African Philosophy

The very phrase “African philosophy” is itself a matter of philosophical debate. Before any doctrine, it raises a question about the criteria by which we recognize something as philosophy — criteria largely defined by the Western tradition. This article traces the main currents of African philosophical thought, from ancient Egypt to contemporary debates, without either erasing or essentializing a diversity that spans an entire continent and its diaspora. Three Preliminary Questions Any study of the field runs into three methodological problems: ...

Achille Mbembe Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages. ...

Aimé Césaire Aimé Fernand David Césaire (26 June 1913, Basse-Pointe, Martinique — 17 April 2008, Fort-de-France) was a poet, playwright, and politician, one of the founding voices of twentieth-century anticolonial thought. A student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (1935 cohort), it was there, in the vibrant milieu of black students from the French colonies, that he helped forge — alongside the Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Guianese Léon-Gontran Damas — the Négritude movement. Later elected mayor of Fort-de-France (1945–2001) and a deputy in the French National Assembly, he was one of the architects of the 1946 law that turned Martinique into an overseas department — a decision he would later reassess critically. He was also Frantz Fanon’s teacher at the Lycée Schœlcher. ...

Frantz Fanon Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique (then a French colony). A psychiatrist, essayist, and political militant, he is the most influential figure of African and Caribbean anticolonial philosophy. Trained in medicine and psychiatry in France (Lyon), he served as chief of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria from 1953. Confronted with the atrocities of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), he joined the FLN (National Liberation Front) and became one of the principal intellectual voices of the anticolonial cause. He died of leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961, aged 36, days after the publication of Les damnés de la terre. ...

Kwame Anthony Appiah Kwame Anthony Appiah was born on 8 May 1954 in London, to a Ghanaian father (Joe Appiah, lawyer and politician) and a British mother (Peggy Cripps). He grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, and studied philosophy at Cambridge (BA and PhD). He has taught at Yale, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton; he is currently professor at New York University. Appiah is one of the most versatile and influential philosophers in the contemporary anglophone world, with contributions to ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, racial theory, and political philosophy. He is one of the thinkers who has most systematically challenged the presuppositions of “racialism” — the belief that human races exist as biological entities endowed with moral and intellectual essences. ...

Kwame Nkrumah Kwame Nkrumah (21 September 1909 – 27 April 1972) was born in Nkroful, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). He studied in the USA (Lincoln University and University of Pennsylvania) and the United Kingdom (London School of Economics), where he developed his Pan-Africanist ideas in contact with figures such as C.L.R. James and George Padmore. He returned to the Gold Coast in 1947, led the independence movement, and became the first president of Ghana in 1957 — the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in the postwar period. He was deposed in a military coup in 1966 while in Beijing, en route to Hanoi. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Guinea-Conakry, where he died in 1972. Nkrumah is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern Pan-Africanism and a central figure of the Organisation of African Unity (founded 1963). ...

Léopold Sédar Senghor Léopold Sédar Senghor (9 October 1906, Joal, Senegal — 20 December 2001, Verson, France) was a poet, philosopher of culture, and statesman. The first president of independent Senegal (1960–1980) and the first African elected to the Académie française (1983), he was also, alongside Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the founders of Négritude in 1930s Paris. While Césaire gave the movement its poetic force, Senghor set out to give it a systematic philosophical and aesthetic elaboration, making of it a general theory of the African contribution to human civilization. His work is today the object of both recognition and lively controversy. ...