Conceptual decolonization as an imperative in contemporary African philosophy : some personal reflections

The controversy about how best to do African philosophy has now gone at least three decades. That controversy is sometimes misconstrued to be about whether there is such a thing as philosophical thinking among Africans as a people. The absurdity of this latter question should be apparent at least to Africans. Ignorance, due perhaps to geographical distance or racist conceits, may have engendered such questioning in some foreign minds. But any African of the slightest philosophical sensitivity, raised within an African culture, must be aware, at least, of the wealth of philosophical apothegms in our folklore 1. These emanate not from the void but from the brains of individual thinkers. Thus the existence of philosophy in our traditional culture is a given 2. What is open to debate is the African