Introduction

Some intellectual questions are especially live and inescapable for those doing philosophy in African contexts. In response to the first tendency, African scholars mined the orature of their cultures for theses and conceptions which were both unquestionably African and recognisably philosophical: ethical views, cosmogonies, conceptions of causation or personal identity. In response to the second tendency, a war was declared on scholars who presented mere collections of proverbs or descriptions of traditional practices as ‘African philosophy’. Conceptions of decolonising philosophy have a common core: the conviction that Eurocentric colonial influences have had a harmful or otherwise objectionable effect on the discipline of philosophy as it exists in Africa today. When a philosophical idea is intelligible or plausible in one of the languages but not in the other, the next step is ‘to try to reason out the matter on independent grounds’.