African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

A collection of essays by the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji that became a starting point of the debate over what African philosophy is. Hountondji attacks what he calls ethnophilosophy: works such as Placide Tempels's Bantu Philosophy, which claimed to describe the implicit, collective worldview of a whole people and to call it philosophy. Such works, he argues, assume a unanimity that no society has, and they speak for Africans, often to European readers, without letting individual Africans argue. Philosophy on his account is a body of explicit texts produced by individual thinkers in critical dialogue with one another, so African philosophy is simply philosophy produced by Africans, and its future depends on science, writing and open debate. The book includes essays on Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century philosopher born in what is now Ghana who taught in Germany, and on Kwame Nkrumah's Consciencism.

It forced a whole field to state its standards, and its argument about who gets to speak for a culture applies far beyond Africa.