JOURNAL ON AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY ISSN: 1533-1067 Issue 2 (2003)

Ernest Wamba dia Wamba

“Risking one’s life is a necessary condition for attaining true self-consciousness, and hence humanity.” -- Hegel

“One must get one’s feet wet before attaining truth.” -- Walter Rodney

Introduction: “I, Too, Am A Researcher in African Philosophy”

It has been a while since I have — as I used to do regularly - visited the homes of African philosophers (or was it philosophers for Africa?) and often renewed my fidelity to my declaration of love for their wisdom. Thus, I may not now be aware of possible breakthroughs and cannot even claim to have a familiarity with the younger faces among them, especially with the lightening passage of the great contemporary sophism called ‘post-modernism’. At a distance, I have been trying to cure myself of my then recurrent illusions (or was it a theoretical slumber?). I have been getting my feet wet, as advised by my friend Walter Rodney who did pass away from it, and risking my life, with the hope of attaining clarity and true self-consciousness.

Definitely, despite its sharp and vivid clarity, post-modernist sophism did not affect me too much; its attempt to deny the existence of truths in the world (as did all sophists of all times, the Gorgias and the Protagoras, etc.), refusing the almighty Reason its central role or the naïve claim of a sense or direction in history left me very puzzled; was I getting my feet wet in vain?

My feet did indeed get wet, a number of times; but the attained truth, in the shape of singular events seemed nameless: why did surviving targets of the Rwandese genocide fail to rise above revenge? Why did resistants to the whims of Mobutu’s solitary exercise of power refuse to return power to the people? Why did critiques of the so-called negative values (anti-valeurs) keep falling under their rusting unethical logic? Critiques of corruption, the betrayal of public morality and principled politics, have been unable to uphold their fidelity to the commitment to the eradication of corruption. How to account for that fatigue which discourages the fidelity? Protracted suffering Congolese, fighting Mobutism, applauded as liberators and guarantors of their sovereignty foreign armed groups—humanitarian intervention not withstanding. Should one’s self-mastery be guaranteed by others than oneself? The United States of America too would like to impose on the Iraqi people the rule of the Iraqi people, by the Iraqi people, for the Iraqi people. We ourselves had recourse to arms to deal with the solitary exercise of power by the former Mobutu of the bush—Laurent D. Kabila. Is this the way to empower the people to rule themselves by themselves and for themselves? A species that destroys its environment, destroys itself. The most “developed” country in the world has refused to go along with those who wish to conserve nature. It has also resisted the demands by peoples of the world for compensation for the slave trade as a healing process to eradicate surviving harmful attitudes and ideas going against the reconfirmation of the equality of humanity. Given a chance to rule, i.e., to lead in the process of self-emancipation, even the best critiques of underdevelopment have, instead, helped aggravate rather than alleviate underdevelopment.

It has appeared to me that even religion, instead of the opiate of the people, has become the most demanded commodity and one of the most enriching, through never- ending offerings, while God seems so deaf to the cries of the miserable people—His time has not come yet. Centuries of schooling in this civilization have not prevented people from protractedly falling into greater depths of barbarism. Cutting short and not so short, and brutally, innocent people’s arms has been consumed as a liberating exercise (or was it Fanonian therapeutic violence?) Does vivid pain heal the frozen ones? Do vivid traumas cure the effects of past traumas? To devour Pygmy’s flesh is presented as an invigorating and empowering medicine for the combatants of liberation and democracy. Does this not absolve the placing of Ota Benga in the NY Bronx Natural Zoo with the primates? More centuries of Christianizing have lapsed; fetishism has not been uprooted, once and for all.

Our present schools of initiation for keeping one’s head above water have failed to give reasons why one should behave that way. Is man an attribute of technology or is it technology the attribute of man? Are the Internet café and the cellphone emancipating public and individual consciousness? The devastating presence of H1V/A1DS has not made the encounter of love impossible. Are African philosophers mere witnesses to those obscure ‘happenings?’

At a distance, I have been pondering these situations. The absence of a theoretical palaver of the bush and the remote quarelling sophism and those who live by palavering theoretically, even if on paper, have not always reached us. So I do appreciate having been given this excellent occasion to hear the new wisdom of philosophers for Africa and their sophist counterpart. What has happened to all us Africans and how can we be assured of the love for wisdom? Please do accept my apology if what I say is not quite the “State of African Philosophy”. I will, however, share my vision of what challenges it might take up in the future.

African Philosophy Revisited

African philosophy is a name for a multiplicity of ‘positions’ and perhaps a multiple of multiples. From which position should one characterize African philosophy? Philosophy from Africa has produced an already very rich literature—satisfying thereby the philosopher Hountondji.

While the questions “Is there African philosophy ?” and “What is African philosophy?” have dominated African philosophizing, very little, as far as I know, has been devoted to the search and explicitation of the conditions for an African philosophy . It has been those who are critical of the existence of African philosophy who have tended towards posing conditions for African philosophy. For example, Franz Cray who spoke of the need for a conceptual take-off.

Let us start from the most explicit Western characterization of the conditions of philosophy (e.g. Alain Badiou) that philosophy is prescribed or called for by conditions which are generic procedures of truth, procedures through which truth emerges as an event. Philosophy as a dialectics articulating the compossibility of various truths. Four generic processes of truth are identified: science (mathesis), a deductive and demonstrative procedure leading to discoveries; theory of love giving rise to figures of love such as courtly love; art (more precisely: poem) giving rise to masterpieces; and politics or more precisely emancipative politics (progressive, revolutionary, self- referent politics) such as the invention of democracy. Philosophy is the site through which is made the enunciation: “there are truths”, philosophy is a seizure of truths, it grasps these in their compossibility, it exhibits the unity of thought. The emergence of truths motivates philosophical thinking. In its very practice, philosophy reflects the system of its conditions: its argumentative exposition imitates science; its persuasive style of exposition imitates art; the intensity of the philosophical act imitates love without an object; and it addresses itself to all so that all may grasp the existence of truths, as such, it imitates political strategy without having power as its target.

The issue could be: what are the specific conditions for African philosophy ? The truths about the African condition, in art, gravitate around the quest for the African “self- apprehension” (Soyinka, Okri, etc.), the revealed truth in politics seems to be “African incapacity to self-determine, impossibility of a subjective break from colonial consciousness, incapacity to actualize the civilization of Africans, by Africans for Africans, difficulty of achieving democracy, peace and collective self-development or the State for all people.” Love does not seem to have received much theoretical attention: is there an African truth about love? Is “deuxième bureau” an example? Science seems to have been assumed to be essentially Western. Traditional scientific knowledge, African fractals for example, has not been seized by African philosophy . This is one reason why African philosophy has tended to be a projection on the Western mirror.

One can also speak of presuppositions of African philosophy , the fact of the historical separation of manual labor and intellectual/mental labor and the emergence of a social category of people whose only occupation is to produce ‘powerful ideas’ (principles) for good collective living. For a long time, all colonized African people seemed to be considered as speaking machines, manual laborers, uncivilized savages, with no philosophy—seen as the refined core of civilization. The process of assimilation gave rise to a social category of colonial intellectuals becoming civilized through the required ignoring of their cultural roots and self-acculturation. Their alienated consciousness gave them a constant craving desire to be accepted in the company of the civilized. Threatened by what they experienced as Western rejection seen as rejection of African humanity, as default of being human, they tended to have a conflictual relationship with the West: opposition and fascination. This is the basis of the Western civilizing mission of the African. A tendency towards a theoretical exhibitionism to seek for acceptance. “A Mbuti Pygmy thinks” is trivial to a real Mbuti. “You also think,” uttered by a European to Africans, is a foundational statement. European Cogitata prove the being of Africans and not the coffee and tea the latter produce for the Europeans. For the “invisible African”, the “Here I am” is part of the “words to win the war”.

From “the African has nothing between her or his shoulders” to “the African is a little brother or sister i.e., in European infancy”, from a default of being to a beginning of human history, the body of the African who becomes a philosopher as well as his or her starting consciousness matter. When Africans are viewed as colonizable and in fact colonized, they could not be said at the same time to be able to achieve self-mastery. He is wise, who has achieved self-mastery or at least who aspires to achieving it. The issue is not one of knowledge per Se, it is developing a capability for self-mastery, a mode of being. While it was criminal for Socrates to have induced the slave to achieve the capacity for a slave self-mastery, so it appears to be criminal to induce Africans to achieve the capacity for self-mastery. The African philosopher must settle his or her account with his or her consciousness of her or his origins. She or he can do so with the moral criteria drawn from the conditions of philosophy: absolute love (unwavering fidelity to love), absolute honesty (deductive/demonstrative fidelity), absolute purity (fidelity to singularity of art) and absolute disinterestedness (fidelity to absolutely generic equality). One must change oneself to change the world. Has African philosophy achieved that much?

We may also characterize African philosophy by examining its infrastructures. The number of Departments of philosophy and philosophical associations has increased rapidly on the African continent. It is true that the coherence between African philosophy and other philosophies in those Departments is not evident The number of academic people doing philosophy is growing and a great number of dissertations in philosophy exist. The number of colloquia, seminars, conferences on African philosophy has been growing as well. The number of publications has grown: introductory texts on African philosophy, critical readers, at least one dictionary of African philosophy with five thousand entries (French), scientific journals dealing with African philosophy (in English and French) and various treatises and books on African philosophy. It is not, however clear, that a critical mass of African philosophy doers and materials has been reached to make a real impact in society.

We could also add the productions related to African philosophy taking place outside Africa by non-Africans. These concern: - taking note of something new happening, the small sister or brother wants to become an adult and may be in need of help (the case of the philanthropic contribution by the humanist Other as a guiding light—P. Tempels); - take the opportunity to reassert his or her position of marginality and the pitiful essential incapacity to become adult; - take the opportunity to try to redirect the thinking of this dominated default of being a small sister or brother so that he or she cannot cure herself or himself on his or her own, the default is: theoretical intimidation. The Westerner too needs to settle his or her account with his or her starting consciousness to avoid bad faith or a feeling of domination.

Philosophy, even where it is taken for granted, does not always exist; even when it did exist, it disappeared in some epochs. Even with the increased skillful capacity to imitate to the perfection the West, there is still no complete acceptance of the marginal and small brother or sister. One is still under the pressure of bringing to the civilizational arena something specific. The specificity of African philosophy is to be a quest for something different and specific to bring to the civilizational arena.

The question of African philosophy will remain open with no completely agreed upon answers due to the underdevelopment of its conditions and the influence of its sociological rootedness (the body of the philosopher and the starting consciousness). The specificity of African philosophy relies also in the content of the issues philosophized upon. But in philosophy content and form seem to be intrinsically linked. Difference seems to be the name of the very process of philosophizing of African philosophy. How to conceptualize this difference philosophically without falling under the category of the very characteristics of the default of being (one rationality, no rationality, many rationalities?). Fundamentally, the most important task of African philosophy is to free thinking per se for Africans and for the Others. How will the decision to establish existence without bias or one-sidedness be made? It is roughly on that basis that an attempt at specifying schools of African philosophy can be made.

We can only make tentative indications here:

(a) the school of normal professional philosophers, sometimes using African materials as means of theoretical production, and which are as varied as Western philosophers, including: logicians, philosophers of science, phenomenologists, dialectical materialists, linguistic analysts, historians of philosophy, archaeologists of knowledge, hermaneuticians, etc. They aim at reaching a critical philosophical depth for the sake of it.

(b) radical professional philosophers using Western philosophy or its conditions, to critique Ethnophilosophy, and implicitly Western philosophy, especially the soft humanist section condoning Ethnophilosophy as the philosophy for Africa. They insist that if African philosophy will exist, it must have the same modalities of existence as that of the West: have written documents (oral philosophy is a contradiction in terms), done by individual philosophers (philosophizing is solitary activity) assuming responsibility for their philosophizing and organized through an argumentative apparatus informed by, and patterned after, scientific practice. They are geared towards a generation of an African “Enlightenment”.

(c) Ethnophilosophy, the systematization, following the work of P. Tempels, of philosophical/foundational notions or categories said to underline African traditional cultural modes of life and their creations. These philosophies are collective (community shared, lived and experienced) worldviews. It includes both universalist (all Africa) and particularist (every ethnic group) approaches. The aim is to provide a humanistic integral defense of African humanity or establish its incompleteness. Close to this school, is a variant called Philosophical sagacity: an identification of some African sages and their argumentative views on basic philosophy-like issues such as life, God, etc. This school is sutured to art or poem as opposed to the previous one to science. And

(d) the so—called “Nationalist-Ideological-Political” school which focuses on the theoretical conditions of African collective self-mastery or self-emancipation.

Against the implicit doctrine of Western philosophy asserting the impossibility for Africans to achieve self-mastery, the aim of this school is to discover the possibility, in our very situation of domination, to achieve African self-mastery/self-emancipation or self-apprehension. What are the theoretical conditions for Africans to self-master, to self-apprehend? It goes against the cult of “emotion is Black and reason is Greek”, against the cult of the sole return to pre-Western domination roots as a necessary step for self-mastery. It argues that the West too needs to achieve self-mastery as it resides on dominating Others; but, if it did Africans must steal the secret of self-mastery to arrest the domination (technological empowerment for self-mastery). Afrocentricity is not enough for self-mastery, although it is a step for self-healing preparatory to self-mastery. This school is sutured to political conditions.

Those are just a few indications. African philosophy requires that certain conditions be fulfilled before it can deploy itself fully. It is not just a simple question of a search for recognition of an identity in conditions of “generalized master-slave type relations or power relations”. One must still battle for one’s freedom; no matter how humanitarian the master may be, she or he cannot give freedom, not a question of willingness on the master’s part, she or he has to be made incapable of withholding freedom. Freedom should not depend on her or his actions. Crucial issues in African philosophy concerning the establishment of just relationships: identity and transcendence, specificity/universality, particularity/singularity, independence/interdependence with nations of the world, internal contradictions/external conditions, etc. may be settled protractedly through protracted struggles. Along these lines, it has come to us that the urgent tasks of African philosophy could be listed as follows:

1. the freeing of thought,
2. the production of principles to help conceptualize the universal emancipation of the African (singularly and collectively),
3. helping to heal the African from the great disease of the incapacity to self-determine at all levels,
4. theoretically orienting science and technology towards dealing with Africa-specific problems;
5. theoretically freeing the politics of absolutely generic equality;
6. inducing public debates on points of interest to public consciousness in Africa;
7. contributing to the break-up of the triple refusal—to think for oneself, to take seriously one’s entire history and to resist taking up the long term perspective.

Development: Absence of Vision and National Purpose

African countries which have gone through victorious liberation-movement types of war or struggles are all supporting the American-British coalition in Iraq. None of them, after the so-called victory of their revolutions, has developed and experienced a politics of peace. After the so-called end of the Cold War, there has been no politics of peace worldwide, only a search for another protagonist in a new war opposing good against evil. Is not peace the prime condition for development?

Congolese academics talk of the Congolese population as being ignorant and Président J. Kabila as knowing nothing. They are happy doing their routine theoretical work and not caring much about the fact that they are sitting in a sinking boat. I find this attitude deplorable. They cannot even provide the people with an appropriate slogan to mobilize their energies. Development can only be consciously pursued and not left to chance or to others. The Bretton-Woods institutions, which are neither interested in nor capable of developing our countries—which is not in their vision or purpose—have completely taken over themselves the initiative for development of our countries, due to our own lack of vision and purpose around which to mobilize our energies. The uncivil Republics with their rulers opposed to self-mastery are even afraid of what the mobilization of the population for a true cause looks like.

Development for Africa, in the present situation, must be reconceptualized on the basis of a powerful thought which must rise from the need to free thinking through thinking. Liberation movements based only on military prowess have led nowhere. We must link ourselves up to and activate the vast movement of refusal of one sidedness and attempt to exit from the atrocious world whose millinerian presuppositions must be abandoned. Such a process of break from the immense historic epochs implies a profound reflection on the why of the destruction of nature, the accomplished masterpiece and work of madness of homo sapiens sapiens.

The task of freeing thinking requires that we seek to root ourselves solidly in the movement of refusal (from slave revolts, heretics, humanists, proletarian movement, revolutionary women movement, naturians, child revolt against parental repression, etc.); we must root ourselves in the entire humanity’s past (all its moments, from the emergence of the phylum Homo up to the moment of Capital as community); and we must assume the perspective of the whole phenomenon of life viewed in its connection to minerals which have also life—including the whole process of becoming. Only such a grounding will permit the required deep thinking and strength necessary to embark on the movement of the break from the millenanan therapeutic creations of humanity as required by humanity’s accommodation to the trauma caused by the forced separation from or destruction of nature. The break will make it possible to embark on the regeneration of nature. In all times, wars have been the means for eliminating ancestral communities and of destroying nature. The American Vietnam war veteran saw it clearly: “For the American soldiers, everything which had or carried life—including earth itself, was a war target.” Development is about letting life live fully, not struggling for power at the expense of life.

Movements of liberation, in Africa, have largely failed. They have not understood the importance of theory, of principles and spiritual factors or presuppositions for real liberation. The African remains eurocentrist and domesticated, unable to grasp the why of the destruction of the continent in the last five or so centuries. He or she is eurocentrist in her or his cultural vision and his or her representation of the world. We are not “inheritors” of some legacy for our domestication. We must be cured of all promises.

We attach a primordial importance to thinking and it can only thrive outside of the atrocious world of artificial cities and in an illuminating community of women and men immersed in the vibrant nature, in contact with the forest, the sky and its stars, away from all imposed representations by the movement of segmentation and of the destruction of the continuum of life process. Can African philosophy open up to that of movement of freeing thinking, capable of redefining development process?

The world of today has changed profoundly; we need to produce new ideas even to navigate consciously in it. The end of the so-called Cold War opened up a process of dissolution of Capital community which the USA is trying to reverse. Categories such as war, peace or good and evil have become ambiguous. War is no longer the continuation of the State policy by other means, but war of good against evil with need to exterminate evil (absolute enemy): an absolute war without end. Categories of crime and law are also called in to explain war and a criminal figure or entity is used as a scapegoat: Milosevic, Bin Laden, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the Interahamwe, etc. The criminal figure is said to be responsible for the crimes. People in the United States of America march asked: “perpetual war for perpetual peace?” The war is not for peace which does not exist; we must define principles anew and the content of a politics which is capable of peace.

New notions are produced to explain the war: preventive war, liberation by devastating war with arms of precision and the gift of democracy to traumatized people. The military intervention against the crime must lead to a change of regime, whose democratic dimension is self-proclaimed by the strongest belligerent and the whole leads to financial transactions. The consequences are ethnic partition and installation of American military bases. No principle of peace, just deployment and re-disposition of power and its strategies. The unification of Germany, Korea and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is not a question of peace just one of strategic affair.

Devices for organizing politics have changed: the whole twenthieth-century politics was organized through a Party; the State was its organizational principle: to seize the State power or to maintain State power. The Party, assuming the form of the State-Party or Party-State replaced the State per se in organizing the entire society. Politics as people’s capacity disappeared. Today, the question is not to abolish the State. Two forms of anti-Statism have existed: the Marxist withering away of the State and the ultra-liberalist or neo-liberalist reduction of the State to its sole military and police functions, making it irresponsible for development per se. We need today to require that the State be changed, in changing certain modalities of its functioning. We need a State for all, which counts each and everyone for what one is and where one is, defending the rights of each and all and eradicating unjust laws. In the refounding of the State in the DRC how should Congolese (each and all) be counted?

With the collapse of Soviet Union, a separation of politics from the State took place: question of power (of State power) and question of political capacity of people. We are in a great battle between politics as capacity to conquer power and maintain State power and politics as an inventive capacity, as organized thought and practice. It is clear that, in the planetarian peace movement, States refuse to take recognition of the so-called public opinion, which is actually a people’s inventive capacity for peace. Africans are hardly finding themselves in this dynamics. Reacting to events, to data of the current situation (immediatism or empiricism) is to place oneself inside the problematic of the adversary. Thinking requires a broader doctrinal framework through which a response is possible into which it should be integrated. Outside of a global framework, lessons cannot be properly drawn. African philosophy must provide such a global framework capable of redefining questions of development. This is how economistic, technologistic and demographical narrowness will be avoided.

Conclusion: Without a Fundamental Rethinking Will Africa Survive?

Nowhere in Africa does there seem to be an indication that Africans have totally assumed the responsibility of mastering their won independence. Famines, lack of food, moral and spiritual disorientation, recurrence of armed conflicts and armed banditism or genocide are just the consequences. Even traditional structures of solidarity have broken down. Identitary consciousness and ethnicism are just alienated consciouness of community breakdown. It is part of trauma caused by our separation from nature. People are struggling, by all means possible in the DRC, for State positions of State which does not exist. Signs of decay are marking African countries whose population is very young but whose future is bleak. This is a challenge for creative African philosophy to take up.

Note