African Fiction and Philosophy
Jeanne-Marie Jackson, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1176
Published online: 27 October 2020
Summary
Though the two fields have rarely been put in conversation, African philosophy and
African fiction share a set of foundational concerns. These include the relation of the
individual to the community; the significance of culture to unseating exclusively Western
universalisms; and the tension between “lived” and a priori claims to truth against a
background of political and epistemological decolonization. In addition to this substantive
thematic core, both fields have also been shaped by an acute and even anguished degree
of self-definitional questioning. What is “African” about African philosophy, or about the
African novel? And inversely, what is fundamental to philosophy or the novel as such?
Orality has served in both fields as a means of gauging the relative knowledge value
afforded experience, on the one hand, and ideas’ formal contestation, on the other. While
strong advocates of orality as a distinguishing feature of African intellectual production
have extolled its collective dimensions, critics have been wary of its potential for cultural
reductiveness and essentialism. Textuality, some argue, is an epistemological orientation
that exceeds the literal practice of writing, and need not be viewed as a historical
development at odds with African knowledge traditions. A number of influential African
philosophers have homed in on the related problem of individualism in an effort to
differentiate philosophical from social-scientific claims. This makes African philosophy an
ideal interlocutor for African novel studies, which has sought in its own right to reconcile
the form’s historical premium on the individual with African social contexts. While
countless African novels from the mid-20th century to the early 21st century represent
the challenge of negotiating between collective and individual as well as oral and textual
elements, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s masterwork Kintu is an exemplary study in how
the subgenre of the “philosophical novel” can narrativize the interaction of different
African knowledge paradigms. In its staging of an oral, embodied system of knowledge
alongside a textualized, meta-epistemological one, it invites the reader’s mutual
evaluation of each vis-à-vis the other.
Keywords:
African philosophy, African literature, postcolonialism, the novel, Kwame Anthony
Appiah, Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Linking African Fiction and Philosophy
Modern African fiction is widely celebrated for its insights into the social and personal costs of
the transition from colonialism to political self-rule, as well as, more recently, the formations
of power, mobility, and identity that attend global neoliberal capitalism. Since its advent as a
Page 1 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
cosmopolitan institution following the independence movements of the late 1950s, typically
marked by the founding of Heinemann’s African Writers Series in 1962, the African novel has
dissected the relationship between metropolitan and local and/or indigenous values and
traditions. This has often centered on the critical exploration of liberal individualism,
narrativized as a give-and-take between personal growth and African communal affiliations.
From the tension between British and Igbo social norms in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at
Ease; to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s tale of a young girl’s rise above rural patriarchy in Nervous
Conditions; to the transcontinental romance of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, naming
but a few well-known examples, African writers have imagined the enticements and
1
limitations of individual agency with especial prominence.
Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, African philosophers debated a related set of issues
to those that concerned African literary scholars in the same period. The question of the
individual’s relation to community—and analogously, the philosopher’s relation to culture—
undergirds a dense archive of writing by figures including Valentin Mudimbe, Paulin
Hountondji, Sophie Oluwole, Mogobe Ramose, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Kwame
Anthony Appiah, and Olufemi O. Taiwo. It is striking, then, that the fields of African philosophy
and African fiction have rarely been put in conversation. Part of the reason for this is no doubt
African literature’s association with social over meta-epistemological forms of inquiry; that is,
with a capacity to represent globally marginalized “ways of knowing” more than with an
investment in systematically querying what fundamental standards of knowledge are or
should be operative in African contexts. Yet a particular strain of work on individualism in
African philosophy might serve as a valuable resource for theorizing intellection in African
fiction; in this instance, it is mostly addressed to an anglophone postcolonial African context,
by constructing a cross-disciplinary conversation between two distinct intellectual traditions,
philosophy and literature. Bringing parallel streams of inquiry together in order to introduce
an explicit philosophical dimension to the mainly social and historical investments of African
novel studies, thereby illuminates how representations of the philosophical individual speak to
a larger concern with the point of demarcation between knowledge, culture, and experience.
Foundations of African Philosophy
Among African philosophy’s defining features is its preoccupation with what constitutes
African philosophy, and by extension, with the implications of the field’s consolidation around
this self-questioning. Mudimbe and Appiah, in 1993, refer to African philosophy not as a field
but as a “problem,” around which “there is . . . a good deal of uncertainty about how to define
2
its projects.” As Olufemi O. Taiwo writes in 1998, references to Africa as a viable source of
philosophical thought were, at that point, the product of
the last twenty, or at the most twenty-five, years. Even then, a good part of the current
mention is preoccupied with issues of pedigree. Is African Philosophy philosophy? Or of the
3
conditions of its possibility, or whether it ever was, is, or is a thing of the future?
In this way, African philosophy’s self-interrogation overlaps with what have long been the
major concerns driving theories of the novel. Does the novel have consistent traits, or does it
mutate across time and space? What is the minimum threshold of its standardization and
definitional coherence? And, most significantly here, is the novel an inescapably Western and/
Page 2 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
or liberal institution, as per Franco Moretti’s much-cited thesis in “Conjectures on World
Literature” that its rise outside Western Europe is a compromise between European form and
4
local material? African philosophers have been similarly and formatively concerned with
what, if anything, is uniquely “African” about their work. The stakes of this question are high:
if African philosophy is just philosophy that originates in Africa, then the larger discipline’s
universalism, along with Africa’s, is affirmed. If African philosophy requires new
methodological tools attuned to some specific feature of African culture(s), then the field’s
guiding principle will appear to be that of difference, more aligned with anthropological
particularism than with a search for a priori truths.
Much of the debate surrounding what counts as philosophy in relation to Africa has centered
on the controversial label of “ethnophilosophy.” Mostly remembered in the 21st century for its
rejection as culturally essentialist or even nativist, ethnophilosophy is usually traced to the
5
1945 publication of Bantu Philosophy by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels. Based on
his experience living among the Luba people of the present-day Democratic Republic of
Congo, Tempels’s work posits a God-derived “vital force,” variable in degree as it pertains to
any given individual, as the African alternative to the Western ontological fundament of
“being.” To be sure, Bantu Philosophy marked a significant turn away from the Western
denigration of Africans as fundamentally unphilosophical—what Stephen O. Okafor
summarizes as the then-prevailing view that “[The African] is a primal being who has
6
managed to make it to the modern world more or less as a museum piece.” It was rightly
criticized, however, for its vast and untenable generalization across distinct African belief
systems. Successive discussions of ethnophilosophy nonetheless retain a focus on the role of
cultural and linguistic insiderness in understanding African thought. In other words, what is
or should be the relationship between culture as a store of knowledge that is lived, and
philosophy as knowledge’s formal, argumentative pursuit? Sophie Oluwole, in her book
Socrates and Orunmila, warns against too readily conflating culture’s enactment with its
7
conceptual systematization. “What needs to be characterized and critically examined are
African ideas and beliefs,” she writes. “This warning is sacrosanct since philosophy is about
8
what people say rather than what they do.”
The most prominent African philosophers to address the role of culture and indigeneity in the
discipline all avow a commitment to epistemological decolonization. Disagreement among
them is not so much a matter of what, politically speaking, they imagine themselves as
achieving, but of how they methodologically commit to achieving it. They proceed with due
regard for what distinguishes philosophical from anthropological or sociological claims. “The
task for historical sociology is to see which institutions have changed and which ones have
remained the same in content and in form,” writes Oyeronke Oyewumi in The Invention of
Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, “and what historical
9
processes and cultural forces made such changes and continuities ‘permissible.’” Such work
strives for a locally and linguistically embedded account of the beliefs that shape African lives
and institutions, “[recognizing] that traditions as a body of knowledge are in and of
10
themselves not static but dynamic and part of a process in people’s lived experiences.” A
philosophical approach, however, would presumably take a granular and linguistically
informed account of African beliefs as a startingpoint for their normative exposition. And yet
finding this line of disciplinary complementarity is no easy task. As Oyewumi indicates,
culture is embodied and changing, making it a slippery object of abstract as against empirical
analysis.
Page 3 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Determining what is or is not “philosophical,” in this way, becomes twinned with the challenge
that orality presents to philosophy and African fiction alike. In both intellectual settings,
orality serves as a barometer for the relative value afforded immediacy and mediation. As
Mudimbe and Appiah suggest, there is a strong, culturally restitutive motivation for granting
oral traditions philosophical status. “On the whole,” they write,
even when African local Weltanschauungen [worldviews] have been explored with
sympathy . . . they have had to prove themselves against two theoretical assumptions: first,
that African thought was backward, primitive; and second (correlatively) that Africans needed
11
to be converted to a more civilized, more systematic order.
Approaching African-language proverbs, for example, as philosophy thus serves to undo a
stagist or evolutionary model of culture used to justify imperial domination. Kwame Gyekye
argues as much in the Preface to his seminal 1987 work, An Essay on African Philosophical
12
Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme. He maintains that because “philosophy of some
kind is behind or involved in the thought and action of every people, every culture . . .
produces a philosophy,” but that
as a result of the lack of writing in Africa’s historical past, the indigenous philosophical output
of African thinkers, in the traditional setting, has remained part of their oral traditions and
13
has come to be expressed also in religious and sociopolitical beliefs and institutions.
Gyekye thus addresses himself to charting the “reflective impulse” in “African religious
thought” as it deals with “such fundamental questions as the meaning of life, the origins of all
14
things, death, and related questions . . . of ultimate existence.” In this way, his work finds
fruitful dialogue with that of the Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti, who devotes his career to
15
these questions’ particular formulation in African Christianities.
The Individual and Textuality in African Philosophy
Unobjectionable as philosophical attention to Africans’ oral traditions and customary practices
may sound, the critique of this orientation has been rich and persuasive. In African
Philosophy: Myth and Reality, the Beninoise philosopher Paulin J. Hountondji insists that the
“mode of existence of philosophy” is “that of a text or set of texts, that of a piece or pieces of
16
explicit discourse.” As Hountondji is aware, this is a controversial position. While he is, like
Gyekye, committed to the idea of investigating the “world-views and value systems of
traditional African societies,” he is hesitant to equate these categories with philosophy as
17
such. Philosophical status, in his view, demands “empirical” documents that self-consciously
express an “intellectual quest.” This is because philosophy is distinct from “wisdom,” per
Hountondji, in that it exceeds the mere transmission or “living out” of truth to arrive at the
18
structured interrogation of what truth is. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu, in an
interview with Michael Onyebuchi Eze and Thaddeus Metz, also emphasizes the analytic
distance required to cross the threshold of philosophy as distinct from worldview, positioning
the culturally particularized iteration of the field as part and parcel of a larger priority on
molding beliefs into a consistent set of principles. African philosophy, he claims, is “the
Page 4 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
investigation into various fundamental concepts of human thought,” while philosophy in
general is what happens “when you investigate or you try to make a coherent picture from
19
your worldview.”
It is crucial that for Wiredu, philosophy even in its orally transmitted form suggests an
orientation toward the individual and, along with it, textuality. In fact, textuality in his work
often functions as a stand-in for the individuation of the thinker; it is not irredeemably
tethered to European modernity, or even to writing. In “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood:
Comments on Philosophy and Orality” from 2009, Wiredu uses the example of an Akan
tradition called “talking drums” to identify the point of demarcation between an oral and a
textual paradigm, even where writing is not literally present. As drums are made to
approximate the human voice to transmit, through set patterns, “deep reflections about
reality and human experience,” only those who have “[learned] the given drum language” will
be able to understand, so that “something is going on not altogether dissimilar to the reading
of writing . . . to the extent that the method of preserving the drum text is almost as
20
formalized as in the case of written text.” Wiredu ultimately uses this case of acquired,
systematized knowledge to work toward what he sees as the necessity of “dialectical aptitude”
on the part of the individual listener for moving from an oral to a textual and, thereby, from a
21
communal to a differentiated model of conceptual transmission. By identifying a disharmony
between the message latent in a particular drum “text” (which he takes to be pantheistic) and
the broad foundation of Akan theology (which is theistic), Wiredu concludes that “There was
no uniformity of thought in the traditional society under discussion” and that “A pattern of
thought in an oral tradition need not be communal; it may be the outcome of an original and
22
nonconforming way of thinking.” Wiredu’s performance as a philosopher here is also central
to his argument: even those trained to decipher the drum “text” might lack the inclination or
ability to draw deeper, comparative conclusions from its content. His reading, furthermore, in
its attention to where cultural convention breaks down into discordant forces diverges from
Oyewumi’s sociological aims.
In an earlier 1998 essay that distills much of his thinking across his career, “Toward
Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion,” Wiredu memorably underscores his
investment in the “independent grounds” of philosophical evaluation, or “considerations that
are independent of the peculiarities of the given vernaculars and are, therefore, intelligible to
23
all concerned irrespective of language, race, persuasion, etc.” Although he foregrounds
African culture in his turn to Twi grammatical structures (the widest-spoken Akan language),
his central interest is in how Asante phrases and beliefs can be made to disclose concepts and
principles that are then evaluable against others. For example, he reasons that because “The
idea of nothing can only be expressed [in Twi] by some such phrase as se whee nni ho, which
means something like ‘the circumstance of there not being something there,’” Akan
cosmology must attribute ultimate meaning to spatial context and the manipulation of pre24
given materials. This, in turn, suggests “a metaphorical articulation of God as the Great
25
Designer” instead of a miraculous conception of creation. The desired end, for Wiredu, is
that these two ultimate attributions of meaning to existence can be set off against one
another, prompting the proactive evaluation and refinement of their relative truth claims and
merits. The point, in other words, is not simply to represent African cultures as intrinsically
philosophical, but to do philosophy in relation to culturally derived concepts. “The obvious
lesson is that African thinkers will have to critically review both the conceptions—of god as ex
nihilo creator and god as a cosmic architect—and choose one or none, but not both,” Wiredu
Page 5 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
26
concludes. “Otherwise, colonized thinking must be admitted to retain its hold.” The
experience of culture is not the source of philosophy; it is the source of the intellectual
materials that make philosophy possible.
Rather than deny communality’s validity to African philosophical inquiry, Wiredu introduces
an individualized dimension to its theorization. He attests that “a communal philosophy is the
result of the pooling together over a considerable length of time the thoughts of individual
thinkers,” adding that “It goes without saying . . . that a communal philosophy is a gathering
27
together of inputs from thinkers who may not have agreed on all points.” It is revealing, on
this point, that much recent work on Enlightenment thought has moved away from its firm
individual basis. In his 2013 book The Architecture of Concepts, for example, Peter de Bolla
contends, “When concepts are considered as cultural entities, it becomes possible to discern
28
how ‘ways of thinking something’ are not only determined by an agent who thinks.” Whereas
contemplation of the collective origins of thought marks an innovative and indispensable
revision of past Western truth claims, African philosophers have often sought ways to
responsibly assert the significance of discrete minds. Achieving this means tethering localized
knowledge systems to the affirmation that universalism is possible, with the specter of Africa’s
colonization looming large in the background. Against a tendency to dismiss Western values
like individualism because they are associated with the West, Ato Sekyi-Otu writes in Left
Universalism, Africacentric Essays that
the simple or rather complex truth is that there can be and there are transcultural value
commitments not because or only because someone echoes another . . . but because these
29
commitments speak for ill or good to shared human necessities, desires, claims and dreams.
The African philosophical subfield, then, has a different default point of departure than
(implicitly Western) philosophy as such. For Hountondji, Wiredu, and others, the African
philosopher emerges as the individual who can perform being both of a culture—at least
enough to have knowledge of the grammatical and religious systems by which it is
instantiated—and capable of standing at an analytic distance from it. If Appiah can justifiably
claim, in In My Father’s House, that “‘Philosophy’ is the highest-status label of Western
humanism,” then African philosophers contend with the counter-pull of a hard-earned
30
skepticism toward Western humanistic hubris.
What then should be salvaged, and what disregarded from Western philosophy’s tarnished
universalizing aims and individualistic biases? While being part of a culture and critically
evaluating it are by no means mutually exclusive, the latter, per Appiah and Mudimbe, when
generalized as a textual practice inculcates a distinct level of deliberation. They succinctly
articulate this distinction by noting that the difference between “an experimental, skeptical
science and an unexperimental, ‘dogmatic,’ traditional mode of thought is the difference in
images of knowledge that are represented in the difference in the social organization of
31
enquiry in modern as opposed to ‘traditional’ societies.” Their point is not to discredit oral
cultures as intellectual wellsprings or to valorize professional philosophy as somehow
superior, but to associate it with the generation of knowledge through largely agreed-on
32
norms of individual contestation “for its own sake.” Philosophy by this definition, they argue,
is inextricably bound up with “political individualism, of a kind that is rare in the traditional
polity” and that accompanies the social mobility facilitated by industrialization, with writing
as a specific means of testing ideas. “Write down a sentence and it is there, in principle,
Page 6 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
forever,” they contend, “and that means that if you write down another sentence inconsistent
with it, you can be caught out. It is this fact that is at the root of the possibility of the
33
adversarial style.” The conjoining of individuality, textuality, and ideas’ status as
“philosophical” is a consistent theme in Appiah’s highly influential work across the 1990s.
Again in In My Father’s House, he writes that
Creative, critical philosophers have been very few in the history of the West, and their bravery
has often been made easier by their access to a written critical tradition. Oral traditions have
a habit of transmitting only the consensus, the accepted view: those who are in intellectual
34
rebellion . . . often have to begin each generation all over again.
Contested Communality in African Literary Studies
Regardless of the empirical validity of Appiah’s claim above (which I and most literary
scholars lack the methodological tools to evaluate), the conjunction of the individual and
philosophy within a self-consciously textualized mode of intellectual contestation has
particular relevance for narrative fiction. Transposing the parameters for “philosophy” from
the African philosophical lineage to the context of the African novel can facilitate a sharper
definition of “the philosophical novel” as a generic subcategory. More specifically, discussion
of orality in the literary arena suggests a distinction, here again, between cultural experience
or embodiment, and a degree of critical distance from culture sufficient for its evaluation and,
if desired, modification. While any intellectual practice is in principle embodied, philosophers
and novelists alike have often sought to distinguish between seeing it as a mediation versus a
root source of knowledge claims. This is not necessarily a normative assessment, in that a
novel that wields the individual toward a goal of representing the beliefs common to a certain
time or place may well fulfill literary criteria that a meta-epistemological novel does not. It is a
distinction, rather, more in keeping with the one Hountondji formulates between wisdom and
philosophy. While the first represents individual reflection in a way that is true to the spirit of
folk sages within Henry Odera Oruka’s “sage philosophy” project—as elders in whom a
community’s collective wisdom comes to its fullest fruition—the second entails stronger
35
emphasis on meta-argumentative exploration. A folk-philosophical figure in a novel may
embody, articulate, and refine widely held cultural understandings, whereas a philosophical
figure on the order of Mudimbe, Appiah, and Wiredu’s textualized contestation should reflect
on the stakes introduced thereby for knowledge as such. The line between experientially
oriented or “culturalized” forms of knowledge, and those that skew toward knowledge
practices by which culture becomes an object of analysis is tricky, at best, to determine.
As in African philosophy, debates about orality in African literary studies have centered on
whether literacy marks continuity or a break with more obviously embodied forms of
knowledge transmission. Emmanuel Obiechina, in an essay called “Narrative Proverbs in the
African Novel,” argues that “vital aspects of the oral literature [of Africa] are absorbed into an
emerging written literature of greatly invigorated forms infused with vernacular energy
through metaphors, images and symbols, more complex plots, and diversified structures of
36
meaning.” He represents a position that sees African literacy as an amplification of oral
cultures’ distinctive rhetorical features, noting, for example, that “a substantial body of
Africa’s oral literatures—from epics and extended forms to unicellular tales and verbal art—
was written down, recorded, and archived” owing to the “superimposition of alphabetic
Page 7 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
37
writing upon the oral cultures of Africa in the nineteenth century.” By turning to the ways in
which proverbs are embedded in novels alongside folktales and myths, grounded in a reading
of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Obiechina wrests the form out of the individual locus it shares
38
with the textual modernity described by Mudimbe and Appiah. He concludes that
The African novel is not a sole product of an individual consciousness (even though the
novelist is a conscious individual artist), but is mediated by communal consciousness and
impulses arising from group sensibility. The story when used as a proverb is drawing upon
group habits of speech and narration as a means of giving shape to experience, drawing upon
39
what could be called the populist impulse in art and life.
Abiola Irele argues along similar lines in his field-defining essay “The African Imagination,”
concluding that African literature is best defined as a body of writing for which orality is a
40
“basic intertext.” A palpable proximity to orality, then—a formal engagement with collective
knowledge forms and terminology—would seem to distinguish the African novel from its
European predecessors. This is precisely the innovation attributed to Things Fall Apart by
Obiechina and many others, as in Isidore Okpewho’s suggestion, in reference to the novel’s
use of “moons” rather than “months,” that “the most visible revolution affected [in the book]
is on the level of language: here, the English language has been forced to assume lexical and
41
semantic burdens for which it was never designed.”
Here again, though, the perceived valorization of orality has met with sharp criticism.
Comparably to their counterparts in philosophy, African literary scholars through the 1990s
established what are in some ways rival paradigms of cultural restitution and no-holds-barred
intellectual accountability. As one case in point, Wole Ogundele described the field’s
constitutive concern with mythology and orality as an evasion of more rigorous attention to
pre-colonial pasts, facilitating “the displacement of history by myth in the postcolonial African
42
novel in English.” Just as Hountondji and Wiredu, especially, insist that culture is important
in its own right but not in essence philosophical, Ogundele seeks to disarticulate an overly
generalized sense of history as “African experience” from one that ascribes significance to
particular actors and events. The first sort, which he describes as “history as reality, or
existence, or being generally” tends to “align history with myth,” while the second sees
history “as the deeds of human beings, done by particular individuals or groups at specific
43
moments and places, with discernible motives, causes, and consequences.” Ogundele pulls
44
no punches, designating the restitutive, mythologized sense of history as “fudged.” He also
holds the postcolonial realist novel to account for its role in blurring the line between a
rationally knowable and, thus, specifically critiquable sense of the historical past, and one that
is at heart concerned with what he casts as the “eternal” realm of “the inner life of a people
45
and their worldview, supernatural beliefs and myths.” Ogundele’s attribution of historical
status does not map exactly onto the criteria for a philosophical one, but it does share an
investment in analytic individuation. Whereas Obiechina turns to Things Fall Apart to
showcase the refraction of its main character’s life through communal forms, Ogundele
adopts the same text as an example of how communal emphasis is used to foster a misleading
sense of cultural and historical stasis. The novel’s “narrative weight,” he claims, “is more on
filling a cultural canvas with the way it was than on dramatizing the historical evolution of
that way,” an effect achieved through techniques such as “extended flashbacks that give the
46
impression that personal and communal life revolves around a still point.” In his insistence
Page 8 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
on an “infinitely more complex” notion of history than representations of culture as “a slow,
cyclic, and permanent rhythm” can allow, one hears echoes of Wiredu’s efforts to dig down
into the discordant origins of what might easily be taken as straightforward collective
47
beliefs.
Ogundele’s intention is not to prioritize the individual over the broader social good; on the
contrary, he takes a studied disaggregation of the many things bundled as “culture” to be an
essential part of instilling social accountability through the accumulation of arguable analyses
over time. He writes that
Oral texts change during performance, and more so in the process of being handed down from
one generation to the next, as each modifies, adds, and deletes according to its own needs.
This is to say that while an oral text may in performance directly mirror, or capture, all the
48
many-sided qualities of lived experience, it is as evanescent as the experience itself.
A central, recurring quandary among African humanists has been whether or not a cultural
belief system transmitted by and lived out as experience is adequate to imagine what might be
called a truly decolonized—which is to say, epistemologically equal because fully interrogable
—place for African thought traditions in larger disciplinary conversations. On the one hand,
the customs and beliefs of any given African polity are subject to change, and so arriving at a
clear view of their operation at any given time is a mammoth task all its own. On the other,
lived forms of knowledge were overlooked or denigrated for so long within European colonial
archives—often in gendered terms—that their deliberate representation as objects of
intellectual inquiry feels politically essential.
This tension between recuperative desire and analytic slipperiness means that the narrative
and philosophical treatment of pre-literate traditions often risks reverting to essentialisms,
“appropriated,” in the words of Adeleke Adeeko, “for a localist foundation of the emergent
49
post-independence culture.” The trick, then, following Eileen Julien’s instructive caution in
African Novels and the Question of Orality is to acknowledge African literature’s debt to both
oral and textual forms without reverting to the idea that Africans are intrinsically more
50
disposed to the former. “Paradoxically,” she writes, “the assumption of the profoundly oral
nature of African life and art is expressed more subtly in the expectation or requirement that
51
novels be leavened with the appropriate African yeast of orality.” In other words, the
assumption that orality bears an organic connection to “Africanness” becomes a convention in
its own right. This is where the novel’s inbuilt predisposition to individualism can be helpful,
rather than the hurdle it is often perceived to be in an African context: the range of
contrastive types required to create an effect of individuation fosters the form’s capacity to
52
stage different analytic orientations alongside one another. It is neither an intrinsically
“sociological” nor “philosophical” medium based solely on the historical prominence of the
individual as its main representational tool. Instead, the novel can wield distinct kinds of
knowledgeable figures to stage the point of demarcation between knowledge as the
embodiment of communal wisdom, and knowledge as a textualized, meta-epistemological
pursuit. It can, in other words, differentiate between what the African philosophers and
literary scholars surveyed here thus far elaborate as cultural versus philosophical knowledge
modes, without necessarily hierarchizing their relation.
Page 9 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Modes of Knowledge in the African Novel: Kintu as Case Study
It would be impossible to survey all the ways in which the primacy of the individual has been
adopted, transformed, and contested by African novelists. One key strain of critical discussion
has centered on the Bildungsroman, and specifically the degree to which its African
permutations may or may not be complicit in normalizing global regimes of legal and
53
economic inequality. A second has concerned “spectral” or flat characterization, often with
54
socially radical investments. Still another has seen the deep exploration of consciousness as
a tool for narrativizing what Wole Soyinka calls the “psychic emanations” of African
55
cosmologies. Both of the latter two approaches urge individual representation toward
collective expression, in effect rehabilitating the novel form from its bourgeois European
origins. At the farthest reaches of this undertaking is a questioning of the most fundamental
aspect of Western liberal modernity: namely, its presumed and constraining definition of the
56
human. In keeping with debates about what constitutes African philosophy, however, as
distinct from what Hountondji might call the “wisdom” accrued by and within particular
cultural traditions, a prominent 21st-century African novel represents two people marked in
different ways as exceptionally knowledgeable.
The Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel Kintu retains a representational
investment in the individual in order to foreground the challenge of epistemological
discordance, making space for both oral transmission and textualized argumentation within
57
the same family. At the same time, the book clearly distinguishes between their respective
methods and merits, demonstrating the coexistence of but not quite compatibility between
knowledge acquired through bodily experience and that formed mainly by abstract study.
More specifically, Kintu employs a roving third-person perspective to explore the collision
between orality in the form of supernatural mythology (namely a cross-generational curse),
and ideas’ textual contestation as it hews to rational-scientific norms. The text spans four
centuries of the Buganda Kingdom, from the 18th to the 21st, and is structured as a Prologue
followed by six long sections or Books, each of which is devoted to a different main character
(or, in the last case, to their assembly during a family reunion). Its overarching theme is the
supposed unfolding of a curse’s effects from 1750 to 2004, and by extension, the evolving
ways in which the very notion of a curse is affirmed or doubted in accordance with the era in
which it surfaces. As she weaves oral tales about the curse’s origins together with apparitions,
family misfortunes, and characters’ self-reflexive commentary on all of these, Makumbi
creates real uncertainty in the reader as to what constitutes the right interpretation of events.
Is the curse a story or a fact? And what kinds of knowledge are adequate to its contestation
and legitimation? By adopting such a wide range of characters brought together by a central
epistemological challenge, Kintu offers a fictional enactment of the influential notions of
African philosophy. Following Hountondji (and in large part, Mudimbe and Appiah), the book
hosts both “wise” and “argumentative” figures without conflating the two. In a similar vein to
Wiredu’s definition of philosophy, it then facilitates their deliberate evaluation vis-á-vis one
another. Kintu, in other words, is a philosophical novel by virtue of the comparative and
contestatory work it both performs and demands of its reader.
Page 10 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Embodied Knowledge in the Figure of Suubi Nnakintu
Arguably the key example of an oral tradition’s substantiation as knowledge by lived or
embodied means is Book Two’s protagonist Suubi Nnakintu. While Suubi is privy to the story
of the curse, she understands it precisely as a story, which is to say as fiction rather than
knowledge that has a real role to play in shaping her life’s decisions. It is transmitted to her in
oral form by her grandmother, who warns her that the curse’s ancestral progenitor, the
58
original Kintu, “is still roaming the world” to protect his descendants. Events in her
childhood that might have lent credence to this tale, though—including the death in infancy of
an identical twin sister—are lost to her faltering memory. “It felt as though someone had come
with a broom,” Suubi thinks, “swept away all her childhood recollections, but missed her
59
grandmother’s voice.” As a result, she begins from a position of skepticism toward what the
reader knows may be effects of the curse introduced in the previous section, attributing its
possible manifestations to her own psychic fragility. On her way home one day, Suubi
perceives the dark presence of the dead twin, named Ssanyu, which then causes her to flash
back to an earlier encounter.
The first happened eight years ago on the morning after Suubi’s graduation. She had lain halfawake in bed when a sensation of being “locked”—she could not open her eyes or move or
scream—came over her. Yet she could see a young woman standing above her bed looking
down at her. The woman looked exactly like Suubi only she was so emaciated that it was
60
surprising she could stand at all.
Over time, however, Suubi determines that Ssanyu was “a bad dream” and moves forward
with her life committed to what she sees as rational principles that rule out deeper
61
contemplation of her oralized inheritance. Instead of what Obiechina calls the mythological
“story-within-the-story” enriching the individual’s experience with a collective consciousness,
62
it is isolated here as a cultural curiosity.
The family reunion approaching the novel’s conclusion, however, marks a critical turn of
events that helps usher Kintu toward the meta-definitional stakes of African philosophy. Upon
her arrival, Suubi remarks that she is “neither Christian nor atheist,” seeing herself as “just
plain.” She quickly takes any uncontestable form of knowledge off the table with the quip,
63
“These things have no place in the modern world.” Nonetheless, Suubi agrees to participate
in a traditional ancestor-conjuring ceremony as a matter of pro forma respect. Its effect on her
is unexpectedly profound: she undergoes a complete transformation and begins to channel
what announces itself as the voice of the previously disregarded dead twin. “The woman’s
64
body swinging or rotating, picked up momentum and started hopping about on her hands.”
Suubi’s almost exaggerated embodiment of “culture”—her literal, physical containment of
voices once relegated to the status of mere myth—portends the reinstatement of orality as a
viable source of worldly knowledge. More subtly, it also merges a narrative of personal growth
with that of cultural representation, as Suubi becomes the apotheosis of centuries’ worth of
wisdom. She makes an informed choice to embrace the “un-modern” belief system foretold by
her grandmother during her childhood, bringing what she once saw as the “pieces” of herself
65
into a wholeness encompassing both communality and individuality.
Page 11 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Textualized Knowledge in the Figure of Misirayimu Kintu
On the other end of the spectrum linking lived, orally transmitted knowledge to its formalized,
written alternative is Misirayimu or “Miisi” Kintu, a self-conceived rational intellectual
educated through the doctoral level in an Irish Catholic seminary, the Soviet Union, and finally
England. His dissertation clearly though ironically positions him in “objective” relation to an
anthropologized version of African culture, as he studies “child worship in African
66
communities” through the evergreen example of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Upon
returning to Uganda after Idi Amin’s rule has ended in the late 1970s, Miisi aims to recover an
African sense of self. “He and his friends constructed their own narratives of we, they, us, and
them,” Makumbi dryly narrates.
In these narratives, Miisi concentrated on those things that made black more human,
wholesome and natural than white. Once he had convinced himself of this, it was not hard to
67
find evidence in the everyday manners, actions, tendencies and behavior of Europeans.
All the same, he proves unable to internalize a belief system on the order of that to which
Suubi comes around through her spirit possession. “As for the family curse,” he thinks, “Miisi
argued that it was a documented fact that in Buganda mental health problems such as
68
depression, schizophrenia and psychosis ran not only in families but in clans.” Where Suubi
begins, Miisi resolutely remains.
When a mysterious swarm of bees descends on his home, he refuses to see it as the omen that
necessarily comes to mind for the reader. The bees’ appearance is described as “a drama so
bizarre that Miisi’s wife and sister looked to the supernatural. But not Miisi. . . . He was
69
rational. There had to be a logical explanation.” Notably, however, affording the curse the
benefit of the doubt is not in any straightforward way upheld by the novel as the exclusive
domain of the “African”: the Irish priests by whom Miisi was raised did believe in it, and so
Miisi’s rejection of culturalized modes of knowledge in favor of what he considers to be
universal logic is better read as a generative second option for how Africans imagine their
pursuit of truth in the world. Miisi attends the family reunion alongside Suubi, but his outlook
remains anthropological. He describes it as “a chance . . . to observe and study traditional
spirituality,” in advance ruling out any possible truth claims that new experiences there might
70
afford. If Suubi’s defining moment in the text is her embodiment of the Kintu mythology,
then Miisi’s is his written exploration of the African cultural syncretism whereby mythology
continues to operate as a social force. He authors an argumentative piece for the local paper
that he calls “Africanstein,” which he translates into Luganda as “Ekisode,” and in which he
maintains that, “Africa must learn to walk on European legs and work with European arms” as
71
it evolves into something “neither African nor European.” Faced with the same oralmythological inheritance as Suubi and the same event by which its intellectual legitimacy
rises or falls, Miisi opts for a meta-level textual analysis of the cultural situation they both
inhabit. Makumbi no doubt provides ample room to doubt Miisi’s path, and Miisi himself
experiences a mental breakdown as a result of the cultural syncretism he diagnoses. The
novel’s most salient feature, nonetheless, is the evaluable presence of multiple
epistemological standards side by side, facilitated by their realization as individual characters.
In sum, African philosophy and African fiction share an interest in the relationship between
communal experience and individual analytic agency. Where the first prioritizes culture,
embodiment, and orality against the grain of their wrongful dismissal as “knowledge,” the
Page 12 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
second looks to textual contestation and intellectual non-conformity in wariness of cultural
essentialism. Many of the most influential African philosophers of the 1980s to 2020s have
grappled with how to distinguish philosophy from complementary social-scientific pursuits.
This distinction has often taken shape as a critical individualism that emerges from deep
cultural awareness, making African philosophy a useful interlocutor for the African novel as it
works through that form’s historical elevation of the individual. Jennifer Nansubuga
Makumbi’s novel Kintu is one of many possible cases in which the relationship between oral
and textual modes of intellectual transmission and contestation comes to fictive fruition. In its
elegant, exaggerated contrast of oral myth with a textualized claim to transcultural rationality,
it invites the reader to evaluate a range of competing knowledge claims. In doing so, it
exemplifies the philosophical novel as a notable and under-recognized African subgenre.
Discussion of the Literature
What work exists at the intersection of African philosophy and African fiction typically
conforms to one of two broad models: the first turns to literary texts to substantiate
philosophical claims, the best example of which is Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s
House in its use of Wole Soyinka’s career to illustrate a philosophical argument for racial non72
essentialism. Soyinka’s own Myth, Literature, and the African World also remains critical
reading on this front, as it draws on African writing—and in particular, drama—to make a
73
larger case for ritual’s significance to Yoruba cosmology and its influence on the world. The
second broad model foregrounds figures and texts that confound the very distinction between
philosophy and literature. With few exceptions, scholarship in this vein works more within a
continental than an analytic philosophical idiom, prioritizing a stylistic fluidity well matched to
the blurred epistemological boundaries of its subjects. Examples of texts that address
literature and philosophy in this overlapping way are Samuel Oluoch Imbo’s Oral Traditions as
Philosophy: Okot p’Bitek’s Legacy for African Philosophy; M. S. C. Okolo’s African Literature
as Political Philosophy; Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s African Art as Philosophy: Senghor,
Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude; and Omedi Ochieng’s The Intellectual Imagination:
74
Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy. Ochieng’s book, for its
part, professes ambitiously that
robust and rigorous thought about the form and contours of intellectual practices are best
envisioned in light of a comprehensive critical contextual ontology—that is, a systematic
account of the contexts, forms, and dimensions in and through which knowledge and aesthetic
practices are created, discovered, embodied, performed, disseminated, translated, learned,
75
and critiqued.
To some degree, Olakunle George’s Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters also
bridges philosophy and literature through its discussion of key Nigerian writers of fiction
76
alongside the institutional genealogies of poststructuralist and postcolonial theory.
Students of African philosophy and literature might also wish to familiarize themselves with
philosophical approaches to literary study broadly, one useful introduction to which is Patrick
77
Colm Hogan’s Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature. Much scholarship on J.
M. Coetzee’s work offers a bridge between generalist and postcolonial literary-critical
contexts. Stephen Mulhall’s The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in
Literature and Philosophy, as well as the edited volume Beyond the Ancient Quarrel:
Page 13 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee both look to Coetzee’s novels to flesh out what is
78
distinctive about literary contributions to philosophical ways of thinking. “I am not
suggesting that philosophy can or should become literature,” Mulhall writes, “or literature
philosophy; but I am suggesting that for each properly to acknowledge the other would
require both to confront the challenge of re-conceiving their self-images, and so their defining
79
aspirations.” By and large, such emphasis on breaking down epistemological and
disciplinary walls is characteristic of literature and philosophy as a field.
Links to Digital Materials
Jonathan O. Chimakonam, “History of African Philosophy <https://iep.utm.edu/afric-hi/>,”
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 30, 2020.
Omedi Ochieng, “African Philosophy and Rhetoric <https://ashr.org/teaching-resources/
diversifying-teaching/african-philosophy-rhetoric/>,” American Society for the History of
Rhetoric (online teaching resources).
Kwame Gyekye, “African Ethics <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/african-ethics/>,” Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 9, 2010.
Africa in Words <https://africainwords.com/>, an African literature blog run out of the
University of Sussex.
African Literature on the Internet <https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/global/virtual-libraries/
african_studies/literature.html>, an African Studies virtual resource furnished by Columbia
University Libraries.
Further Reading
Adeeko, Adeleke. “My Signifier Is More Native Than Yours: Issues in Making a Literature
African.” In African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Edited by Ato Quayson
and Tejumola Olaniyan, 234–241. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993.
De Bolla, Peter. The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights.
Kindle edition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of
Negritude. Translated by Chike Jeffers. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2011.
George, Olakunle. Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters. Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2003.
Gyekye, Kwame. An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Hayes, Patrick, and Jan Wilm, eds. Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J. M.
Coetzee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Page 14 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Hogan, Patrick Colm. Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2001.
Hountondji, Paulin J.African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Translated by Henri Evans.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Imbo, Samuel Oluoch. Oral Traditions as Philosophy: Okot p’Bitek’s Legacy for African
Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Irele, Abiola. “The African Imagination.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (1990): 49–67.
Julien, Eileen. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992.
Makumbi, Jennifer Nansubuga. Kintu. Oakland, CA: Transit Books, 2017.
Mbiti, John. African Religions and Philosophy. Oxford: Heinemann, 1969.
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1, no. 4 (Jan–Feb 2000):
54–68.
Mudimbe, V. Y., and Kwame Anthony Appiah. “The Impact of African Studies on Philosophy.” In
Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and
Humanities. Edited by Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean F. O’Barr, 113–138. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Mulhall, Stephen. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature
and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. “Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel.” Research in African
Literatures 24, no. 4 (1993): 123–140.
Ochieng, Omedi. Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and
African Philosophy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018.
Ogundele, Wole. “Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the
Postcolonial African Novel.” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 3 (2002): 125–139.
Okafor, Stephen A. “‘Bantu Philosophy’: Placide Tempels Revisited.” Journal of Religion in Africa
13, no. 2 (1982): 83–100.
Okolo, M. S. C.African Literature as Political Philosophy. London: Zed Books, 2007.
Okpewho, Isidore. “Introduction.” In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook. Edited by
Isidore Okpewho. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Presbey, Gail M. “African Sage Philosophy <https://iep.utm.edu/afr-sage/>.” Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 30, 2020.
Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Page 15 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
Soyinka, Wole. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1976.
Taiwo, Olufemi O. “Exorcising Hegel’s Ghost: Africa’s Challenge to Philosophy.” African Studies
Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 3–16.
Tempels, Placide. Bantu Philosophy. Orlando, FL: HBC Publishing, [1945] 2010.
Wiredu, Kwasi. “Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion.” African Studies
Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 17–46.
Wiredu, Kwasi. “Emergent Issues in African Philosophy: A Dialogue with Kwasi Wiredu.”
Interview by Michael Onyebuchi Eze and Thaddeus Metz. Philosophia Africana 17, no. 2 (winter
2015–2016): 75–87.
Wiredu, Kwasi. “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality.”
Research in African Literatures 40, no. 1 (2019): 8–18.
Notes
1. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (New York: Anchor Books, [1960] 1994); Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous
Conditions (London: Women’s Press, 1988); and Chimamanda Adichie, Americanah (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
2013).
2. Valentin-Yves Mudimbe and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Impact of African Studies on
Philosophy,” in Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social
Sciences and Humanities, eds. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean F. O’Barr (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 116.
3. Olufemi O. Taiwo, “Exorcising Hegel’s Ghost: Africa’s Challenge to Philosophy,” African
Studies Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 3.
4. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1, no. 4 (Jan–Feb 2000):
65.
5. Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Orlando, FL: HBC Publishing, [1945] 2010).
6. Stephen A. Okafor, “‘Bantu Philosophy’: Placide Tempels Revisited,” Journal of Religion in
Africa 13, no. 2 (1982): 88.
7. Sophie Oluwole, Socrates and Orunmila: Two Patron Saints of Classical Philosophy (Lagos, Nigeria:
Ark Publishers, 2014).
8. Quoted in Anote Ajeluorou, “Socrates and Orunmila . . . Putting Premium on Africa’s Indigenous Philosophy,”
Guardian (Nigeria), 25 August 2015.
9. Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 81.
10. Oyewumi, Invention of Women, 81.
11. Mudimbe and Appiah, “Impact of African Studies,” 117.
12. Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Page 16 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
13. Gyekye, Essay on African Philosophical Thought, ix.
14. Gyekye, Essay on African Philosophical Thought, 8.
15. See, for example, Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Oxford: Heinemann, 1969).
16. Paulin J. Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, trans. Henri Evans (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1983), xii.
17. Hountondji, African Philosophy, 8.
18. Hountondji, African Philosophy, 105.
19. Kwasi Wiredu, “Emergent Issues in African Philosophy: A Dialogue with Kwasi Wiredu,”
interview by Michael Onyebuchi Eze and Thaddeus Metz, Philosophia Africana 17, no. 2 (winter
2015–2016): 86–87.
20. Kwasi Wiredu, “An Oral Philosophy of Personhood: Comments on Philosophy and Orality,”
Research in African Literatures 40, no. 1 (2019): 11.
21. Wiredu, “Oral Philosophy,” 11.
22. Wiredu, “Oral Philosophy,” 11.
23. Kwasi Wiredu, “Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion,” African Studies
Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1998): 25.
24. Wiredu, “Toward Decolonizing,” 29.
25. Wiredu, “Toward Decolonizing,” 35.
26. Wiredu, “Toward Decolonizing,” 38.
27. Wiredu, “Toward Decolonizing,” 25–26.
28. Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights,
Kindle edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), location 693.
29. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (New York: Routledge, 2019), 158.
30. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 88.
31. Mudimbe and Appiah, “Impact of African Studies,” 131.
32. Mudimbe and Appiah, “Impact of African Studies,” 131.
33. Mudimbe and Appiah, “Impact of African Studies,” 132.
34. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 92.
35. For a comprehensive overview of how Odera Oruka’s work with sages evolved over many years and publications,
see Gail M. Presbey’s entry on “African Sage Philosophy” on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, July 30,
2020.
36. Emmanuel Obiechina, “Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel,” Research in African
Literatures 24, no. 4 (1993): 123.
37. Obiechina, “Narrative Proverbs,” 123.
38. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart: A Casebook, ed. Isidore Okpewho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
39. Obiechina, “Narrative Proverbs,” 125.
40. Abiola Irele, “The African Imagination,” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (1990): 56.
Page 17 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
41. Isidore Okpewho, “Introduction,” in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook, ed.
Isidore Okpewho (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 28.
42. Wole Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion: The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination in the
Postcolonial African Novel,” Research in African Literatures 33, no. 3 (2002): 125.
43. Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion,” 129.
44. Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion,” 129.
45. Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion,” 130.
46. Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion,” 134.
47. Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion,” 135–136.
48. Ogundele, “Devices of Evasion,” 133.
49. Adeleke Adeeko, “My Signifier Is More Native Than Yours: Issues in Making a Literature
African,” in African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, eds. Ato Quayson and
Tejumola Olaniyan (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 236–237.
50. Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992).
51. Julien, African Novels, 10.
52. The novel’s individualistic biases are so well substantiated that it is not worth reviewing them in the main text. For
an authoritative account of the form’s development in England, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in
Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). For a rich engagement with
the novel’s vexed response to individualism, see Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of British
Individualism, 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
53. See Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International
Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); as well as Elizabeth Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying
Human Rights in World Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
54. As the most influential example, see Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South
African Literature and Culture (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 1991).
55. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), 2. Also, Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971)
and, arguably, Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1973) are
two especially achieved examples of this general tactic.
56. Examples include, Chigozi Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), narrated by
an Igbo spirit; and Namwali Serpell, The Old Drift (New York: Hogarth, 2019), which includes narration from the
perspective of mosquitos.
57. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu (Oakland, CA: Transit Books, [2014] 2017).
58. Makumbi, Kintu, 106. Original italics.
59. Makumbi, Kintu, 107.
60. Makumbi, Kintu, 108–109.
61. Makumbi, Kintu, 109.
62. Obiechina, “Narrative Proverbs,” 124.
63. Makumbi, Kintu, 389.
Page 18 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020
64. Makumbi, Kintu, 399.
65. Makumbi, Kintu, 392.
66. Makumbi, Kintu, 342.
67. Makumbi, Kintu, 344–345.
68. Makumbi, Kintu, 380.
69. Makumbi, Kintu, 310.
70. Makumbi, Kintu, 367.
71. Makumbi, Kintu, 337. Original italics.
72. Appiah, In My Father’s House.
73. Soyinka, Myth, Literature.
74. Samuel Oluoch Imbo, Oral Traditions as Philosophy: Okot p’Bitek’s Legacy for African
Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); M. S. C. Okolo, African Literature as
Political Philosophy (London: Zed Books, 2007); Souleymane Bachir Diagne, African Art as Philosophy:
Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2011); and Omedi Ochieng, The
Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy,
Kindle edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).
75. Ochieng, Intellectual Imagination.
76. Olakunle George, Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003).
77. Patrick Colm Hogan, Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Literature (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 2001).
78. Stephen Mulhall, The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in
Literature and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Stephen Mulhall,
Beyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, Philosophy, and J. M. Coetzee (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2018).
79. Mulhall, The Wounded Animal, 3.
Related Articles
Black Arts Movement
Publishing in South Africa
Black Arts Publishing and the Politics of Design
Page 19 of 19
PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA,
Legal Notice 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see and ).
Privacy Policy <https://global.oup.com/privacy>
Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 31 October 2020