African Philosophy, Ethnophilosophy, and the Debate Over Philosophy’s Origins
A bigoted bias exists in the study of philosophy by placing a dominating mask around the Greek tradition of philosophy, as if no other philosophy has validity. Kwame Nkrumah, the leader and revolutionary from Ghana, and eventual leader of Pan-Africanism, may have been the first to use the term “ethnophilosophy.” From ancient times up to the present, all philosophies have addressed the concerns of justice and the well-being of the people. Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, and others are what was emphasized in schools. Charles Mills, a Black philosopher, addressed and explored the meaning of life and the reality of those meanings.
All philosophies are culturally based and not just a Greek model. One could argue that much of the Greek tradition is not rooted in real life, but much in the manipulation of perceptions. The criticism of Greek thought centers around the idea that consciousness is prime and not the material conditions of people that creates thought. The European tendency to regard thought as only that which is written, while oral traditions are disregarded, is white supremacy a work. This derived idea is associated with Plato who took the highbrow position that ideas were only to be understood by the philosophers. Wrong!
African political culture and philosophy was based on an “elder’s tradition, the warrior’s tradition, the wisdom tradition, and a monarchial trend.” The point here is that all of philosophy is ethnic based. This study is known as ethnophilosophy. No philosophy is completely applicable to all peoples and cultures, all the time, around the world. Many have argued that all of philosophy is ethnic based, an idea that is disturbing to Eurocentric philosophers (biased racist philosophers).
The centuries-old idea that philosophy has its origins in ancient Greece, is challenged in that ancient philosophy can be traced to earliest Egypt. Egypt is not Europe, but attempts to make Egyptians “White” was done long ago. This is the concept of “Stolen Legacy” whereby African political and philosophical thought spread to Greece and other areas but is denied by those wishing to make myth of real history.
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Historical records indicate that the Greek Goddess Isis is an Egyptian God that Greece borrowed, or was blended into their religious culture. This was erased for the public on purpose. There were many other great philosophers besides European ones or Greek ones. The Chinese had deep philosophic ideas as did Native Americans. There was always an attempt to reduce African political philosophy to the category of ideology by reductionism to individual agents (African political leaders) of philosophical thought. This is part of a calculation to reduce the world of philosophy to European models of thinking and has been described as a conscious attempt to enshrine white supremacy or European cultural imperialism in the philosophical arena.
To be clear, philosophy is supposedly a rational pursuit of truth and understanding. Philosophers ask questions, they criticize assumptions, and encourage critical thinking using different disciplines. On the other hand, ideology is an action-oriented. It provides fixed answers and aims to mobilize people to change the world. It appears that claiming African philosophers are only ideologists was a racist attempt to deny ethnophilosophy.
According to the writers from the Rutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Ethnophilosophy is a subfield of philosophy that documents and analyzes the implicit, indigenous belief systems and worldviews of specific ethnic or cultural groups. It codifies unwritten, shared cultural norms into formal philosophical frameworks, playing a vital role in decolonial and post-colonial studies.” Why this goes unrecognized is to prevent the end of white supremacist ideas in philosophy.
