African Philosophy? Questioning the Unquestioned
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25159/2413-3086/6795Keywords:
African Philosophy, Liberation philosophy, History of African philosophyAbstract
African philosophy, at least the modern modality of its practice, is said to have been initiated by the overwhelming question concerning its existence: Is there an African philosophy? No doubt such radical questioning concerning “knowledges” from Africa is determined by an overarching, indeed imperial, definition of what is understood to be “philosophy”; in other words, this question sought to determine whether those knowledges from Africa fit the category of what is known to be “philosophy” in the Western world. In this paper, I deal with the historical question pertaining to the existence of an African philosophy and the present reiterations of this question. I begin in the first section with an interrogation of such questioning concerning doubt about African philosophy’s existence: 1) to subvert the question and thereby undermine the basis of its questioning; 2) to examine the underlying structures of coloniality in Western philosophy and its colonising effects—showing how such a question is rooted in doubt, ignorance and power as functionaries of the European epistemological paradigm facilitating epistemological dominance; and 3) to use such questioning as a basis from which to develop an account of what African philosophy is.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Thabang Dladla
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2021-08-19
Published 2021-10-19