Pursuing the agenda of Africanising philosophy in Africa: Some possibilities

Abstract

The question about the existence or non-existence of African philosophy has almost died a natural death in the past few years. It is now a question of African and non-African thinkers putting their attention on actually doing African philosophy instead of “flogging the dead horse” by continuing to grapple with the question about whether African philosophy exists or not. However, in that quest for doing African philosophy, only recently has there been some growing consensus on the thinking that the content and curriculum of philosophy in Africa ought to be transformed and Africanised. In this article, I critically interrogate the question of what Africanising philosophy ought to reasonably entail. Much of the discussion on Africanisation eventually leads towards somewhat anthropological and ethno-philosophical interpretations of African cultural heritage. However, I transcend these interpretations as I seek to critically situate African philosophical thinking within universal philosophical discourse. Although I admit the danger of romanticising African indigenous value systems in the pursuit of the agenda of Africanisation of the philosophy curriculum, I seek to argue that the idea of Africanising philosophy ought to be understood as being compatible with, and consistent with, the requirement of philosophy as a critical discourse. Also, I argue that an Africanised philosophy curriculum must be relevant to the African condition. Overall, I propose some possibilities and ways by which the agenda of Africanising the current philosophy curriculum in Africa could be pursued.