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Reading path · Intermediate

African and Africana philosophy

This path reads philosophy from Africa and its diaspora, and the debate over what African philosophy is. It starts with Du Bois on double consciousness and with the Hatata, a seventeenth-century Ethiopian inquiry that tests religious claims by reason. It then follows the twentieth-century argument over ethnophilosophy, the attempt to read a philosophy off a people's shared beliefs: Hountondji's critique, Oruka's interviews with sages and Wiredu's essays. Fanon and Gyekye close the path. Allow about three months.

7 books, in order

  1. Step 1: The Souls of Black Folk

    W. E. B. Du Bois · 1903

    Du Bois's essays of 1903 introduce double consciousness, the sense of always seeing oneself through the eyes of others, and the colour line as the problem of the century.

    Where to start
    Read 'The Forethought' and chapter I, 'Of Our Spiritual Strivings', then chapter III, 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others', and chapter XIV, 'Of the Sorrow Songs'.
    Time
    1–2 weeks
    Difficulty
    Beginner

  2. Step 2: The Hatata Inquiries

    Zera Yacob (with Walda Heywat) · c. 1668; Walda Heywat's text later

    Zera Yacob's inquiry tests the claims of rival faiths by reason, and his student Walda Heywat adds practical ethics. Authorship has been disputed since 1920, when Carlo Conti Rossini argued that the nineteenth-century Capuchin missionary Giusto da Urbino forged the texts. The 2023 translators defend Ethiopian authorship, but the debate continues.

    Where to start
    Read Zera Yacob's text first, then Walda Heywat's, in the 2023 De Gruyter translation by Ralph Lee, Mehari Worku and Wendy Laura Belcher; Jeremy R. Brown, credited as a collaborator, wrote the appendices on the manuscripts.
    Time
    1 week
    Difficulty
    Intermediate

  3. Step 3: African Philosophy: Myth and Reality

    Paulin J. Hountondji · 1976 (English translation 1983)

    Hountondji argues that ethnophilosophy, which presents a people's shared world view as their philosophy, is a myth, and that philosophy is made of explicit, argued texts open to debate.

    Where to start
    Read chapters 1 to 3, 'An alienated literature', 'History of a myth' and 'African philosophy, myth and reality', in the second edition (1996).
    Time
    1–2 weeks
    Difficulty
    Intermediate

  4. Step 4: Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy

    H. Odera Oruka (editor) · 1990

    Oruka and his colleagues interviewed Kenyan sages to ask whether some were philosophers in their own right, critical of their own communities' beliefs. It offers an alternative to ethnophilosophy that keeps the named individual thinker at the centre.

    Where to start
    Read chapter 2, 'Sage philosophy: The basic questions and methodology', then compare a few folk sages (chapter 6) with philosophic sages (chapter 7).
    Time
    1–2 weeks
    Difficulty
    Beginner

  5. Step 5: Philosophy and an African Culture

    Kwasi Wiredu · 1980

    Wiredu's essays ask what philosophy can take from, and give to, African culture, and test Western philosophical assumptions against African language and thought. They lay the ground for his later programme of conceptual decolonisation.

    Where to start
    Begin with the title essay and the essay comparing African and Western thought, then read the chapters on truth.
    Time
    2 weeks
    Difficulty
    Intermediate

  6. Step 6: Black Skin, White Masks

    Frantz Fanon · 1952

    Fanon, a psychiatrist from Martinique, describes how colonial racism is lived in language, desire and the body, and how the white gaze fixes the Black person from outside.

    Where to start
    Read the Introduction and chapter 5, 'The Lived Experience of the Black Man', then chapter 1, 'The Black Man and Language', in Richard Philcox's translation (2008).
    Time
    1–2 weeks
    Difficulty
    Intermediate

  7. Step 7: An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme

    Kwame Gyekye · 1987; revised 1995

    Gyekye analyses the ontology, psychology, theology and ethics of the Akan of Ghana. He argues that African philosophy must grow from African thought itself; use the revised edition of 1995.

    Where to start
    Begin with the chapter on the concept of a person, then read the chapter on destiny and free will; use the 1995 revised edition.
    Time
    2–3 weeks
    Difficulty
    Advanced

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