ABSTRACT
Africa today is occupied by people of various ethnic groups: Blacks, Portuguese, Asians, and Arabs. Naturally, these people all have their distinctive consciousness, informed by their own worldviews and ideology. In the postcolonial era, Africans owe their epistemological allegiance to different westernized, colonial powers. Some therefore wonder if there can be distinctly African philosophical and environmental views which will hold for everyone, sufficient to warrant the locution “African thought.” Although they are correct to raise the question, there are general orientations in African thought such that the label can be justified (Momoh, 2000), just as we use the locutions “German philosophy,” “Continental philosophy,” and “Greek philosophy” despite contrasting ideologies and views within each school of thought. As Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Ali Al'amin Maxrui, and other critical thinkers have said, the present African is a three-headed person, one who carries a triple heritage of traditional African, Asian-Islamic, and Judeo-Christian philosophical ideas. Here we present environmental principles springing from the precolonial African traditional heritage, which represents the foundational consciousness of the people.
