ABSTRACT
Placide Tempels’s legacy in Africa is truly mixed. His reception by African philosophers can be divided into three broad attitudes: (1) violent reaction; (2) a view that it is the basis for the affirmation of some authentic African concepts, and (3) indifference. Tracing the sources and intentions of these reactions will yield an interesting topography of the effects of different colonial adventures on the continent. However, besides this geographical mapping of the different effects of a variety of missions to civilize on the continent, there are dark contradictions in Tempels’s project which deserve attention. While Tempels’s intentions appear to have proceeded from a desire to assert the existence of philosophy among Africans, this intention was accompanied by a disturbing overemphasis on the difference between Bantu Philosophy and its Western counterpart. By overplaying these differences, Tempels shows that he is deeply committed to the view that Africans are not quite the same as Westerners in their conceptual outlook, which inadvertently led to the reinforcement of racial prejudice. What I seek to do in this instance is to demonstrate how Tempels’s contradictions led to his ambivalent reception in philosophy, which endures to this day. In addition, I seek to demonstrate that Tempels could not overcome what he was opposed to because he was deeply committed to the idea that, fundamentally, there was a difference between the Muntu and the white person. This drove his development of Bantu philosophy, which effectively sent the black person’s thinking to the Bantustan ghetto of categories of thought. Thus, Tempels notoriously led to the Bantustanisation of African thought.
