ABSTRACT
Lingering in the background of an understanding of African philosophy (most of African thought for that matter) is a bias often called “unanimism.” “Unanimism,” says Hountondji, is “the illusion that all men and women in such societies speak with one voice and share the same opinion about all fundamental issues.”1 As we have seen this is inherited from early ethnophilosophical thinking like that of Placide Tempels’ view that all Bantu-speaking Africans believe in a unified spiritual life force-an elan vital-and because of this have a shared African view of the world. The concept of a “separate being,” an individual apart from a bonding force, “is foreign to Bantu thought,” says Tempels.2 “The Bantu speak, act, live as if, for them beings were forces…. Force is the nature of being, force is being, being is force.”3 The philosophical foundation for “unanimism” was firmly set by Tempels and recent African philosophical discourse has had to continually engage its assumptions. This engagement has been mostly to “deconstruct” and “liberate” itself from the implications of Tempels’ ideas and from various other forms of “unanimism.”
