Literacy and The Oral Tradition in Sage Philosophy

The influence of colonial bias against unwritten thought was also challenged by Oruka’s project. By publishing his interviews with the sages he aimed to counter the second negative claim regarding the denigration of African thought, namely that “philosophy is and can only be a ‘written’ enterprise; and so a tradition without writing is incapabale of philosophy [and that any claim to the contrary] …is a non-scientific, mythological claim” (Sage Philosophy, p.xv). He insisted that there are African thinkers, not yet absorbed into the tradition of the written word, whose memories are, in terms of consistency and organization, as good as the information recorded in books (Sage Philosophy, pp. 49–50). Responding to adversaries, he cautioned that:

اقتباس :: to argue like the critics, not just of Sage philosophy but of African philosophy generally have done that Africa is having a late start in philosophy just because we have no written records of her past philosophical activities is, wrongfully, to limit the sources from which we could detect traces of such activities (Sage Philosophy, p. 50).

Peter Bodunrin was particularly critical of Oruka’s method of extracting Sage Philosophy. He argued that to show that there were people, like the indigenous sages, who were capable of philosophical thinking was one thing, but it was a completely different thing to show that there were African philosophers who have engaged in organized systematic reflections on the traditions of their people. Regarding Bodunrin’s first objection, Oruka’s response, as already indicated above, was that philosophers often work in response to other ideas, whether they are the ideas of other philosophers, or popular ideas in the philosopher’s own setting. Oruka had a relatively longer response to Bodunrin’s second objection. In another essay popularly associated with his name, Oruka identified four main trends to be constitutive of African philosophy, namely (i) African ethnophilosophy, (ii) African nationalist-ideological philosophy, (iii) professional African philosophy, and of course, (iv) the African Sage philosophy under consideration here. Not only do these trends show different approaches that African philosophers have adopted to unravel and systematically to expose the underlying principles on which different departments of African life are based, they also demonstrate that African philosophy is not limited or confined to the academic institutions.
Indeed, many African philosophers look far beyond the traditional philosophical texts for sources and subject matter of philosophical reflection. For example, while engaging in subtle analytic philosophical reflections, African philosophers incorporate with great ease narratives from everyday lives and from literature into their reflections of the philosophical implications of their cultural events. Oruka was especially wary of the sub-group among professional African philosophers whose position regarding African traditional modes of thought was analogous to European bias in denying reason to Africans in their traditional settings. It was this attitude, according to Oruka, that amounted to a claim that Africans lacked a tradition of organized systematic philosophical reflections on the thoughts, beliefs, and practices of their own people. He thought that this view was exemplified in its most eloquent and strongest form by Peter Bodunrin. In his (Oruka’s) own estimation, Bodunrin had seriously underestimated the central point in the long tradition of Western scholarship, popularized by the works of Lévy-Bruhl, that denied Africans not only the existence of organized systematic philosophical reflection, but reason itself. Oruka thought that this view was rather absurd, for no society of humans can live for any reasonable amount of time, let alone making any advances in their own ways of seeing and doing things, if they do not have reason, or if the ideas and concepts upon which their cultures are built do not make sense. If, on the other hand, critics of African Sage philosophy based their refutation of the possibility of sage philosophy on the lack of written philosophical treatises, Oruka countered such a position by arguing that to exist as a philosopher it is not necessary that one’s thoughts must be written, or that they must progress — meaning that they must be commented on or even be available to future generations. While systematicity is important to the structure and consistency of good thinking, neither it nor preservation of thought necessarily requires literacy. Preservation in particular, he thought, was done selectively by generations for divers emerging reasons and circumstances, and so was not, in and of itself, the measure of the philosophical quality of someone’s thoughts. For just as thoughts can be expressed either in writing, or as unwritten oral reflections, e.g., sayings and argumentations of sages, so they may be preserved for a long time by sages, or quickly forgotten and cast into historically insignificant bits of a community’s past, only to be remembered by the few whom they touched in some special way.
Oruka’s position, as is also argued forcefully by Kwasi Wiredu, another African philosopher and Oruka’s contemporary, is that there is no harm in African philosophers’ creative fusion of influences from other traditions into their critical evaluations of African beliefs and practices in different fields (“The Ghanaian Tradition of Philosophy” in Person and Community, p. 2). Such a fusion is part of bringing into focus the interplay between philosophy and practice. Oruka believed, as he explains in Trends in Contemporary African Philosophy (pp. 17–18), that this is precisely what Kwame Nkrumah (1964), Léopold S. Senghor (1962), and Julius K. Nyerere (1968, 1968a), for example, had done in forming their political-philosophical positions (what Oruka calls “ideological trends”), all with different results.

4. Ethnophilosophy, Unanimity and African Critical Thought

Although it had been used previously by other writers, the term “ethnophilosophy” acquired its notoriety in the work of the Beninois philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1970, 1983). Perhaps unaware that the term had been used earlier, Hountondji criticized the Belgian missionary, Placide Tempels’ book, Bantu Philosophy (first French ed. 1945, and Eng. tr. 1959), as well as his disciples, among them the French philosopher and ethnographer Marcel Griaule, the Rwandais philosopher Alexis Kagame, and the Kenyan theologian John Mbiti, for casting African philosophy as an anonymous system of thought, without individual thinkers to claim or account for it. By the end of the 1960s, the positive reception in Anglophone Africa, not only of Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy, but also John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1969) and Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with Ogotemmêli that had recently been translated into English (1965), coincided with the rising tides of political and cultural nationalism throughout the continent.
The third negative claim Oruka aimed to challenge pertains to the philosophical status of indigenous African thought. Ethnophilosophy had falsely popularized the view that traditional Africa was a place of philosophical unanimity and that African traditions encouraged unanimity regarding beliefs and values. If this were true it would allow no room for individual thinkers like, say, Socrates or Descartes, with their own independent views on such matters. Oruka was concerned that African intellectuals were drawn into this false assumption regarding the intellectual inclination of African people, maintaining the belief that critique is absent from indigenous African thought. This situation was worsened by the new political movements of postindependence African nations where one-party political systems sprang up. By outlawing opposition politics as being both unAfrican and antinationalist, political leaders often appealed to this view of unanimity. The Sage Philosophy project objected to this claim regarding unanimity in Africa, which Oruka regarded as absurd, by presenting empirical evidence of the diversity of thought among indigenous thinkers. Oruka insisted that, while rulers everywhere will always crave unanimity, thinkers thrive in dialogue and diversity of opinion. He pointed out that Sage philosophy was about thinkers, not rulers.
Oruka’s desire to distinguish Sage philosophy from ethnophilosophy was also in response to another false view, partly created by ethnophilosophy, that indigenous African thought is anonymous. An important charge against ethnophilosophy has been that, by simply presenting the teachings of African beliefs in the allegorical modes, the impression is created that indigenous African modes of thought are deeply grounded in their mythical representations of reality, thus leaving the philosophic ideas largely unexplained. With this in mind, Oruka’s project aimed to counter two types of false perception of indigenous African thought. First, he separated the myths from the clearly thought out and logically valid philosophical ideas of indigenous individual thinkers to make clear what he frequently referred to as the “anthropological fogs” (Sage Philosophy, pp. xxi-xxix). Secondly, he contested the idea that a qualitative mental leap from myth is required for Africans to embrace philosophical thought. Such a view had been expressed by the Belgian philosopher Franz Crahay in a widely read article, “Le décollage conceptuel: conditions d’une philosophie bantoue” (1965). Although he was critical of ethnophilosophy, Hountondji was the first philosopher to distance himself from Crahay’s position, arguing that local knowledge systems were already separate from myths, as no humans can live on myths. Moral principles, for example, would have to be abstract in character to be applicable in general terms beyond one person (Hountondji 1970). According to Wiredu (1996: 182ff), such independent and critical thinking was available in varying forms in Akan communities and was the basis of frequently protracted disputations among elders in search of a consensus regarding matters that required negotiations. Thus, contrary to the view that knowledge at the communal level was anonymous, Wiredu argues that it is precisely in regard to the importance of consensus on matters of common good that disputation and careful navigation through different opinions was not just considered to be crucial, but was put on transparent display until some form of consensus was attained. In other words, consensus was not imposed, but relentlessly pursued. Such important matters like just claims to different kinds of rights were not adjudicated without the input of those members of community who were well regarded for their independent opinions.
Another point that Oruka makes against the perception of unanimity in African traditional thought can be found in the expressions of thinkers whose ideas are grounded in critical analysis and evaluation of everyday experiences in their communities. Another example of this, besides such figures as Paulo Mbuya Akoko and others who Oruka mentions and discusses in the book Sage Philosophy is the famous Swahili poet, critic, and philosopher Shabaan bin Robert from then Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Shabaan, famed as a pioneer in the interface between the oral and the written traditions, has established a unique legacy as an indigenous independent thinker, whose focus in his written work was to theorize about metaphysical and social ideals. About the former, Shabaan theorizes in his work entitled Utubora Mkulima the attributes of ideal personhood by arguing strongly, in a dialogical setting, that an ideal person is one whose moral righteousness is aimed at being a perfect member of community, and therefore his concerns for common good supersede individual interests (pp. 26–28). Regarding social ideals, Shabaan argues in Kusadikikathat a good society is defined as one in which all members are accorded their basic rights and treated with equality regardless of gender, age, or social status (pp. 29–43). This makes Shabaan Robert an example of a liberal thinker whose ideas bridge between indigenous or pre-colonial social structures and values, and the so-called modern society whose values were significantly influenced by colonial occupations and interests, as well as new economic, political, and moral values. In these senses, Shabaan Robert thought and works complement those of other indigenous thinkers in critiquing both indigenous and new modes of existence. To Oruka, these are signs that indigeneity is not, as is widely but falsely thought, synonymous with anonymity and stagnation in thought.

Literacy and The Oral Tradition in Sage Philosophy

4. Ethnophilosophy, Unanimity and African Critical Thought

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Literacy and The Oral Tradition in Sage Philosophy