ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that within the broad philosophical context of European domination, which hierarchised culture and religion—against the background of racialised economic inequality as the material underpinnings of this dual mode of existence—the postapartheid continuance of the privileging of European languages is inimical to African memory. African philosophical discourse names four possible categories of African philosophical trends: the nationalistic-ideological, the ethnophilosophy, philosophic sagacity and professional philosophy. The Chinese postcolonial experience has patently demonstrated the value of cultural utility (and of integrating an indigenous, conceptual scheme to recast modernity on indigenous terms) in forging ahead in the world, as well as engaging external reality. Accordingly, the transformation of South Africa today is predicated on the total re-purposing, re-configuring and re-calibrating of material and philosophical systems whose moral imagination provides underpinnings for the existential framework of postapartheid society. The misleading nature of terms embedded in the sociocultural history of foreign cultures is amply demonstrated by the use of the term "development".
