Thesis Conceptual decolonisation only counts as a method if it can conclude that the borrowed concept was right

Kwasi Wiredu's proposal is simple to state. Take a philosophical problem that came to Africa in a European language and try to think it through in your own. If the problem cannot even be formulated there, ask whether it was ever a real problem or an artefact of the language it came in.

His best-known example concerns existence. In Akan, he argued, to exist is expressed as to be there, at a place, so the Cartesian idea of something that exists nowhere at all has trouble getting started. That is an interesting result.

My thesis: a test that can only ever return one verdict is not a test. If conceptual decolonisation is a method, as I keep telling my after-school club, and not a mood, then sometimes it must conclude: we thought this through in Akan, and the imported concept turned out to be the better one.

Wiredu himself, I think, accepted this. He was no romantic about tradition, and he criticised authoritarian habits he found in it. But much of what is now done in his name only ever finds the European concept wanting.

Last term my students tested the concept of an individual right against Akan ideas of personhood. They expected to find rights an alien import. Half of them came out defending rights, in Twi.

For or against?