ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The status of Father Tempels and ethnophilosophy in the discourse of African
philosophy *
MOYA DEACON
THE CONCEPT OF ETHNOPHILOSOPHY
African philosophy can be identified as constitutive of a post-colonial quest for a uniquely African identity, which has become lost amid the brutality of the European rape of the African continent. The relevance of this reaction becomes clear in terms of Van Hook’s view:
Questions concerning the existence of African philosophy are…perceived as reflecting a Western colonial bias that there is no such thing as, and has never been (and some would even say, cannot be) an African philosophy, because Africans are not rational or not as rational as Westerners, or do not have the temperament needed to produce philosophy (Van Hook 1993:30).
