Listen to this essay
25 minute listen
Though less-known to many than the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, there has been, over the course of the past century, a fervent struggle to build an African philosophical practice. That meant developing modern philosophical traditions that centred Africa as a universal site of thought. During the 1940s, after decades of colonial subjugation and rule, African nations started attaining political freedom, with Frantz Fanon and even earlier theorists of the Négritude movement like Léon-Gontran Damas, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire seeking intellectual decolonisation by liberating the ‘native’ through thought and action. Fanon remains critical in theorising the conceptual and existential options available to the formerly colonised. He believed that decolonisation involved multiple aspects, at the very least political and psychological, in addition to an element of violence, to overthrow the decayed and unjust colonial order of things.
Within the global contemporary climate of decolonial agitations and reconstruction prompted by Latin American theorists such as Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, decolonial theory and critiques have become immensely popular. One of the philosophers to have risen to even greater prominence in this project is Kwasi Wiredu from Ghana, for his pragmatic and quite effective theory of conceptual decolonisation. Wiredu addresses the existential and philosophical deficiencies inherent in precolonial eras, as well as in the colonial one, seeking to make decolonised people more attuned to the challenges of modernity and postcoloniality, thereby making them reformed and epistemically empowered.
Another philosopher, V Y Mudimbe from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, traces the repressed and silenced Black subject in Western archaeological and anthropological archives. Mudimbe’s work demonstrates what it means to exist in colonial archives – he termed it the Colonial Library – as a mute and perennially dominated subject. In the Republic of Benin, the philosopher Paulin Hountondji made his career debunking the fallacies of ethnophilosophy in affirming universality. And the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka established the Sage school of philosophy, which sought to recover suppressed folk knowledges of ‘ethnic’ and non-literate communities in East Africa. All these African thinkers faced similar existential and conceptual problems at the dawn of African political independence, which was chiefly an attempt to build new, modern societies in the wake of the widespread debacle occasioned by the often-violent colonial encounter.
All these renowned African philosophers have died within my career. Wiredu in 2022, Mudimbe in 2025, Hountondji in 2024, and Oruka in 1995. The debates they initiated and transformed remain some of the most relevant in African philosophy today.
Building an African philosophical practice during the previous century was no easy task. Philosophy as a discipline was never a welcoming enclave to Africans. Kant, Hegel and Hume had all disavowed the Black subject, claiming s/he hadn’t attained the status of real Homo sapiens. In works such as Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Immanuel Kant espoused racist views. Meanwhile, in a footnote added in 1753 to his essay ‘Of National Characters’ (1748), the British empiricist David Hume stated:
I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular.
This repudiation by Western philosophy had a devastating impact on the incentive and impetus for building modern philosophical practices in Africa. So the first task of the African philosopher was not necessarily a search for meaning per se but, rather, a search for a state of consciousness that was universally recognisable. During slavery and colonialism, the subjugation and maltreatment of Africans was justified on the basis that they were sub-human. Thus, initially, the primary task of African philosophy was a reclamation of a supposedly lost humanity. After this, all things, including the equally significant quest for meaning, were possible.
Keita is able to engage millennia of philosophy with the entanglements of the African continent
Wiredu, Hountondji, Mudimbe and Oruka all came of philosophical age after the demise of colonialism in Africa in the 1960s. The Ghanaian Wiredu and the Kenyan Oruka had an understandably Anglophone orientation that emphasised conceptual rigour and a barely stated ideological neutrality. The Beninese Hountondji and the Congolese Mudimbe, on the other hand, favoured the Francophone tradition, which stressed an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach – in short, they embraced a holistic understanding of the human sciences much like the French theorist Michel Foucault had done.
Another contemporary African philosopher who engaged in the same foundational debates was Lansana Keita from Sierra Leone, who died in 2024. After a doctorate in economics and philosophy from Columbia University in New York City, Keita worked at the University of Arizona and Howard University in Washington, DC before returning to Africa to continue his career, teaching at universities in Nigeria and the Gambia. Keita offers one of the broadest understandings of the universal as well as the holistic inheritance of philosophy of all the major contemporary African philosophers (with the exception perhaps of Mudimbe). Keita is able to engage millennia of philosophy with the entanglements of the African continent. This kind of breadth is rare and not only refreshing but truly liberating.
One of Keita’s major philosophical achievements was his piercing critique of the notion that development in Africa entails purely technological and scientific progress. Instead, Keita argues, development should also involve ideological evolution, as well as economic and cultural advancement. In his article ‘Models of Economic Growth and Development in the Context of Human Capital Investment – The Way Forward for Africa’ (2016), Keita attempts to refine the meaning and purpose of philosophical study in Africa, especially as it pertains to the question of development.
Traditionally, in the West, philosophy had been regarded as ‘the queen of the sciences’ – and was located at the vanguard of the most significant advances in the natural and moral sciences, the law and axiology (value theory). Several of the Western philosophers of antiquity and beyond were highly accomplished polymaths. Aristotle, René Descartes, Hume, Kant and John Stuart Mill come to mind. Keita contends that this tradition continues today, as there are mathematicians, linguists and scientists who have employed philosophical methods within their respective disciplines. For instance, in the realm of pure science, key figures to mention are Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg, among others who have all expended a great deal of time on philosophical matters.
The perceived dichotomy between ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’ is not only superficial but privileges empiricism over metaphysics. Keita writes that, if the term ‘science’ had not supplanted ‘philosophy’, perhaps there wouldn’t have been the current division of labour between the two. ‘Philosophy’ (from the Greek philo-sophia for ‘love of wisdom’) and ‘science’ (from the Latin scientia for ‘knowledge’) are similar in meaning.
Philosophy and science were originally interrelated but, over time, both have developed several branches. The original idea behind philosophy as a quest for knowledge still exists in other disciplines where there is a constant search for theory that is, in turn, closely related to the preoccupations of epistemology and ontology. Undoubtedly, the persistent debates between socialism and capitalism are philosophical in nature as they include arguments about ontology, epistemology and axiology. African thinkers have a great deal to contribute to these debates.
In Africa, knowledge constituted via sensory perception is rather widespread and therefore more entrenched
In Keita’s view, a central problematique confronting African philosophers is that little attention has been paid to how philosophy itself has been defined and employed in the West. Given its etymology from the Greek, this epistemological quest involves the manner in which humans experience and constitute knowledge. Units of knowledge were assembled either through sensory or empirical means.
In many instances, knowledge constituted via sensory means is devalued as it does not adhere to the strict benchmarks of scientific adjudication. Meanwhile, in Africa, knowledge constituted via sensory perception is rather widespread and therefore more entrenched. This is because, although there are ancient traditions of writing in Africa, they were uncommon: the major modes of knowledge dissemination were oral in nature. Hence, understandably, scientific methods of enquiry and verification were not widespread. In this context, the metaphysical dimensions of knowledge are often positioned by leading European anthropologists such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and E E Evans-Pritchard to portray African forms of knowledge and cognition as animist in nature and orientation.
In his influential book Bantu Philosophy (1945), Placide Tempels, a Belgian priest, drew on examples from Central Africa to argue that Bantu knowledge systems were founded on attributes of animism. Parallels of this view can be discerned in Ethics (1677) by Baruch Spinoza, who promoted a notion of pantheism in which the universe can be understood as driven by animist phenomena. According to Spinoza, God and Nature were the same, and an understanding of the universe was verifiable through sensory or empirical means. According to Keita:
Spinoza who was later seen to propose a philosophy of pantheism, implicitly founded on an assumption that the world of reality was an animist one. For Spinoza, God and Nature (Deus sive Natura) were identical, and was expressed in both empirical and non-empirical forms.
Since humans are not controlled by instinct alone, there had to be other forces or principles that guided human conduct. Accordingly, Keita saw social behaviour determined by three aspects of knowledge, notably empiricism/meta-empiricism (metaphysics); ontology; and evaluative judgments (ethics and aesthetics). This line of reasoning, Keita believed, was first developed in Kemet, more commonly known as ancient Egypt. The discipline now known as philosophy evolved from this mode of critical thought, and Keita contends that philosophy in this exact sense can be found in all human societies. For some contingent reasons – including intellectual inputs from ancient Egypt especially – the ancient Greek philosophers were especially focused on the human quest for knowledge in all its dimensions. More specifically, the Greeks pursued knowledge throughout what they saw as the three dimensions of the empirical world (the world of sensate reality), the metaphysical world (the world of hidden causes eventually leading to religion and final causes), and the world seen through the evaluation of behaviour (ethical and aesthetical conduct). They used analysis and exploration of the three dimensions of knowledge to proffer holistic claims about the entirety of reality, called ontology.
At least, this is the conventional wisdom about how humans have understood the world since antiquity, according to the philosophical tradition. There are other more complex ways of understanding and experiencing the world too. Consequently, various Europeans in their individual ways have privileged Paul’s Christianity over their traditional metaphysical belief systems such as paganism, and Greek philosophical thought over Gallic, Vandal, Pict, Celtic, Jute and Saxon folk beliefs. Indeed, in Keita’s words: ‘It was philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that Western philosophy was not much more than footnotes to Plato and Aristotle.’
Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton and other major figures of the European post-Renaissance era learned in Latin, then later wrote in their native French or English. The general practice of Western scholars of the period was to engage with the latest developments in Christian theological theory as their primary sources of intellectual inspiration.
Keita debunks the Eurocentric approach that divides the African continent into two main geographical regions: the so-called ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ and North Africa. He shows that North Africa was never separate from ‘sub-Saharan Africa’, as the inhabitants of regions such as ancient Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia were all connected, by virtue of culture and phenotype, with Africa’s hinterlands. Keita reminds us that Eurocentric scholars often ignore Aristotle’s remarks in his Physiognomonica:
Too black a hue as an Egyptian or Nubian [also translated as ‘Ethiopian’] marks a coward. So too for having too white a hue as is the case with women. The best colour is the intermediate tawny colour of the lion. Such a colour marks for courage.
Furthermore, in Problemata, Aristotle posited that the Egyptians and Ethiopians developed curly hair as a result of the intense heat of their respective countries. Instructively, the Greek historian Herodotus in the Histories makes a similar claim regarding the phenotype of the ancient Egyptians and Colchians.
Keita bemoans Africa’s lack of familiarity with the history of ideas. He argues that, in the study of philosophy, the ahistorical approach is a colonial legacy in institutions of higher learning. It should hardly be surprising that professional philosophical study was organised to disadvantage Africa – we can see many cultural biases at work. For example, the study of philosophy differs between Anglophone and Francophone countries as a result of British and French colonial legacies. In Francophone African countries, Descartes, Foucault, Gaston Berger and Jean-Paul Sartre are favoured above Hobbes, Locke, Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Galen Strawson, who are the preferred choices in Anglophone countries.
According to Keita, pre-colonial African philosophers such as Zera Yacob of 17th-century Aksum (now Ethiopia), author of the treatise Hatata (1667) meaning ‘Inquiry’, remain extremely rare in Africa too. Some interpreters make comparisons between Yacob’s work and the works of Descartes and Kant, as recently noted by the Harvard philosopher Teodros Kiros. Another rare example is the prolific 17th-century scholar Ahmad Baba, who taught at the University of Timbuktu. His study Miraj al-Sud (1615) is noted for its progressive insights on the human rights of individuals in an era when slavery was the norm, at the same time as arguing it was possible for slavery to have a human face and needn’t be necessarily brutal and inhumane. Going further back, the Muqaddimah (1377) by the historian Ibn Khaldun of Tunis, is considered by many a groundbreaking early work in social science theory.
Colonised and postcolonial Africans were not taught about African philosophers
Keita frequently promoted philosophical works by ancient Egyptian thinkers like Imhotep, who paved the way for Greek philosophers such as Plato, Thales and Pythagoras, all of whom travelled to ancient Egypt for study, inspiration and enlightenment. Their learning was informed by the Corpus Hermeticum, as originally conceived by ancient Egyptian thinkers, a major work crucial for the evolution of philosophical thought in Africa. Properly speaking, the Corpus Hermeticum belongs to the Graeco-Egyptian philosophical tradition. It was composed in Greek by Hermes Trismegistus and blends the insights of the Greek god Hermes with the thought of the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. The postcolonial Ugandan scholar Dani W Nabudere even once argued that Thoth was actually responsible for a significant proportion of ancient Greek thought, being the author of more than 1,000 volumes in various aspects of human wisdom, many of which significantly shaped Greek philosophy.
In particular, the African philosophers Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus, both born in Roman Egypt, worked within this philosophical tradition. Plotinus, often regarded as the progenitor of Neoplatonism, claimed that his Enneads is a wholehearted endorsement of ancient Egyptian monism. Keita traces the animism of premodern African thought to the birth of modern science. He maintains that monistic beliefs and animism developed in East Central Africa, eventually spreading to other regions of the continent. From this mapping, it is possible to discern common metaphysical features across Africa. The 20th-century Nigerian scholar Jonathan Olumide Lucas argued that there are similarities between Ifa spirituality in West Africa, Brazil and, more tellingly, modes of worship in ancient Egypt. Lucas was a pioneer of modern studies in Yoruba culture and history. Originating from West Africa, primarily Nigeria and the Republic of Benin, Yoruba culture has proved to be rather resilient, having survived transplantation to various parts of the New World.
Keita avers that the influence of Plotinus was such that his ideas were adapted by a major intellectual figure in Christian theology – Augustine (an indigenous Berber from what is now Algeria). Augustine’s texts Confessions and The City of God are regarded as classics of Christian theology. The above discussion could be seen as establishing the format for both ancient and medieval philosophy in Africa. But there was a break in continuity that occurred with the European colonisation of Africa.
It was modern European colonialism that ruptured the deep relationship between ancient African philosophical thought, the classical world and medieval philosophy, and later with contemporary philosophy in general. Colonial-era European scholars and anthropologists promoted the erroneous view that, prior to the European incursion, there was no tradition of philosophical thought in Africa. The continent, they claimed, was a tabula rasa without any noteworthy currents of critical or conceptual thought. G W F Hegel made this claim in The Philosophy of History (1837), where he concluded that Africa was exempt from the human telos (meaning ‘purpose’) through history. Consequently, colonised and postcolonial Africans were not taught about African philosophers but compelled to rely solely on British or French traditions of philosophical thought.
Hegel’s derogatory remarks about the racial status of Africans have become fairly well-known in African intellectual circles. In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1986, the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka – Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature – quoted Hegel writing that the African had not ‘attained that realisation of any substantial objective existence – as for example, God or Law – in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realises his own being.’ And yet today, said Soyinka, ‘the libraries remain unpurged, so that new generations freely browse through the works of Frobenius, of Hume, Hegel, or Montesquieu and others without first encountering, freshly stamped on the fly-leaf: WARNING! THIS WORK IS DANGEROUS FOR YOUR RACIAL SELF-ESTEEM.’
Due to these counterproductive legacies of colonial intellectualism, Keita advocates that contemporary African philosophers should also be educated in at least one of the natural or social sciences. Keita himself is an avidly multidisciplinary scholar, versed in philosophy, history, economics and development studies. He claims that current philosophical research in Africa seems methodologically unmoored and overly localised. Keita also bemoans the over-compartmentalisation of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economics and political science, while at the same time advocating a meta-analytical role for philosophy in mediating the differences and connections between these newer academic disciplines.
The argument that African philosophers should be educated in at least one of the social sciences seems to possess some merit. Karl Marx’s axiom that philosophers ought not only to interpret the world but also to strive to change it would require knowing more than just philosophy. Marx himself knew political economy, history, sociology, anthropology and other social sciences. In Keita’s view, this path best suits African philosophers in building relevant and useful traditions of philosophical thought in the continent. There is also the example of many Western philosopher-mathematicians such as Gottlob Frege, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing and John von Neumann.
Keita is able to engage with the Western philosophical heritage with equanimity, without rancour
Keita advocates this transdisciplinary view for the contemporary African philosopher, rather than highly specialist work that bedevils so much scholarly and research work. With the foundations of philosophy being epistemology, ontology and value theory, the African philosopher should in turn view this range as an opportunity to examine and analyse the complexities of human sensate consciousness. Keita adds that African philosophy ought to include investigations of neurons, synapses and dendrites in exploring the correlations between neuroscience and philosophy. The same approach could be adopted in the study of space and time, which would be assisted tremendously by a knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Unlike Afrocentrists such as the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop and the American philosopher Molefi Kete Asante, Keita’s primary sources can sometimes seem patchy. Even when his work espouses a consistent multidisciplinarity, there isn’t much evidence on bibliographical sufficiency and rigour. However, his references and positions are widely known and respected within Afrocentric circles. His method isn’t argumentative: it works more like historical narratives aimed at the converted. Rather than being analytical, it is descriptive and mildly prescriptive.
Keita’s thought is confidently Afrocentric without the jarring political militancy that usually accompanies Afrocentricity. He is able to engage with the Western philosophical heritage with equanimity, without rancour. Keita embraces and even celebrates the epistemic holism of ancient philosophical traditions. His approach distinguishes him from his other philosophical peers, with the possible exception of Mudimbe. But where Mudimbe establishes and maintains ideological neutrality, Keita is more focused on rebuilding African communities at a broader social level, reinvigorating philosophical discourse. Herein lie his main contributions to philosophical discourse in Africa.
Supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.
