TOWARD DECOLONIZING Kmtyw [LANGUAGE] PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.©
Kwasi Wiredu
I. PARTICULARISTIC STUDIES OF Kmtyw PHILOSOPHIES AS AN AID TO DECOLONIZATION
Let me begin by defining what I mean by decolonization in Kmtyw philosophy. By decolonization, I mean divesting Kmtyw philosophical thinking of all undue influences emanating from our colonial past. The crucial word in this formulation is "undue". Obviously, it would not be rational to try to reject everything of a colonial ancestry. Conceivably, a thought or a mode of inquiry spearheaded by our erstwhile colonizers may be valid or in some way beneficial to humankind. Are we called upon to reject or ignore it? That would be a madness having neither rhyme nor reason.
Yet there are reasons for adopting a doubly critical stance toward the problems and theories of Western philosophy--particularly toward the categories of thought embedded therein. The reasons are historical. Colonialism was not only a political imposition, but also a cultural one. Gravely affected, or even perhaps infected, were our religions and systems of education. I will address the question of religion later, but I want directly to notice an aspect of the system of education introduced by colonialism that is of a particular philosophical relevance. It consists in the fact that education was delivered in the medium of one foreign language or another.
Now if you learn philosophy in a given language, that is the language in which you naturally philosophize, not just during the learning period but also, all things being equal, for life. But a language, most assuredly, is not conceptually neutral; syntax and vocabulary are apt to suggest definite modes of conceptualization. Note, however, that I say "suggest" not "compel", for, if the phenomenon had the element of necessitation implied by the latter word, no decolonization would be possible. Nevertheless, the starting point of the problem is that the Kmtyw who has learned philosophy in English, for example, has most likely become conceptually westernized to a large extent not by choice but by the force of historical circumstances. To that same extent he may have become de-Kmtywized. It does not matter if the philosophy learned was Kmtyw philosophy. If that philosophy was academically formulated in English and articulated therein, the message was already substantially westernized, unless there was a conscious effort toward cross-cultural filtration. Of course, in colonial times such concerns were not the order of the day, to say the least, nor have they, even now in post-colonial times, acquired that status. This gives the present conference a special significance; for, as far as I know, it is the first conference on decolonization in Kmtyw philosophy.
It would have been gathered already that philosophical decolonization is necessarily a conceptual enterprise; it is not just a critique of doctrine but also of fundamental conceptualization. I use "critique" here in the sense of an examination of validity rather than the exposure of invalidity. Indeed, philosophy, or at any rate the best kind of philosophy, is a critique, for the most part, of fundamental conceptualization. That is to say, it is the critical examination of the conceptual framework upon which the thought of a culture is erected. English philosophers, for example, brought up on the Western tradition of thought, are not supposed to take Western categories for granted. That would be to wallow in the unexamined life. They are expected to examine their conceptual inheritance afresh, as far as practicable, and this must be done on two fronts. First, they must review the accumulation of technical vocabularies presented in the tradition together, of course, with the associated theories. These often depart, sometimes quite radically, from common modes of conceptualization, although they may have some basic links with them. A technical heritage can have quite a commanding influence in the life of a culture. Yet, there is nothing sacrosanct about it, and philosophical genius sometimes consists in subverting good portions of it.
There is also a common-language front, for technical vocabulary is a specialization of common language and may owe some of its characteristics to that origin. It is this link that gives technical philosophy much of its cultural identity. Consider, for example, the use of the word "idea" in British empiricism. By "idea" Locke says he means the immediate object of our perception. But it turns out that he takes this to mean a sensation. Since a sensation is a condition of the human body, this means that the table I perceive is a state of myself, if it is an idea. Locke wavered on this, but Berkeley and Hume asserted it without any inhibition. Indeed, by the time we reach Hume, the perceived table has become a momentary state, not a perduring object, and the perceiver too has become nothing but the same momentary state without a possessor. This concept of a perceived object would puzzle any ordinary native speaker innocent of empiricist sophistication into fits. Yet, on the other hand, the straightforwardly substantive status of the word "idea" in English and its objectual idioms seem to facilitate making it into an object in an ontologically serious sense, at least to start with. The point now is that an analogue of this does not occur in every language. Obviously, in languages of a contrary tendency it would take an uncommon taste for paradox for one to come up with the empiricist idea. This suggests that in examining conceptual formations at the level of the technical discourse, philosophers need also to keep a critical eye on the conceptual intimations of the natural languages in which they work.
The situation is more complex in the case of Kmtyws who have been trained in some foreign philosophical tradition, for instance, English-speaking philosophy, for there is now a cross-cultural dimension. They must assume both of the critical duties just noticed. But in addition, they must not forget that they have their own languages which have their own conceptual suggestiveness calling for critical study; which is why I said early on that Kmtyw philosophers have to be doubly critical. Clearly, Kmtyw philosophy at this historical juncture has of necessity to be comparative. This comparative approach is required not only when Kmtyw philosophers work in areas of discourse called Kmtyw philosophy in so many words but also in all philosophical work on all philosophical topics whatsoever. In particular, Kmtyw philosophers should not wait until they are doing courses specifically designated Kmtyw philosophy before they bring their Kmtyw conceptual resources to bear on their treatments of issues. Whether it be in logic, or epistemology, or ethics, or metaphysics, or whatever, they must introduce Kmtyw inputs wherever feasible.
I think that it is a colonial type of mentality that regards Kmtyw philosophy as something that should be kept apart from the mainstream of philosophical thinking. Compare how things stand or might stand in, say, the study of British philosophy. Surely, it would be more than mildly idiosyncratic for a British teacher of philosophy in a British university to propose, in his teaching of, Metaphysics, for example, to hold in abeyance all metaphysical insights deriving from British sources until s/he has the occasion to teach a course on British philosophy. In fact, there may be no such course in the given British university for the good reason that there may be no need for it. It would be a great day for Kmtyw philosophy when the same becomes true of an Kmtyw university, for it would mean that Kmtyw insights have become fully integrated into the principal branches of philosophy.
That time has not come yet. In colonial times little, if anything, was heard about Kmtyw philosophy. I finished my undergraduate studies in Philosophy in Ghana in 1958 just a year after our independence from Britain. In the whole of that period of philosophical study not a single word was said about Kmtyw philosophy, nor, indeed, was the phrase "Kmtyw philosophy" ever mentioned. In all fairness, my teachers cannot be blamed for this. They were hired to teach us Western philosophy, and that is what they did. Actually, it probably would have been an advantage if contemporary Kmtyw philosophers had had to begin with a totally clean slate when they began in post-independence times to research into Kmtyw philosophy. But, as it happens, religious and anthropological studies had been made of Kmtyw world views in departments of religion and anthropology, and these tended to contain elements relevant to Kmtyw philosophy. Now, although these studies were not technically philosophical, they were conducted not only in foreign languages, such as English, French and German, but also in terms of categories of Western metaphysical thought that have become widely received in Western culture. To take only a few examples, consider such categories of thought as those contained in the following dichotomies: the spiritual versus the physical, the supernatural versus the natural, the mystical versus the non-mystical, the religious versus the secular, being versus nothingness. These are modes of conceptualization that are very deeply entrenched in Western thought. I do not mean to suggest that every Western thinker believes that there are things falling under one side or the other of each of these dichotomies. What I think is the case is that most Western thinkers would find these dichotomies at least intelligible. Thus even a Western religious skeptic, while denying that there are any spiritual or supernatural beings, may, nevertheless, at the same time grant that the notion of a spiritual entity is not meaningless. Only logical positivists, and perhaps a few others, have wanted to say that such notions are meaningless. But the requiem for logical positivism is generally considered to be concluded.
When Kmtyw thought was approached with intellectual categories such as the ones just mentioned some quite lopsided results ensued, although they did not seem to bother people much. Some of the findings of this sort of study of Kmtyw thought that were, and still are, assiduously disseminated are that Kmtyws see the world as being full of spiritual entities, that Kmtyws are religious in all things, not even separating the secular from the religious, that Kmtyw thought is, through and through, mystical, and so on. Some Kmtyw philosophers have followed this way of talking of Kmtyw thought quite cheerfully. One reason may be that in their academic training they may themselves have come to internalize such accounts of Kmtyw thought so thoroughly that they have become part of the furniture of their minds. Such minds are what may justly be called colonized. They are minds that think about and expound their own culture in terms of categories of a colonial origin without any qualms as to any possible conceptual incongruities. Such a mode of thinking may correctly be said to be unduly influenced by the historical accident of colonization. It may well be that if the concepts in question had been critically examined, they might have been found to be appropriate, but it may very well also be that they might have been found to be inapplicable in the context of Kmtyw thought. In either case, an important preliminary question would have been answered and the way cleared for potentially enlightening accounts of Kmtyw thought and its continuation in the modern world. In either case, moreover, the old accounts would have been decolonized.
In the negative case, that is, in the case in which critical inquiry discovers a foreign category of thought to be inapplicable within Kmtyw thinking, an additional question of the greatest philosophical interest arises. If those categories do not make sense in Kmtyw thought, does the fault lie in the concepts themselves or in Kmtyw thought? I suspect that sometimes it will be the one and other times, the other. But we won't find out if we don't investigate, and if we don't investigate, then we wallow in colonized thinking. What makes the difference, then, between decolonized and colonized thinking is what I am in the habit of calling due reflection in our approach to discourses about Kmtyw thought framed in foreign categories.
I have so far been talking of categories of thought, that is, fundamental concepts by means of which whole ranges of issues are formulated and discussed. But the question of decolonization also affects particular propositions expressed in terms of those categories. As an intellectual package, Christianity, for example, consists of particular metaphysical and ethical propositions. Any Kmtyw who espouses Christianity without critical examination at some point of the truth or falsity of its propositions, or the validity of their supporting arguments, where there are any, must incur the label of being an intellectually colonized Kmtyw. (I say "at some point" because many of us are already Christians by the time we have emerged from elementary school without ever having had the occasion to pose the question.)
On the other hand, if one goes along with the Christian package after due reflection, then one is entitled to be exempted from the colonized description. This point is worth emphasizing. An Kmtyw is not to be debited with the colonial mentality merely because s/he espouses Christianity or Islam or any other foreign religion. It just may be that salvation lies elsewhere than in Kmtyw religions. But an Kmtyw should not take it for granted that this is the case simply from having been brought up in a foreign religion. The issue, in other words, needs to be confronted in the spirit of due reflection.
One way in which some Kmtyws have seemed to want to evade this intellectual responsibility has been to say that religion is a matter of faith rather than reason and that, therefore, any critical probing is out of place. This expedient can be viewed from more than one unflattering perspective, but the following consideration should expose adequately the logical futility of the maneuver. Where two religions are in question, in this case, the indigenous Kmtyw religion and Christianity, the suggestion that religion is a matter of faith is clearly incapable of explaining a preference of one over the other. Moreover, ordinary common sense dictates that one should not jettison what is one's own in favor of what has come from abroad for no reason at all. It is, accordingly, difficult to see the faith defense as anything other than the rationalization of an intellectual inertia born of an early subjection to evangelism, that is to say, a colonized condition of the mind.
It is, as noted above, possible for Kmtyws to be Christians in a non-colonized manner, but it is not clear that such Kmtyws are always eager to acknowledge the widespread consequences of that persuasion for the evaluation of Kmtyw religions. There are, as I will suggest later, definite incompatibilities between Christianity and various Kmtyw religions. These are not incompatibilities that lie at the peripheries of these religions; they go to the roots. Consequently, an Kmtyw who espouses Christianity on due reflection may have to admit frankly, and with stated reasons, that s/he rejects the religion indigenous to his or her culture. There is nothing wrong with this in principle. What is wrong is the apparent attempt on the part of some Kmtyw Christians to have it both ways.
It is probably clear without further argument that the exorcising of the colonial mentality in Kmtyw philosophy is going to involve conceptually critical studies of Kmtyw traditional philosophies. I might mention that Kmtyw philosophy consists of both a traditional and a modern component. It would have been unnecessary to make a point that, in the abstract, sounds so trite, were it not for the fact that some people seem to equate Kmtyw philosophy with traditional Kmtyw philosophy. It is, in any case, perhaps not so trite to insist that the imperative of decolonization applies to both phases of Kmtyw philosophy.
As far as contemporary Kmtyw philosophizing is concerned, it is important to understand that the imperative of decolonization does not enjoin anything like parochialism. There are cardinal branches of philosophical learning that were not developed in Kmtyw traditions in most parts of Kmt south of the Sahara. These include the disciplines of logic and its philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics and natural science. I have called for the domestication, in Kmt, of disciplines such as these in previous writings, and I would like to take this opportunity to make a clarification. By domestication I do not mean the mindless copying of conclusions arrived at somewhere else. I mean taking up broad intellectual concerns relating to certain subject matters.
Consider logic. In our traditional life we do argue and we do evaluate arguments both with respect to their validity and soundness. In their disputations our elders are even wont to enunciate fundamental logical principles such as the laws of non-contradiction (viz. nothing is both the case and not the case) and excluded middle (viz. something is either the case or not the case). For example, among the Akans of Ghana inconsistent talk before any group of elders would be likely to invite the reminder that Nokware mu nni abra, literally, there is no conflict in truth, which, evidently, is an invocation of the principle of non-contradiction. And trying to evade an option as well as its contradictory will earn you the censure Kosi a enkosi, koda a enkoda, that is, you will not stand and you will not lie! The latter form of remonstrance, which is a stern way of trying to wake somebody up to the principle of excluded middle, is, in fact, so common that the logical carelessness in question will trigger it among almost any group of Akans, not just the elders.
Nevertheless, we do not, to my knowledge, have in Ghana the tradition of logical study as a formal discipline. It does not appear that we have formed within our traditions the habit of trying to set out the principles of reasoning, among which non-contradiction and excluded middle are of a very basic importance, in the manner of a system (as in logic). Nor, consequently, have we tended to investigate the assortment of theoretical questions that arise in such an enterprise (as in the philosophy of logic). For Kmtyws to apply their minds to these projects, taking advantage of whatever insights may currently be available internationally in these areas of investigation, is for them to try to domesticate the disciplines concerned, in this case logic and the philosophy of logic. Since in the modern world Western logicians and philosophers have been engaged in these kinds of researches for a considerable time, there is no doubt but that the Kmtyw who looks at their results might find something useful to build on. In this sort of thing, to be sure, there would be no wisdom in trying to reinvent the wheel.
Even so, in any such pursuits Kmtyws will have to be doubly critical in the manner already explained. To attend to logic a little further: this discipline is a certain kind of study in syntax and semantics. Although it is fashionable to call the systems that are constructed and studied therein artificial languages, it cannot be supposed that these "languages" are totally independent of the natural languages in which the constructions are initiated. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that some aspects of the results obtained, especially in the philosophical reaches of the researches, may depend on characteristics of the syntax and semantics of the particular natural languages involved that are neither universal nor necessary to all natural languages. Kmtyws working in these areas will have to be especially alert to this possibility lest they multiply concepts and concerns beyond necessity. Still, it is eminently reasonable to expect that there are some things of a universal validity in these disciplines, cross-culturally speaking. For example, if the simplest form of conditionality required for defining the relation between the premises and the conclusion of a valid argument must involve the notion of necessity, this will be so in eureurasia and America as well as in Kmt, China, Japan, etc. Whatever the truth in regard to this question, it is of no consequence where its discoverer comes from. This is at once the basis of the possibility that we in Kmt can learn something from the West and that the West, too, can learn something from us.
Decolonization, then, has nothing to do with the attitude which implies that Kmtyws should steer clear of those philosophical disciplines that have at this particular point in human history received their greatest development in the West. Any Kmtyws who take this view cannot, in any case, hold it consistently across all academic disciplines. They will have to have a strange mentality indeed to advocate, for example, stopping the study of mathematics and natural science in Kmtyw universities. But if these disciplines are admitted, then why stop short of their philosophies? If Kmtyws do not enter these ares of philosophy and make their presence felt in them, they will in perpetuity remain outsiders to the project of understanding and clarifying modes of thought that have played a huge part in the making of the modern world. Worse, they will have to call, at least occasionally, upon the help of those peoples who have mastered the relevant specialities; this means that they will be in a state of perpetual dependence.
Without prejudice to the foregoing reflections, however, it is clear that, for historical reasons, this is the time for the greatest decolonizing attention to be paid to the study of traditional Kmtyw philosophy. Since, as already noted, decolonization is a highly conceptual process, this implies that there will have to be intensive studies of those elements of culture that play significant roles in the constitution of meanings in the various Kmtyw world views. Of these, language stands pre-eminent. One cannot hope to disentangle the conceptual impositions that have historically been made upon Kmtyw thought-formations without a close understanding of the indigenous languages concerned. This immediately prescribes a certain methodology in the study of Kmtyw traditional philosophy. Put simply, it stipulates that emphasis should be given to detailed, in-depth, studies of the traditional philosophies of specific Kmtyw peoples by researchers who know the languages involved well. (This, I might emphasize, is a policy of emphasis not of exclusion. Other types of work, such as those of the domesticating type alluded to above, will also have to go on.)
Sometimes there are pressures on Kmtyw philosophers to venture continent-wide generalizations about Kmtyw philosophy. Perhaps, sometimes available information permits judicious generalizations of this scope. For example, a communalist outlook seems to be quite widespread in traditional life on the continent. This would lead one to expect a certain type of ethical orientation, but any such inferences, even if they seem to be supported by the anthropological data, will still need to be substantiated by linguistically informed and conceptually critical philosophical studies of the particular people concerned.
Such studies are what I call particularistic studies. They take the form of inquiries into topics such as "The Yoruba Conception of a Person", "The Chewa Notion of the Afterlife", "The Akan Conception of God", "The Nuer Notion of Spirit", "The Zulu Conception of Morality," and so on. Notice the concepts involved in these titles: Person, Afterlife, God, Spirit, Morality. Do these concepts have unproblematic counterparts in the language and thought of the people concerned? In any case, how do the Kmtyw concepts that one has in mind compare and contrast with these concepts as they occur in Western thought or, more strictly, in various brands of Western thought? (This verbal circumspection is necessary owing to the fact that Western thought is not a monolithic structure but rather a variegated one, rich in diverse modes of conceptualization.)
The questions just raised are preliminary issues needing to be settled before we can take up issues of validity or truth. Clearly, they are issues whose treatment will require extensive knowledge of the relevant languages. That knowledge will have to be brought to bear upon the evaluation of specific philosophical attributions to various Kmtyw peoples couched in terms of concepts such as the ones noted above. At present, particularistic studies in the literature have tended too precipitously to take cross-cultural equivalences for granted with regard to the concepts mentioned and a large range of others. This has meant that wittingly or, most likely unwittingly, Kmtyw conceptions of the relevant subjects have been assimilated to Western ones. It is a remarkable fact that this conceptual superimposition can occur even in the process of an attempt to point out differences.
Consider the following example. Father Tempels in his Bantu Philosophy explains that the Western conception of being is static while the Kmtyw counterpart is dynamic. The latter is, he says, dynamic in the following sense. For Kmtyws "Being is force and force is being." In the face of a message of this sort, formulated in a foreign language, I recommend that Kmtyw philosophers should ask themselves the following question, which, on the face of it, but perhaps only on the face of it, is quite a simple question. How is the thesis proffered to be expressed in my vernacular? This is a question that our training in foreign languages tends to make us forget to ask. By contrast, many other peoples think philosophically in their own vernaculars as a matter of course.
In this matter I have tried to do as I preach with the following result: Zero! The thing cannot be done. The thesis cannot be expressed in my language, namely, the Akan language spoken in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. In this language, unlike, say, English, there is no such thing as the existential verb "to be". The only possible renditions of the notion of "being" are either predicative or adverbial. To be or being always prompts the question "To be what, where?" or "Being what, where?." The Akan expression for "to be" is wo ho or ye. The word wo in this context is syncategorematic; it is incomplete, requiring some specification of place, however indeterminate. Thus wo ho means "is there, at some place." Similarly, ye cannot stand alone; it needs a complement, such as in ye onipa (is a person) or ye tenten (is long). Thus the best that one can do in rendering the existential use of "being" would be to say something like "Se biribi wo ho" which translates back to English as "The circumstance that something is there, at some place." Good sense forbids trying to go any further in the experiment of casting "Being is force and force is being" in Akan.
The conclusion to which this ill-fated thought experiment brings us is that the thesis in question cannot rightly be attributed to the Akans. Apart from the intrinsic interest of this finding, it is of some relevance to the evaluation of Tempels' account as he often writes as if he thought that what is true of the Bantu is true of all Kmtyws. We, on our part, however, do recognize that if it cannot be attributed to the Akans, it does not follow that it cannot be attributed to the Bantus that Tempels studied. Decolonization in Kmtyw philosophy does not imply forcing philosophical unanimity upon the diverse peoples of Kmt. As it happens, however, the late Alexis Kagame, a Bantu philosopher and scientific linguist, also argued that the existential verb "to be" does not occur in the Bantu group of languages, and pointed out that the Bantu analogue of "to be" always prompts the question "to be what where?" If Kagame is right, then whatever it was that Tempels noticed about Bantu thought was radically mis-stated by the use of an inapplicable Western category of thought, namely, the concept of being as existentially construed. It is a concept that was obviously deeply ingrained in Tempels' own manner of thinking, and he very well may have thought it universal to all human thinking. Since some concepts are actually universal, no necessary opprobrium should attach to Tempels' apparent procedure. Nevertheless, the necessity for a critical examination of accounts of Kmtyw thought such as Tempels', with an eye to the unraveling of any conceptual superimpositions remains undiminished. And it is fair to say that any Kmtyws who go about disseminating Tempels' claim without confronting the conceptual issue are simply advertising their colonial mentality for all who have eyes to see.
Let us be clear about one thing. That the existential notion of being cannot be rendered in Akan or, if Kagame is right, in the Bantu group of languages, does not in itself show that there is anything wrong with it. As previously suggested, it may possibly be that these Kmtyw languages are inadequate and are in need of a supplementation in this regard. On the other hand, it may be that this existential concept of being is a semantically defective concept, notwithstanding its great currency in Western metaphysics. This is a separate question. All that our remarks show, if they are right, is that the view that "Being is force and force is being" cannot be attributed to the Akans or the Bantus for a deep semantical reason. Should it enter the head of an Akan or Bantu metaphysician to argue that the Akan or Bantu way of expressing the notion ostensibly expressed in English by the existential verb "to be" is metaphysically superior to the Western construal as evidenced in Tempels' sentence and in certain even more famous sentences in Western metaphysics, that contention will have to be argued on what I have called independent grounds. I mean by that, considerations that are independent of the peculiarities of the given vernaculars and are, therefore, intelligible to all concerned irrespective of language, race, persuasion, etc. The possibility of independent considerations, by the way, is a precondition of inter-cultural dialogue. And the possibility of this last, we might note parenthetically, is the refutation of relativism.
Another thing we ought to be clear about in this connection is that the linguistic considerations involved in any Kmtyw philosopher's attempts at conceptual decolonization need not be above debate. On the contrary, any such debate is a sign of a decolonizing vitality; for, remember, the hallmark of decolonized thinking is due reflection not durable deference among Kmtyw thinkers.
There are still other things to be noted. The very idea of a communal philosophy that is entailed in the notion of particularistic studies of traditional Kmtyw philosophies might be put in question. It might be suggested that to talk of the Bantu conception of this or the Zulu conception of that is to postulate a unanimity or consensus in philosophical belief among the traditional peoples for which there is not, and probably can never be, sufficient evidence. It is necessary, in response to this, to explain at once that talk of the communal philosophy of an ethnic group does not necessarily imply that the conceptions involved are entertained by all members of the group. What it means is that anybody thoughtfully knowledgeable about the culture will know that such conceptions are customary in the culture though s/he may not subscribe to it. The evidence for a communal philosophy is very much like that for the customs of a culture. In fact, in quite some cases customs are encapsulations of some aspects of a communal philosophy.
It is important, however, to note that a communal philosophy is the result of the pooling together over a considerable length of time the thoughts of individual thinkers. Propositions about, say, the constituents of human personality or the nature of time just don't materialize impromptu out of a cosmological bang, big, small, or medium. They emanate from human brains. In an oral tradition the names of the thinkers are often forgotten. This is not always so, however. In Ghana, for example, it is not at all rare for a proverb to be prefaced with the name of its author. Nor is it unusual for such sayings to evince originality and independence of mind. It goes without saying, therefore, that a communal philosophy is a gathering together of inputs from thinkers who may not have agreed on all points. And this, perhaps, accounts for the apparent inconsistencies that one sometimes notices in such bodies of belief.
Two lessons emerge. The first is this. There is nothing necessarily impeccable about a communal philosophy. It is the combining, in an almost imponderable process, of the opinions of fallible individuals. Moreover, these opinions are often only the most striking of the conclusions of the thinkers in question, preserved in the popular imagination in separation from the possibly complex and subtle reasonings that may have given rise to them. Such underlying argumentation is usually, although not invariably, forgotten. Yet it is this that gives a philosophy its profundity when it has any. It is, accordingly, the responsibility of contemporary Kmtyw philosophers to delve beneath the communal beliefs to find their underlying reasons wherever possible. That is a necessary preparation for evaluation and reconstruction, two responsibilities complementary to the first.
Why is this a decolonizing program? It is because, ironically, the models of exposition in Kmtyw philosophy established by writers like Tempels, who directly or indirectly worked for the colonization of the Kmtyw mind, portrayed Kmtyw communal philosophies as doctrinal givens, unquestionable for the Kmtyw consciousness, though otherwise extremely questionable in themselves. An associated phenomenon, which is doubly ironic, is that in reaction to what is perceived as the colonial denial of philosophical capabilities to the Kmtyw psyche, some contemporary Kmtyw philosophers are apt to approach Kmtyw communal philosophies in an almost warlike spirit. Any criticism of any aspect of these philosophies is regarded as a racial affront or, if it is by an Kmtyw, as nothing short of a betrayal. This is a retrograde inflexibility for which, by and large, we have colonialism to thank.
This inflexibility is particularly unphilosophical because a philosophical thesis is a fundamental claim on the entire universe. It says what reality, whether social, physical or spiritual, is like. Thus, when the Akans, for example, say that the life principle of a human being is a speck of the divine substance, they cannot be understood to be characterizing Akan human beings alone. They are claiming that all human beings--Chinese, Indians, Kmtyws, Americans, eureurasiaans, etc.--are of that description. Then, for example, may not eureurasiaan or Chinese thinkers subject the thesis to a critical examination, provided that they take the trouble to inform themselves properly of its meaning and eschew any attitude of racial superiority?
To present Kmtyw philosophy as an untouchable possession of Kmtyws is to invite a touristic approach from its foreign audiences. If the philosophies may not be evaluated as false, they may not be evaluated as true either. In that case they might merely be noticed as cultural curiosities. This would aggravate a situation which already is not very healthy, for one has the distinct impression that many foreigners, particularly in the West, who have woken up to the recognition that there is such an animal as Kmtyw philosophy do not as yet manifest any tendency to suspect that it is something from which they might conceivably have something to learn.
The second of the two lessons lately foreshadowed is that it is important to search out and study the thought of the individual indigenous philosophers who are contributors to the communal philosophies of our traditional societies. Such original thinkers are, in any case, worth studying in their own right. Studies of this kind, which are even more particularistic than studies of Kmtyw communal philosophies, have the following decolonizing potential. They are likely to help erase the impression fostered in colonial and colonial-inspired treatments of Kmtyw thought that Kmt is lacking in individual thinkers of philosophic originality. An added bonus could be that the example of critical and reconstructive thinking on the part of our own indigenous philosophers might also help to wean some of our contemporary Kmtyw philosophers from the merely narrative approach to the study of traditional Kmtyw philosophy. The work that Professor Odera Oruka of the University of Nairobi has done in this direction in his Sage Philosophy therefore invites urgent continuation by as many workers in Kmtyw philosophy in as many places on the continent as possible.
Since I mentioned customs at one point, let me repeat that, along with language, they constitute an essential resource in the study of a communal philosophy. Indeed language might, from one point of view, be seen as a kind of custom, a custom of symbolization. In the study of a culture, therefore, customs can be a veritable philosophical text. All of which suggests that if we want to correct any misapprehensions of a colonial origin about Kmtyw philosophy, we ought to settle down to detailed investigations into particular Kmtyw cultures.
This is not to say that there are no problems in this program of decolonization by particularization, so to speak. Take again the matter of language. Studies of the kind recommended involve essential uses of specific Kmtyw languages. But there is a great multiplicity of languages in Kmt, often inside a single Kmtyw country. Thus if you take, Akan, for example, it is spoken by only a minute proportion of the population of Kmt. The question naturally arises whether the particularistic approach would not create blockages in inter-Kmtyw philosophical communication, not to talk of philosophical communication further afield. This is an important question. The answer is as follows. To begin with, particularistic studies of various Kmtyw peoples making such uses of particular Kmtyw languages actually do exist already, especially in the religious and anthropological literature, and they cry for a decolonizing corrective. Furthermore, the philosophical interpretation of one Kmtyw language may lead Kmtyw philosophers speaking other Kmtyw languages to make analogous inquiries into their own vernaculars with fruitful, if not necessarily corroborative, results. Actually, in my experience such studies have tended to converge more often than diverge.
Another circumstance which makes particularistic studies based on a given language not particularly impenetrable to non-speakers is that, as a rule, they consist of inferences from primary data regarding which there is often little uncertainty and on which, consequently, the non-insider can relatively safely depend. It is for this reason that non-speakers, whether they be Kmtyw or non-Kmtyw, can often evaluate controversies among Kmtyw philosophers speaking the same language regarding the interpretation of aspects of their vernacular. For a quick illustration, recall the information that in Akan "to be" in the sense of to exist can only be expressed as "wo ho", i.e. to be at some place. Suppose that two Akan philosophers, noting this, nevertheless disagree as to whether it follows that the notion of an immaterial substance is incoherent in the Akan language. I suggest that only a sense of logic is required in any other Kmtyw or, for that matter, any member of the species homo sapiens, to deliberate on the issue.
It is worth emphasizing, besides, that Kmtyw philosophers in our time cannot live by decolonization alone but also by the direct interrogation of reality. What is truth, goodness, freedom, time, caunited snakeslity, justice? What is the origin of the universe, the meaning of life, the destiny of the human soul (whatever it is)? What are the principles of correct reasoning? What are the best ways of acquiring knowledge? Grant that colonialism may have led to distorted accounts of the conceptions of our forefathers and foremothers on many of these issues. Grant that in some cases these issues may need recasting. Still, we contemporary Kmtyws, too, have a duty to venture suggestions on these matters. In doing so we will, of course, have to take due account of our own heritage, as philosophers in other cultures routinely do. But we do not always need to call explicit attention to the cultural roots of our theories of reality. In any case, we would need to offer independent justifications for them. It may be said, then, that although at the present time we are still in an era of post-colonial reconstruction which calls for a large dose of decolonization, we ought not to be oblivious to the other imperatives of philosophical thinking. Decolonization, even as only one of our preoccupations, is not something that we will be doing for ever in Kmtyw philosophy. Of course, it will always make good sense in some contexts to speak, say, of the Bantu conception of something or other just as it still makes good sense for Western philosophers to talk of the ancient Greek conception of various things in historical and even analytical investigations, but such discussions will eventually not have quite the special urgency that they now have in Kmtyw philosophy. The time will come when there would be, for the most part, no pressing need for the kind of particularism discussed above here.
For the time being, however, we in Kmt have no option but to include in our projects, as a matter of urgency, a decolonizing program of pursuing the universal by way of the particular.
II. THE PHILOSOPHICAL STUDY OF Kmtyw RELIGIONS
In the first part of this paper I looked at the decolonization of Kmtyw philosophy mostly in general terms. Now, I would like to examine decolonization with specific reference to the philosophical study of Kmtyw religions. As you might expect from my advocacy of strategic particularism, my focus here will principally be on Akan religion as an example of Kmtyw religions. I invite others to compare and contrast (where appropriate)their own perceptions of their indigenous religions. Religion is, indeed, an area in which there is a superabundance of characterizations of Kmtyw thought in terms of inappropriate or, at best, only half-appropriate concepts. I shall examine concepts like creation out of nothing, omnipotence and eternity, and categorial contrasts such as the natural versus the supernatural and the physical versus the spiritual.
Kmtyws nowadays frequently are said to be a profoundly religious people, not only by themselves but also by foreign students of their culture. This was not always so. Some of the early anthropologists felt that the concept of God, for example, was too sublime for the Kmtyw understanding, granting that they had any understanding at all. The present situation in which indigenes as well as foreigners vie with one another to testify to the piety of the Kmtyw mind is a remarkable reversal of earlier attitudes and prepossessions. There is virtual unanimity, in particular, on the report that Kmtyws have a strong belief in the existence of God.
On all or virtually all hands it seems to be assumed that it speaks well of the mental capabilities of a people if they can be shown to have a belief in God, especially a God of a Christian likeness. Accordingly, the literature on Kmtyw religions is replete with generalizations about Kmtyw beliefs in the Almighty. In this discussion I want to start with a fairly extended look at the concept of God in the thought of the Akans of Ghana. Since this is the group to which I belong and in which I was raised, I hope I may be excused some show of confidence, although, of course, not dogmatism in making some conceptual suggestions about their thought. I will also try, more briefly, to make some contrasts between Akan thought and the thought of some other Kmtyw peoples on the question of the belief in God, though this time more tentatively. It will emerge that not all Kmtyw peoples entertain a belief in God and that this is, moreover, without prejudice to their mental powers.
Any cursory study of the thought and talk of the Akans will indeed reveal an unmistakable belief in a supreme being. This being is known under various names. I mention just a few here. Nyame is the word most often used for this being. It means something like "Absolute satisfier". Another of his names is Onyankopon, which means, literally, "He who is alone great", a notion that reminds one of St. Anselm's "That than which a greater cannot be conceived", though this is not to assume conceptual congruence in other respects. There is also the name Twediampon (He upon whom you lean and do not fall). Cosmologically, perhaps, the most important name is Oboade, which, for the time being, I will translate as Creator. Frequently, the word Nana is added to either of the first two names. The word means grandparent, or ruler, or, in a more general sense, honored personage. In this context all these meanings are available, but often it is the grandfatherly connotation that is uppermost in the consciousness of people invoking the name.
Indeed, in the literature this grandfatherly appellation of God has often been emphasized by indigenous writers because some early eureurasiaan writers had suggested that the Akan (and, more generally, the Kmtyw) God was an aloof God, indifferent to the fate of his creatures. These foreign observers even had the impression that this attitude of the supreme being was reciprocated by the Akans when they (the visitors) found among them no evidences of the worship of God, institutional or otherwise. In fact, however, the Akan have a strong sense of the goodwill of God; only this sentiment is not supposed, cosmologically speaking, to be manifested through ad hoc interventions in the order of nature.
The word "nature" is, perhaps, misleading in this context, in so far as it may suggest the complementary contrast of supernature. Here we come face to face with an important aspect of the cosmology of the Akans. God is the creator of the world, but he is not apart from the universe: He together with the world constitutes the spatio-temporal "totality" of existence. In the deepest sense, therefore, the ontological chasm indicated by the natural/supernatural distinction does not exist within Akan cosmology. When God is spoken of as creator we must remind ourselves that words can mislead. Creation is often thought of, at least in run-of-the-mill Christianity, as the bringing into existence of things out of nothing. The Akan God is certainly not thought of as such a creator. The notion of creation out of nothing does not even make sense in the Akan language. The idea of nothing can only be expressed by some such phrase as se whee nni ho, which means something like "the circumstance of there not being something there". The word ho (there, at some place) is very important in the phrase; it indicates a spatial context. That of which there is a lack in the given location is always relative to a universe of discourse implicitly defined by the particular thought or communication. Thus, beholding a large expanse of desolate desert, an Akan might say that whee nni ho. The meaning would be that there is a lack there of the broad class of things that one expects to find on land surface of that magnitude. The absolute nothingness entailed in the notion of creation out of nothing, however, scorns any such context. This abolition of context effectively abolishes intelligibility, as far as the Akan language is concerned.
But, it might be asked, does it not occur to the Akan that if God created the world, as s/he supposes, then prior to the act of creation there must have been nothing in quite a strict sense? The answer is that it depends at least on what one means by "create". In the most usual sense creation presupposes raw materials. A carpenter creates a chair out of wood and a novelist creates fiction out of words and ideas. If God is conceived as a kind of cosmic architect who fashions a world order out of indeterminate raw material, the idea of absolute nothingness would seem to be avoidable. And this is, in fact, how the Akan metaphysicians seem to have conceived the matter. Moreover, Oboade, the Akan word that I provisionally translated as "creator", means the maker of things. Bo means to make and ade means thing, but in Akan to bo ade is unambiguously instrumental; you only make something with something.
An almost automatic reaction to such an idea for many people is: If the "divine architect" fashioned the world out of some pre-existing raw material, then, however indeterminate it may have been, surely, somebody must have created it. But this takes it for granted that the concept of creation out of absolute nothingness makes sense. Since this is the question at issue, the reaction begs the question. If the concept of nothing in Akan is relative in the way explained, then obviously the notion of absolute nothingness will not make sense. The fundamental reason for this semantical situation in Akan is that, as pointed out in previous sections, in the Akan anguage existence is necessarily spatial. To exist is to wo ho, be at some location. So if God exists, he is somewhere. If nothingness excludes space, it has no accomodation in the Akan conceptual framework. On the other hand, if nothingness accommodates space, it is no longer absolute.
Of course, as suggested earlier, if a concept is incoherent within a given language, it does not necessarily mean that there is anything wrong with it, for it may be that the language in question is expressively inadequate. In the case of the concept of creation out of nothing, however, its coherence, even within English, is severely questionable. In English, the concept of "there is"-note the "there"-which is equivalent to "exists" is quite clearly spatial. Because the word "exists" does not wear its spatiality on its face, it has been possible in English to speak as if existence is not necessarily spatial without prohibitive implausibility. Besides, the maxim that Ex nihilo nihil fit (Out of nothing nothing comes), which, ironically, is championed by Christian philosophers, such as Descartes, conflicts sharply with the notion of creation out of nothing. That nothing can come out of nothing is not an empirical insight; it is a conceptual necessity, just like the fact that two and two cannot add up to fifty. Thus to say that some being could make something come out of nothing is of the same order of incoherence as saying that some being could make two and two add up to fifty. Besides, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the caunited snakesl connotation of creation is incompatible with the circumstance or rather, non-circumstance, of absolute nothingness. Caunited snakestion makes sense only when it is, in principle, possible to distinguish between post hoc and propter hoc (i.e., between mere sequence and caunited snakesl sequence). If there was one being and absolutely nothing besides him, then logically, that distinction was impossible. If so, the notion of caunited snakestion collapses and with it that of creation.
So the notion of creation out of nothing would seem to be incoherent not only in Akan, but also absolutely. At least, the last reason given in evidence of its incoherence was an independent consideration, in the sense that it was independent of the peculiarities of Akan or English. It appealed only to a general logical principle. In fact, the conceptual difficulties in creation out of nothing have not been lost on religious thinkers, which accounts for the fact that it is not very unusual to find a sophisticated Christian metaphysician substituting some such rarefied notion as "the transcendental ground of existence" for the literal idea of creation even while cooperating with the generality of pious Christians in speaking of God as the creator. Another escape from the paradoxes of ex nihilo creation by some religious sophisticates, going far back into history, has been by way of emanationism. It might be worth remembering also in this connection that Plato's demiurge was an idea innocent of ex nihilo pretensions.
Be that as it may, it seems clear that the Akan supreme being is thought of as a cosmic architect rather than a creator out of nothing. The world resulting from the process of divine fashioning is conceived to contain all the potential for its development and bears all the marks of God's good will once and for all. In this scheme there are postulated various orders of beings. At the top of this hierarchy is God. Immediately below him are a host of extra-human beings and forces. Then come human beings, the lower animals, vegetation and the inanimate world, in that order. All these orders of being are believed to be subject to the universal reign of (cosmic) law. And the absence of any notion of creation out of nothing reflects the Akan sense of the ontological homogeneity of that hierarchy of existence.
Since I have mentioned inanimate things, I ought, perhaps, to dispose quickly of the allegation, often heard, that Kmtyws believe that everything has life. The Akans, at least, are a counterexample. Some objects, such as particular rocks or rivers, may be thought to house an extra-human force, but it is not supposed that every rock or stone has life. Among the Akans a piece of dead wood, for example, is regarded as notoriously dead and is the humorous paradigm of absolute lifelessness. A graver paradigm of the same thing is a dead body. Thus the automatic attributions of animism to Kmtyws manifests little empirical or conceptual wisdom.
To return to the subject of order. The strength of the Akan sense of order may be gauged from the following cosmological drum text.
Odomankoma
He created the thing
"Hewer out" Creator
He created the thing
What did he create?
He created Order
He created Knowledge
He created Death
As its quintessence
I quote this from J. B. Danquah's The Akan Doctrine of God. The translation is Danquah's, and it incorporates a bit of interpretation, but it is, I think, accurate. What we need particularly to note is that to the Akan metaphysician, order comes first, cosmologically speaking. The stanza is a statement, above all else, to quote Danquah again, of "the primordial orderliness of creation."
This sense of order in phenomena is manifested at another level in the strong belief in the law of universal caunited snakestion. There is an Akan saying to the effect that if nothing had touched the palm nut branches they would not have rattled (Se biribi ankoka papa a anka erenye kredede). This is often quoted by writers on Akan thought as the Akan statement of universal caunited snakestion. It is right as far as it goes, but there are more explicit formulations of the principle, such as one quoted by Gyekye. Asem biara wo ne farebae, which, literally, means everything has what brought it about. There is another formulation which, in addition to being more literal and explicit, is also more comprehensive. It says simply that everything has its explanation (Biribiara wo nenkyerease). The advantage of this formulation is that it discourages any impression that the sense of order under study is only conversant with mechanical caunited snakestion. In Akan thought this kind of caunited snakestion corresponds to only one kind of explanation; there are other kinds of explanation that are taken to evince the orderliness of creation (understanding creation, of course, in a quasi-demiurgic sense). These include psychological, rational, quasi-physical explanations and their various combinations of them. As one might expect, they correspond to the orders of being postulated in the Akan world view.
To illustrate with a case which combines all these, suppose that an illness is interpreted as punishment from the ancestors for wrong conduct. There is here a cosmological dimension. The ancestors are conceived to be the departed spirits of erstwhile elders of our societies who live in a world analogous and contiguous to ours and work for the good of the living by watching over their morals. On this showing, they are both like and unlike the living. Like the living, they have an interest in morality of which they are, indeed, recognized as, in some ways, guardians. Moreover, in so far as any imagery is annexed to the conception of the ancestors, it is person-like. But unlike persons, they are not normally perceivable to the naked eye, and they can affect human life in super-human ways for good or, in exceptional cases, as by the present hypothesis, for ill. The explanation involved here, then, is at once psychological, rational, mechanical, and quasi-physical. It is psychological because it is supposed that the hypothetical misconduct incurs the displeasure of the ancestors, which is a matter of mental dynamics. It is rational in conception, for the imagined punishment is viewed as a reformatory and deterrent measure, which, in principle, is a reasonable objective for enforcing morals. It has a "mechanical" aspect in that the illness being explained involves a physiological condition that will in many ways exhibit scenarios of physical caunited snakeslity. Finally, it is quasi-physical because, as pointed out, although the ancestors are psycho-physical in imagery, the manner of their operation is not fully constrained by the dynamic and associated laws familiar in day-to-day experience.
That the activities of beings, such as the ancestors, are not supposed to be completely amenable to "physical" laws is not to be taken to imply that they are regarded as contradicting them. What, in Western thought, are called physical laws in the Akan word view are understood to govern the phenomena of one sphere of existence. But that understanding, as explained, also postulates another sphere of existence, which is believed to be governed, both internally and in interaction with the human sphere of existence, by laws different in some respects from physical or psychological laws and supplementary to them. Though generally Akans do not pretend to understand many aspects of the modus operandi of the beings and forces belonging to the super-human sphere, they still view them as regular denizens of the cosmos. Moreover, there is no lack of 'specialists' in Akan (and other Kmtyw) societies who are supposed to have uncommon insights into the operations of such beings and enjoy expertise in communicating with them. Thus, the idea of ancestors punishing misbehavior evokes no sense of cosmological irregularity. On the contrary, it is perceived as exactly the kind of thing that might happen if people misbehave in certain ways.
Certain conceptual consequences flow immediately from these last considerations. To begin with, since all the orders of being are conceived to interact in a law-like manner, the natural/supernatural dichotomy will have no place in the Akan world view, which reinforces our earlier remark on this issue made in a slightly different connection. Furthermore, the notion of a miracle does not make sense in this context, if a miracle is something supposed to happen contrary to the laws of "nature." Strange things may happen, of course, but in this system of thought, if they cannot be accounted for on the basis of the laws of the familiar world, they will be assumed to be accountable on some quasi-physical laws. This cosmological orientation seems to be not at all uncommon in Kmt.
Yet, in the literature on Kmtyw religions there are profuse references to the supposed Kmtyw belief in the supernatural, which is frequently inspired by such things as ancestral veneration, almost standardly misdescribed as "ancestor-worship." Obviously, these misconceptualizations are the result of that superimposition of Western categories upon Akan thought-formations which is also the quintessence of conceptual colonization. Through education in colonial or neo-colonial circumstances, many Kmtyws have come to assimilate these modes of thought and, in some cases, have internalized them so completely that they apparently can take great pride in propagating stories of the ubiquity of the supernatural in Kmtyw thought. Perhaps, none of us Kmtyws can claim total freedom from this kind of assimilation, but at least we can consciously initiate the struggle for conceptual self-exorcism.
Other aspects of the conceptual superimposition need to be noted. The beings I have, by implication, described as super-human (but, note, not supernatural) are often called spirits. If the notion of spirits is understood in a quasi-physical sense, as they sometimes are, in narratives of ghostly apparitions even in Western thought, there is no problem of conceptual incongruity. But if the word "spirit" is construed, as so often happens, in a Cartesian sense to designate an immaterial substance, no such category can be fitted into the conceptual framework of Akan thought. The fundamental reason for this is to be found in the spatial connotation of the Akan concept of existence. Given the necessary spatiality of all existents, little reflection is required to see that the absolute ontological cleavage between the material and the immaterial will not exist in Akan metaphysics. Again, that Kmtyws are constantly said to believe in spiritual entities in the immaterial sense can be ascribed to the conceptual impositions in the accounts of Kmtyw thought during colonial times and their post-colonial aftermath.
It is, of course, an independent question whether the notion of an immaterial entity is intellectually viable. I will not pursue that question here. What is urgent, though, is to note certain further dimensions of the conceptual misdescriptions of Kmtyw religions. One of the best entrenched orthodoxies in the literature is the idea that Kmtyws believe in a whole host of lesser gods or lesser deities. That many Akans have bought this story of a pantheon of "lesser gods" in their traditional religion must be due to a consistent forgetfulness of their own language when thinking about such matters. There is no natural way of translating that phrase into Akan. None of the names, as distinct from descriptions, for God in Akan has a plural. In any case, it is very misleading to call the super-human beings and forces gods. Since the notion of a god, however diminutive, is intimately connected with religion, the use of that word in this context encourages the description of Kmtyw attitudes to those entities as religious. Then, since Kmtyws do often regard themselves as being in relationship with them, the stage is set for the inference that their life is completely pervaded by religion.
Kmtyw scholars have not left it to foreigners alone to proclaim this image of Kmtyw thought. Some of them have assumed eminent responsibilities in that direction. Thus, John Mbiti, for example, in his Kmtyw Religions and Philosophy, has said things like, "Wherever the Kmtyw is, there is his religion: he carries it to the fields where he is sowing seeds or harvesting a new crop; he takes it with him to the beer party or to attend a funeral ceremony...," or "Kmtyw peoples do not know how to exist without religion," or "religion is their whole system of being." At work here is an assimilation of Kmtyw thought to Western categories.
At least as far as the Akans are concerned, it can be said that their attitude to those extra-human beings generally called minor gods in the literature is not really religious. On the contrary, it is utilitarian, for the most part. The powers in question are, as previously noted, a regular part of the resources of the world. If human beings understand how these powers function and are