Defining African Philosophy: The Ethnophilosophy Debate

The question of what counts as "African philosophy" became a formal academic controversy only in the second half of the twentieth century, ignited above all by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels's book Bantu Philosophy (La philosophie bantoue, 1945), which claimed to reconstruct a coherent metaphysical system, centered on a dynamic concept of "vital force" (force vitale), underlying the customs, language, and social practices of Bantu-speaking peoples of the Congo. Tempels's method was not to cite named individual thinkers making explicit arguments, but to infer an implicit, shared worldview from proverbs, kinship terms, and ritual behavior — a procedure that the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji, in African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (Sur la "philosophie africaine," 1976; English translation 1983), later baptized "ethnophilosophy" and subjected to sustained critique. For Hountondji, ethnophilosophy, however well-intentioned, effectively denies Africans individual philosophical authorship by treating an entire ethnic group as if it held one undifferentiated, unanimous set of beliefs, collapsing philosophy into ethnography and anthropology rather than treating it as a critical, argumentative discipline practiced by identifiable individuals who can disagree with one another.