion in the mid-1970s, and to economic hardship, and Tanzania abandoned it after Nyerere stepped down in 1985. Yet his emphasis on equality, Swahili as a shared national language and the avoidance of ethnic politics left a lasting mark.

Many African languages express an idea of personhood summed up in the Nguni phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons; the shared concept is called ubuntu in Zulu and Xhosa and botho in Sotho and Tswana. On this view a human being becomes fully a person through relationships of care, respect and reciprocity, and personhood can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree. The Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti defended a strong version of the idea in 1984, and the Ghanaian Kwame Gyekye proposed a moderate one that left more room for individual rights.

In South Africa ubuntu took on public importance in the transition from apartheid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu invoked it to explain the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Nelson Mandela spoke of it often, and the Constitutional Court cited it in 1995 when it abolished the death penalty. Philosophers such as Mogobe Ramose and Thaddeus Metz have developed it into a general ethical theory centred on harmonious relationships, while critics warn that the term is often used vaguely or romanticised.

The modern debate over the very existence of African philosophy began with Bantu Philosophy by Placide Tempels, a Belgian Franciscan missionary in the Belgian Congo, published in French at Élisabethville, now Lubumbashi, in 1945 and in Paris in 1949. Tempels argued that the Bantu-speaking peoples shared an implicit philosophy in which being is force: everything in the world possesses a vital force that can grow or diminish, and morality aims to increase life. The book was meant partly to help missionaries and colonial officials, but it was also among the first European works to grant Africans a philosophy at all. The Rwandan priest Alexis Kagame refined the approach in 1956 by studying the grammar of Kinyarwanda, and John Mbiti's African Religions and Philosophy (1969) claimed that traditional African thought had a distinctive concept of time oriented towards the past.

This approach came to be called ethnophilosophy, the reconstruction of a whole people's collective world view, and in the 1970s it faced sharp criticism. The Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, in a book published in Paris in 1976 and in English in 1983 as African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, argued that ethnophilosophy wrongly assumed that all members of a culture agree, invented a philosophy for people who had not claimed one, and addressed itself to Western readers. Philosophy, he argued, is a body of critical texts produced by individual thinkers, and African philosophy is the philosophy Africans themselves produce. The Cameroonian Marcien Towa and the Nigerian Peter Bodunrin made related arguments. The Ghanaian Kwasi Wiredu, in Philosophy and an African Culture (1980), called for conceptual decolonisation: African philosophers should examine whether the problems they inherited from Western philosophy, such as the mind-body problem, arise at all when stated in their own languages, such as Akan, while also criticising traditional beliefs, such as authoritarian customs, with the same rigour they applied to Western ones.

The Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka of the University of Nairobi proposed a middle way. In 1978 he distinguished four trends in African philosophy: ethnophilosophy, nationalist-ideological philosophy such as Nkrumah's and Nyerere's, professional philosophy, and sage philosophy. From the 1970s he and his students recorded conversations with elders in Kenya who had no formal education, distinguishing folk sages, who faithfully reported the shared beliefs of their communities, from philosophic sages, who examined those beliefs critically and sometimes rejected them. The Luo elder Paul Mbuya Akoko, for example, gave reasoned views on communalism and the nature of God. Oruka's Sage Philosophy (1990) set out the project; he died in 1995. Critics asked whether the professional interviewer, not the sage, was doing the philosophy, a question that sharpened debates about authorship in an oral culture.

In the Americas, people of African descent built a parallel tradition of reflection on freedom, race and citizenship, beginning with the narratives and speeches of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, and earlier with the leaders of the Haitian Revolution. Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery in North Carolina, argued in A Voice from the South (1892) that Black women's education was central to the progress of the whole race, and later earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne. Alain Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar and a philosopher at Howard University, edited The New Negro (1925), the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance in New York, and developed a pluralist theory of values.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard, studied with William James and in Berlin. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he declared that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the colour line, and he described double consciousness, the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a society that holds one in contempt. A founder of the Pan-African movement, he spent his last years in Ghana at Nkrumah's invitation and died in Accra in 1963. The tradition continued through Martin Luther King Jr., the Caribbean writers C. L. R. James and Sylvia Wynter, and the American philosophers Angela Davis, Cornel West, Lucius Outlaw, Leonard Harris, Lewis Gordon and Charles Mills, whose The Racial Contract (1997) is discussed in analytic philosophy. The term Africana philosophy came into use in the 1980s and 1990s as professional bodies in the United States began to recognise the field.

The founders of the academic discipline have now died, Wiredu in 2022 and Hountondji in 2024, and a new generation works across the continent and the diaspora. The Ghanaian-British philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah questioned the idea of race in In My Father's House (1992). The Nigerian Sophie Oluwole compared the Yoruba sage Orunmila with Socrates, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí argued that gender as a fixed social hierarchy was imposed on Yoruba society by colonial rule. The Cameroonian Achille Mbembe and the Senegalese Souleymane Bachir Diagne write on race, the postcolony, and the history of philosophy in Arabic and French. A school of conversational philosophy based in Calabar, Nigeria, has tried to build new theories by structured debate between thinkers.

Questions of decolonising universities, given new force by the Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town in 2015, have made African philosophy a subject of public argument, and courses on it are now taught in Europe, the Americas and Asia as well as Africa. For the wider history of which it forms part, see the history of philosophy overview.