Debating African Philosophy: Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy [1 ed.] 9781138344952

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Debating African Philosophy

In African countries there has been a surge of intellectual interest in foregrounding ideas and thinkers of African origin—in philosophy as in other disciplines—that have been unjustly ignored or marginalized. African scholars have demonstrated that precolonial African cultures generated ideas and arguments which were at once truly philosophical and distinctively African, and several contemporary African thinkers are now established figures in the philosophical mainstream. Yet, despite the universality of its themes, relevant contributions from African philosophy have rarely permeated global philosophical debates. Critical intellectual excavation has also tended to prioritize precolonial thought, overlooking more recent sources of home-grown philosophical thinking such as Africa’s intellectually rich liberation movements. This book demonstrates the potential for constructive interchange between currents of thought from African philosophy and other intellectual currents within philosophy. Chapters authored by leading and emerging scholars: •• •• •• ••

recover philosophical thinkers and currents of ideas within Africa and about Africa, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary mainstream philosophy; foreground the relevance of African theorizing to contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of language, moral/political philosophy, philosophy of race, environmental ethics and the metaphysics of disability; make new interventions within on-going debates in African philosophy; consider ways in which philosophy can become epistemically inclusive, interrogating the contemporary call for ‘decolonization’ of philosophy.

Showing how foregrounding Africa—its ideas, thinkers and problems—can help with the project of renewing and improving the discipline of philosophy ­worldwide, this book will stimulate and challenge everyone with an interest in philosophy, and is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and scholars of African and Africana philosophy. George Hull is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Debating African Philosophy Perspectives on Identity, Decolonial Ethics and Comparative Philosophy

Edited by George Hull With a Foreword by Lungisile Ntsebeza

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business ©  2019 selection and editorial matter, George Hull; individual chapters, the contributors The right of George Hull to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hull, George, editor. Title: Debating African philosophy: perspectives on identity, decolonial ethics, and comparative philosophy / edited by George Hull. Description: New York: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018036706 (print) | LCCN 2018042424 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429796289 (web pdf) | ISBN 9780429796272 (epub) | ISBN 9780429796265 (mobi) | ISBN 9781138344952 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138344969 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429438189 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, African. Classification: LCC B5303 (ebook) | LCC B5303 .D43 2019 (print) | DDC 199/.6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036706 ISBN: 978-1-138-34495-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-34496-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43818-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

About the contributors Foreword by Lungisile Ntsebeza

Introduction

viii x

1

GEORGE HULL

PART I

Decolonising philosophy 1

Ottobah Cugoano’s place in the history of political philosophy: slavery and the philosophical canon

23

25

ROBERT BERNASCONI

2

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy: moral neocolonialism as a bioethical problem

43

REBECCA BAMFORD

3

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery: on epistemic justice in South Africa

60

MOGOBE RAMOSE

PART II

Race, justice, identity

73

4

75

Neville Alexander and the non-racialism of the Unity Movement GEORGE HULL

vi Contents   5 Biko on non-white and black: improving social reality

97

BRIAN EPSTEIN

  6 Black autarchy/white domination: fractured language and racial politics during Apartheid and beyond via Biko and Lyotard

118

SERGIO ALLOGGIO AND MBONGISI DYANTYI, WITH A POSTSCRIPT BY BARNEY PITYANA

  7 Impartiality, partiality and privilege: the view from South Africa

130

SAMANTHA VICE

PART III

Moral debates

147

  8 Making sense of survivor’s guilt: why it is justified by an African ethic

149

THADDEUS METZ

  9 African philosophy and nonhuman nature

164

EDWIN ETIEYIBO

10 On cultural universals and particulars

182

UCHENNA OKEJA

11 The Metz method and ‘African ethics’

195

TOM P. S. ANGIER

PART IV

Meta-philosophy

211

12 The edges of (African) philosophy

213

BRUCE B. JANZ

13 Is philosophy bound by language? Some case studies from African philosophy

228

BERNHARD WEISS

14 African philosophy in the context of a university ORITSEGBUBEMI A. OYOWE

248

Contents 

vii

PART V

Comparative perspectives

267

15 Relational normative thought in Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism

269

DOROTHEA GÄ DEKE

16 African philosophy, disability, and the social conception of the self

289

JULIE E. MAYBEE

Index

305

About the contributors

Sergio Alloggio is a lecturer in Philosophy at Rhodes University, Makhanda Tom P. S. Angier is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town Rebecca Bamford is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Quinnipiac University, Hamden, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Fort Hare, East London Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University Mbongisi Dyantyi is a lecturer in Philosophy at Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth Brian Epstein is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, Medford Edwin Etieyibo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Dorothea Gä deke is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands, and a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg George Hull is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cape Town Bruce B. Janz is Professor of Philosophy, Co-director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, and core faculty in the Texts and Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida, Orlando Julie E. Maybee is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Disability Studies Program at Lehman College, City University of New York Thaddeus Metz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg Lungisile Ntsebeza is Professor of Sociology and African Studies in the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, and holds the A. C. Jordan Chair in African Studies and the National Research Foundation Chair in Land Reform and Democracy in South Africa

About the contributors  ix Uchenna Okeja is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes Univer­ sity, Makhanda Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the Western Cape, Bellville Barney Pityana is a professor and former vice-chancellor of the University of South Africa, former president of the South African Students’ Organisation, and currently a programme advisor at the Thabo Mbeki Foundation Mogobe B. Ramose is a professor and member of the Department of Clinical Psychology, Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University, Ga-Rankuwa Samantha Vice is Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwaters­ rand, Johannesburg Bernhard Weiss is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Cape Town

Foreword Lungisile Ntsebeza

The publication of this book compelled me to reflect on its gestation. As my ­colleague George Hull points out in the Introduction, the book is by and large the product of a series of seminars that took place in 2016. These seminars were in many ways our response to a critical moment in the history of higher education in South Africa. The immediate cause was the entry of university-based students into the political life of South Africa which manifested itself in the open on 9 March 2015, when a University of Cape Town (UCT) student activist, Chumani Maxwele, flung “poo” onto the imposing statue of arch-imperialist and capitalist Cecil John Rhodes, which was mounted on UCT grounds. Soon thereafter his student supporters, who organized themselves under the #RhodesMustFall movement, demanded the removal of the statue. They alleged that the statue signified deep-rooted links between UCT and colonialism or, in the words of UCT Emeritus Associate Professor Dave Cooper, “colonial capitalism” (Cooper 2015). Within a month, the statue was removed, making this a significant victory for the student-led effort. By this time, students had added more demands, notably the “decolonization of the curriculum”. They were vehemently opposed to what they loosely referred to as “Euro-centrism” and expressed inclinations towards “Afro-centric” approaches to teaching and research. Students and academics at a number of universities in South Africa, as well as elite American and British universities such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge and Oxford, had pledged support for the campaign. This clearly demonstrated that the protest was the proverbial spark that started the prairie fire, highlighting as it did the urgency of problematizing the African colonial past, not merely as a national issue, but as a continental and global phenomenon. It soon became clear to some of us that, while this was a period of great excitement, offering opportunities for institutions of higher education in South Africa and elsewhere to interrogate their past as they considered their future options, there was an urgent need to stand back, reflect and harness the energies into a sustained intellectual project that would bring clarity and critical analysis to the student demands, most of which were expressed in the form of slogans. This is a call similar to the one Archie Mafeje (1978) issued to students in his assessment of the 1976 Soweto Student Revolts.1 For him, “militant action” and “simple slogans”,

Foreword  xi important as they are, are no substitute for a programme of action, whose task it is to come up with clear, informed and well-justified demands and policies. The clamour for the decolonization of the curriculum pushed to the fore the thorny issue of African Studies, specifically at UCT. I use the word “thorny” deliberately, drawing from the experiences of UCT’s past 27 years or so, a period beginning with the demise of official apartheid in the early 1990s and the advent of the democratic era beginning in 1994. A notable response from UCT was the establishment in 1993 of the AC Jordan Chair in African Studies. The main aim of the Chair was to provide a meaningful study of Africa by integrating African Studies into research, teaching and learning. The Chair was appropriately located in the Centre for African Studies (CAS). Having made such a good start, UCT lost a golden opportunity in not appointing, under controversial circumstances, the late Archie Mafeje when he applied for the Chair when it was advertised in 1993. Mafeje was at the time by far the foremost scholar of African Studies.2 When UCT eventually appointed Mahmood Mamdani, there was a fierce debate and deadlock on the issue of Africa in the curriculum, which led to the resignation of Mamdani after only three years (1996–99) at UCT (Mamdani 1998).3 This led to a 13-year period when the Chair was not advertised and was vacant. During this period, various attempts were made to “disestablish” CAS. The student campaign beginning in 2015 thus forced African Studies and the role of CAS back on to the UCT agenda. CAS in its current form was relaunched in June 2012, with my appointment to the AC Jordan Chair of African Studies, which carried with it the directorship of CAS. The main mission of CAS under my charge has been to promote African Studies across departments and faculties at UCT and beyond, particularly within the African continent and the global South. This mission is in line with the notion of CAS as creating an interdisciplinary environment facilitating discussions, research and teaching on Africa, while at the same time taking a leadership role in establishing and consolidating links with universities across the African continent and the global South in particular. Although CAS is not a teaching unit, its academic staff members are actively involved in teaching at both under- and postgraduate levels. The commitment to teaching is based on the vision of CAS that the best way of promoting African Studies at UCT, or any academic institution in South Africa for that matter, is through research, teaching and curriculum design and development. CAS’s approach to teaching involves a three-pronged approach: a University-wide course on the study of Africa, curriculum design of an undergraduate major and to influence teaching within departments. The prioritization and elevation of African Studies as a major degree subject right from the undergraduate level has been the response of CAS to the studentled campaign. There was a feeling among some of us that the undergraduate major offered opportunities for us to systematically re-think the colonial and de-colonial moments in Africa and the diaspora. In discussions within CAS and with colleagues outside CAS with whom we worked on the major, there was a strong view that the major should not simply be about content. Nothing should be taken for

xii  Lungisile Ntsebeza granted and all assumptions should be scrutinized and re-thought with an emphasis on putting Africa at the core of research, teaching and learning. It is in discussions on the African Studies major that I met George Hull from the Department of Philosophy. I had been made aware of him by a colleague, Kathy Luckett, who was part of a curriculum reform committee that CAS put together when I became Director. I was particularly excited to learn that he was a member of the Philosophy Department. I majored in philosophy and completed Part One of the Honours degree at the University of South Africa in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I trace my interest in philosophy to my teens in the late 1960s when, as a political activist, I was introduced to study groups whose purpose was to connect political economy and political theory to political activism. By the mid-1970s, I had established and led my own study groups. Our idea of political activism was that a historical and theoretical understanding of oppression and exploitation was a necessary prerequisite for constructive activism and militancy. We were drawing from what was a well-established tradition within the liberation movements: the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), later renamed the South African Communist Party (SACP), the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), the African National Congress (ANC) and the Black Consciousness (BC) movement. These movements were known for setting up study groups, fellowships and schools focusing on political education. We focused a great deal on close reading and analysis of texts, in a bid to acquire a good grasp of complex theoretical matters, including historical and philosophical questions of justice, race, class, gender and the meaning of emancipation. At school and university, I studied commercial subjects with a focus on accountancy/accounting. However, when I was arrested for my political activism and, upon being sentenced, allowed to study in prison, I registered for philosophy and not accounting. My reasoning was that the four years in prison would be better spent engaging with ideas, rather than analyzing financial transactions. My interest in philosophy had also been ignited by Emeritus Professor André  du Toit’s testimony in our trial. He was, at the time, Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch. Although his evidence was dismissed by the late Judge George Munnik, Du Toit, in our opinion, acquitted himself so well in his testimony, which essentially dealt with analyses of concepts such as Marxism, communism and Stalinism, that I did not struggle with my decision to switch to philosophy, as an academic field of study. When, in the late 1980s, I decided to continue with my studies on a fulltime basis, having been accepted at UCT in 1987, I thought that I would make Philosophy my home department. I was adamant, though, that I would want to apply the skills I developed in philosophy, especially logic and conceptual analysis, to real-life situations, pretty much following the example of André  du Toit. South Africa in 1987 had emerged from a period (1984–6) that was generally referred to as a period of “ungovernability and insurrection”, and I wanted to do a deeper study of this period by focusing on the ideas that informed militant tendencies of the time. My enthusiasm was unfortunately shattered when the then

Foreword  xiii Head of Department, David Brooks, refused to accept me on the grounds that the Department was rooted in analytic philosophy and would not be able to accommodate my interests. Although rejected by the Philosophy Head of Department, my attitude to philosophy, particularly its emphasis on conceptual analysis and clarity, never changed. In many ways, I continued to use these tools outside formal philosophy departments. I have, in the context of African Studies, argued and continue to do so, that philosophy (and language) are key to African Studies and should one way or the other be at the core of the study of Africa. When I met George Hull, I discovered that we shared a lot of ideas in common about the role of philosophy in real-life situations. To my surprise, a lot was happening in his Department that I was not aware of, largely because of, I must say, loss of interest in the Department from past experience. Close discussions with George Hull, which are still continuing, reveal(ed) that dramatic changes have and are taking place in the Department of Philosophy. It strikes me as vastly different from the Department of the 1980s. Most notable is the attempt to put philosophy at the disposal of society by analyzing, as I wanted to in the 1980s, what I refer to as real-life situations. The employment of George Hull in 2013, as I see things, contributed to this shift. His Philosophy of Race course (PHI2045S) that he introduced in 2014 is a good example. This is how he introduced the course in the outline: This course is a philosophical exploration of central issues in scholarly and public debates about race. The approach will be both rigorous and open minded. The course will have a particular focus on investigating currents of thought about race that have arisen in the context of struggles against colonialism and white supremacism—specifically, in North America, in the former French colonies, and in South Africa. Thus some of the readings are detached philosophical analyses, while others, as well as being pregnant with philosophical ideas, are responses to contemporary political events or engage in political advocacy. Yet others are a mixture of the two. The course will systematically examine the philosophical content of these currents of thought, while always remaining sensitive to the contexts in which they emerged. A course on “Xhosa for Philosophers”4 was also introduced in 2014, to accompany two first-year courses: Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy. Hull recalled that he collaborated with Mbulungeni Madiba in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) to set the “Xhosa for Philosophers” course in motion. These courses, it must be noted, precede the #RhodesMustFall campaign and discussions of an undergraduate major in African Studies by close to a year. At the time, CAS was exploring the teaching of a university-wide course on Africa. In the same year, the UCT Philosophy Department organized an international conference on the topic of social equality, and hosted an engagement between Professor Jonathan Wolff from University College London and Dr Mamphela Ramphele, former VC of UCT, and former Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge, on “Dealing with Disadvantage”.5

xiv  Lungisile Ntsebeza It seems clear that there was a lot of internal discussion and dynamism taking place in the Philosophy Department at least a year before the student-led campaign which erupted into the open in 2015. Hull told me that in the context of discussions about how to expand teaching and research in the department, they came to the view that African philosophy was an important priority area. He went on to state that as a result of these discussions, a proposal was submitted to the Humanities Faculty to create a new post in the department with expertise specifically in African philosophy. This post would make it possible for the Philosophy Department to devote a member of its staff to teaching in the proposed undergraduate major in African Studies. The committee designing the undergraduate major had unanimously agreed that the major should include a second-year semesterlong course on philosophy in an African context. Unfortunately, the Philosophy Department’s proposal to employ an additional staff member for this purpose was, for whatever reason(s), rejected by the Humanities Faculty. What the above meant was that the undergraduate major would proceed without exposing students to philosophy in the African context. This makes me wonder how one can even begin to talk about African Studies without reference to philosophy. At the same time as we were discussing the role of philosophy in the undergraduate major, Hull and I discussed the possibility of a seminar series that ultimately had the title “Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy”. We had observed that, much as the student-led protests had opened up valuable opportunities for transforming higher education, especially at the level of curriculum reform, there was always the danger that the heat of the moment and the slogans that were deployed would narrow the space for an open, rigorous debate and discussion about the precise meaning of the slogans and critical examination of the arguments that were made. We sensed that there was a lot of intolerance and refusal to listen to the other side of the debate. As the saying goes, there seemed to be more heat than light in debates and discussions. The seminar series was our attempt to create space for a more focused and open-minded examination of the burning issue of the moment, specifically the notion of decolonization and what philosophy could contribute. The series, which was approved and supported by the Philosophy Department and CAS, ran, as Hull states in the Introduction, throughout 2016. Integrally linked to the series was a Postgraduate Conference on African Philosophy in August 2016.6 The book you are reading is the product of these seminars, whose realization, I must say, was almost the solo effort of George Hull. I was more of a sounding board in the enterprise. As I conclude, I want to make two points. First, we see this book as the starting point of more intense debates and discussions of the issues highlighted in this Foreword and the book itself. While the seminar series was well attended and attracted a number of scholars, from South Africa and abroad, we were not successful in drawing to the seminars some of our colleagues who were and are especially active on the topic of decolonization. They were invited but, for various reasons, stayed away. I personally attribute this to the spirit of the time.

Foreword  xv The year 2016 at UCT and in the Faculty of Humanities in particular was fraught with tensions which were not conducive to constructive discussion among those who did not see eye to eye on the issues at stake. Without going into the detail, there was a lot that revolved around personalities. Things seem to have settled down now and it may be time for a resumption of the debates and discussions that have now been published in this book. With this and other contributions, the issue of what philosophy is and who defines the meaning thereof is now up for debate and discussion. In such moments it is important to reflect on how our forerunners reflected on similar topics. I have found re-reading Archie Mafeje’s booklet In Search of an Alternative (Mafeje 1992) pertinent to the issues we are dealing with, close to three decades later. The central theme of his booklet is the “quest for an African identity in the world of scholarship”, what Mafeje refers to as “the search for a lost identity or the attempt to affirm an inner self” (1992: 3). Mafeje had concluded that “a true community of African scholarship” had not been achieved in the early 1990s, largely as a result of “three fronts” on which African intellectuals and their organisations had to struggle: 1 The adverse effects on intellectual life arising out of the malaise of the postcolonial state in Africa: bannings and imprisonment of intellectuals. 2 The role of donors who are “invariably politically and ideologically motivated”, and “are hostile to, or at best suspicious of, independent-minded African scholars and often accuse them of ‘ideological bias’ … . African scholars are dependent for their research on donations from the North – they are caught in a serious dilemma …  their pride is hurt and the realization of the power of veto of the North is hard to swallow …  [leading] to bitter arguments among African scholars.” 3 The attitude of intellectuals in the Northern hemisphere, who continue to “rationalise their own desire to control and dominate by imputing that most of the research proposals by African radicals or non-conformists are unscientific or ‘below standard’. Given the fact that in such cases the criteria for judgements are themselves in dispute, rationally, who is to say? …  The issue [is] not scientific; it ha[s] to do with racial super-ordination and subordination in an age of imperialism.” (1992: 20–21) Mafeje’s observations are as relevant to our current conditions as they were when he published his booklet. They are a challenge to us. Hopefully, this book makes an important contribution to the quest.

Notes 1 The student-led revolts starting on 16 June 1976 were triggered by the introduction of Afrikaans, a language that was associated with the oppressive apartheid regime, as a medium of instruction in schools. Initially led by students from the township of Soweto, the revolts spread to the rest of the country as a general challenge to Bantu Education which was introduced in 1953 in particular, and the apartheid system in general.

xvi  Lungisile Ntsebeza 2 See Ibbo Mandaza (1992) where he outlines the intellectual activities Mafeje was involved in, in many ways an agenda for what he would do when he returned to South Africa, which to him meant UCT. At the time, the political negotiations which would end up with the democratic elections of 1994 had started and Mafeje was making inquiries about a possible return to his alma mater, UCT – see Ntsebeza (2014). 3 See also responses by Johan Graaff and Martin Hall in the same issue of Social Dynamics: Volume 24, Number 2. 4 www.n​ews.u​ct.ac​.za/a​r ticl​e/-20​14-11​-06-x​hosa-​cours​e-att​racts​-inte​r nati​onal-​philo​ sophy​-stud​ents.​ 5 www.h​umani​ties.​uct.a​c.za/​news/​philo​sophy​-conf​erenc​e-she​ds-li​ght-s​ocial​-equa​lity.​ 6 www.p​hilos​ophy.​uct.a​c.za/​sites​/defa​ult/f ​iles/​image​_tool​/imag​es/16​0/Afr​ican%​20Phi​ losop​hy%20​Postg ​radua​te%20​Confe​rence​%20Pr​ogram​me%20​and%2​0List​%20of​ %20Ab​strac​ts.pd​f.

References Cooper, D. 2015. Thieves’ Role in Tainted History. Cape Times, 7 April. Hendricks, F. 2008. The Mafeje Affair: The University of Cape Town and Apartheid. African Studies, Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 423–451. Mafeje, A. 1992. In Search of an Alternative: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory and Politics. Harare: SAPES Books. Mafeje, A. 1978. Soweto and its Aftermath. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 11, pp. 17–30. Mamdani, M. 1998. Teaching Africa at the Post-Apartheid University of Cape Town: A Critical View of the ‘Introduction to Africa’ Core Course in the Social Science and Humanities Faculty’s Foundation Semester, 1998. Social Dynamics, Vol. 24, No. 2, pp 1–32. Mandaza, I. 1992. Foreword. In Mafeje 1992, pp. iii–viii. Ntsebeza, L. 2014. The Mafeje and the UCT Saga: Unfinished Business? Social Dynamics, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 274–288.

Introduction George Hull

Some intellectual questions are especially live and inescapable for those doing philosophy in African contexts. As a sequel to political decolonisation, does the discipline of philosophy need to be decolonised? Have African philosophy and philosophical problems relevant to Africa been unfairly marginalised in philosophy? What place do questions of racial and ethnic identity have in debates about social justice in Africa’s former settler colonies? If a philosophical problem or thesis, expressed in English, French, German or Portuguese, appears not to translate into an indigenous African language, what does that tell us about language—and about philosophy? But these questions are also important for philosophy conducted outside Africa. Increasingly, questions such as these are occupying the attention of philosophers throughout the world. Of the sixteen new philosophical essays collected here, some participate in and advance on-going debates within African philosophy. Others are penned by scholars who specialise not in the subdiscipline of African philosophy, but in areas—such as philosophy of language, social ontology or political philosophy—on which much African philosophy has been written. A guiding aim of the volume is to show that much African philosophy on these topics can and should be debated not only by African philosophy specialists, but by any philosophers working on the relevant topics. All of the chapters contribute to contemporary debates particularly relevant to philosophical reflection in African contexts, and to reflection worldwide on the place of Africa in philosophy. Each chapter, bar one,1 was originally drafted as a seminar paper for a series hosted by the Philosophy Department and the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which ran throughout the 2016 academic year. This was a time when the student-led Rhodes Must Fall movement had captured public imagination in South Africa and inspired similar campaigns abroad (Mpofu-Walsh 2016). Initiated in March 2015 at UCT, the protest movement demanded ‘decolonisation’ of the university’s research and teaching, with the removal of the statue of English imperialist Cecil Rhodes on its Rondebosch campus as a symbolic starting point (Naidoo 2016). Some of the seminar papers were

2  George Hull presented in hidden locations to the nearby accompaniment of struggle songs, as groups of students and workers protesting outsourcing and fees advanced along University Avenue, interrupting lectures and ejecting academics and administrators from their offices as they went.2 The call for intellectual decolonisation of the academy, and of the discipline of philosophy in particular, is nothing new in postcolonial African scholarship3— although it remains important. What is new, however, is a palpable mood of soul-searching and self-criticism in parts of the North American and European philosophical establishments. Peter K. J. Park has recently called attention to the role of explicit racism, including that of Immanuel Kant and his exponents,4 in the formation of the mainstream philosophical canon (Park 2013). Bryan W. Van Norden now argues that the persisting exclusion of African, Asian and South American philosophical thought from teaching and research in the Global North is due to ignorance and tacit racism on the part of contemporary practitioners (Van Norden 2017). Prominent philosophers in the United States of America, including Robert L. Bernasconi, Jay L. Garfield and Charles W. Mills (Mills 2014), have claimed that without ‘decolonizing the philosophy canon’,5 American philosophy departments have little hope of addressing the notorious skew towards the white and male ends of the spectrum in their staff and student demographics. In an opinion piece for the New York Times published on 11 May 2016, Garfield and Van Norden wrote that too many U.S. philosophy departments do nothing to belie the perception that they are ‘temples to the achievement of males of European descent’ (Garfield et al. 2016). In convening the series ‘Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy’, our intention was not to replicate in the seminar room the bluster of the open meetings through which the Rhodes Must Fall movement was asserting itself on campus. Rather, the Director of the Centre for African Studies, Prof. Lungisile Ntsebeza,6 and I aimed to create a forum for critical, informed and open-minded philosophical discussion of a series of topics which—partly due to the student-led movement—were once again receiving enthusiastic attention in South Africa. At the same time, acknowledging that these topics featured prominently in established currents of philosophy elsewhere on the continent, as also in the ongoing soulsearching of philosophers from the Global North, we resolved that the series should be an international conversation involving scholars with relevant expertise from South Africa, other African countries and elsewhere in the world. In this chapter, I introduce some of the overlapping themes which unite the essays collected here.7

African philosophy8 Because the question of the nature of African philosophy has itself been a major preoccupation of modern African philosophy,9 it is almost impossible to say anything general about African philosophy without saying something highly controversial.

Introduction  3 It is important to appreciate how this situation came about. Around 1960, most African countries achieved political independence from their erstwhile European colonisers. The generation of African philosophers active in the decades that followed spent much of its energy resisting two tendencies in European socialscientific thought. The first was an ethnographic approach—epitomised by the work of Lucien Lé vy-Bruhl (see e.g. Lé vy-Bruhl 1923; Lé vy-Bruhl 1926)— which held that African cultures exhibited insufficient rationality to support genuinely philosophical thinking (Hountondji 1984: 24; Oruka 1991: 47; Osha 2011: 31). The second was an assumption on the part of some missionaries and theologians10 that, though African cultures did exhibit philosophical thinking, this resided exclusively at the level of an uncritical communal consciousness—possibly shared by all Africans—and owed its acceptance to the authority of tradition, rather than to any individual ratiocination (Oruka 1991: 47–50; Hountondji 1996: 55–56). Belgian missionary Placide Tempels’ influential Bantu Philosophy (Tempels 1959) straddles both tendencies: though he insists that the metaphysic of ‘vital forces’, which he describes, informs the perceptions and actions of all Africans, Tempels claims that Africans themselves lack the cognitive and linguistic resources to articulate it (Hallen 23–24). In response to the first tendency, African scholars mined the orature of their cultures for theses and conceptions which were both unquestionably African and recognisably philosophical:11 ethical views, cosmogonies, conceptions of causation or personal identity. In response to the second tendency, a war was declared on scholars who presented mere collections of proverbs or descriptions of traditional practices as ‘African philosophy’. Paulin Hountondji, who led the charge, exhorted his peers to reject the ‘myth of primitive unanimity’ (Hountondji 1996: 61) (the doctrine that all Africans fundamentally think alike) and cease their quest for ‘an implicit, unexpressed world-view, which never existed anywhere but in the anthropologist’s imagination’ (op. cit.: 63). Naturally, the two lines of resistance came into conflict:12 scholars combating the second tendency denounced bodies of traditional or folk philosophy compiled to combat the first tendency as constituting mere ‘ethnophilosophy’. Yet, several philosophers pioneered new syntheses, combining the wisdom of both. Hountondji announced that his African colleagues pursuing ‘ethnophilosophy’ were philosophers after all, only they were imprisoned by a false self-conception: ‘looking for philosophy in a place where it could never be found’, they had projected their own philosophical views onto ‘the collective unconscious of African peoples’ (1996: 63). Now it was time for them to stand up and defend those views as their own, in the face of counterargument and critique. Meanwhile, philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, J. Olubi Sodipo and K. Anthony Appiah have blazed a different path. Demurring from Hountondji’s condemnation of ‘[e]thnophilosophy’ as ‘an indeterminate discourse with no object’ (op. cit.: 62), they hold that African cultures, like all other cultures, possess a collectively understood ‘folk philosophy’ (Appiah 1992: 101)—a ‘traditional philosophy’ (Wiredu 1984: 32) or ‘pervasive world outlook’ (Sodipo 1984: 75)—which does qualify as

4  George Hull genuine philosophy. Where they converge with Hountondji is in urging contemporary African philosophers to do more than simply describe this folk philosophy. Though purely descriptive ethnophilosophy is not without value (Appiah 1992: 100), African philosophers ought also to approach folk philosophies in a ‘critical and reconstructive spirit’ (Wiredu 1984: 33), bringing theoretical coherence to bodies of folk beliefs, testing their justifiability, and being willing to discard beliefs which do not pass rational muster.13 All philosophy is self-conscious about method. The particular focus of African philosophy’s self-consciousness is, though, a distinguishing trait. Time and again, African philosophers return to the question of the right relationship between theory construction by contemporary practitioners and the folk philosophies of African cultures; as they do to the concomitant question of precisely where in that relationship ‘African philosophy’ is to be located. One reason for this focus is the role of resistance to tendencies in European social science in modern African philosophy’s trajectory—‘the Levy-Bruhl syndrome’ (Falaiye 2017: 142); another reason is the predominance, until relatively recently, of oral rather than written transmission in sub-Saharan African cultures;14 no doubt there are others.15 Controversies over such matters as whether in ascertaining folk beliefs it is good practice to canvas philosophical opinion from the population at large or only from pre-identified ‘sages’ (see Kalumba 2004),16 and whether a philosophical doctrine reconstructed from African folk philosophy must be applicable only locally or can be of universal application (see Bello 2004: 263–64), remain live. In his essay for this volume, Edwin Etieyibo seeks to defend African philosophy from the charge that it exhibits a problematic anthropocentrism—and to do so without succumbing to theoretical ‘unanimism’ himself. Based on the testimony of philosophers from many sub-Saharan African countries, who have worked up the folk philosophy of several different cultures, Etieyibo argues that the view most prevalent in African philosophy is that individual nonhuman beings have intrinsic moral value, and are not merely valuable insofar as they can be beneficial to human individuals and human communities. This view may not be found ‘in every nook and cranny of Africa’, and is certainly not attributable to an African collective unconscious, but it is the view which prevails. Like Wiredu,17 Etieyibo is willing to credit Bantu Philosophy as a reasonably reliable record of the folk philosophy of some Africans, despite Tempels’ problematic framing of his work. He argues that the ‘hierarchy of beings’ described by Tempels does not necessitate a purely instrumental view of nonhuman beings, and may even permit viewing all beings, human and nonhuman, as fundamentally of equal value. Etieyibo concludes that African ethics generally comes closer to biocentrism or ecocentrism than to anthropocentrism. Thaddeus Metz is a scholar who has pursued a version of the critical reconstruction approach recommended by many African philosophers in their writings on methodology. Beginning with twelve prevalent folk ethical beliefs, six of them ‘more widespread in the sub-Saharan part of [Africa]…  than in Europe,

Introduction  5 North America or Australasia’ (Metz 2007: 324), he has constructed a normative ethical theory which, in its latest form, holds that an agent becomes a ‘real’, or ethically fully developed, person by ‘prizing identity and solidarity with others’: that is to say, by ‘honour[ing] relationships of sharing a way of life with others and caring for their quality of life’ (Metz, this volume). Metz has presented his theory as a ‘theoretical interpretation’ (Metz 2007: 328) or ‘construal’ (op. cit.: 330) of the Nguni language-group concept ubuntu. A striking difference between this reconstructed African ethic and other moral theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, argues Metz in his contribution to this volume, is that the former holds some instances of ‘survivor’s guilt’ to be morally justifiable. In other words, it holds that there can be good moral reason for a person to feel bad about themselves because their associates died and they did not, even when they are not morally culpable for the deaths. While mainstream Western moral theories typically count survivor’s guilt as unreasonable, Metz’s reconstructed African ethic views it as, at least sometimes, a manifestation of good character—because it is ‘one way of honouring communion’. Since Metz now advocates for the reconstructed ubuntu ethic as a universal moral theory superior to its rivals (Jones et al. 2015: 539), his claim is not that just Africans, or just some Africans, can be morally justified in feeling survivor’s guilt, but that every human could, in the right circumstances, be morally justified in feeling survivor’s guilt. Metz’s critical reconstruction has come in for healthy criticism.18 Recently, Dylan Futter has questioned the form of Metz’s reconstructed ubuntu. He argues that Metz’s twelve folk beliefs will remain an inadequate starting point for reconstruction until it is established what kind of ethical subject matter they give voice to—whether a set of principles for moral rightness, a single character virtue, a set of character virtues or something else (Futter 2016).19 In this volume, Tom P. S. Angier casts doubt on the content of Metz’s reconstruction. Angier writes that he has no qualms about the ‘Metz method’ of philosophical reconstruction per se; however, he is concerned that in Metz’s hands it has been misapplied, since, according to Angier, Metz has cherry-picked the distinctively African ethical folk beliefs least offensive to ‘mainstream Western liberal commentators’. Homing in on what he suggests are some further pervasive African ethical beliefs—including acknowledgement of ‘the value of hierarchy’ and the ‘notion that poverty has value’—Angier offers a blueprint for a revised reconstruction of a distinctively African ethic, which he believes is both ‘truer to the cultural and philosophical resources of Africa’ and more distant from ‘the nostrums of Western liberal egalitarianism’ than Metz’s. Bruce B. Janz and Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe’s chapters both tackle the question of the nature of African philosophy head-on. Janz warns against setting up Western currents of philosophy as a standard and then asking how well or how badly African philosophy lives up to it.20 Taking as his case study the prominent South African philosopher Mogobe B. Ramose’s treatment of ubuntu (Ramose 2005), Janz renews his advocacy for a ‘platial’ (see Janz 2009) philosophy. He argues that in Ramose’s work, ubuntu is not a metaphysical or ethical theory, but

6  George Hull rather a ‘cognitive strategy’—an ‘open-ended structure for new creation’, including creation of concepts—and that this provides a stimulating example of how philosophy can ‘explore its edges’. Oyowe, on the other hand, argues that insofar as African philosophy is a practice involving teaching and research which occurs at a university, ‘the idea of a university’ should play a regulative role in our thinking about its nature. This regulative idea would, according to Oyowe, rule out conceptions of African philosophy which exclude otherwise qualified practitioners on the basis of their ‘ethnic, racial, gendered etc. identities’, or which would ‘fail to provide the platform for members of the local community to be part of the discursive tradition’. It would not, however, rule out a conception of African philosophy on which it can play ‘a key role in African liberation politics’.

Decolonising philosophy Both in the Global South and in the Global North, there are calls for the discipline of philosophy to be decolonised.21 Several of the essays written for this volume address, indirectly or directly, the theme of intellectual decolonisation. As with other evocative slogans, those who speak of the ‘decolonisation’ of philosophy mean different things by it; but that is not to say the notion is fundamentally empty or incoherent. Conceptions of decolonising philosophy have a common core: the conviction that Eurocentric colonial influences have had a harmful or otherwise objectionable effect on the discipline of philosophy as it exists in Africa (and other regions of the world) today, and the call for this to be put right. Below, I outline five different focuses or emphases in calls for the decolonisation of philosophy, not all mutually exclusive. Each one spells out the objectionable effect of Eurocentrism in a different way, and, accordingly, recommends remedies of a different type. Decolonising for identity It is possible to view decolonising philosophy as simply a matter of ‘ours’ versus ‘theirs’. In European countries—on this conception—it is fine for the philosophies of Europeans to be most prevalent in teaching and research; but in Africa, the philosophies of Africans should be most prevalent. This line of thought becomes more seductive, the more ‘philosophy’ can be made to sound synonymous with ‘general cultural outlook’.22 It would, after all, be odd if African researchers interested in compiling and itemising general cultural outlooks were studiously to ignore the general cultural outlooks of African people around them. Of course, many would contest the notion of a clean divide between African cultural outlooks and European ones, given the common historic influences on both regions, and the cross-fertilisation between African and European societies at various points in history.23 But it is not wrong to speak of cultural differences between African countries and European countries—as of cultural differences among, and within, both African and European countries: differences of language, religion, dress, cuisine, manner of greeting and hospitality, and prevailing

Introduction  7 concepts and ideas. It is normal and appropriate for these cultural differences to influence the institutional culture of universities in different parts of the world and, to some extent, to influence the topics and types of problem focused on in philosophical teaching and research (see Metz 2015). However, the idea that one should adhere to or teach a doctrine simply because it is part of one’s culture sits uneasily with philosophy’s self-image as a critical discipline with a special commitment to discursive justification. For this reason, many scholars who are committed to decolonising philosophy mention this simplest identitarian conception of intellectual decolonisation only in order to dismiss it.24 Decolonising for universal truth Kwasi Wiredu has put forward a model of ‘conceptual decolonization’ (2007: 76) for philosophy whose ultimate goal is attaining to truth. According to Wiredu, there is nothing wrong with Africans adopting words, concepts and beliefs from elsewhere in the world per se (Wiredu 1984: 32). However, Wiredu argues that there is an urgent need for African philosophers to weed out the false doctrines introduced to Africa by the colonising powers’ ‘religious evangelism…  and political tutelage’, and to do away with whatever wrongheaded concepts and ‘categories of thought’ have been imposed upon Africans through ‘philosophical education…  in the medium of foreign languages’ (Wiredu 2007: 76). Since he takes it that the rightful aim of philosophy is to discover universally true answers to fundamental questions, conceptual decolonisation, as Wiredu conceives of it, is as relevant to philosophers in Europe and other non-African parts of the world as it is to African philosophers. He acknowledges that sometimes it will be the African doctrine, and not that of the colonial powers, which is in need of correction, and that in some areas African languages will prove in need of ‘revision or enrichment’ (Wiredu 1984: 40); but the principal focus of Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation programme is to excise as much ‘philosophical deadwood’ (Wiredu 2007: 76) as has been inherited from colonial doctrines and languages. As regards conceptual dead wood with a linguistic origin, Wiredu offers the following ‘simple recipe for decolonization’: Try to think [the concepts] through in your own African language and, on the basis of the results, review the intelligibility of the associated problems or the plausibility of the apparent solutions that have tempted you when you have pondered them in some metropolitan language. (Wiredu 2007: 77) When a philosophical idea is intelligible or plausible in one of the languages but not in the other, the next step is ‘to try to reason out the matter on independent grounds’ (ibid.). A concept should be used, or a doctrine adopted, only if doing so

8  George Hull is supported by reasons ‘fathomable in both the African and the foreign language concerned’ (ibid.). In his contribution to this volume, Bernhard Weiss, like Wiredu, endorses the practice of confronting one’s own ‘parochial way of speaking’ with another as a valuable philosophical heuristic. But he takes a critical look at a further thesis of Wiredu’s: that this practice reveals some philosophical problems to be ‘language relative’ or ‘[t]ongue-dependent’ (Wiredu 2004b: 49), because one and the same statement can be ‘correct and philosophically interesting’ in one language but ‘truistic’ and ‘of no philosophical interest’ in another (op. cit.: 48). Wiredu has claimed that a statement of the correspondence theory of truth is ‘conceptually informative in a philosophical way’ in English, but ‘an uninformative tautology, sans all philosophical pretences’, in his mother tongue Akan (ibid.). Weiss critically discusses Wiredu’s treatment of this case, arguing that Wiredu has not succeeded in providing an example of a tongue-dependent philosophical problem, because an accurate statement of the correspondence theorist’s distinctive thesis is as non-trivial in Akan as it is in English. Though he agrees with Wiredu that there could be tongue-dependent problems in cases where two languages differ in their conceptual resources, he concludes that an example of natural languages differing in their ‘repertoire of fundamental concepts’ has yet to be provided. Weiss’s critique does not discredit Wiredu’s overarching project of conceptual decolonisation, but it does cast doubt on an important corollary thesis to it. Decolonising for relative truth Wiredu believes relativism is false (Wiredu 2007: 77). He hopes that with his version of intellectual decolonisation implemented, it will soon ‘no longer be necessary to talk of the Akan or Yoruba or Luo concept of this or that, but simply of the concept of whatever is in question with a view to advancing philosophical suggestions that can be immediately evaluated on independent grounds’ (op. cit.: 81). But some scholars embrace relativism. If relativism is granted, a relativist variant of Wiredu’s conceptual decolonisation programme suggests itself. Decolonising philosophy would consist in stripping away philosophical material which is true, or at any rate plausible, relative to the languages, cultures or conceptual frameworks of the colonial powers, and replacing it with material which is true or plausible relative to those of indigenous Africans—wherever the two do not coincide. Since prominent versions of relativism hold that what is true depends on who you are, this conception of intellectual decolonisation combines a focus on identity with a focus on truth, showing that they are not necessarily in tension. Barry Hallen and J. Olubi Sodipo have made a detailed case for philosophical relativism, based on their investigation of the concepts and beliefs of Yoruba speakers. In Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft, Hallen and Sodipo argue that the Yoruba propositional-attitude terms ‘mo’ and ‘gbagbo’ have no exact equivalents in English (they are usually inaccurately rendered as ‘know’

Introduction  9 and ‘believe’); they conclude ‘that propositional attitudes are not universal’ (Hallen et al. 1997: 84). However, Weiss in this volume points out an equivocation in Hallen and Sodipo’s conclusion. While non-Yoruba speakers may not have at their disposal individual terms which pick out the precise propositional attitudes designated by ‘mo’ and ‘gbagbo’, this does not mean they do not have those propositional attitudes; indeed, the paraphrases supplied by Hallen and Sodipo suggest that English speakers, say, regularly have the propositional attitudes in question and can refer to them. Weiss argues that if Hallen and Sodipo have identified a significant difference between Yorubu speakers and English speakers, it is a difference not in propositional attitudes exhibited, but in relative epistemic value assigned to first-hand as opposed to second-hand knowledge. Yet this difference, if it exists, entails not that we should embrace ontological or conceptual relativism, but rather that there is a principled choice to be made—on Wiredu-type ‘independent grounds’—about the epistemic value that ought to be assigned to beliefs of second-hand as opposed to first-hand provenance. Decolonising for justice An alternative view says that what is primarily at stake in intellectual decolonisation is not truth or identity, but justice. It might initially be jarring to see the word ‘justice’ applied to matters of knowledge and belief; however, a body of philosophical work has recently grown up25 which articulates a variety of different ways in which ‘a wrong’ can be ‘done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’ (Fricker 2007: 1). In her chapter of this book, Rebecca Bamford advocates for intellectual decolonisation of theoretical biomedical ethics, on the basis that ‘neocolonialism’ in theories of biomedical ethics unjustly harms people on the receiving end of certain types of research and aid interventions. According to Bamford, ‘moral neocolonialism’ involves proceeding on the basis that the moral values one recommends are universally agreed upon, or are of universal applicability, when in fact they are not universally agreed upon, or not universally applicable. Besides indirectly working to the advantage of commercial and political interests in the Global North, moral neo-colonialism—in Bamford’s view—can also do wrongful harm of distinctively epistemic kinds: for example, it may impede the development of theoretical problem-solving resources based upon moral values adhered to locally, and it may result in patients and research participants who adhere to different moral ideals being ignored or ‘silenced’. Forward-looking justice requires the avoidance of wrongful harm in prospect. Backward-looking justice requires the redress or rectification of wrongs committed in the past. Some contemporary writers argue that there should be an epistemic component to redress for colonialism, since many of the wrongs of colonialism had an epistemic character. For example, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni states that European colonialists committed ‘epistemicides’—an epistemicide

10  George Hull being ‘the process of the killing and appropriations of other knowledges’ (2017: xii). In Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s view, ‘Africanisation’ of the pursuit of knowledge in universities today realises decolonial justice by producing ‘restitutive knowledge’ (op. cit.: x). It remains unclear whether intellectual decolonisation can be conceived of as epistemic restitution without presupposing a form of relativism— or indeed smuggling in an identitarian conception of intellectual decolonisation by the back door. What is more, it would be important to consider whether the need for epistemic redress could ever override the truth-seeking imperative in responsible research and teaching. Still, the very notion of a distinctively epistemic form of restitution or redress is a tantalising philosophical subject, worthy of further exploration. If the discipline of philosophy is to make epistemic redress for wrongs in the past, it must cultivate in its contemporary practitioners an awareness of the wrongs which require rectification: ‘A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery’, as the title of Mogobe B. Ramose’s contribution to this volume puts it. Ramose is one of the foremost theorists of ubuntu (see Ramose 2005), and two of the essays in this volume give interpretative responses to his work in that area— Janz reading it as a ‘transversal…  way of thinking about the cognitive strategies that have emerged over the centuries among Africans’, while Dorothea Gä deke reads it as a ‘relational’ form of moral perfectionism. In his own chapter, Ramose turns his attention to epistemic injustice in the South African context. He probes this country’s troubled history in order to identify some of the injustices which contemporary philosophers must keep before their mind, if philosophy in South Africa is to be a truthful discipline, committed to social and epistemic justice. Decolonising for relevance Finally, decolonising philosophy is sometimes presented as a struggle for relevance. On this conception, philosophy as practised by, say, Europeans and North Americans tends to focus mainly on topics of particular concern and relevance to people in those regions of the world. Decolonising philosophy, then, means enlarging the set of problems addressed by philosophers, so that the discipline is of equal interest and relevance to people from all regions of the world. What in the African context needs to be undone, on this conception, is a pervasive EuroAmerican influence on the academy which means it generates only—in Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s (2012: 138) phrase—‘excellence at irrelevance’. The complaint that philosophy is irrelevant is likely to connect very quickly with concerns about justice. If a field of study lacks relevance to a society, it will be difficult to justify that society’s spending public money to support it.26 What is more, blind spots in an academic discipline are sometimes the result of unjust practices of exclusion and discrimination in society at large, and their existence can, in turn, normalise and perpetuate such practices.27 Nonetheless, irrelevance is a shortcoming in its own right, alongside—and distinguishable from—untruth and injustice.

Introduction  11 In his essay for this volume, Robert Bernasconi identifies a striking example of a blind spot in academic philosophy: the moral question of slavery. Bernasconi criticises contemporary scholars who research or teach the moral and political thought of Immanuel Kant and John Locke without pausing to acknowledge these canonical philosophers’ willingness to defend the enslavement of Africans, or to investigate ‘what this means for our understanding of them’. He notes that this silence today is echoed by the unwillingness of moral philosophers such as James Beattie and Francis Hutcheson towards the end of the 18th century to take a clear position on contemporary slavery—even at a time when public opinion in northern Europe was outraged by the institution. Bernasconi shows that 18th-century philosophers’ failure to take a stand on the question of slavery can often be traced to their fear of offending powerful commercial and religious vested interests. He concludes that contemporary scholarship should not only expose and condemn Kant and Locke’s support for slavery, but elevate to the philosophical canon those 18th-century figures who did offer sustained philosophical argument against slavery, including the West Africa-born writer and former slave Ottobah Cugoano.

Philosophy and African liberation movements Political philosophers working in African countries have frequently turned to precolonial modes of governance for intellectual inspiration.28 They have sometimes neglected an equally valuable resource: the ideas worked out within African liberation movements in the course of their struggles against oppressive regimes, during colonial rule and after. Some of the manifestos written by philosophically trained African statesmen (e.g. Nkrumah 1964; Senghor 1964; Nyerere 1968) have, it is true, entered the canon of African philosophy—classified as ‘nationalist-ideological philosophy’ by H. Odera Oruka (1991: 49). But there is much creative philosophising to be found in works by individuals and collectives who—unlike Africa’s post-independence ‘philosopher-kings’ (Martin 2012: 154)—never tasted political power. Organised African liberation movements have often been fora for political and philosophical theorising which is as ready to challenge the authority of age-old cultural traditions as it is the rationalisations of those in government. Nowhere is this truer than in South Africa, where officially state-backed racial exploitation and oppression continued decades longer than in other African countries. During this time, a strikingly rich body of contesting theoretical approaches grew up within the organisations opposed to segregation and apartheid.29 In the opinion of Mabogo P. More, it is ‘in this political sphere’—‘outside mainstream university departments’—‘that African philosophy has been vibrant in South Africa’ (More 2004: 156). In the face of colonial and apartheid-era attempts at thoroughgoing social engineering, theorists within liberation movements had to address not only the questions ‘What is liberation?’ and ‘How should liberation be achieved?’ but also the question ‘Who is to be liberated?’ (More 2008: 48) The South African struggle’s intellectual legacy is a trove of position papers, treatises and polemics,

12  George Hull in which there is ‘a convergence between questions of identity and questions of liberation’ (ibid.). This intellectual legacy is of direct relevance to debates in contemporary philosophy of race; however, the latter has tended to focus exclusively on ideas and issues from the U.S. context.30 Two essays in this volume focus on the thought of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement, which grew up out of the activism of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), established in the late 1960s as a black-only breakaway from the National Union of South African Students. Bantu Steve Biko, SASO’s first president, took issue with the other organisations fighting apartheid, claiming that, by focusing on the ‘material want of the black people’ (Biko 1978: 28), they had ‘diagnosed the problem incorrectly’ and ‘not even considered the root cause’ (op. cit.: 27). It was, thought Biko, ‘spiritual poverty’ which ‘creates mountains of obstacles in the normal course of emancipation of the black people’ (op. cit.: 28). During the 1970s, in a series of speeches, articles and interviews,31 Biko developed his conception of ‘spiritual poverty’—at once an individual psychological malaise and a corrosive form of social injustice—and his analysis of how it was to be overcome. The writings of Nyameko Barney Pityana, Biko’s successor as president of SASO, are also of great interest.32 One of South Africa’s most notable contemporary philosophers, Mabogo P. More,33 has done more than anyone else to establish that Biko’s writings, in his words, ‘contain numerous philosophical insights and ideas from which it is possible to draw together an account of a philosophical outlook’ (More 2008: 64).34 On More’s interpretation, Biko’s thinking is to be characterised as an ‘Africana philosophy of existence’ (op. cit.: 49), which uses a phenomenological approach to trace the ‘consciousness of the situation of being black in an antiblack world’ (59), and is concerned to establish the conditions for a liberation of black South Africans which avoids ‘bad faith and lack of authenticity’ (62).35 Brian Epstein’s essay for this volume takes as its point of departure Biko and SASO’s definition of ‘black’ people: those who are by law or tradition politically, economically and socially discriminated against as a group in the South African society and identifying themselves as a unit in the struggle towards the realisation of their aspirations. (Biko 1978: 48) Epstein agrees with More that Biko’s intellectual project is one of ‘existential phenomenology’, strongly influenced by the work of Frantz Fanon. However, he points out that Biko’s theorisation of black identity in apartheid South Africa is also aimed at the ‘amelioration’ of social categories—and in this respect has much in common with projects of conceptual amelioration pursued by contemporary philosophers like Sally Haslanger (see e.g. Haslanger 2000). Biko’s aim, as Epstein interprets him, is to ‘transform…  one inter-related pair of categories’— the apartheid state’s categories white and non-white—‘into another pair’—white and black. Biko does not aim to replace non-white with a concept which picks out

Introduction  13 a different group of people; rather, he means to replace it with a category which is non-derivative, and in particular not socially constructed out of a more fundamental ‘base case’ category white. To be black, for Biko, is partly to have one’s agency restricted by the oppressive measures of apartheid; but it also, argues Epstein, consists in adopting an attitude of defiance to the inappropriate self-­ categorisations and other restrictions placed on black South Africans. Whereas Fanon views people categorised as black in anti-black societies as humans deprived of their humanity, Biko views black South Africans—much less paradoxically— as ‘agents…  deprived of their capacity to act’. On Epstein’s interpretation, Biko aims to replace the category non-white with the category black, because the latter is an improvement on the former. Part of what makes it an improvement is that its introduction is likely to remove some of the impediments—especially the internal, psychological ones—to resistance by black people to oppression. Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi’s chapter, by contrast, explores affinities between Biko’s writings and those of the French poststructuralist philosopher Jean-Franç ois Lyotard. Their exploration takes the form of an exchange, more palimpsest than dialogue—sometimes becoming ‘parallel lines’, as former Black Consciousness activist Barney Pityana puts it in his postscript to the chapter. Dyantyi asserts that those Biko described as ‘liberals’ do injustice to the ‘black world’ when they ‘impose’ a type of ‘order’ upon it. Alloggio’s retort is that, if Lyotard is right, any choice of a ‘genre of discourse’ necessarily ‘does wrong’ to some other which is not chosen, since ‘every phrase regimen…  is incommensurable to another’: the choice of a ‘genre of discourse’ is always ‘political’. Dyantyi resists conceiving of the discursive wrong done to black people under apartheid as a species of the generic wrong Lyotard identifies: it is not clear that any language, or genre of discourse, could give expression to the ‘world’ he has in mind— indeed, ‘[b]lack consciousness philosophers might yet turn away from language as a vehicle of expression’. My own chapter focuses on the political theory of the Unity Movement (UM), an organisation which—though little-known today—was the chief rival of the African National Congress (ANC) in the struggle against apartheid in mid-20thcentury South Africa. While the ANC, and its allies in the Congress Movement, held that the ‘African’, ‘Indian’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘white’ groups each needed its own liberation as a distinct ‘race’ or ‘nation’, UM leaders dismissed ‘race’ and ‘nation’, applied to the ‘population registration groups’, as destructive, unscientific categories, and advocated for the liberation of South Africa as one nation. The UM favoured a broadly Marxist analysis of the idea of ‘race’ as an ideological weapon intended to divide the working class. But it did not think that the South African liberation struggle should be conceived of as purely a class struggle. Despite its strict non-racialism—which denied there was any sense in which races exist—the federally structured UM continued to do its work of political organising along ‘population registration group’ lines. I argue that the UM’s political practice was not made fully compatible with its non-racialism at the theoretical level until Neville Alexander published his magnum opus, One Azania,

14  George Hull One Nation, in 1979. Though he later abandoned it, I argue that Alexander’s colour-caste framework of analysis in this book is illuminating not only of the nature of the ‘population registration groups’ in South Africa, but also of the ways in which racialised group identities can be related to demands of justice in many societies today.

Comparative perspectives Several of the chapters of this volume contribute to breaking down some of the unnecessarily rigid barriers between the subdiscipline of African philosophy and the rest of the discipline of philosophy. They take a comparative approach not in a spirit of exoticism, but rather in the spirit of ‘integrating African philosophy with the main stream of philosophy’ (Wiredu 1984: 51). Some classic writings in African philosophy are also classics of, say, the philosophy of language. As things stand, specialists in the philosophy of language can be inhibited from engaging these writings in their own work by the thought that they are not an expert on African philosophy, or African studies. NonAfrican philosophers of language can also be made to feel that their lacking an African identity excludes them from having anything legitimate to say about the subject matter. This is very different from the situation with, say, the classics of moral philosophy which are also classics of German philosophy. Contemporary moral philosophers tend not to be given the impression that they must first become a specialist in German philosophy, let alone ‘European studies’, before they can engage an argument from, say, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. And someone who (seriously) criticised an objection to one of Kant’s arguments in the Groundwork for being ‘insufficiently European’ could expect to be laughed out of the seminar room. However, it is important to place these points of contrast in their correct context. For one thing, there is no denying that factors besides those mentioned above, including various sorts of snobbishness and sometimes racism, have inhibited philosophers outside Africa from engaging philosophical texts by Africans in their own work (see Park 2013; Van Norden 2017; Etieyibo 2018). What is more, in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, due to the necessity of rebutting claims made at that time in the social sciences which would scarcely get a hearing today, the Africanness of philosophical work done by Africans was—alongside its ‘philosophiness’ (Mawere et al. 2016: 41)—rightly stressed.36 This does not, though, preclude asking from the vantage point of the present whether the continued emphasis on Africanness in African philosophy has not also had some perverse consequences.37 Most substantively, the above contrasts need to be viewed in the light of the ambition of much African philosophy to include a component which is interpretative and reconstructive of shared traditional, cultural or folk philosophies. It should be straightforwardly accepted that having an African cultural background, or having training in a field such as social anthropology in the context of the

Introduction  15 discipline of African studies, can give someone an advantage when it comes to conducting or evaluating interpretative and reconstructive work upon African cultural material. Still, African philosophers who are not content to produce purely descriptive ‘ethnophilosophy’, and who do not subscribe to a radical form of relativism, also aspire to include a critical, argumentative component in their work.38 There will generally be no reason why either an African cultural background or expertise in African philosophy—or African studies—should be a prerequisite for taking part in this process of critical analysis and assessment. What is more, philosophical views arrived at through interpretation and reconstruction of African cultural material will sometimes be able to help along debates currently being conducted in philosophy without special reference to African cultures. In this volume, Bernhard Weiss engages views advanced in the philosophy of language by Sodipo, Hallen and Wiredu on the basis of his expertise in the philosophy of language; Brian Epstein, who has written an important book about social ontology (Epstein 2015), explores points of similarity and difference between Biko’s efforts to reform the categorial pair white/non-white and contemporary efforts by analytic philosophers to ‘ameliorate’ social concepts and categories; Edwin Etieyibo discusses environmental ethics from within African philosophy, but in constant dialogue with philosophical work on this field from elsewhere in the world. The chapters by Dorothea Gä deke and Julie E. Maybee identify points of constructive comparison and interchange between African philosophy and contemporary social and political philosophy from the Global North. Gä deke challenges the stereotype that Western normative philosophy is ‘individualist’, while African philosophy is ‘communalist’ or ‘collectivist’ in character. She discusses two prominent African normative philosophical theories—one perfectionist and one a theory of right action—which are neither individualist nor communalist, but rather take relationships between people to be the principal ‘subject matter of normative thought’. Since neo-republican normative theories in the Western tradition (e.g. Philip Pettit’s) are also ‘relational’ in this sense, Gä deke identifies ‘relationality in normative thought’ as a fruitful topic for comparative analysis and potential synthesis. Julie E. Maybee’s focus is different: the convergence between some African philosophers’ accounts of the social construction of the self and philosophical theorising about the social construction of disabled and able-bodied selves by disability studies scholars in the West. Building on her own previous work in this area, Maybee argues that both ‘what it is like (as an object out there)’ for a disabled or able-bodied person to be as they are and ‘what it feels like (in experience, or from the inside)’ to be able-bodied or disabled are ‘irreducibly social’. Work by African philosophers such as Ifeanyi A. Menkiti (see Menkiti 1984) and Oyè rónké.  Oyě wù mí (see Oyě wù m í 1997) can, in Maybee’s estimation, help with theorising how this is so. Samantha Vice’s and Uchenna Okeja’s chapters both focus on the topic of partiality and impartiality in moral philosophy. Vice suggests that the tension

16  George Hull between ‘the impartial moral demands of the impersonal perspective’ and the reasons to show ‘partiality towards certain people or projects’ given by the ‘personal perspective’ is especially pronounced in countries which exhibit severe material inequality, such as South Africa. Indeed, South Africans who are relatively wealthy, especially if they are white, often owe their materially privileged position—directly or indirectly—to the unjust laws established during segregation and apartheid, rendering even more urgent the impartial demand for redistribution. Vice argues that theorising about restitution and redistribution in a country like South Africa must acknowledge that the co-existence of a personal and an impersonal perspective is a fact of human existence. Even when the source of the good things in someone’s life is injustice, it is not unreasonable for them to value those things, and behave in valuing ways towards them. This is one reason—besides mere selfishness and akrasia—why it is important for unequal societies to have governments and institutions which force citizens to fulfil the impartial requirements of morality. In the absence of strong institutions, the genuine ethical tension between partiality and impartiality remains something which no individual—least of all the white and privileged— can evade. Uchenna Okeja explores partiality and impartiality in the context of the debate in African philosophy about ‘cultural universals and particulars’. This was kicked off by Kwasi Wiredu (see Wiredu 1996), and continued by H. Odera Oruka, who claimed that there exist ‘cultural fundamentals’ as well as cultural universals (see Oruka 1990). Okeja’s starting point is Wiredu’s claim that ‘human beings need both impartiality and sympathy to be truly moral human persons’ (Okeja, this volume). In his chapter, Okeja seconds Oruka’s challenge to the view that ‘sympathetic impartiality’ is a ‘necessary presupposition…  of human action’. Oruka has challenged Wiredu’s contention that the form of impartiality which is a moral universal always involves sympathy. Okeja argues that Oruka’s challenge to Wiredu can be strengthened by floating the possibility that sympathetic impartiality is a principle of morality—‘a universal rule of human conduct’—rather than something humans are biologically disposed to embrace.

Notes 1 The exception is Chapter 14, originally delivered as a keynote address at the University of Cape Town Postgraduate Conference on African Philosophy on Friday, 19 August 2016. 2 See e.g. Fredericks et al. (2016); Rice (2016). 3 Ngũ gĩ  wa Thiong’o (1986) is an influential manifesto for intellectual decolonisation, focusing on literature. Wiredu (2007) discusses intellectual decolonisation in ­philosophy. 4 Writings on race by Kant himself and some of his contemporaries are handily collected in Mikkelsen (2013). 5 Bernasconi, quoted in Patel (2016).

Introduction  17 6 Prof. Ntsebeza took part in the conception and planning of the seminar series ‘Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy’. Due to other commitments, he was unable to take part in editing the volume; instead, he has contributed the Foreword. 7 I will sometimes draw attention to links between the chapters different from those which the ordering and grouping of the chapters in the book as a whole emphasise. 8 For overviews of African philosophy, see Wiredu (2004a); Afolayan et al. (2017). Serequeberhan (1991) and Eze (1998) are valuable anthologies of classic readings. Hallen (2009) is a brief high-level survey, as are Osha (2011) and Mawere et al. (2016)—though the latter two are somewhat eclectic, with a less strictly philosophic focus. 9 It is, for example, the main focus of all of the essays collected in Serequeberhan 1991. In the meantime, as Edwin Etieyibo notes, ‘much of contemporary African philosophy has moved away from metaphilosophical issues such as methods and methodology in African philosophy and what African philosophy is or its nature’ to ‘more substantive issues’ (Etieyibo 2018: 24). 10 Hountondji suggests that because the writers exemplifying this second tendency were ‘churchmen’, their ‘main preoccupation…  was to find a psychological and cultural basis for rooting the Christian message in the African’s mind without betraying either’; this preoccupation then led them to ‘conceive of philosophy on the model of religion, as a permanent, stable system of beliefs, unaffected by evolution, impervious to time and history, ever identical to itself’ (1996: 59). 11 As Mawere and Mubaya put it, they sought to establish not only the Africanness but also the ‘philosophiness of… African philosophy’ (2016: 41). 12 Mafeje diagnoses the tension between them in a critical survey of UNESCO (1984). ‘Whereas,’ he writes, ‘most [African philosophers] welcome the recognition of unwritten African philosophical ideas, they, at the same time, object strongly to ethnophilosophy per se and accuse those Westerners (such as Tempels) who dared to pass African ethnophilosophy or folk philosophy as philosophy qua philosophy of paternalism.’ (1992: 4) 13 See also Tangwa (2017). 14 Appiah (1992: 92) indicates why this will have limited contemporary practitioners’ access to creative, dissenting thought from the past: ‘Oral traditions have a habit of transmitting only the consensus, the accepted view: those who are in intellectual rebellion (and European anthropologists and missionaries have met plenty of these) often have to begin in each generation all over again.’ See also Bodunrin (1991: 82); Tangwa (2017: 23–24). Of course, it would be quite wrong to say there is no canon of African written philosophy from past centuries and millennia: see Sodipo (1984: 76–77), Wiredu (2004a: pt. I) and Hallen (2009: ch. 1). 15 Bodunrin (1991: 77) suggests that ‘[i]n Africa, more than in many other parts of the world, traditional culture and beliefs still exercise a great influence on the thinking and actions of men’. See also Appiah (1992: 87). 16 Oruka (1991: 52–53) further distinguishes between ‘[o]rdinary sages’, who simply have ‘expertise in’ the ‘culture philosophy’ of their people, and ‘[t]he few sages’ who exhibit ‘philosophic sagacity’; the latter are ‘skeptical of communal consensus’, and ‘make a critical assessment of their culture and its underlying beliefs’. 17 Who writes: ‘In spite of his objectionable paternalism it is possible that he had some insight into Bantu thought.’ (Wiredu 1984: 53 n. 2). 18 See e.g. the four critical essays in South African Journal of Philosophy, 26(4). 19 Futter’s paper was presented in the ‘Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy’ series at UCT on Tuesday, 5 April 2016. It could not be a chapter in this book, as it was published in Phronimon, 17(1). 20 Sodipo (1984: 74) issues a warning along similar lines. 21 See e.g. Msila (2017), Patel (2016), and Bernasconi (this volume).

18  George Hull 22 For attempts at this sort of seduction, see Mayere et al. (2016: 188–89); Msila (2017: 23). 23 See e.g. Bernal (1991); Appiah (2016). 24 For example, Wiredu (1984) writes disparagingly of a ‘misplaced nationalism’ which holds that ‘cultural self-assertion must involve a wholesale retention and prizing of traditional beliefs’; he calls this ‘a truly reactionary attitude’ (34). 25 See especially Fricker (2007); see also Kidd et al. (2017). 26 As Appiah (1992: 90) and Bodunrin (1991: 69) point out, this is particularly true in African countries. 27 Mills (2003: ch. 8) has critiqued contemporary political philosophy along these lines, for its blindness to issues of racism and racial justice. See also Fricker (2007: ch. 7). 28 See e.g. Wiredu (1995); Wamala (2004); Teffo (2004). 29 For stimulating overviews of intellectual currents within the South African struggle, see Gerhart (1978) and Halisi (1999). Fredrickson (1995) is a comparative history. 30 There are signs that this may be beginning to change. See e.g. the ‘Symposium on Critical Philosophy of Race: Beyond the USA’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 34(4), pp. 514–606; Mills (2010). 31 These are collected as Biko (1978). 32 See especially Pityana (1972); Pityana (1974). 33 We invited Prof. More to present a paper in the ‘Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy’ series; regrettably he was unable to, due to other commitments. 34 More has published several philosophical essays on Biko and Black Consciousness, including More (2008) and More (2014); he has now also published a full-length monograph on Biko (More 2017). Another book-length philosophical treatment of Biko is Sithole (2016). 35 For a different philosophical interpretation of the writings of Biko and Pityana, see Hull (2017). 36 This was, as Bernard Matolino writes, ‘a natural reaction to the dehumanization that had been forced on Africans’ (Matolino 2018: 348). Janz (this volume) observes that the question, ‘Is there an African philosophy?’ may not be an ‘innocent question’. 37 This question is, perhaps, in line with the spirit of something else Matolino has written: ‘Thinking and talking of philosophy in Africa differs from thinking and talking of African philosophy. I suggest that the former is progressive while the latter is not necessarily so’ (Matolino 2018: 335). 38 As Godfrey Tangwa puts it, the ‘fundamental beliefs and convictions reflected in action’—‘philosophy in the first sense’—which can be recovered from African (and other) cultures are to be tested for internal consistency and justifiability as they are incorporated into ‘a consciously articulate critical discourse’—‘philosophy in the second sense’ (Tangwa 2017: 24).

References Afolayan, A. & Falola, T. (ed.) 2017. The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Appiah, K. 1992. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appiah, K. 2016. ‘There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilisation’, Guardian (London), 9 November. Bello, A. 2004. ‘Some Methodological Controversies in African Philosophy’, in Wiredu 2004a, pp. 263–73. Bernal, M. 1991. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (vol. i, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece: 1785-1985), London: Vintage Books.

Introduction  19 Biko, S. 1978. I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings, ed. A. Stubbs, Harlow: Heinemann. Bodunrin, P. 1991. ‘The Question of African Philosophy’, in Serequeberhan 1991, pp. 63–86. Etieyibo, E. 2018. ‘African Philosophy in History, Context, and Contemporary Times’, in E. Etieyibo (ed.), Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13–33. Eze, E. (ed.) 1998. African Philosophy: An Anthology, Malden & Oxford: Blackwell. Falaiye, M. 2017. ‘Is African Studies Afraid of African Philosophy?’ in Afolayan et al. 2017, pp. 141–52. Fredericks, I. & Dano, Z. 2016. ‘Six Arrested as UCT Disruptions Continue’, Cape Argus (Cape Town), 4 October. Fredrickson, G. 1995. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Futter, D. 2016. ‘Ethical Methodology in Metz’s Theory of Ubuntu’, Phronimon, 17(1), pp. 57–70. Garfield, J. & Van Norden, B. 2016. ‘If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is’, New York Times (New York), 11 May. Gerhart, G. 1978. Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology, Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA & London: University of California Press. Halisi, C. 1999. Black Political Thought in the Making of South African Democracy, Bloomington, IN & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Hallen, B. 2009. A Short History of African Philosophy (second edition), Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Hallen, B. & Sodipo, J. 1997. Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haslanger, S. 2000. ‘Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?’, Noû s, 34(1), pp. 31–55. Hountondji, P. 1996. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (second edition, trans. H. Evans with J. Ré e), Bloomington, IN & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Hull, G. 2017. ‘Black Consciousness as Overcoming Hermeneutical Injustice’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 34(4), pp. 573–92. Janz, B. 2009. Philosophy in an African Place, Lanham, MD & Plymouth: Lexington Books. Jones, W. & Metz, T. 2015. ‘The Politics of Philosophy in Africa: A Conversation’, South African Journal of Philosophy, 34(4), pp. 538–50. Kalumba, K. 2004. ‘Sage Philosophy: Its Methodology, Results, Significance, and Future’, in Wiredu 2004a, pp. 274–81. Kidd, I., Medina, J. & Pohlhaus, G. (ed.) 2017. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, London & New York: Routledge. Lé vy-Bruhl, L. 1923. Primitive Mentality, London & New York: Allen and Unwin & Macmillan. Lé vy-Bruhl, L. 1926. How Natives Think, London: Allen and Unwin. Mafeje, A. 1992. African Philosophical Projections and Prospects for the Indigenisation of Political and Intellectual Discourse, Harare: Southern African Political Economy Series Books. Martin, G. 2012. African Political Thought, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

20  George Hull Matolino, B. 2018. ‘The Shaping of the Future of African Philosophy’, in E. Etieyibo (ed.), Method, Substance, and the Future of African Philosophy, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 335–53. Mawere, M. & Mubaya, T. 2016. African Philosophy and Thought Systems: A Search for a Culture and Philosophy of Belonging, Mankon: Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group. Menkiti, I. 1984. ‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’, in R. Wright (ed.), African Philosophy: An Introduction, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 171–81. Metz, T. 2007. ‘Toward an African Moral Theory’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 15(3), pp. 321–41. Metz, T. 2015. ‘Africanising Institutional Culture: What Is Possible and Plausible’, in P. Tabensky & S. Matthews (ed.), Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp. 242–72. Mikkelsen, J. (ed. & trans.) 2013. Kant and the Concept of Race: Late Eighteenth-century Writings, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Mills, C. 2003. From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism, Lanham, MD & Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Mills, C. 2010. Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination, Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. Mills, C. 2014. ‘Philosophy: Answers to the Really Big Questions’, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg), 8 August. More, M. 2004. ‘Philosophy in South Africa Under and After Apartheid’, in Wiredu 2004a, pp. 149–60. More, M. 2008. ‘Biko: Africana Existentialist Philosopher’, in A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander & N. Gibson (ed.), Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko, New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 45–68. More, M. 2014. ‘The Intellectual Foundations of the Black Consciousness Movement’, in P. Vale, L. Hamilton & E. Prinsloo (ed.), Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp. 173–96. More, M. 2017. Biko: Philosophy, Identity and Liberation, Cape Town: HSRC Press. Mpofu-Walsh, S. 2016. ‘The Game’s the Same: ‘MustFall’ Moves to Euro-America’, in S. Booysen (ed.), Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 74–86. Msila, V. 2017. ‘Of African Philosophy and African Renaissance: Redeeming Education’, in V. Msila (ed.), Decolonising Knowledge for Africa’s Renewal: Examining African Perspectives and Philosophies, Johannesburg: KR Publishing, pp. 21–33. Naidoo, L. 2016. ‘Contemporary Student Politics in South Africa: The Rise of the Black-led Student Movements of #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall in 2015’, in A. Heffernan & N. Nieftagodien (ed.), Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa Before and Beyond Soweto ’76, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 180–90. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. 2017. ‘Foreword: The Case for a Decolonised/Africanised Africa’, in V. Msila (ed.), Decolonising Knowledge for Africa’s Renewal: Examining African Perspectives and Philosophies, Johannesburg: KR Publishing, pp. x–xv. Ngũ gĩ  wa Thiong’o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Nairobi, Oxford & Portsmouth: East African Educational Publishers, James Currey & Heinemann.

Introduction  21 Nkrumah, K. 1964. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation, London: Panaf Books. Nyamnjoh, F. 2012. ‘‘Potted Plants in Greenhouses’: A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 47(2), pp. 129–54. Nyerere, J. 1968. Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Oruka, H. 1990. ‘Cultural Fundamentals in Philosophy: Obstacles in Philosophical Dialogues’, Quest: An International African Journal of Philosophy, 4(2), pp. 21–37. Oruka, H. 1991. ‘Sagacity in African Philosophy’, in Serequeberhan 1991, pp. 47–62. Osha, S. 2011. Postethnophilosophy, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Oyě wù mí , O. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Park, P. 2013. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780-1830, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Patel, V. 2016. ‘Diversifying a Discipline’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 62(29), pp. 28–33. Pityana, B. 1972. ‘Power and Social Change in South Africa’, in H. van der Merwe & D. Welsh (ed.), Student Perspectives on South Africa, Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 174–89. Pityana, N. 1974. ‘What Is Black Consciousness?’, in B. Moore (ed.), The Challenge of Black Theology in South Africa, Atlanta: John Knox Press, pp. 58–63. Ramose, M. 2005. African Philosophy Through Ubuntu (revised edition), Harare: Mond Books. Rice, C. 2016. ‘This Is Not Protest, It’s Intimidation: UCT Lecturer’, Cape Argus (Cape Town), 4 October. Senghor, L. 1964. On African Socialism (trans. M. Cook), London & Dunmow: Pall Mall Press. Serequeberhan, T. (ed.) 1991. African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, St. Paul, MN: Paragon House. Sithole, T. 2016. Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness, Lanham, MD & London: Lexington Books. Sodipo, J. ‘Philosophy in Pre-colonial Africa’, in UNESCO 1984, pp. 73–80. Tangwa, G. 2017. ‘African Philosophy: Appraisal of a Recurrent Problematic’, in Afolayan et al. 2017, pp. 19–33. Teffo, J. 2004. ‘Democracy, Kingship, and Consensus: A South African Perspective’, in Wiredu 2004a, pp. 443–49. Tempels, P. 1959. Bantu Philosophy, Paris: Pré sence Africaine. UNESCO (ed.) 1984. Teaching and Research in Philosophy: Africa, Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Van Norden, B. 2017. Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto, New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press. Wamala, E. ‘Government by Consensus: An Analysis of a Traditional Form of Democracy’, in Wiredu 2004a, pp. 435–42. Wiredu, K. 1984. ‘Philosophical Research and Teaching in Africa: Some Suggestions’, in UNESCO 1984, pp. 31–54. Wiredu, K. 1995. ‘Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-party Polity’, The Centennial Review, 39(1), pp. 53–64.

22  George Hull Wiredu, K. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, Bloomington, IN & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Wiredu, K. (ed.) 2004a. A Companion to African Philosophy, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wiredu, K. 2004b. ‘Truth and an African Language’, in L. Brown (ed.), African Philo­ sophy: New and Traditional Perspectives, New York: Oxford University Press. Wiredu, K. 2007. ‘The Need for Conceptual Decolonization in African Philosophy’, in B. Mosupyoe & M. Ramose (ed.), The Development of Thought in Pan Africanism, Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt, pp. 76–82.

Part I

Decolonising philosophy

1

Ottobah Cugoano’s place in the history of political philosophy Slavery and the philosophical canon Robert Bernasconi

I At a time when there are calls from around the world for decolonizing the canon, there is an urgent need to clarify the facts about what the thinkers who are served up to students in philosophy classes had to say on such an important issue as the enslavement of Africans, and on how their positions related to their philosophies. Although much of this chapter is devoted to offering examples of the failures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century canonical philosophers to use their authority to speak out on this issue, the thrust of my discussion is to highlight the widespread failure of philosophers today to engage this issue. Even when a canonical philosopher’s support of slavery is well known, as in the case of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, there seems to be little appetite on the part of specialists on these philosophers to mount a sustained investigation of what this means for our understanding of them, as if there was no possibility that the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans was worth the attention of philosophers. Irrespective of its immense historical importance, the rejection at the end of the eighteenth century by Europeans within Europe of the traditional justifications for slavery would seem worthy of philosophical study in order to better understand how changes in morality take place. It is a striking fact that popular revulsion in England against the slave trade and against slavery did not await, in Robin Blackburn’s phrase, “the approval of philosophers,” but was generated by a small number of former slaves working mainly with clergymen (Blackburn 1998: 36). To be sure, the political task of emancipating the slaves held by European colonists proved an inordinately slow process, but the moral transformation at the popular level, once it began, took place with astonishing speed. One gets an early indication of this by comparing the first and second editions of William Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy. In February 1785, Paley observed in his chapter on slavery that “The great revolution which seems preparing in the Western world, may probably conduce, and who knows, but that it is designed to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny” (Paley 1785: 197). A year later, this sentence was revised to read: “The great revolution which has taken place in the Western world, may probably conduce, and who knows, but that it is designed to accelerate the fall of this abominable tyranny” (Paley 1786: 197). But Paley was an

26  Robert Bernasconi exception. The most eminent philosophers of the time seem to have missed this seismic event and, perhaps for no better reason than that, philosophers today fail to study it. The canonical philosophers who still provide the models for how we think of moral and political philosophy today turned their backs on the sufferings of Black slaves, and many of the scholars who dedicate themselves to studying those canonical philosophers repeat the same avoidance mechanisms. It is not anachronistic to complain about the way eighteenth-century philosophers approached the issue of slavery. When Condorcet published his Ré flexions sur l’esclavage des Nè gres in 1781, he attacked the moralists for remaining silent on the crime of reducing human beings to slaves, albeit he did so anonymously, perhaps thereby compromising the strength of his criticism (Schwartz 1822: 318). A few years earlier, in 1773, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre completed his description of the way slaves were treated in Mauritius by complaining that he was “annoyed that philosophers who fight abuse so courageously mention the slavery of blacks only to make a joke of it” (Wilson 2003: 132–33). He was probably thinking of David Hume’s notorious remark, made in the context of a discussion of Negro slaves and subsequently recycled by Kant, that a Negro might be admired “for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly” (Hume 1987: 208n; Kant, 2011: 58–59). What makes Bernardin de St. Pierre’s observation especially significant for my purposes is that he also offered a diagnosis of why so many philosophers failed to criticize the horrors of the African slave trade at a time when others were doing so. He said that they “avoid the problem by looking to the past.” If, as seems likely, he meant to highlight the way that philosophers frequently, as a matter of course, allow their attention to be drawn to past arguments directed to conditions that no longer pertain, thereby overlooking the contemporary conditions that are staring them in the face, then, as I will show in the second section, that was very much the case with discussions of slavery by a number of prominent philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If one relied solely on textbooks of political philosophy, one would have no idea that the debate on the abolition of both the slave trade and the institution of slavery itself was one of the most prominent and contentious philosophical debates in Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. That debate has been handed over to the historians and, with the notable exception of Glen Doris, they usually ignore the role of canonical philosophers in those debates, although Montesquieu sometimes gets a mention (Doris 2011b). The resulting silence about how canonical philosophers viewed the slave trade might lead one to conclude that they had little to say about it, but this is far from the case. It was a standard philosophical topic throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and often took the form of commentary on previous studies. This seems to have given the philosophical discussion of slavery an inherently conservative tendency, with the result that it was slow to adapt to changes in sentiment. My quick survey in the second section of the failure of canonical philosophers to address slavery adequately, even within the framework of the time in which they lived, provides the appropriate context for demonstrating in the third section

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  27 the radicality of Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, first published in 1787 (Cugoano 1999). Cugoano, who wrote explicitly as “a Native of Africa,” knew what he was talking about at first hand. By his own account, he was captured when he was around 13 years old in what is now Ghana, taken to the West Indies in 1770 as a slave, and after two years brought to England. That was at the time of the Somerset decision delivered by Lord Mansfield, who ruled that a slave owner could not in England exercise dominion over his slaves according to American laws. Two years later, at the age of about 18, Cugoano was freed. One contemporary observer, Scipioni Piattoli, claimed that Cugoano’s book caused a great sensation (Cugoano 2009: 22; see Pierrot 2012). However, there is otherwise little record of its impact beyond Henri Gré goire’s complaint that the book was both unmethodical and repetitious (Gré goire 1788). What Gré goire and many others since failed to see was the striking originality of some of the philosophical arguments found there. My aim here is not to offer an assessment of the place Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments should be given within the historical debate on abolition. Others have sought to do this and it should be said that it is generally agreed that it was the most radical of all the abolitionist tracts (Bogues 2003: 32–46).1 My concern is to identify among the arguments that he introduced those that have a special resonance today.

II The framework of modern political philosophy was established in the seventeenth century by such figures as Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and, of course, Locke, but none of these figures opposed the slave trade, let alone slavery. Indeed, I am not aware of any seventeenth-century text, philosophical or not, that unambiguously attacked the enslavement of Africans with the possible exception of the English puritan Richard Baxter, who insisted that anyone who bought “negroes or other slaves of such as we have just cause to believe did steal them by piracy, or buy them of those that have no power to sell them” had committed a “heinous sin”: “by right the man is his own, and therefore no man else can have just title to him” (Baxter 1677: 73). Nevertheless, Baxter seems to have been more tolerant of those slave owners whose intention was to baptize them. Principled opposition to the institution of slavery was rare, even at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Jameson 1911: 185–87). What makes the lack of a principled opposition in the seventeenth century to the institution of slavery so remarkable is the fact that one can find voices in the previous century already denouncing slavery. In 1537, Pope Paul III in Sublimis Deus condemned the slavery of “Indians and other peoples,” although this statement was soon largely forgotten and seems to have had little influence (Panzer 1996: 81; Boer 1978: 30–38). In 1576, Jean Bodin argued that slavery was unnatural, but it is telling that Bodin’s contribution receives even today almost no recognition from philosophers (Bodin 2013: 266–317; see Heller 1994). It is also telling that in Bodin’s own time, his view was dismissed because he did not have

28  Robert Bernasconi the majority of authorities behind him and that he lacked the support of Aristotle in particular, whom he had explicitly criticized (Braun 2013: 286–87). Bernardin de St. Pierre said that his contemporaries were looking to the past, and it seems that Bodin’s contemporaries were already doing the same. The dominant way of justifying slavery throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century was not by appealing to racial differences, if by that we mean an appeal to something like a biological concept of race. That was more characteristic of nineteenth-century debates on slavery in the United States. In the seventeenth century, what we think of as racial differences were aligned to religious differences and more often thought of in those terms: because of the strong convention among both Christians and Muslims that one did not enslave anyone with whom one shared a religion, this significantly narrowed the range of people who could legitimately be enslaved. One can find what is in effect a racial justification of slavery in Immanuel Kant’s 1788 essay “On the Use of Teleological Principles of Philosophy,” but it is worth noting that his purpose in appealing to the arguments of the pro-slavery lobby that Negroes were inherently lazy was to bolster support for his idea that there were races that could be characterized in terms of permanent inheritable characteristics (Kant 2013: 344–45; Bernasconi 2002: 149–52). James Tobin’s Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Colonies was Kant’s source for the claim about their laziness, although it is worth noting that Tobin was so far from espousing the racial justifications of later times that he explicitly denied that anyone had ever “pretended, that the slaves either of the Jews, Greeks, or Romans of old, or the European and African slaves of modern times, were, or are, in way inferior to their masters, except in strength, policy, or good fortune” (Tobin 1785: 141). To be sure, during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a link was increasingly being established in the minds of white people, both in Europe and the Americas, between slavery and Africans (Painter 2010: xi, 42). However, that particular passage was not available to Kant in the extracts he read. From early on, critics of the way Africans were increasingly being singled out for slavery, like Thomas Tryon, tried to break the connection between the two ideas, but it is telling that any knowledge we have of what look like racial arguments for enslaving Africans are known mainly from those who attacked those arguments (Tryon 1684: 114–17; Kitson 2007: 114–21). The main justification for the enslavement of Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the traditional argument that prisoners captured in war could be enslaved instead of being killed during hostilities. The argument was rehearsed by Hugo Grotius in his The Rights of War and Peace (Grotius 2005), which was first published in 1625 and repeatedly revised and reissued. It contained an extensive discussion of slavery that included a detailed presentation of the ius gentium, the law of the peoples, which detailed the practices of the Greeks and Romans as a kind of justification, albeit one that lacked the authority of the ius naturae, the law of nature. This essentially backward-­looking approach set the parameters of later discussions insofar as Grotius, together with Samuel Pufendorf, who in 1672 responded to him, were widely discussed in

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  29 the Universities in the eighteenth century, almost always with reference to the practices of the Greeks and Romans and frequently combined with the view that their judgement that political slavery was worse than domestic slavery should be trusted: “The Courtiers of Tiberius or Nero even the Senators of Neros [sic] time were debased to a degree far beyond that of the Slave to an Ordinary Master” (Fletcher 1698: 7–18; Merolle 2006: 145). Grotius and Pufendorf both allowed for different kinds of slavery, including slavery by contract, which subsequently came to be known as a form of indentured servitude. By adopting a narrower definition of slavery, according to which one could not sell oneself into slavery, Locke in his Two Treatises of Government was able to justify a harsher treatment of slaves, because it did not have to accommodate relations one might accept by contract. Grotius was clear that the law of nations authorized the victors to dispose of prisoners captured in war as they saw fit. The options included enslaving or killing them, but he also insisted that there was in fact no right to kill someone once hostilities were over and that this established clear limits on the treatment of slaves. “No Masters, (if we judge by the Rules of Full and complete Justice, or before the Tribunal of Conscience) have the Power of Life and Death over their Slaves” (Grotius 2005: 558). Locke explicitly rejected any such restriction. Drawing on the “strange Doctrine” that “in the State of Nature, everyone has the Executive Power of the Law of Nature,” he judged it legitimate to enslave anyone who had in the state of nature committed “some Act that deserves Death” (Locke 1988: 275). Locke excluded slavery between those who were party to the social contract, but to be outside of civil society, as Africans and Native Americans were thought to be, was to be in a state of war and they could legitimately be punished by enslavement if they had gone against the law of nature, for example, by engaging in an unjust war (Locke 1988: 284–85). Slavery was simply a continuation of the state of war. An anonymous reviewer of the Two Treatises on Government in Jean Leclerc’s Bibliothè que Universelle, perhaps Locke’s friend Leclerc himself, understood very well what Locke meant by his claim that one can destroy anyone who makes war upon the innocent just as one kills wolves and lions when he suggested that it could be applied to “the commerce which Europeans can have with barbarous peoples” who have neither magistrates nor laws (Anon. 1690: 577; Locke 1988: 278–79). Locke had thereby found a philosophical justification for one of the provisions of The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina with which he, as Secretary to the Lord Proprietors, had been involved in 1669 and which he helped to revise in 1682 at the same time as he was writing relevant parts of the Two Treatises of Government. We read in The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina that “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his Negro slaves, of what Opinion or Religion soever” (Parker 1963: 164, 204–5; see Bernasconi 2011). Baptism did not change their status. This provision claimed for the freemen of Carolina the right, against Grotius, of killing specifically Negro slaves, albeit by 1698 Locke had apparently departed from this position in drafted instructions for Governor Nicholson that punished by death “the willful killing of Indians and Negroes” (Farr 1986: 269). Nevertheless, the doctrine of Two Treatises was that

30  Robert Bernasconi slavery simply postponed execution of the death sentence that could therefore be re-imposed at any time. This gave to the master “Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another” in the sense that, in relation to his slave, the master could “take away his Life, when he pleases” (Locke 1988: 284). Slavery was not an alternative to passing a death sentence. It was simply its indefinite suspension and it could be re-imposed at any time. At the same time, this formulation amounted to an early moment in the racialization of slavery and thus in establishing a distinction between slaves and indentured servants, a distinction not readily made in Latin, although one can see it coming into focus in Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (Ligon 1673: 43, 54, 107). It is hard to explain the presence of a justification for such an extreme form of slavery in Two Treatises of Government, a political treatise whose chief purpose was to defend the English from being treated by their own monarchs as “slaves” in some much looser sense, unless one acknowledges that Locke had Carolina on his mind as he was writing that part of the book. However, throughout the following century, when University philosophers addressed slavery, for the most part they seemed to do everything they could to keep their students or their readers from thinking of the Americas. One clear exception was Gershom Carmichael of the University of Glasgow who, in 1724, in the course of commenting on Pufendorf’s discussion of slavery, explained that he had addressed the topic at length because “this usurped right of owning slaves like cattle, as it existed among the ancients, is exercised today by men who profess to be Christians, to the great shame of that holy name, with greater tyranny perhaps than it was by the ancient pagans” (Carmichael 1724: 360). By calling this form of slavery that was being practiced by Christians outside of Christian Europe “a sure sign of the death of sociability,” he made it clear that he thought it the antithesis of everything Pufendorf stood for, although Jean Barbeyrac was not convinced as can be seen from his commentary on Pufendorf (Pufendorf 1734: 286–87; Moore and Silverthorne 2002: 144–45). Nevertheless, this did not set a precedent that was followed by his successors in the chair of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Francis Hutcheson, who was Carmichael’s immediate successor, acknowledged Carmichael’s book in the discussion of slavery in his own textbook on moral philosophy, but he did not find a place in his classroom for applying his principles to the use to which slaves were put by his contemporaries, let alone to the debates that were already beginning to take place around them (Hutcheson 1745: 282n). He cited Locke as an authority when denying that slavery was hereditary, but he failed to mention that he was going against Locke when he sided with Grotius by insisting that captives could not legitimately be put to death and put the burden on the purchaser of slaves to be sure that they were justly enslaved (Hutcheson 1745: 285). A much longer discussion of slavery is to be found in a manuscript which it is usually agreed he completed before the publication of the Short Introduction, even though it was only published posthumously by his son in 1755. In that discussion he included a critique of the seventeenth-century practice of appealing to the law of nations: “As to the notions of slavery which obtained among the Grecians and

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  31 Romans, and other nations of old, they are horribly unjust” (Hutcheson 1755: 202). However, even with the model of Carmichael in front of him, and even though his criticisms applied to the enslavement of Africans in his own time, he avoided drawing the conclusions that might have had practical implications for his own time, as if he judged the topic too hot to handle. It seems he was blinded by the fact that there were few slaves in Europe at that time (Sypher 1939). Hutcheson was not alone in his reluctance to court political controversy by speaking out against the slave trade even though his theory gave him the resources to do so. One of the clearest examples of a University philosopher whom we know to have been actively opposed to it was James Beattie. As early as 1764, Beattie was attacking contemporary slavery as unlawful in his lectures on Moral Philosophy, but his arguments did not appear in print until 1793 in Elements of Moral Science (Beattie 1793: 153–87). Even though in 1784 he openly attacked Hume’s presentation of Negroes as inferior (Beattie 1774: 463–68), he never published his 1778 manuscript “On the Lawfulness and Expediency of Slavery, particularly that of the Negroes” in spite of pleas for him to do so (Beattie 1999; see Doris 2011a). Although he was perfectly capable of exposing the frigidity and languor of intellectuals, he refused to publish his tract on slavery because, as he told Mrs. Montagu in 1779 somewhat defensively, “it would rather create enemies to the author, than promote justice and benevolence” (Robinson 2004: 115). Even Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws went no further than to say that slavery is “not good by its nature” before appealing to his theory that the human varieties are determined by climate in an effort to offer an explanation of why Blacks made such good slaves (Montesquieu 1989: 246). The result was that his discussion was so ambiguous and so marked by irony that he was appealed to by figures, both opponents of slavery (Wallace 1760: 888–98) and its defenders (Turnbull 1786: 3). To be sure, when in his unpublished Pensé es he addressed slavery, albeit without mentioning the enslavement of Africans explicitly, he did not hesitate to assert that “slavery is contrary to natural right,” but although much of the discussion in that place found its way into The Spirit of the Laws, that sentence did not (Montesquieu 2012: 58). One has to assume that this omission was again motivated by a reluctance to speak out unambiguously against the strong vested interests that sought to perpetuate slavery. But it was not only the cowardice of philosophers and their nostalgia for the Athenian polis that seems to have led philosophers to hold back from taking a principled stand against it. The fact that Christianity had for so long tolerated slavery presented an obstacle to some philosophers to come out against slavery in principle. William Paley, who was a clear opponent of the slave trade, on becoming Archdeacon of Carlisle in 1785 published his lectures at the University of Cambridge under the title The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy with the clear hope that his book would be adopted as a textbook. In this he was extraordinarily successful because it did indeed become one of the standard textbooks for the teaching of ethics in both Britain and the United States into the 1920s, but it is striking that in his brief chapter on slavery, he not only did not rule out slavery as illegitimate, he spent more than a third of the chapter outlining his explanation of

32  Robert Bernasconi why Christians had not already abolished slavery. This clearly troubled him and this worry seems to have contributed to his adoption of the idea that emancipation should be gradual. When in 1792 he gave a speech against the slave trade as “incompatible with the natural rights of man, contrary to the principles of religion and morality, founded in extreme injustice, and the cause of many cruelties,” he expressly excluded proposing emancipation: “we do not aim at the emancipation of the slaves, in the British West-Indies, but only that the future importation of them, from Africa, may be prohibited” (Paley 1792: 12). Paley’s significance lies in the fact that he chose to directly address the use of African slaves in the Americas in a philosophical context. His procedure was to examine the three circumstances – crime, captivity, and debt – under which traditionally slavery, understood as the obligation to labor for the benefit of one’s master without contract or consent, was considered consistent with the law of nature. That is to say, he looked to past arguments to find a starting-point on which there might be consensus and then proceeded to show that the African slave trade did not meet those conditions. By contrast, most philosophers of the time considered slavery only at the level of principle. Paley himself drew attention to this difference when in the Preface to his book he launched an attack on Adam Ferguson’s Institutes of Moral Philosophy that was going into its third edition and which was a rival candidate for textbook use in the Universities. Paley believed that philosophers like Ferguson chose to argue in a “sententious, apothegmatizing style” that concealed from their readers the implications of their arguments (Paley 1785: vi). To illustrate his point, Paley cited three sentences from Ferguson found at the end of a section entitled “Of the Right to Command, or Service.” They read: “No one is born a slave; because everyone is born with all his original rights. No one can become a slave: because no one from being a person can, in the language of the Roman law, become a thing, or subject of property. The supposed property of the master in the slave, therefore, is a matter of usurpation, not of right” (Ferguson 1769: 222). These statements have contributed to Ferguson’s reputation as an advocate of abolition, but Paley was hearing nothing of this. His commentary is striking: “It may be possible to deduce from these few adages such a theory of the primitive rights of human nature, as will evince the illegality of slavery: but surely an author requires too much of his reader, when he expects him to make these deductions for himself; or to supply, perhaps from some remote chapter of the same treatise, the several proofs and explanations which are necessary to render the meaning and truth of these assertions intelligible” (Paley 1785: 197). One might find Paley’s verdict on Ferguson unduly harsh. If students at the University of Edinburgh could not conclude from these three sentences an opposition to slavery, this does not speak well of them. And yet if Paley’s point was that what characterizes the philosophy of the Enlightenment is precisely that strong statements of principle were combined with a widespread failure to draw the practical conclusions that would seem to follow from them, then he had a point. Nevertheless, even those of Paley’s contemporaries who, like him, were abolitionists seemed not to take the argument very far. So, for example, Thomas Gisborne, who in 1789 published The Principles of Moral Philosophy in

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  33 opposition to the proposal that Paley’s The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy should serve as a textbook at Cambridge, provided a defense of slavery in cases of indemnification and punishment (Gisborne 1789: 95). His argument was about the limits on the rights of masters and their corresponding duties. One could read this chapter and imagine that the enslavement of Africans was far from his mind, but, earlier in the book, he responded to the argument that one should not emancipate “the West-Indian negroes, though in general reduced to slavery by unjust means,” on the grounds that they would massacre the planters (Gisborne 1789: 70–1). Gisborne rejected that argument as based on insufficient examination as to whether or not that would happen. Three years later he issued a pamphlet that argued that the purchasers of African slaves were not taking any care to establish that the Africans were being enslaved according to the principles of justice set out in the earlier book. Gisborne argued on that basis that the slave trade “ought instantly and universally to be abandoned” (Gisborne 1792: 15). He also rejected racial justifications of slavery, but, turning the tenor of the earlier argument about the dangers of emancipation on its head, he now insisted that abolition did not mean emancipation (Gisborne 1792: 23). This pamphlet was, with some changes, incorporated into the third and subsequent edition of The Principles of Moral Philosophy, but his only concession to the cause of emancipation was to say that the inquiry about whether it would result in violence against the planters was one that should be repeated at regular intervals and that, in the meantime, preliminary steps on the path to emancipation could be taken (Gisborne 1798: 141). Against this backdrop, it is easy to document Cugoano’s originality and his importance for a rewriting of the history of political philosophy in the cause of its decolonization.

III Cugoano published Thoughts and Sentiments in 1787, and it appeared in a French translation within a year, at a time when the campaign against the slave trade was gathering momentum. It was only in the previous year that Thomas Clarkson had published An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, an expanded English version of his prize-winning Latin essay submitted at the University of Cambridge in 1785 (Clarkson 1786). The year 1787 also saw the foundation of both the Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Sons of Africa, of which Cugoano was a founding member. Although, among Africans writing against slavery in England at that time, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano are now better known than Cugoano, his book is more conventionally philosophical in the sense of being more directly theoretical, whereas their writings are more literary and autobiographical. Thoughts and Sentiments belongs to the same genre as the abolitionist writings of Granville Sharp (1776) and Thomas Clarkson (1786), to which it is indebted, but I want to highlight three arguments that Cugoano introduced in his book that make it stand out in direct contrast with the writings of his contemporaries and that still merit the attention of philosophers today.

34  Robert Bernasconi First, Cugoano rejected the gradualism of his contemporaries. Whereas other abolitionists focused on abolishing the traffic in slaves on the assumption that it would be better to work by increments in an effort to get the widest support possible, Cugoano, while arguing for “an immediate end and stop” to this “base traffic,” also rejected any delay before the “universal emancipation of slaves, and the enfranchisement of all the Black People employed in the culture of the Colonies” (Cugoano 1999: 97, 220). He even set out the process by which this would happen, including mitigating “the labour of their slaves to that of a lawful servitude” until, after seven years, having attained a “competent degree of knowledge of the Christian faith,” they would be freed (Cugoano 1999: 130). Gradualism was a strategy not only of white abolitionists like Paley (Paley 1792: 15), but also of the pro-slavery faction because it delayed what was increasingly being seen as inevitable. It enabled even Tobin, a slave owner with plantations in Nevis, to claim that he should not be “ranked among the advocates of slavery” (Tobin 1785: 15), a claim dismissed as absurd by Cugoano (Cugoano 1999: 15). Cugoano argued for a quick and sweeping resolution of the problem, not only of the slave trade but also of slavery itself, and this was at the forefront of his early embrace of immediatism (Davis 1962). In addition to refusing the compromises that were being promoted even among his fellow abolitionists, Cugoano, secondly, insisted that nobody, even if they were not directly involved in the slave trade, could be considered innocent unless they spoke out against it. He wrote: “But while ever such a horrible business as the slavery and oppression of the Africans is carried on, there is not one man in all Great Britain and her colonies that knoweth anything of it, can be innocent and safe, unless he speedily riseth up with abhorrence of it in his own judgment, and, to avert evil declare himself against it, and all such notorious wickedness” (Cugoano 1999: 103). Cugoano here presented an idea of responsibility that is familiar in our time: the idea that there are no innocent bystanders and that moral responsibility extends further than those actions for which we can be held directly accountable according to legal standards. This sense of responsibility was less common in a period where people generally felt less empowered, but it was reflected to some degree in the petitions that the ordinary people of Britain were presenting to Parliament, beginning in 1783 and culminating in the unprecedented campaigns of 1788 and 1792.2 Cugoano was among the first to frame a broad notion of responsibility and his choice of the word is especially worth considering. Although the adjective “responsible” is much older, the noun “responsibility” and its French and German equivalents are a product of the 1780s. The Oxford English Dictionary, citing the Federalist Papers, gives 1787 as the first year in which the word “responsibility” was used in the English language (Hamilton 2009: 362). Remarkably, that was the same year in which it was used by Cugoano to highlight both “the guilty responsibility” of “the great men and the kings of Europe” for this “awful iniquity” and “the greatest eminence of responsibility” that belongs to the enslavers themselves (Cugoano 1999: 106, 108). More important than this linguistic innovation is Cugoano’s application of the idea more broadly: “every man, as a

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  35 rational creature, is responsible for his actions, and he becomes not only guilty in doing evil himself, but in letting others rob and oppress their fellow creatures with impunity, or in not delivering the oppressed when he has it in his power to help them.” It is an argument he also applied to other nations standing by “when it beholds another nation or people carrying on persecution, oppression and slavery” (Cugoano 1999: 114–15). Extending responsibility to all those bystanders who, whether individuals or nations, “saw others robbing the Africans, and carrying them into captivity and slavery,” and who “neither helped them or opposed their oppressors in the least” was not characteristic of the anti-slavery literature up to this time (Cugoano 1999: 116). It has a particular resonance in the light of Francis Wayland’s The Limitations of Responsibility, where, some 50 years later, the President of Brown University exonerated all citizens of Northern states of any responsibility for slavery (Wayland 1838: 161–88). But Cugoano did not only challenge the innocence of bystanders, he also suggested, somewhat threateningly, that they might not be safe. This third aspect of his discussion that I have chosen to highlight has a number of different dimensions. Cugoano threatened with divine vengeance those who chose to ignore the issue of slavery. In this he followed Granville Sharp’s The Law of Retribution; or A serious warning to Great Britain and her colonies, founded on unquestionable examples of God’s temporal vengeance against Tyrants, Slave-holders, and Oppressors. But when Sharp listed the various ways in which the slave trade leads to deaths and included, alongside disease, “the Rising of the Negroes in Slave Ships,” he was not thinking of them as instruments of divine vengeance (Sharp 1776: 148–49). By contrast, the threat can be clearly heard in Cugoano’s final paragraph when he wrote that “the voice of our complaint implies a vengeance because of the great inequity that you have done and because of the cruel injustice done unto us Africans” (Cugoano 1999: 148). Historians have followed C. L. R. James in highlighting the role of slave revolts in bringing an end to slavery, but although rebellion might represent a principled opposition to all forms of slavery, it does not necessarily do so (James 1938: 16). The revolts needed their spokespersons. One thinks, for example, of the speech attributed to Moses Bon Sà am in 1735. This former slave, in addition to attacking the morality of the slave trade and the grounds on which they were held, especially as hereditary slaves, threatened revolt (Sà am 1735: 21–23; Hoffmann 1975). Cugoano belongs in this lineage. However, Cugoano brought a new perspective to the idea. It emerges in stages beginning, somewhat surprisingly until the argument as a whole is revealed, with Cugoano seeming to allow for the possibility that some forms of slavery might be legitimate. More specifically, he argued that “the greatest transgressors of the laws of civilization” are “the only species of men that others have a right to enslave” (Cugoano 1999: 72). His first example of such a transgression was the forging of money, but it soon emerged that the example he was aiming at was the Biblical idea that if anyone should steal another human being they should die.3 In other words, if one enslaves someone unjustly, then one should oneself be enslaved. The most widespread justification of slavery in the seventeenth and

36  Robert Bernasconi eighteenth centuries referenced prisoners captured in a just war, and this theory was regularly applied to the African slave trade. However, as I showed above, John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government gave this argument a rigor that was not usually attached to it and with it came an unprecedented harshness. We do not know if Cugoano had read Locke, but Cugoano’s rejection of the application of this theory to Africans successfully turned Locke’s argument on its head. Just in case his readers missed the point, Cugoano announced that the slave-holders had, by virtue of transgressing the golden rule, committed a greater violation than if the slaves were to have reversed the current order and enslaved their masters (Cugoano 1999: 63). Abolitionists had previously attempted to influence the defenders of slavery by putting into their heads the thought of Africans enslaving them and their kin (Wesley 1998: 104). Cugoano went beyond this by suggesting that such a reversal would be legitimate. Furthermore, to the extent that exercising the executive power of the law of nature was a duty and not just a right, then there was perhaps even a duty to enslave the slavers, a possibility made even more relevant in the context of Locke’s justification for slavery given his unusual insistence on the executive power of the law of nature and on the fact that slavery was legitimate only in cases where the war was “unjust and unlawful” (Locke 1988: 383). Cugoano acknowledged that his words – his thoughts and his sentiments – were “harsh,” and it seems that they may have been too harsh for his contemporaries, even if they were less harsh than Locke’s prescriptions (Cugoano 1999: 148). In 1791, four years after the original publication, a second shorter edition was published. Scholars have speculated about the relationship between these two versions, and one prominent view is that the second version was in fact the original version (Edwards 1969: xii). This does not seem to accord with the fact that, in a note to the second edition, Cugoano offered his explanation for printing what he called an “Abstract” of the earlier book. He wrote that he wanted “to convey Instructions to his oppressed Countrymen, and as much as possible to excite their Attention to the religious Observance of the Laws of GOD” (Cugoano 1999: 145). It should be recognized that all three of the arguments I have just outlined were omitted from the second edition and that they were central to the harshness of the text. In other words, the second edition was designed to make the text more palatable. That meant that it would be more palatable not least to white people, including white abolitionists, but it should be noted that whereas the first edition was, according to its title, “humbly submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain,” the second edition was, again in the title, “Addressed to the Sons of Africa.” This suggests that one should avoid the temptation of dismissing the religious and more conventional arguments that reappeared in the second edition as unimportant to Cugoano. Even though I have not dealt with them here, they have all been well summarized elsewhere (Sandiford 1988: 93–117). The three arguments I have isolated from Cugoano’s text have to be seen in context. The argument against gradualism not only establishes a kind of rigorism that brooks no compromise, but also highlights the hypocrisy of those who want to see an end to slavery, but not yet. The second argument issues a warning

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  37 against all those who attempt to justify their inactivity and refusal to speak out against slavery on the basis that they did not own slaves and so were not directly implicated in its operation. Those who did not own slaves may have claimed they could not be held legally accountable for the way the slaves were treated, but they remained responsible by virtue of belonging to a society whose prosperity derived from slavery. Finally, Cugoano took the doctrine that an unjust system can legitimately be overthrown by actions proportionate to the wrong being done, and applied it to the extreme case of slavery, which opened the door very wide indeed. In a world that continues to be rent by racial inequality, all three arguments have a current relevance, so that examining them does not amount simply to looking to the past. It is a reminder of an ongoing struggle to correct the wrongs that created the modern world and to redistribute the wealth created by those wrongs. Cugoano’s early evocation of the responsibility of bystanders not only recalls to mind Martin Luther King’s critique of the white church, but also points toward ideas of collective responsibility, as well as the hyperbolic responsibility announced by Sartre and Levinas when they said everyone is responsible for everything as opposed to being held accountable for specific acts of omissions (King 1986: 298; see Bernasconi 2008). Finally, Cugoano’s text raises the question of the necessity of violence in bringing about the transformation necessary to liberate the oppressed, thereby placing him in the lineage of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X. All too often the oppressed are silenced or ignored, even in campaigns against oppression. This seems to have been true of Cugoano in his own time and it remains true in the history of political thought. In Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments, we can hear an anger commensurate to the evil under discussion. It seems that it was too radical for the eighteenth century, but perhaps the time has finally time come when it can be heard.

IV It is striking that in the late eighteenth century the insight into the evil of slavery was a challenge to Christians like Paley; they needed an explanation as to why Christians had failed to see this. By contrast, for the most part philosophers today use the excuse that he was a child of his time to dismiss with astonishing speed the failure of a thinker like Kant to speak out directly against the enslavement of Africans. They do so without taking the time to establish that he could have known better (Bernasconi 2014: 108). Nor do they ask what it might mean for the study of ethics. Thoughts and Sentiments is a challenge to this kind of complacency. We must not only investigate the failures of past philosophers but also question why academic philosophy is pursued today in such a fashion that it is considered acceptable to ignore the failure of academic philosophy, both past and present, in the face of slavery. No wonder many despair of academic philosophy and turn their backs on it. One problem we face as a world is a lack of honesty about the past. Until the discussion of slavery is restored to studies of the history of philosophy, it is hard not to conclude that it is a dishonest history, a one-sidedly white supremacist history, a history that has been doctored to make it more palatable.

38  Robert Bernasconi Decolonizing the philosophical canon has a much broader aim and more farreaching consequences than anything that emerges simply from an examination of the eighteenth-century debate about slavery, but the fact that the canonical philosophers of that period do not have a place in the history of abolition is in and of itself a reason to re-examine both the canon of moral and political philosophy and the interests of those who once determined what belonged to it and of those who now sustain it. When the philosophical canon was being established, around 1800, the treatment of slaves was not an important issue within the Universities, especially as slavery as a form of property had helped Europe amass wealth and power (Park 2014). But this does not explain why so many specialists today appear to be indifferent to the question of what the philosophers on whom they focus had to say on the issue, as if their contributions to this debate should be entirely irrelevant to any assessment of their philosophies. I have touched on some of the ways in which a philosopher’s failure to address the problem of slavery adequately are often dismissed as a personal failure on the grounds that these are not central to the philosophy without any investigation of how what is central comes to be decided, just as a “child of his time” defense is often applied without any attempt to investigate the positions of that philosopher’s contemporaries. But in addition to examining the failures of canonical philosophers, it is important to show that there were other original thinkers who can be an inspiration to future generations of students. It is my contention that Cugoano is such a thinker. When the debate over the legitimacy of slavery finally finds its rightful place in courses on political philosophy, Cugoano should be front and centre.

Notes 1 On Cugoano and in addition to the works cited in the main body of the text, and Vincent Carretta’s introduction to his edition (Cugoano 1999: ix–xxviii), see Ward (1998); Woodard (1999: 40–56); Wheeler (2001); Henry (2004). Cugoano’s originality and literary competence has been challenged by S. E. Ogude (Ogude 1983: 120–30). For a response, see Gunn (2010). The most powerful case for Cugoano’s originality at a general level is made by Anthony Bogues (2003). What I do here is focus on specific arguments. I am grateful to Chike Jeffers for sharing with me his as yet unpublished essay “Slavery, Freedom, and Equality: Cugoano and Locke on Natural Rights.” 2 A number of philosophers signed these petitions, including Thomas Reid. See Haakonssen and Wood (2015: xxxiii). Nevertheless, Reid’s comments on slavery in his lectures at the University of Glasgow on Practical Ethics (Reid 2007: 132–35) still do not live up to the promise of his predecessor, Carmichael. 3 Adapted from Deuteronomy 24:7.

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40  Robert Bernasconi Goetz, Rebecca Anne. 2012. The Baptism of Early Virginia. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Gré goire, Henri. 1788. De la litté rature des Nè gres. Paris: Maradan. Grotius, Hugo. 2005. The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck. Indianapolis: Liberty. Gunn, Jeffrey. 2010. “Creating a Paradox: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and the Slave Trade’s Violation of the Principles of Christianity, Reason, and Property Ownership.” Journal of World History 21(4): 629–56. Haakonssen, Knud and Paul Wood. 2015. Thomas Reid on Society and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hamilton, Alexander. 2009. Federalist No. 63. In The Federalist Papers. Chicago: American Bar Association. Heller, Henry. 1994. “Bodin on Slavery and Primitive Accumulation.” Sixteenth Century Journal 25(1): 53–65. Henry, Paget. 2004. “Between Hume and Cugoano: Race, Ethnicity and Philosophical Entrapment,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18(2): 129–48. Hoffmann, Lé on-Franç ois. 1975. “An Eighteenth-Century Exponent of Black Power: Moses Bon Sà am,” Caribbean Studies 15(3): 149–61. Hume, David. 1987. “Of National Characters.” In Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hutcheson, Francis. 1745. Philosophiae Moralis Institutio Compendiaria. Glasgow: Robert Foulis. Trans. as A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, 1747). Hutcheson, Francis. 1755. A System of Moral Philosophy, vol. 2. London: A. Millar. James, C. L. R. 1938. A History of Negro Revolt. London: Fact. Jameson, Russell Parsons. 1911. Montesquieu et l’esclavage. New York: Lennox Hill. Kant, Immanuel. 2011. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Fierson and Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2013. “On the Use of Teleological Principles of Philosophy,” in Kant and the Concept of Race, ed. Jon Mark Mikkelsen. Albany: SUNY Press. King, Martin Luther, 1986. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” In A Testament of Hope. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Kitson, Peter. 2007. Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ligon, Richard. 1673. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. London: Peter Parker. Locke, John. 1988. Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merolle, Vincenzo, ed. 2006. The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson. London: Pickering & Chatto. Montesquieu, Charles de. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws, trans Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montesquieu, Charles de. 2012. My Thoughts, trans. Henry C. Clark. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Moore, James and Michael Silverthorne, eds. 2002. Natural Rights on the Threshold of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Ogude, S. E. 1983. Genius in Bondage. A Study of the Origins of African Literature in English. Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press.

Ottobah Cugoano and political philosophy  41 Painter, Nell Irvin. 2010. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton. Paley, William. 1785. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. London: Faulder. Paley, William. 1786. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy. London: Faulder. Paley, William. 1792. Recollections of a Speech Upon the Slave Trade; delivered in Carlisle, on Thursday the 9th of February, 1792. Carlisle: F. Jollie. Panzer, Joel. 1996. The Popes and Slavery. New York: Alba House. Park, Peter J. 2014. Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830. Albany: SUNY Press. Parker, Mattie Erma Edwards, ed. 1963. John Locke, “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, Version of 21 July 1669.” In South Carolina Charters and Constitutions 1578–1698. Raleigh: Carolina Charter Tercentenary Commission. Pierrot, Gregory. 2012. “Insights on ‘Lord Hoth’ and Ottobah Cugoano.” Notes and Queries 59: 367–69. Pufendorf, Samuel von. 1734. Les devoirs de l’homme, et du citoein, vol. 2, trans. Jean Barbeyrac. Amsterdam: Coup and Kuyper. Reid, Thomas. 2007. Practical Ethics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rice, C. Duncan. 1981. The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Robinson, Roger, ed. 2004. The Correspondence of James Beattie, vol. 3. Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum. Sà am, Moses Bon. 1735. “The Speech of Moses Bon Sà am, a Free Negro, to the revolted Slaves in one of the most Considerable Colonies of the West Indies.” Gentleman’s Magazine 5 (January): 21–23. Sandiford, Keith A. 1988. Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in EighteenthCentury Afro-English Writing. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Schwartz, M. 1822. “Ré flexions sur l’esclavage des Nè gres.” In Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrè s de l’esprit humain. Paris: Masson et Fils. Sharp, Granville. 1776. The Law of Retribution, or a Serious Warning to Great Britain and her Colonies, Founded in Unquestionable Examples of God’s Temporal Vengeance against Tyrants, Slave-holders, and Oppressors. London: Richardson. Sypher, Wylie. 1939. “Hutcheson and the ‘Classical’ Theory of Slavery.” The Journal of Negro History 24(3): 263–80. Tobin, James. 1785. Cursory Remarks upon the Reverend Mr. Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Colonies. London: G. and T. Wilkie. Tobin, James. 1786. “Anmerkungen ü ber Ramsays Schrift von der Behandlung der Negersklaven in den Westindischen Zuckerinseln.” In Beiträ  ge zur Vö  lker und Lä nderkunde, ed. M. C. Sprengel. Leipzig: Weygand. Tryon, Thomas. 1684. Friendly Advcie [sic] to the Gentelmen-Planters [sic] of the East and West Indies. London: Andrew Sowle. Turnbull, Gordon. 1786. An Apology for Negro Slavery, or, The West-India Planters vindicated from the Charge of Inhumanity. London: Stevenson. Wallace, George. 1760. A System of the Principles of the Law of Scotland, vol. 1. Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour. Ward, Julie K. 1998. “‘The Master’s Tools’: Abolitionist Arguments of Equiano and Cugoano.” In Subjugation and Bondage, ed. Tommy L. Lott, 79–88. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Wayland, Francis. 1838. “The Slavery Question.” In The Limitations of Responsibility. Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln.

42  Robert Bernasconi Wesley, John. 1998. Political Writings of John Wesley, ed. Graham Maddox. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Wheeler, Roxann. 2001. “‘Betrayed by Some of My Own Complexion’: Cugoano, Abolition, and the Contemporary Language of Racialism.” In Genius in Bondage, ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, 17–38. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Whyte, Iain. 2006. Scotland and the Abolition of Slavery. Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, Jason, trans. 2003. Voyage to Mauritius. New York: Interlink. Trans. of JacquesHenri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Voyage a l’Isle de France, vol. 1. Neuchatel: Imprimerie de la Socié té  typographique, 1773. Woodard, Helena. 1999. African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century. Westport: Greenwood Press.

2

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy Moral neocolonialism as a bioethical problem Rebecca Bamford

Global bioethics combines medical professional work with responding to ­ecological and social problems across geographical and cultural boundaries, and requires interdisciplinary collaboration, use of diverse perspectives, and clear understanding of the interplay of existing value systems (ten Have & Gordijn 2014, 11; Verkerk & Lindemann 2011, 94). However, it is less clear whether, or how, to accomplish this. Universal ethical approaches may not be sufficiently inclusive of cultural diversity, and may foster cultural imperialism. Yet there is doubt whether concerns about cultural or moral imperialism address any substantive problems in bioethics. I argue that moral neocolonialism is a real problem for bioethics, and that it merits continuing investigation as part of developing bioethics in African contexts. I consider why some scholars reject moral neocolonialism as a problem. I use evidence from Widdows (2007) in conjunction with resources from African philosophy to differentiate between direct and indirect moral neocolonialism. I show how both forms occur in African bioethical contexts, and how African philosophy supports treating moral neocolonialism as a real problem. I consider and respond to some anticipated objections to my view from bioethics and from moral philosophy before suggesting further directions for inquiry.

Denying moral neocolonialism is a problem for bioethics A helpful definition of ‘moral neocolonialism’ is found in Widdows (2007). Widdows uses ‘moral’ “in a straightforward sense of a value system which upholds specific actions and attitudes,” and ‘neocolonialism’ to indicate values being presented not “as superior, but as universal, requiring not conversion to an alternative (presumably better) value system, but recognition of universal values” (2007, 306). She treats this conversion process as ‘covert’ rather than overt, as in straightforward colonialism in which there is “the attempt to openly convert people to one’s own moral ideas,” for example by enforcing one’s own religious code (2007, 306). If moral neocolonialism exists, it involves a dominant Western framework covertly promoting “certain codes of ethics and particular types of rights, while appearing to assert universal values,” as in the case of human rights as universal values (2007, 306). I shall have more to say on defining moral

44  Rebecca Bamford neocolonialism below; meantime, I acknowledge three approaches to denying that moral neocolonialism is a real problem for bioethics. One denial appeals to universalism. In ethics, this is the position that ethical principles apply to everyone, regardless of their background or particular cultural values. Moral neocolonialism cannot “describe the transcultural imposition of values” if ethical judgments have cross-cultural validity, and must be rejected as a product of relativism (Macklin 1999, 25). Additionally, moral neocolonialism risks making bioethics inconsistent with the biomedical sciences, because its relativism legitimizes views that are inconsistent with the “naturalistic commitments of Western biomedical sciences” such as suspending pain medication that interferes with prayers, or parental demand for painful surgical procedures to be performed on children because of parents’ beliefs about health or chastity (Bracanovic 2013, 648–649). The second denial treats theoretical debate as less valuable than practical bioethical problem-solving (Widdows & West-Oram 2013). Since it is unclear that Western ethics is indeed alien to ethical systems grounded in cultures beyond the West, theoretical debate contributes little of use. For instance, Widdows gives the examples of virtue ethics, “a picture of morality which has at its heart many of the aspects of morality which have been claimed to belong to the ethics and worldviews of the developing world; namely the importance of moral virtues embodied in the experience of moral living and as part of a way of life” (2007, 310–312). Detailed comparison of virtue-based approaches from diverse ethical traditions would reveal substantial overlap; given such overlap, then at most there is a spectrum of value priority in which some ethical systems tend to prioritize certain values and other systems prioritize other values (Widdows & West-Oram 2013). The third denial attributes a misunderstanding of globalization to defenders of the existence of moral neocolonialism and suggests that this explains the emphasis they place on debating a common framework for values ahead of practical problem-solving in bioethics (ten Have & Gordijn 2014). On this account, a universalist global normative bioethical framework already includes sufficient respect for cultural diversity, and need not involve wealthy and powerful countries imposing their values on less advantaged peoples (ten Have & Gordijn 2014). UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights exemplifies this: the call for the declaration was initiated by developing nations concerned about their vulnerability to coercion; 191 nations negotiated to develop 15 bioethical principles over 2 years (ten Have & Gordijn 2014, 13–14). The contemporary relationship between global and local contexts is not antithetical: the global and the local shape one another to promote the development of a human moral community (ten Have & Gordijn 2014, 12). Those who claim moral neocolonialism exists misconstrue the global-local dialectic as one-way, powerful to powerless, and so underestimate the power of local value systems, fail to appreciate how indigenous rights activists use universal human rights resources to support their work, and ignore the ongoing dialogue between global and local values (ten Have & Gordijn 2014, 12).

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  45 Widdows’s account incorporates two possible ways of recognizing moral neocolonialism as a problem in global bioethics. First, bioethics may be directly morally colonialist in that those who fail to accept dominant values as universal, or who challenge the universality of the relevant values, run a risk of censure by the international global ethics research community (2007, 306). Second, bioethics may be indirectly morally colonialist: here, the real danger of moral neocolonialism arises through implementing ad hoc solutions to practical issues in global ethics without sufficient “theoretical consultation and involvement” with ethics from beyond the West (Widdows 2007, 314). Even with dialogue between global and local values across cultures, insufficient consultation will perpetuate existing problems as the new value framework would be largely informed by a dominant Western ethical system (2007, 314). I shall clarify direct and indirect moral neocolonialism in what follows, in order to develop a way to count moral neocolonialism as a real problem for bioethics by showing that it causes harm (Chattopadhyay & De Vries 2013).

Direct moral neocolonialism in African bioethical contexts Kwame Nkrumah (1965) has shown that neocolonialism involves direct covert actions that pursue the conversion of people’s values, in ways that benefit former or emerging Western colonial powers. Nkrumah writes, Faced with the militant peoples of the ex-colonial territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, imperialism simply switches tactics. Without a qualm it dispenses with its flags, and even with certain of its more hated expatriate officials. This means, so it claims, that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for their development. Under cover of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It is this sum total of these modern attempts to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom’, which has come to be known as neo-colonialism. (1965)1 Unlike “naked colonialism,” neocolonialism is covert, because its acts of conquest are intentionally disguised. In Nkrumah’s example, the former colony is encouraged to accept the allegedly universal moral and political value of freedom – but what freedom means in practice is the continued advantaging of the former colonizing nation at the expense of the formerly colonized nation. Nkrumah gives Moral Re-Armament, the US Peace Corps, and the United States Information Agency as examples of moral neocolonialist engagement (1965).2 Development efforts may contribute to powerful nations’ control over less powerful nations, through presenting preferred values as universal and providing incentives such as aid to promote their adoption.

46  Rebecca Bamford Nkrumah’s view is recognized in contemporary development studies, where neocolonialism, including moral neocolonialism, is accepted as a problematic dimension of international development, and as a factor in the re-inscription of colonial divisions between developing and developed world nations (Chuwa 2014; Sobocinska 2017).3 More vulnerable nations or regions are harmed through the entrenchment and perpetuation of disadvantage. Medical anthropologists point out that biosocial understanding in medicine shows that social inequalities become health disparities, and use biosocial approaches to design more effective public health interventions to combat communicable diseases, for example in the US, Haiti, and Rwanda (Farmer et al. 2006). The point here is that the theoretical and the practical cannot be separated out to avoid the problem of direct moral neocolonialism. Harm arises specifically through presenting preferred values as universal and incentivizing their adoption: this can result in practical harms to research and to communities. Researchers may be required to adopt the ethical priorities of funders in order to be able to complete their projects, such as following specific ethics regulations in performing a clinical trial, without being able to make defensible changes, or may be prohibited from attending to the particular health priorities of the communities involved in their research as a part of completing that research (Tangwa 2017). African scientists and researchers in biomedicine who work with Western funding (especially where funding from African governments or Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) is limited) can achieve a high global professional standing, but are often at the behest of funders whose priorities are commercial, not philanthropic (Tangwa 2017). The economic and practical realities of conducting research trials give rise to direct moral neocolonialism: here, the conversion of researchers’ and research subjects’ values to those of a dominant ethical system through the disguise of aid or partnership. A specific, relevant, bioethics development example is a bioethics training program funded by the US National Institute of Health that aims at building capacity in research ethics in African nations (Hyder et al. 2007). The program’s partnerships include affiliations with Botswana, Uganda, and Zambia (Hyder & Krubiner 2016). While the program has a helpful aim in training scholars in African nations to be prepared to engage in, and advance, research ethics in African contexts, it may at the same time incorporate what I am defining as direct moral neocolonialism (Hyder et al. 2007; Hyder & Krubiner 2016; Fayemi & Macaulay-Adeyelure 2016). The harm was that practical solutions to problems in scientific research were held up by direct moral neocolonialism (Hyder & Krubiner 2016). In mentioning this example, I do not mean to dismiss this program’s worth overall: project researchers rightly consider concerns about Western-centrism as part of continuous program review (Hyder et al. 2007; Hyder & Krubiner 2016; De Vries & Rott 2011). My point is to emphasize why program review should attend to moral neocolonialism. Structurally, program curricula are generally skewed towards Western values embedded in US bioethics professional and conceptual orthodoxies, even when involving direct application to African bioethical

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  47 contexts (De Vries & Rott 2011). There is an acknowledged need to improve faculty members’ awareness of social and political issues of trainees’ countries, in order to facilitate research ethics framework development in these locations (Hyder et al. 2007). Relatedly, while citizens of formerly colonized nations are embedded in Western modes of bioethical practice, discourse, and values through education, training, and clinical practices, they remain dependent on access to funding sources and research programs organized by Western agencies, in order to pursue bioethical or biomedical sciences careers (Campbell 1999; Alora & Lumitao 2001; Chadwick & Schuklenk 2004; Hyder & Krubiner 2016). A study of East Africa-based researchers working in partnership with two Western-funded programs aiming to improve research ethics capacity and access, affordability, and quality of healthcare for economically disadvantaged people in low and middleincome countries, including Uganda and Nigeria, showed up some concerns about direct moral neocolonialism; researchers raised concerns that they would be cut off from funding sources, and from the opportunity to attend or present research at international conferences, if they presented dissent on empirical research results or conceptual orthodoxies assumed by foreign funders (Hyder & Krubiner 2016). While this conforms to the definition I provided of direct moral neocolonialism as the conversion of people’s values through presenting preferred values as universal and providing associated incentives for participation, the harm here is less easy to comprehend. That the researchers and many local communities depend on aid and/or partnership in the form of research funding to complete projects might not mean that they were harmed: they agreed to participate and continued to agree even when a problem arose. The difficulty in comprehending harm here arises because not all dimensions of moral neocolonialism are direct. Hence we also need to clarify an indirect form of moral neocolonialism.

Indirect moral neocolonialism in African bioethical contexts Widdows (2007) acknowledges that moral neocolonialism might happen indirectly when a pressing practical problem receives an ad hoc solution without sufficient theoretical consultation with, and involvement of, ethics from beyond the West (in cases where such consultation is necessary). She uses the example of informed consent in research ethics to support this possibility: even if efforts to recognize non-individual-based approaches to consent are made, insufficient rethinking of the basic premises of the ethics of consent may be done; for instance, communal consent might be sought in places where communitarianism is highly valued, but individual informed consent continues to be treated as key to research being counted as ethical (2007, 314). As she points out, “the danger is that Western ethics is simply regarded as a ‘base’ which is ‘added to,’ and thus the individual presumptions remain largely unquestioned and the critiques of this dominant framework and the insights of non-Western and alternative forms of Western ethics continue to be peripheral”; if this were to be the sum of efforts to

48  Rebecca Bamford recognize values from diverse cultures beyond the West, she suggests, then fears of global bioethics as morally neocolonialist would be substantiated (2007, 315). In brief, then, indirect moral neocolonialism is the inadvertent conversion of people’s values to those of a dominant ethical system, without direct intent. I suggest that this can be explained as systemic injustice (Young 1990), and is compounded by epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Mason 2011) and global white ignorance (Mills 2015). Iris Young explains systemic oppression in terms of the disabling constraints experienced by members of vulnerable groups: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (1990, 40). These types of oppression are systemic, rather than tyrannic, because there is no single group or person targeting the oppressed group or person: systemic oppression operates in and through institutions and systems, and occurs even when agents act with good intentions (Young 1990). Medical practitioners and researchers may promote Western values ahead of either indigenous or reconstructed values from cultures beyond the West as a matter of habit, or out of conviction, in either case acquired through education and training. Even if dialogue between ethical systems does occur, insufficient consultation and dialogue with values from beyond the West and pressure to find the simplest possible solution will perpetuate existing problems; new frameworks, like current frameworks, would be largely informed by the dominant system (Widdows 2007, 314).4 The harm here lies in part in the loss of insight that could develop and refine existing problem-solving resources, as well as in the injustice experienced by local agents. An increasing volume of scholarship indicates that African thought has been marginalized and underdeveloped within bioethics, either because African scholarship is taken less seriously because it is done by Africans, using African concepts, or within African contexts, or because even within African contexts there has been a historical bias against taking African thought seriously (Fanon 1952; Gbadegesin 2009, 2013; Metz 2010; Behrens 2013; Tangwa 2017). Hence people’s values can be converted to those of a dominant system inadvertently through systemic injustice, even when those contributing to the conversion do not intend to do so, have good intentions, and may be unaware of what is happening. This harm is compounded by epistemic injustice. Miranda Fricker defines epistemic injustice as involving wrongs done to people in their capacity as knowers (2007). In testimonial injustice, a hearer’s prejudice causes them to give less credence than is warranted to a speaker’s testimony; in hermeneutical injustice, a gap in collective interpretative resources disadvantages a speaker who is trying to make sense of their social experiences (Fricker 2007). People experience epistemic injustice in bioethical contexts (Carel & Kidd 2014). A patient or research subject’s testimony may be ignored by an epistemically privileged healthcare professional or researcher; testimony could be heard but not treated as worthy of epistemic consideration; patient or research subject testimony could be heard but judged irrelevant by the professional; patients or research subjects may lack the capacity to express testimony (Carel & Kidd 2014).

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  49 Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice has been extended in two important ways. First, it has been shown that marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences (Mason 2011). Patients or research subjects might, for instance, discuss and analyze first-person experiences of a medical problem or intervention effectively with family or friends using their first language, but might find it challenging to get a medical practitioner or researcher who lacks their cultural background or language or whose professional orthodoxy is grounded in a different language and associated culture/s to hear their reports of these if expressed in their second or third language. In order to avoid supporting inadvertent value conversion through this kind of silencing, dialogue between stakeholders, and critical reflection on the fruits of such dialogue, would have to determine whether “socially shared moral understandings under examination really are shared by all those who enact them” – and whether such understandings are equally intelligible to all involved (Verkerk & Lindemann 2011, 94). The harm of indirect moral neocolonialism is further compounded by silencing. Second, it has been suggested that the explanatory burden in cases of epistemic injustice should be shifted from speakers to socio-epistemic circumstances (Dotson 2011). Testimonial quieting occurs when an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower (2011, 242). Testimonial smothering occurs when a speaker perceives that their immediate audience is either unwilling or unable to gain the appropriate uptake of the speaker’s testimony, and so truncates their testimony (2011, 244). Marginalized patients or research subjects testifying across language and culture barriers might not be identified as knowers, or might truncate their testimony because they recognize that their interlocutor is unwilling or unable to achieve uptake of what they have to say. A professional with epistemic privilege in one context, for example in care-giving or instruction-giving dialogue with a patient or research subject, may find that they lack such privilege depending on factors in their socio-epistemic circumstances. For example, returning to the example of researchers in East Africa working in partnership with a Western funding organization: the researcher must adhere to the organization’s values and so truncates their testimony rather than proposing changes in values (Hyder & Krubiner 2016). If this happens consistently, as seems likely from the evidence, then it counts as a harm (Dotson 2011). Testimony can also be given too much credence, which reinforces how indirect moral neocolonialism harms via testimonial injustice. For example, disease feigned for psychological reasons is only revealed as such after repeated visits to the doctor show that patient reports do not match test results (Carel & Kidd 2014). Similarly, surveying research subjects in a clinical trial can yield answers that are misleading for complex reasons. For example, observable research study fatigue was reported among subjects in multiple studies drawn from East African communities and resulted from two factors: experienced human research subjects developed ‘standard’ ways to answer study questions, skewing researchers’ data, and subjects were over-researched owing to duplication of studies and competition between funding agencies, which wrongly over-burdened the local

50  Rebecca Bamford communities from which research subjects were recruited (Hyder & Krubiner 2016). The communities continued to provide research subjects and the research teams in East Africa continued to study them, because they were guided by the value system in operation – and this led to harm in the form of subjects being overresearched, their communities unfairly burdened, and Western-funding-dependent researchers feeling powerless to address these issues. This illustrates direct moral neocolonialism as the conversion of researchers’ and research subjects’ values to those of a dominant ethical system through the disguise of aid or partnership, and at the same time, indirect moral neocolonialism as the inadvertent production of value conversion to the dominant ethical system through the erroneous weighting of testimonial credence, prompted by systemic and epistemic factors. Systemic and epistemic injustice and the harms they cause are further compounded by global white ignorance, which Charles Mills defines as involving a nominal, and sometimes genuine, acceptance of nonwhite equality that is combined with cultural prejudices and deracialized conceptions of social causality (2015, 219). In cases of global white ignorance, the history of white racial ideology and white global dominance is denied, and the “foundational miscognition” of white superiority spreads through white “perceptions, conceptions and theorizations, both descriptive and normative, scholarly and popular” (Mills 2015, 219). Mills argues that overcoming the status quo of white ignorance requires a systematic investigation into how past theory (social sciences, humanities, and relevant natural sciences) and practice (law, public policy, government) have been shaped by racial ideology and racial liberalism, and also mandates an ‘uncompromising’ examination of what purging its legacy would involve today (2015, 221–222). While Mills (2015) does not explicitly mention bioethics or moral philosophy, both fall within the disciplinary scope of his call to investigate and challenge the racist conditioning of theory and practice. We cannot know what the framework of a demonstrably racially just global bioethics would be without conducting the investigation for which Mills calls. The harm of epistemic disadvantage and loss caused by global white ignorance is to inadvertently perpetuate racist colonialist value systems, including within bioethics, if colonialism and racism are inextricably intertwined as e.g. Fanon (1952) shows.

African philosophical resources for overcoming moral neocolonialism I have argued that direct moral neocolonialism converts people’s values to those of a dominant ethical system covertly, through aid or partnership, e.g. via a government, NGO, or research organization. Indirect moral neocolonialism produces the conversion of people’s values to those of a dominant ethical system through systemic and epistemic injustice, and global white ignorance. Both forms of moral neocolonialism may be present at once and may reinforce one another’s effects. If bioethics accepts moral neocolonialism as a problem, then it may benefit from attending to African philosophical resources, both within and outside of African

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  51 bioethical contexts.5 Remember, those who defend the view that moral neocolonialism is a problem for bioethics and those who reject this view can both already agree that dialogue between traditions is both possible and desirable, and that cross-cultural ethical dialogue must involve more than a minimal adding of values to an existing Western ethical base that leaves ethical systems from beyond the West on the periphery of inquiry (Widdows 2007; ten Have & Gordijn 2014). African philosophy has already been tied to a project of values revision. Fanon provides a compelling counter-colonial account of the psychology of anti-black colonialist racism (1952). Eze treats African philosophy as intrinsically countercolonial, describing it as “a representative voice of counterhegemonic histories of modern philosophy” (2001, 207). More recent work reiterates that African philosophy emphasizes pursuing and promoting health, since health is often harmed or undermined by the effects of colonialist violence and oppression (Tabensky 2008; Oelofsen 2015). More argues that ubuntu, which has formed the basis of a number of recent engagements with the possibility of a distinctively African ethics, is both an ethical and a politico-ideological project: this is because as a moral principle it aims to consider and enhance human well-being, and as a politico-ideological principle, it guides social and political relationships in healthy, harmonious, directions (More 2005, 156–157). Grounded in values revision and in a concern for health promotion and restoration, African philosophical resources are therefore well-placed for effective engagement in cross-cultural dialogue concerning the ethical principles that should frame global bioethics. There is already such dialogue, which opens up some opportunities for mitigating moral neocolonialism. One approach has been to propose using African philosophy as a means of supporting cultural pluralism in bioethics. This approach holds that we can aim at universals, but pay more attention to the role of phenomenal experiences in place in shaping ethical engagements, including in African contexts (Oelofsen 2015; Verkerk & Lindemann 2011). Gbadegesin proposes a version of this approach that he calls ‘transcultural’ bioethics, in which resolutions to perceived conflicts between Western ethics and African ethics, along with diverse perspectives from other ethical traditions worldwide, could be arrived at (2009). Bioethical issues and questions are acknowledged to cut across cultures, but specific ways of responding to bioethical issues may vary from culture to culture (2009). This approach to bioethics cannot be grounded in any form of moral imperialism, because moral adequacy cannot logically be based on claims of cultural superiority; similarly, it cannot be grounded in cultural relativism, as the relativist simply and wrongly assumes that there is no objective basis for crosscultural judgment of values (Gbadegesin 2009). As an example, Gbadegesin uses the Yoruba principle of ikuyajesin, which he defines as “death is preferable to the loss of dignity,” to clarify the middle pathway between universalism and relativism that he proposes (2009). He shows that ikuyajesin applies to four discrete cases: (i) a woman refusing surgical intervention for breast cancer on the basis that she would be left without a breast, (ii) a man paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident committing

52  Rebecca Bamford suicide, (iii) the daughter of a 90-year-old woman refusing permission for her mother’s surgery on the basis that her mother was old enough to die peacefully in her own home, and (iv) relatives of an elderly woman deciding to kill her on their own because they are so concerned about her ‘confessions’ of past ‘wickedness’ (2009). Unlike a universalist or a relativist, a cultural pluralist can allow that there is consistent and intelligent application of the principle of ikuyajesin in each of these cases; hence, ethical space is available in which we may try to understand and appreciate the perspective of a given standard before we judge it (Gbadegesin 2009). Gbadegesin points out that Westerncentrism could be mitigated if bioethicists engaged in and coordinated more dialogue across diverse ethical systems, and facilitated the research focus of regional bioethicists on their community’s area/s of pressing need while helping to ensure researchers do not merely export Western priorities to nations facing different realities (2009). A second specific approach has been to examine whether ethical principles drawn from Western ethics provide at least equally effective tools for contemporary bioethical analysis compared with principles drawn from African ethics; it remains an open research question as to whether these may prove more effective than Western ones. Metz appeals to ubuntu to argue that a distinctively African approach to bioethical inquiry can be developed (2010, 2017). By ‘African,’ Metz means a reconstructed account “informed by salient beliefs and practices of many sub-Saharan peoples” (2010, 50). Metz reconstructs a principle based on ubuntu: “an action is right just insofar as it is a way of living harmoniously or prizing communal relationships, ones in which people identify with each other and exhibit solidarity with one another; otherwise, an action is wrong” (2010, 51). He discusses several bioethical cases showing that an African moral theory may entail a similar conclusion to Western moral theories, but for a different reason that is at least as plausible as Western theories (2010, 50). In the case of free and informed consent to participation in research, for example, a deontologist might argue that it would be disrespectful of a person’s autonomy to treat them or involve them in a research study without first gaining their voluntary and informed agreement to participate (2010, 54). In contrast, an African moral theorist on Metz’s reconstructed account might conclude likewise, but for very different reasons: it would be ‘unfriendly’ to treat or study a person without their free and informed consent because, in “genuinely identifying with others,” we “cannot share a life with others in a meaningful way when they are unclear about the basic terms of one’s interaction with them” (2010, 54). This line of inquiry has been further explored in moral philosophy; its intersectional capacity has been interrogated though attention to whether a feminist account of ubuntu can be offered (Cornell & van Marle 2015; Gouws & van Zyl 2015). Research subjects or patients are more likely to understand ethical reasoning and to accept and follow associated recommendations if such reasoning is accessible to them, which is more likely to happen if they can easily connect

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  53 ethical reasoning with their own lives and experiences (Behrens 2013, 33). Moreover, the complexity and diversity of African and European languages in use in African nations and regions means that those working with human subjects in African contexts have a responsibility to acquire at least a rudimentary command of relevant languages, in order to facilitate communication with their interlocutors, participate effectively in cross-cultural dialogues, and ensure participants can identify “unjust imbalances of power, manipulation, or even force” (Verkerk & Lindemann 2011, 95). Use of reconstructed African moral principles might well support research subjects and patients in engaging more actively and with greater empowerment with the relevant scientific study or healthcare initiative in which they are involved, and mitigate structural, historical, and epistemic injustices. As such, it is worth continuing to examine the efficacy of African ethical concepts within bioethical contexts, including through empirical study of their efficacy.6

Objections and replies Based on the systemic and historical factors that combine to produce indirect moral neocolonialism, it is unsurprising that there is significant resistance to recognizing moral neocolonialism. And yet such resistance may still find support. First, someone might argue that we all present our values as universal, on the basis that if we are persuaded that a particular norm or a particular value is right, then we claim it as such. From this it might follow that everyone would be a moral neocolonialist. Yet it is not obvious that all of us do always present our values as universal. It assumes that moral nihilists, or the morally confused, do not exist. It involves an empirical question: for a full answer, we would need to provide evidence to show whether everyone (or at least a substantial number of people) is truly certain of what their values are, and whether or not they are certain that these values are absolutely right rather than simply values that they live by for the sake of convenience, in the absence of more compelling values. Second, universalists might worry that acknowledging moral neocolonialism would make it unclear how to present values in a non-imperialist way. We could be more careful about how we present our values, but pointing out that value talk may need (constant) revision to help us avoid moral neocolonialism is not a strong objection to treating moral neocolonialism as a problem. The history of racism, white supremacy, and colonialism, along with systemic oppression that further perpetuates such injustices, means that values (and specific articulations of values) supported and nurtured by injustice have been wrongly assumed to be universal; that they continue to be privileged at the expense of other values; that attending to historically less privileged voices and value systems is complicated by epistemic injustice; and that these forms of injustice cause harm to persons and communities (Young 1990; Fricker 2007; Mason 2011; Dotson 2011, 2012; Mills 2015; Alcoff 2015). Lack of clarity about the non-imperialist presentation of values should therefore rather be addressed.

54  Rebecca Bamford Relatedly, it may seem that if harms caused by moral neocolonialism are less extreme than those of colonialism, then moral neocolonialism is unworthy of attention. However, moral neocolonialism perpetuates historic harm; it does not only create fresh harm. In a discussion of the physical and mental health effects of colonialist violence upon black people, Frantz Fanon quotes from a medical study included in the 1948 book Colour Prejudice by Sir Alan Burns: Dr. H. L. Gordon, attending physician at the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi, declared, in an article in the East African Medical Journal (1948) “A highly technical skilled examination of a series of 100 brains of normal Natives has found naked eye and microscopic facts indicative of Inherent new brain Inferiority.” … Quantitatively, he added, “the Inferiority amounts to 14.8 percent.” (Burns in Fanon 1952, 30) Fanon – a qualified psychiatrist – mentions this racist colonialist claim made in a scientific journal as part of showing how medicine and its ethics in African contexts are and continue to be, shaped by the history of colonial violence. Hence, even if moral neocolonialism is less easily recognized than colonialism, it should not be dismissed as harmless. Third, there are also concerns to note with regard to recognizing and overcoming moral neocolonialism in African bioethical contexts. The diversity of African cultures and languages and associated diversity of ethical principles involves a risk of generalizing about the ‘African-ness’ of a value (Fayemi & Akintunde 2012). This concern has already been pointed out in efforts to develop ‘an’ African approach rather than ‘the’ African approach to ethics, and explore ways of implementing it in the broad range of African bioethical contexts; such efforts are explicit in their efforts to avoid the assumption there is only one way to account for African ethics, or that everyone living in a particular African nation or region accepts values associated with the history or culture of that region (Metz 2010; 2017). Continuing to work to avoid exceeding epistemic warrant when discussing African ethics, while attending to history and location in order to facilitate performing philosophical analysis in place, responds to this concern (Oelofsen 2015, 139). Moreover, the impact of colonialism on African nations and regions and the fact that cultures are fluid and internally heterogeneous means that we might wrongly assume, or romanticize, the cultural specificity – the ‘African-ness’ – of a value, or engage in stereotyping discourse regarding such African-ness (Jaggar 1998; Fayemi & Akintunde 2012; Chattopadhyay & De Vries 2013). Treating African cultures as museum pieces reinscribes the historical harm of denying agency to African peoples (Gbadegesin 2013). Yet African peoples have not been fully assimilated into Western cultures (Oelofsen 2015, 139). Hence it remains possible to explore how dialogues between indigenous and reconstructed African ethics, and between these and other ethical systems, might be mutually

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  55 beneficial and might properly recognize the full diversity of humans’ phenomenal worlds, while still aiming at a transcultural, less relativist, more universal, way of responding to ethical and bioethical problems (Gbadegesin 2009; Metz 2010; Behrens 2013; Oelofsen 2015). Additionally, bioethicists could raise the concern that a global framework for ethical decision-making could be made impossible if moral neocolonialism were accepted as a substantive problem, as it would then be unclear how to resolve urgent bioethical problems requiring international solutions, such as the black and grey market in human body parts, and the spread of HIV or other communicable diseases (Widdows 2007, 313).7 While practical problems need quick and effective solutions, it is hard to see how attending to a factor that negatively impacts scientific efficacy and ethical correctness could possibly eliminate bioethical problem-solving. Raising and assessing reasonable concerns regarding priorities in practical problem-solving that are sensitive to location and context seems exceptionally unlikely to render global ethics utterly impossible: therefore, this concern is overstated. The need to respond effectively to practical problems does not make critical engagement with the issues raised by systemic and liberal racist structuring of values, including in bioethics, unnecessary (Mills 2015; Myser 2003). Appeal might be made to UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights as already having mitigated concern about moral neocolonialism; however, values used in the declaration, such as ‘justice,’ are culturally conditioned, even though general formulation of the declaration’s principles using these leaves room for cultural diversity (Andorno 2007). So, appealing to UNESCO’s universal declaration doesn’t clearly protect against direct moral neocolonialism. Fourth, even if we admit the problem exists, efforts to counter moral neocolonialism might unintentionally perpetuate it. Perspectives from outside Western bioethics might be welcomed because they shed light on multicultural dimensions of dominant Western nations, as well as broadening and enriching Western bioethical analysis (Verkerk & Lindemann 2011). Yet bioethics should avoid the perpetuation of cultural and racialized stereotypes, for example by contrasting individualist with communalist values as if all people in a particular region must identify as such or make their moral decisions on this basis, and as if reassessment of individualist or communalist cultural emphasis never happens (Widdows & West-Oram 2013). A willingness to continue to learn and reflect as part of the profession may mitigate this; thus, bioethicists might more easily recognize that they are not divorced from all cultural influences; that they too are raced, gendered, and classed; that they are dependent for parts of their lives; and that their perspectives are shaped by experience (Verkerk & Lindemann 2011). As we have already seen, perspectives are further shaped by systemic and historical-social factors. Hence, in self-reflection, bioethicists should pay more attention to their social location and its assumptions and privileges as a means of coming to understand how ethics – including bioethics – can examine what the best way of living really might be, inclusively (Verkerk & Lindemann 2011).

56  Rebecca Bamford

Conclusion I have argued that moral neocolonialism is a real problem for bioethics, including for bioethics in African contexts. I differentiated between direct and indirect moral neocolonialism, and showed how both arise within African bioethical contexts. I suggested that both of these forms of moral neocolonialism count as problems because they cause harm. This is supported by analysis of the need for systematic engagement with the history of racial oppression and global white ignorance in our conceptions of theory and practice, a need of pressing importance within the broad set of challenges associated with clarifying and pursuing ethical ways of living today (Tabensky 2008; Oelofsen 2015; Alcoff 2015; Mills 2015). It is further complicated by epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2011; Mason 2011). Further analysis would engage in greater depth with issues of intersectional justice in bioethics in African contexts, for example by continuing work to develop feminist approaches to ethical analysis in African contexts and explicitly connecting these with bioethical issues (Cornell & van Marle 2015; Gouws & van Zyl 2015). In addition, further analysis would give more attention to moral neocolonialism in healthcare provision and public health policy development (e.g. Komparic 2015), as well as in research ethics and in research ethics capacitybuilding efforts. In particular, empirical as well as conceptual assessment of the degree of testimonial injustice between professionals and patients and/or research subjects in African bioethical contexts, and between African professionals intranationally and intra-regionally compared with internationally, needs attention.8

Notes 1 I do not rule out that powerful nations from outside of the West could engage in some form of colonial or neocolonial activity, but lack space to discuss this possibility here. 2 The MRA and USIA are now disbanded, but the Peace Corps continues to operate as a program for volunteers to help promote world peace and friendship and to help interested countries to meet their needs, including in many African nations. For example, 1,539 Peace Corps volunteers have served in South Africa since 1997, and there are 129 volunteers currently serving in the nation (Peace Corps). 3 For example, USAID plans to provide $268,912,000 in aid to South Africa in FY 2017 as it is an important strategic partner of the US (USAID). At a session on ending violence against women sponsored by the South African Mission to the United Nations, held as part of the Committee on the Status of Women’s 60th session in New York (March 2016), discussion between a USAID representative and South African government representatives on the issue of the best approach to a South African governmentUSAID relationship demonstrated that while local values do have global power, as pointed out by ten Have and Gordijn (2014), the kind of moral and social neocolonialism to which Nkrumah (1965) and Sobocinska (2017) refer remained a primary discussion point. 4 This does not exclude that in some contexts, the dominant system may not be Western. 5 My focus on bioethics in African contexts notwithstanding, other contexts are no less important. Similar accounts could be developed for further bioethical contexts in which dialogue between stakeholders could produce progress towards greater inclusivity (Oelofsen 2015).

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  57 6 I cannot give the debate concerning the difference between indigenous and reconstructed African ethical or philosophical principles, and implications of this debate, the attention it deserves here. I have sought not to confuse indigenous with reconstructed ethical principles in this essay. 7 Tuberculosis, and its multi-drug-resistant and extremely-drug-resistant variants, is a good example of a communicable disease with profound public health implications that requires collaborative global action (Selgelid 2008). 8 I thank George Hull, along with audience members at the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies conference in 2015, the University of Cape Town in 2016, and Rhodes University in 2016, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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58  Rebecca Bamford Gbadegesin, S. 1993. Bioethics and culture: an African perspective. Bioethics 7(2–3): 257–262. Gbadegesin, S. 2009. Bioethics and culture. In A Companion to Bioethics, ed. Kuhse, H. and Singer, P., 257–262. Oxford: Blackwell. Gbadegesin, S. 2013. Bioethics and an African value system. Keynote Address: Teaching Skills in International Research Ethics (TaSkR) V Workshop, April 17, 2013 (Indiana University Center for Bioethics). Gouws, A. and van Zyl, M. 2015. Towards a feminist ethic of ubuntu. In Care Ethics and Political Theory, ed. Engster, D. and Hamington, M., 165–186. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hyder, A.A., Harrison, R.A., Kass, N. and Maman, S. 2007. A case study of research ethics capacity development in Africa. Academic Medicine 82(7): 675–683. Hyder, A.A. and Krubiner, C. 2016. Ethical challenges in designing and implementing health systems research: experiences from the field. AJOB Empirical Bioethics 7(3): 209–217. DOI:10.1080/23294515.2016.1182236. Jaggar, A.M. 1998. Globalizing feminist ethics. Hypatia 13(2): 7–31. Komparic, A. 2015. The ethics of introducing GMOs into sub-Saharan Africa: considerations from the sub-Saharan African theory of ubuntu. Bioethics 29(9): 604–612. Macklin, R. 1999. Against Relativism: Cultural Diversity and the Search for Ethical Universalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mason, R. 2011. Two kinds of unknowing. Hypatia 26: 294–307. Metz, T. 2010. African and Western moral theories in a bioethical context. Developing World Bioethics 10(1): 49–58. Metz, T. 2017. Ancillary care obligations in light of an African bioethic: from entrustment to communion. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38(2): 111–126. Mills, C. 2015. Global white ignorance. In Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. Gross, M. and McGoey, L., 217–227. London: Routledge. More, M.P. 2005. Philosophy in South Africa under and after apartheid. In A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Wiredu, K., 149–160. London: Blackwell. Myser, C. 2003. Differences from somewhere: the normativity of “whiteness” in bioethics in the United States. American Journal of Bioethics 3(2): 1–11. Nkrumah, K. 1965. Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd. Retrieved from Peace Corps. South Africa. Retrieved from Oelofsen, R. 2015. Decolonization of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon 16(2): 130–146. Selgelid, M. 2008. Ethics, tuberculosis, and globalization. Public Health Ethics 1(1): 10–20. Sobocinska, A. 2017. How to win friends and influence nations: the international history of Development Volunteering. Journal of Global History 12(1): 49–73. Tabensky, P. 2008. The postcolonial heart of African philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy 27(4): 285–295. Tangwa, G.B. 2017. Giving voice to African thought in medical research ethics. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38(2): 101–110. ten Have, H.A.M.J and B. Gordijn. 2014. Global bioethics. In Handbook of Global Bioethics, 3–18. Springer Netherlands. USAID. South Africa. Retrieved from

Decolonizing bioethics via African philosophy  59 Verkerk, M. and Lindemann, H. 2011. Theoretical resources for a globalised bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics 37(2): 92–96. Widdows, H. 2007. Is global ethics moral neo-colonialism? An investigation of the issue in the context of bioethics. Bioethics 21(6): 305–315. Widdows, H. 2011. Western and Eastern principles and globalized bioethics. Asian Bioethics Review 3(1): 14–22. Widdows, H. and West-Oram, P. 2013. Why bioethics must be global. In Global Health and International Community: Ethical, Political and Regulatory Challenges, ed. Coggon, J. and Gola, S., 43–62. London: Bloomsbury Academic. World Health Organization. Social determinants of health. Retrieved from . Young, I. M. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

3

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery On epistemic justice in South Africa Mogobe Ramose

Introduction I propose to write and speak freed from the religion called “science”. So far, this religion imposes discipline with regard to what may be asked, how that which can be said or written should be done, and why it should be done or said, as well as where and when things may be said. Although beneficial to some extent, the discipline of the religion of “science” permits the questionable disregard of some truths, and by so doing, encourages the avoidance of discerning connections within and among phenomena outside the sphere of the particular scientific discipline. The result is that it often allows the presentation of partial truths as whole truths. Obedience to this religion without protesting is tantamount to slavery. I propose to speak from the position of protest against a social morality which prescribes questionable rules that permit the concealment and suppression of truth. This protest is informed by Kü ng’s dual characterisation of the twentieth century as the century “full of all kinds of insincerity, dishonesty, lies, hypocrisy” (Kü ng, 1968: 29), on the one hand, and a century displaying “a new feeling for straightforwardness, honesty, originality, genuineness, sincerity and truthfulness … ”, on the other (Kü ng, 1968: 30). A social morality that prescribes evasiveness and prevarication is against truthfulness (Kü ng, 1968: 36). Truthfulness is the core of ethics and morality. By truthfulness I understand upholding the principle that it is necessary not to lie to oneself. Lying to oneself is like making the ludicrous claim that one can actually jump over one’s shadow. Surely, as one jumps, so too does the shadow. Through the wisdom of Polonius in his Hamlet, Shakespeare renders this core of ethics and morality thus: “to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man”. My dual protest against the religion of “science” and a social morality that is against truthfulness means that I am at war with epistemic and social slavery: a condition of injustice demanding the restoration of justice. I am well aware that the struggle for epistemic justice demands the recognition that: Above all we must remember that science could not progress along certain lines without traversing vested interests and prejudices and without hurting the feelings of the community. To proceed in the face of such opposition has

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery  61 always required a great deal of intellectual courage. …  In the whole sweep of history there is nothing more impressive than the spectacle of noble men who had the spirit to fight unreason and ignorance and who did not hesitate, not only to renounce material advantages, but even to jeopardize life and happiness in order to increase the amount of beauty, of justice, and of truth which is the essential part of our patrimony. (Sarton, 1927: 20–21) This is epistemic love. It is desiring the good and certainly the best for each other “without first demanding a proof that some great purpose will be furthered by obtaining …  good things” (Russell, 2010: 29). Thus epistemic love ought to “take us beyond Self without effort” (Russell, 2010: 36). Since the practice of this love happens in a political context, epistemic love is indissolubly connected to political love (Sobrino, 1988). By different names, the two kinds of love share the same substance, namely, the readiness to die in order to increase truth, justice and peace among the living. The struggle against epistemic slavery also includes the question whether or not “philosophy” even as a “scientific” discipline may have only one meaning, that is, the dominant meaning derived from the Western history of thought. This essay is part of the struggle against epistemic slavery. It is a deliberate exercise in contesting the one and dominant meaning of “philosophy” (Ramose, 2017, 161–168). It does so by subjecting the “non-philosophical”, that is, the actual living experience of the continual interaction between the conquered and the conqueror, oppressed and oppressor, exploited and exploiter to a sustained and critical philosophical analysis. In waging this war, I do not propose “a season of anomy” (Soyinka, 1988), nor do I plead for “Morals must Fall” (Ngubane, 2016: 3). I am waging a war, but a war with rules allowing me to speak freely “on wearing skirts without underwear” (Althaus-Reid, 1999), and asking if the christian1 “God” is contemplating to ever forgive Lucifer. Slavery is a condition of human relations in which the one side has conquered the other, compelling the defeated to submit to the will of the conqueror in word and deed. Conquest in this situation may be by means of either physical or psychological force. This is a condition of epistemic and social injustice because it violates the human dignity of the defeated and annuls the principle of equality – in the sense of the right to exist (Gutierrez, 1983: 90) – among human beings. My argument against this condition is that a people having a philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery. “In me memoriam facietis” – do this in memory of me – is pronounced precisely at the pinnacle of the celebration of the Roman Catholic holy mass. It is translated into practice, among others, through the dominance of the christian calendar in South Africa and the West and, indeed, across the globe. For example, world money markets are virtually inactive over the christmas period, especially on christmas day. Thus “in me memoriam facietis” shows the importance of memory in the conduct of human relations.

62  Mogobe Ramose

Approach I have already described my approach as belligerent, but with rules. I will begin by a challenge to “history” as a scientific discipline. Then I will present a statement on the reason and meaning of the ethical necessity for a philosophy of memory for Africa, including South Africa, just in case there are those who imagine that South Africa is not part of Africa, at least, geographically. Thence, I will present a series of excerpts, including music, for critical analysis intended to show how the struggle for memorialisation and de-memorialisation is unfolding in South Africa. In both cases, “memory is the weapon” (Mattera, 2009). The basic analytic categories will be the conquered and the conqueror. The categories of conquered and conqueror rest on the memory that Africa is the mother of humanity. The inscription in the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa reminds us that “the world became African” precisely through the exodus (Pickrell et al., 2014 and Stringer and McKie, 1998) from the cradle to other parts of the planet Earth. Referring to the Acheulean period, the inscription states: “For the first time the same way of producing tools was shared by people across a huge territory including Africa, Asia and Europe. In a sense, it’s the first globalized culture”. That Africa is the mother of humanity is also supported by the inscription from the National Museum of Hungary in Budapest. It reads thus: “If one considers the 4.5 billion year long history of the Earth to be equal to one year, Humankind’s time on earth would be no more than a few seconds. Approximately one-one and a half million years ago, the first humans, already producing simple tools, began a journey from Africa fated to populate the World”. The scientific view that Africa is the mother of humanity means that accidental geographic separation as well as language, cultural, skin and hair differences do not eliminate the basic point that all human beings are the children of one mother. On this basis, the deeper ethical argument advanced here is that sharpened and deepened consciousness of the originary and continuing oneness of humanity ought to be cultivated and maintained for the sake of justice and peace among all human beings.

“History” is his-story, it is yet to be our story The above sub-heading conveys the gist of my argument in this context. In general, the historian need not have been actually present during the events she or he is conveying as the history of those events. The method of history concedes this since it considers that the task of the historian is to reconstruct those events (Krishna, 2005: 18). History, then, is an exercise in reconstruction according to the standard canons of the discipline without eliminating totally the subjective preferences of the historian. In this sense, history is his-story. No wonder that feminist epistemologists are continuing to question the hallowed criterion of “objectivity” in science on the ground that for centuries, history has not paid any or serious attention to “her-story”. Add to this the colonised whose humanity

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery  63 was, and continues to be, called into question, discounting them as part of history. Despite decolonisation and rampant human rights discourse, doubt about the humanity of the colonised-decolonised persists. The question of the yet-tobe-firmly-established “her-story” as legitimate and normal applies also to the colonised-decolonised. It means that “history” is yet to become “our story”. It is conceivable that if and when that point is reached, even the concept of “history” as hitherto understood as a scientific discipline will have to be replaced with one appropriate to and consistent with “our story”. I wish to make two observations relevant to my argument. One is that, even if I will rely on his-story, I will do so making provision that his-story may be questioned. Part of the proviso for questioning is that to the extent the historian relies on time as a linear succession, in that much there is a tendency to erect strict boundaries between the past and the present. The assumption that the past of hisstory is closed is not necessarily true as the past can live in the present. After all, the past is the parent of the present and the bond between them does not necessarily die because the historian has erected a scientific boundary between them (Krishna, 2005: 28). My second observation pertains to the recognition that his-story can and does leave out known details of the past if these reveal guilt that induces shame and tarnishes the individual or group consciousness. By contrast, his-story tends to extol the achievements of the past, turning them into virtues that deserve a place in the present. On this basis, “Civilizations may in fact be characterized in terms of the dominant defence mechanisms that they use to suppress the memory of an inconvenient past and the guilty conscience they suffer because of having done what a new value apprehension tells them that they ought not to have done in the past. …  The whole task of colonialism, for example, or of the ‘immorality’ of conquest and war, of the enslavement of peoples other than one’s own which are such a dominant feature of contemporary consciousness have radically transformed the perception of their past on the part of many of the contemporary cultures and civilizations” (Krishna, 2005: 29–30). This potential for the concealment of guilt and shame in preference to the revelation of achievements that enhance one’s image is indeed a psychological problem. It is, however, at the fundamental level a challenge to truthfulness. The challenge of truthfulness recognises the weaknesses of “his-story” identified above. It further acknowledges that “his-story” does, however, serve the important function of being a repository of memory. Accordingly, the memorabilia that will be discussed below will be drawn from “his-story”.

The ethical necessity for a philosophy of memory for Africa The ethical necessity for a philosophy of memory for Africa arises from the lived experience of the past and the living experience of today. Using his-story, I suggest that for more than three centuries, inclusive of the present, the majority of the conquered peoples of South Africa have been and are still suffering from historical, structural, systemic and systematic material and intellectual poverty, hunger

64  Mogobe Ramose and death (Durban Resolution A/CONF/189/12[2001] and Thesee and Carr, 2012: 162). In the light of this lived experience, Bujo argues against a “memoryless” theology. I use the substance of his argument and extend it to philosophy. According to Bujo, “The present generation must not shun its responsibility by forgetfulness. The solidarity of guilt with their forebears should sharpen their awareness that their well-being is due, in large part, to the oppressed, the defeated peoples, … . The memoria passionis et resurrectionis Jesu Christi cannot be limitative: it must include the entire history, to which the victims of colonisation in Latin America, Asia and Africa equally belong. The suffering of so many American Indians and black slaves, who were robbed of their cultural heritage, and the expropriation of sub-Saharan Africa, all this has to become an apocalyptic thorn in the flesh. As long as this is not clearly perceived, we are continuing with a theology devoid of memory” (Bujo, 1998: 140–141). Thus, an African philosophy of and with memory is a philosophy that ­re-­members pre-colonial Africa as a significant dimension of the contemporary community of the peoples of Africa and the peoples of Africa in the diaspora. That “the world became African” is a crucial aspect of this re-membering. Furthermore, an African philosophy of and with memory is a philosophy that takes the transAtlantic slave trade and colonisation seriously as a means to recognise and respect the martyrs of freedom for the African peoples, on the one hand, and to interrogate the meaning of that freedom in the present existential conditions on the other. Having recognised that some African leaders benefited and continue to benefit from the injustice of colonisation, Bujo argues that from the point of view of ethics, the former colonisers owe Africa reparations and that Africa’s foreign debt ought to have been cancelled precisely at the point of decolonisation (Bujo, 1998: 176–177). By this, Bujo reaffirms the Nyerere or clean slate doctrine. The doctrine holds that the concession by the colonialist to political independence for Africa without at the same time accepting that such independence is a matter of state succession is empty because it continues to hold Africa in economic bondage: a slavery with deleterious epistemic and social effects (Ramose, 2003: 486–487). This is one example of interrogating the present in the light of the past. It also shows that the internal struggle in South Africa for epistemic and social justice is intricately linked to international politics since the erstwhile coloniser continues to retain economic power in the country. I now turn to the memorabilia.

Re-member this 1 Van Riebeeck’s vow The Khoikhoi sued for peace, and tried to regain rights to their pastures, ‘standing upon it that we (the Dutch) had gradually been taking more and more of their land, which had been theirs since the beginning of time …  Asking also, whether, if they came to Holland, they would be permitted to do the like. The Commander argued that if their lands were restored there would not be enough grazing for both nations. The Khoikhoi replied ‘Have we then

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery  65 no cause to prevent you from getting more cattle? The more you have the more lands you occupy. And to say the land is not big enough for both, who should give way, the rightful owner or the foreign invader?’ Van Riebeeck made it clear ‘that they had now lost the land in war and therefore could only expect to be henceforth deprived of it …  The country had fallen to our lot, being justly won in defensive warfare and …  it was our intention to retain it’. (Troup, 1975: 53) By his affirmation of conquest, Van Riebeeck established two identities in South Africa, namely, the conquered and the conqueror. If indeed the war were “defensive”, then the Khoikhoi would hardly have had to regard him as an “invader”. Moreover, the war waged against the Khoikhoi is unjustified in terms of the just war doctrine developed in Western moral philosophy. No doubt from the point of view of Western legal philosophy, conquest conferred upon the conqueror the ethically questionable “right of conquest”. According to this doctrine, the conqueror may impose their will upon the conquered with respect to the meaning of experience, knowledge and truth. Thus, the questionable “right of conquest” was the inauguration of epistemic and social injustice in the relations between the conquered and the conqueror. Van Riebeeck vowed that the land would be “retained” and his successors in title have ensured its survival to date. The retention means in practice that the unjustly acquired wealth of the conqueror continues to be their possession, protected by the constitution of South Africa, Act 108 of 1996. From the point of view of the conquered, this injustice ought to be remedied. Furthermore, the retention of the land means that sovereign title to territory is yet to revert to the conquered peoples of South Africa, the “rightful” owners of the land “since the beginning of time”. By opting for government succession, the “new” South Africa failed to respond to this ethical exigency of historic title. It is lunatic absurdity to justify this failure by the frivolous argument that the restoration of sovereign title to territory to the rightful owners is impossible since not every one of them can be allocated a piece of land. When he left his native Holland, Van Riebeeck was already infected and affected by a killer disease already widespread in Holland and the kin cultures known as Western civilisation. The killer disease is virtually unpreventable because it moves faster than the speed of light. It kills directly or indirectly human beings, animals, the fish of the ocean, the plants, the air we breathe and the water we drink; in short, all that lives, including planet Earth. “Market mania” (Sandel, 2013: 164) is the name of the disease. It manifests itself as pecunimania: the insane love of money driven primarily by the decisive motive to make profit, whatever the cost. Pecunimania has brought humanity and all that lives to the living MAD (mutual assured destruction) situation: the madness of the existing annihilative strategic nuclear weapons. These weapons are capable of committing omnicide. Their existence appears to have placed humans on par with “god”, however conceived, insofar as the question of life or death on planet Earth is concerned.

66  Mogobe Ramose “His-story” has erected a boundary dividing the Khoikhoi and the San peoples from the Bantu-speaking peoples. The apparent purpose of the division is to suggest that whereas the former are the original inhabitants of South Africa – a name they never gave to themselves – the latter migrated from the North. “His-story” is forever careful not to delve into the origins of the Khoikhoi and San peoples. Complete silence on this is best since it permits the only reasonable conjecture, namely, that the Khoikhoi and the San peoples grew on South African soil just like grass does. The article by Pickrell et al. cited above does show that the Khoikhoi peoples have not grown like grass from the soil of South Africa. The almost half-a-century silence by the University of Pretoria over the finding of Mapungubwe is yet another example showing “his-story’s” concealment of truth. Complete silence over more than forty years can hardly be a matter of innocent oblivion. Although Mda’s novel, The Sculptors of Mapungubwe, is a fiction, it has a ring of some truth in it in its reference to the San and Khoikhoi peoples living with the Bantu-speaking peoples in Mapungubwe (Mda, 2013: 25). Two curious Afrikaner lady travellers would seem to confirm this, albeit inadvertently. They give a report of their travel to the North-eastern corner of South Africa, specifically, Makgabeng plateau beyond Polokwane. They observe that in this area one finds the footprints of the San, Khoikhoi, Northern Sothos, Vendas, German missionaries, the British, Afrikaners and the descendants of Coenraad Buys. They were informed by Tlouamma, the tourist guide, that “die San het sowat 4000 jaar gelede op die plato gewoon. Hulle het hoofsaaklik tekening gemaak van koedoes en rooibokke wat volop in die omgewing was. … Dit wil voorkom asof hulle vanaf Mapungubwe na Makgabeng gekom het, … In een van die reeks tekeninge – word die ontmoeting tussen die San en die Khoi-Khoi treffend uitgebeeld. …  Bochum se oorspronklike naam was Senwabarwana, wat beteken die plek waar die San water drink” (Tempelhoff en Pretorius, 2016: 23). It is apparent, then, that the concealment of Mapungubwe by “his-story” had a purpose. Whatever the purpose, knowledge about Mapungubwe compels a different reading of “our story” of South Africa. 2 The pink and black divide, and militarism Pecunimania enabled the successors in title to Van Riebeeck to add another identity to that of conquered and conqueror. They enforced the identity of rich and poor. The rich was and remains the conqueror and the poor are the conquered. The mechanism of enforcement included race predicated on the fallacy that pink skin colour, mistakenly referred to as white, actually symbolised the reality of a human being ontologically distinct and superior to the conquered, painted by one brush as black. It was Julius Caesar, and not Julius Malema, who, after satisfaction at a job well done, declared in celebration of his triumph: Veni, vidi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered. All three acts were completed and belonged to the past, as the three verbs testify. But the successors in title to Van Riebeeck preferred a different position, namely, Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat: ab omni

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery  67 malo plenem suam defendat. Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands: may he defend his people from all evil. The present tense of all the three verbs affirms that Christ’s activity, unlike Caesar’s, is ongoing. His threefold activity is not ended. It is unstoppable, as the militaristic rhythm of the song so plainly suggests. Its affinity and reminiscence of “onward christian soldiers” speak for themselves. Thus the threefold activity of Christ came to determine the prominence of the church to the synagogue, the mosque and the religions of the conquered. In view of the words cited, including the militaristic musical rhythm – there are various musical renditions of the song – one wonders why this particular song is still sung instead of being declared unlawful like some of the liberation songs of the conquered peoples of South Africa. A militant Christ is not different from an enthusiast of “mshini wami”. 3 The divine gift of the land Pecunimania also inspired the successors in title to Van Riebeeck to add some spice to the fallacy that the conquest of the Khoikhoi was justified by the just war doctrine. The spice that turned the sweet lie into a delicacy is that the land was given to them by “God”. Thus a new doctrine was enunciated, namely, the doctrine of the divine gift of land. For affirmation, we turn to the constitution of 1961: the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act 32 of 1961. Having declared their submission to their “God” of Jesus Christ, the successors in title to Van Riebeeck state in the preamble to the 1961 constitution that this “Almighty God gathered our forebears together from many lands and gave them this their own”. Thus the doctrine of the divine gift of land was born. It solidified into a belief and conviction that the land indeed belongs to the successors in title to Van Riebeeck. This conviction is crystallised in Article 6 of the constitution, which provides in commanding terms that “The National Anthem of the Republic shall be ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’”. The levity and triumphalism of the song does not detract from the underlying militarism as well as the solemnity of the resolve to reaffirm and defend Van Riebeeck’s vow to “retain” the land. Alliance with and loyalty to the royal house of Orange is also unmistakable. The high point of the renewal of the vow is that the successors in title to the pink “invader” declared their resolve to offer whatever South Africa asks from them, even to die for her; “ons sal sterwe – ons vir jou, Suid-Afrika”. The 1961 constitution was the conqueror-only constitution. It upheld the heritage of Van Riebeeck with all the subsequent constitutional refinements intensifying epistemic and social injustice. For the conquered, race was the bitter pill for the normalisation of this condition. This was of course resisted and the resistance was the continuation of the resistance of the Khoikhoi. As the resistance intensified, so were epistemic and social injustice forcibly maintained. The struggle continued with pecunimania moving at full speed. In the end, during a lucid moment, pecunimania constricted the apostles of racism, advising them that there were many roads to the retention and continuation of the categories of conquered and conqueror, rich and poor. Thus the “new” South Africa was born under Act 108

68  Mogobe Ramose of 1996. The Act proved pecunimania correct, especially with reference to the property clauses which recognised, respected and offered protection to unjustly acquired property for more than three centuries of the slavery and economic exploitation of the conquered. This condition is buttressed by the transition from Parliamentary to constitutional supremacy. 4 Die Voortrekker Monument It is no exaggeration to suggest that Die Voortrekker Monument was the Mecca of Afrikaner spirituality. It probably still is. The building is majestic. It is a structure of solid granite standing for the declaration of the eternity of the edifice and the immortality of Afrikaner spirituality. In some respects its architecture resembles that of the Egyptian pyramids: the symbols of immortality and eternity. The pictures of the “great trek” history on the inside walls are somewhat reminiscent of the christian concept of the “stations of the cross”. A walk through the “stations” ultimately leads to salvation, the gateway to eternity and immortality. And this belief strengthened the resolve of the pink “invader” to preserve and perpetuate the vow of van Riebeeck: “ons sal sterwe – ons vir jou, Suid Afrika”. It is interesting to note that in the “secret talks” about the new South Africa, the question of symbols such as Die Voortrekker Monument did cross the mind of some of the interlocutors. “I made up my mind to ask Mbeki what he thought of Afrikaner monuments such as the Voortrekker Monument, and what the thinking of a black majority government would be with regard to Afrikaners’ symbols and statues and the names they had given to towns and streets. But I neglected to ask him these questions” (Esterhuyse, 2012: 172). Perhaps it needed an Englishman among the interlocutors to think like Esterhuyse and ask similar questions about the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. According to Esterhuyse, “Fikile Bam came up to me where I stood at the memorial stone. He said: ‘I think I’m beginning to understand you. You’re standing at the graves of your ancestors. Maybe one day when our country is free, we should gather the bones of our ancestors in foreign countries, … , and bury them at the Voortrekker Monument. Then we call it the ‘Freedom Monument’. We walked away pensively, in silence” (Esterhuyse, 2012: 186). Does the meditative silence perhaps mean that it is better not to talk about the defilement of Afrikaner spirituality? Is cohabitation possible between the ancestors of Fikile Bam and those of Willie Esterhuyse? How can Fikile Bam be re-membered by the ancestors of Willie Esterhuyse, and vice versa? Matters of the spirit, it is said by some, are not to be entangled in politics. The two domains should be kept apart. Yet, the spirituality of liberation argues against this separation. It maintains that the political domain is pregnant with the reality of political holiness if one takes politics seriously as a matter of life and death in the service of giving life both to oneself and to the other and being prepared to give up one’s own life in the cause of this service (Sobrino, 1988:81). “Like other ANC visitors, Zuma was taken on a sightseeing trip through Pretoria by car. Among other attractions, Smit took Zuma to the Voortrekker Monument,

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery  69 the prime symbol of the Afrikaner survival and freedom – in that case against the Zulus, Jacob Zuma’s ethnic-cultural home” (Esterhuyse, 2012: 255). Esterhuyse acknowledges that, in terms of memory, Die Voortrekker Monument is “against” Zuma. Was Zuma expected to show this “against” by either refusing to visit there or asking for Die Voortrekker Monument to be demolished? Die Voortrekker Monument is still intact and its memory is not only “against” the Zulus but “against” the conquered. To affirm the “right of conquest”, the “Freedom Park” is the neighbour of Die Voortrekker Monument. Just by sight, the “Freedom Park” is built upon a hill slightly lower than that upon which Die Voortrekker Monument is built. This is far from appealing aesthetically. Politically, it is the affirmation of epistemic injustice, confirming the superiority of the constitution of the “new” South Africa (Act 108 of 1996) over the law of the conquered. Furthermore, Esterhuyse echoes Die Stem van Suid-Afrika in his several references to “our country” (Esterhuyse, 2012: 123, 275 and 285). He seems critical of former President Botha and his cabinet, including the Afrikaner electorate, in his observation that: “It has to be emphasised, though, that the blame for the impasse should not be laid solely at Botha’s door, albeit that the final responsibility rested with him as state president. The majority of his cabinet and caucus supported him strongly. So did his electorate. Politically, they clung obstinately to the syndrome of ‘This is our country’” (Esterhuyse, 2012: 173). Beneath this criticism lies Esterhuyse’s compassion for Botha and solid but subtle support for his majority cabinet and the electorate. This is contained in his declaration that: “South Africa, I told Pahad, was different from all the other countries in Africa. It had a large white population, and the Afrikaners had long since ceased to be settlers. They were white Africans” (Esterhuyse, 2012: 277). Why does Esterhuyse single out the “Afrikaners” from among the colonial “settlers”? Is it because the English, for example, cannot or are unwilling to sing Die Stem van Suid-Afrika? Perhaps this question is answered best by the fact that the new national anthem of South Africa – not specified in Act 108 of 1996, as it was in Act 32 of 1961 – contains significant portions of Die Stem van Suid-Afrika. This musical cacophony epitomises the contending claims to sovereign title to the territory of South Africa. Far from being the unifier of the peoples of South Africa, it is a reminder of the ongoing struggle for epistemic and social justice in South Africa today. 5 From democracy to timocracy Today, pecunimania openly presents itself as the silent conqueror of democracy (Hertz, 2002). We live in the age of timocracy; of business-managed democracies world-wide (Beder, 2010: 496–518), the age foretold by former American President Eisenhower fifty-five years ago (Ramose, 2010: 291–303). The MAD insanity of annihilative nuclear weapons intensifies the madness of pecunimania as it kills brutally – below the nuclear war level – in clear breach of the principle of non-combatant immunity. There is neither prudence nor wisdom in this worldwide killing which honours and adores only the god of profit. South Africa is also under the grip of timocracy as contemporary discourses on “state capture” testify.

70  Mogobe Ramose The problem with these discourses is that they reveal the tendency to forget that state capture was particularly contemporaneous with the discovery of diamonds and gold in South Africa. It is not certain if Anglo-American is merely a name that thrills enthusiastic newspaper readers. 6 Race Forty-four years ago, a statement was released from the University of the Witwatersrand on why there ought to be talk about race in South Africa. The statement was true then as it is today. It is that: “We conclude that, from the dawn of man in Pliocene-Pleistocene geological epoch, to the present day, there is no trace of a pure human race. Racial purity is a mythical concept. Man himself has created racial categories; he has made a classification of races to try to bring order to his understanding of the variations of man. His racial categories are arbitrary—that is why different scientists recognise different numbers of races, although all are striving to reflect the natural relationships of populations of human beings. …  Scientifically, it is impossible therefore to classify each single individual or even single population into a particular racial category. Especially is this true where the area of vague and blurred overlap between racial groups has been greatly enlarged by extensive interracial crossing, as in South African history. If there is one subject or group of subjects on which every thinking South African should try to inform himself, it is the true meaning and implications of race. …  the term ‘race’ …  is heavily charged emotionally and politically and full of unsound and even dangerous meanings. It is in the name of race that millions of people have been murdered and millions of others are being held in degradation. That is why you cannot afford to remain ignorant about race” (Tobias, 1972: 31 and 38, emphasis in the text). The lived experience in South Africa today testifies to the veracity of this observation in the unfolding struggle for epistemic and social justice. Race in South Africa today is the determinant of whether or not one belongs to the category of the poor or the rich. A sprinkling of the newly rich out of the category of the conquered hardly obliterates this observation. Race today determines which school or university one shall attend. It is the arbiter on access to opportunities for educational and economic advancement. Race is the daily violator of the principle that the health of the people is the supreme law because multitudes die of preventable and curable diseases just because they do not have medical insurance to cover the costs of living in good health. The memorabilia identified above are by no means exhaustive. They serve, however, to show that it is an ethical necessity to have a philosophy of memory in order to pursue an effective struggle for epistemic and social justice. They show that a memorial philosophy is not abstract. On the contrary, it is an appeal to concrete but knowledgeable and understanding action.

A philosophy without memory cannot abolish slavery  71

Conclusion I have argued that a philosophy without memory cannot abolish epistemic and social injustice. I have given examples of items to be remembered if the goal of social and epistemic justice is to be achieved. The achievement of the goal is an ethical imperative. It requires an ethical revolution as a matter of urgency in the leadership of Africa, especially in the political and educational domains (Maathai, 2010: 23). Such leadership shall have the courage to declare that “waiting for Godot” was not spoken of the imperative for transformation leading to epistemic and social justice. Why wait for Godot when “A famous statistic is that the whole of sub-Saharan Africa has an economy about the size of Belgium’s” (Collier, 2008: 164). This observation was made fifty-one years after the political independence of the first sub-Saharan African country. How can Africa permit that a country almost the size of the Kruger National Park in territory, and with a population almost equal to that of Zimbabwe, should have an economy virtually the same as the whole of sub-Saharan Africa? It is not only time that is “out of joint”, but it would appear that reason and ethics have also yielded to the deadly power of pecunimania. Are we waiting for transformation or trans-substantiation? Four weeks before his death, Fanon is reported to have written a letter to his friend, Roger Tayed. He stated that: “We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty” (Zahar, 1974: xx).

Note 1 We take the view, like Wole Soyinka, (1999: 32) that the “convention that capitalizes this [christianity, christian] and other so called world religions is justified only when the same principle is applied to other religions, among them, the Orisa”.

References Althaus-Reid, M. M. (1999) On wearing skirts without underwear: ‘indecent theology challenging the liberation theology of Pueblo’. Poor women contesting Christ. Feminist Theology, 7 (20): 39–51. Beder, S. (2010) Business-managed democracy: the trade agenda. Critical Social Policy, 30 (4): 496–518. Bujo, B. (1998) The Ethical Dimension of Community: The African Model and the Dialogue between North and South, Nganda, C. M., (trans.). Nairobi: Paulines Publications. Collier, P. (2008) The Bottom Billion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durban Resolution A/CONF/189/12 (2001) United Nations World Congress on Racism and Xenophobia, Durban, South Africa. Esterhuyse, W. (2012) Endgame: Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Gutierrez, G. (1983) The Power of the Poor in History, Barr, R., (trans.). Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

72  Mogobe Ramose Hertz, N. (2002) The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. London: Arrow Books. Krishna, D. (2005) Prolegomena to Any Future Historiography of Cultures and Civili­ zations. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. Küng, H. (1968) Truthfulness. London: Sheed and Ward Ltd. Maathai, W. (2010) The Challenge for Africa. London: Arrow Books. Mattera, D. (2009) Memory is the Weapon. Grant Park, South Africa: African Perspectives Publishing. Mda, Z. (2013) The Sculptors of Mapungubwe. Cape Town: Kwela Books. Ngubane, S. (2016) Blesser-finder social media page ‘prostitution in disguise’, Pretoria News, Tuesday April 12. p. 3. Pickrell, J. K., Patterson, N., Loh, P.-R., Lipson, M., Berger, B., Stoneking, M., Pakendorf, B. and Reich, D. (2014) Ancient west Eurasian ancestry in southern and eastern Africa. PNAS, DOI:10.1073/pnas.1313787111. Ramose, M. B. (ed.), (2017) On the contested meaning of ‘philosophy’. South African Journal of Philosophy, 34 (4): 551–558. Ramose, M. B. (2010) The death of democracy and the resurrection of timocracy. The Journal of Moral Education, 39 (3): 291–303. Ramose, M. B. (2003) I conquer, therefore I am the sovereign: Reflections upon sovereignty, constitutionalism, and democracy in Zimbabwe and South Africa, in Coetzee, P. H. and Roux, A. P. J., (ed.) The African Philosophy Reader. London: Routledge. Republic of South Africa Constitution Act No. 108 of 1996. Republic of South Africa Constitution Act No. 32 of 1961. Russell, B. (2010) On Education. London: Routledge. Sandel, M. J. (2013) What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Sarton, G. (1927) Introduction to the History of Science, Volume 1. Baltimore: The Williams and Wilkins Company. Shakespeare, W. (1982) Hamlet. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Sobrino, J. (1988) Spirituality of Liberation Toward Political Holiness, Barr, R. R., (trans.). New York: Orbis Books. Soyinka, W. (1988) Season of Anomy. London: Arrow Books Ltd. Soyinka, W. (1999) The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness. New York: Oxford University Press. Stringer, C. and McKie, R. (1998) African Exodus. New York: Holt Publishers. Tempelhoff, E. and Pretorius, A. (2016) ‘n Kriskras van ou voetspore, Beeld, 19 March. Thesee, G. and Carr, P. R. (2012) The 2011 International Year for People of African Descent (IYPAD): The paradox of colonized invisibility within the promise of mainstream visibility. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1): 158–180. Tobias, P. V. (1972) The Meaning of Race. Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations. Troup, F. (1975) South Africa: An Historical Introduction. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books Ltd. Zahar, R. (1974) Franz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Part II

Race, justice, identity

4

Neville Alexander and the non-racialism of the Unity Movement George Hull

The history of the struggle against racial oppression in South Africa is, to a great extent, a history of ideas. Intellectuals within organisations such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), and in more loosely structured groupings such as the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), developed competing conceptual answers to the questions about justice and identity with which their circumstances confronted them. Though often influenced by thinking from elsewhere in the world, these represent above all a set of homegrown intellectual responses to the situation of oppressed South Africans. Today, the Unity Movement (UM) is one of the least well-known 20th-century South African liberation movements. Sometimes its anciens combattants complain that it has been airbrushed out of history.1 In truth, the UM never became a mass movement and failed to leave an enduring mark at the level of political mobilisation. Its intellectual contribution, by contrast, has been substantial, and UM ideas continue to be a palpable subterranean influence on South African politics. Several UM activists crossed over to ANC-linked organisations in the 1980s, bringing UM ideas with them; some became prominent politicians.2 In the Western Cape, a cadre of politically engaged teachers has transmitted UM thinking through the generations at high schools including Trafalgar, Livingstone and Harold Cressy (Nasson 1990: 189–90, 204). This chapter focuses principally on the work of Neville Alexander, the most accomplished theoretician in the UM tradition—though he published his best writing after being expelled from formal UM structures. Like UM thinkers before him, Alexander dedicated much of his intellectual energy to the national question: the question of ‘who constitutes the [South African] nation’ (No Sizwe 1979: 1), and the important corollary question of how South Africa’s ‘population registration groups’3 (op. cit.: 141)—‘Africans’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’, ‘whites’—are to be conceived of. In his major work, One Azania, One Nation, Alexander argues that the population registration groups are neither races nor separate nations, but colour-castes, their social identity constituted by the practices of disadvantaging and privileging which uphold an unjust social hierarchy. His approach connects interestingly with contemporary philosophical thinking about race and justice. It also, I will argue, supplies a plausible theoretical justification for a controversial element of

76  George Hull the UM’s political practice: despite trenchantly rejecting the notion that white, African, Coloured and Indian South Africans constituted distinct ‘races’ or ‘nations’, the UM nevertheless conducted its political organising along population registration group lines. Though he distanced himself from it in his post-Apartheid writings, I argue in this chapter that Alexander’s approach in One Azania stakes out a cogent and attractive middle ground between two untenable positions: a purist classism which denies the South African population groups’ reality, and an essentialising approach which mystifies them into ‘races’ or ‘nations’. It continues to have the potential to illuminate, and contribute to resolving, current controversies about identity and justice in South Africa and beyond.

NEUM non-racialism: the double lock The Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), to which Neville Alexander became affiliated in the 1950s, arose from the federation of two organisations, themselves federally structured, and both founded to oppose segregatory legislation in the Union of South Africa. The first of these, the All-African Convention (AAC), was formed in 1935 to combat proposals from J.B.M. Hertzog’s government for further political and territorial segregation of Africans—the ‘Slave Bills’ (Tabata [1950] 1974: 17); its membership was largely Africans from rural areas in the eastern Cape (Adhikari 2005a: 404). The second, the Anti-CAD, came into being in February 1943, when Leftist intellectuals from three Cape Town discussion groups (the New Era Fellowship, the National Liberation League and the Non-European United Front) joined forces to boycott government plans for a Coloured Advisory Council (CAC) and Coloured Affairs Department (CAD) (Lewis 1987: 208; Jaffe 1992: 16); its membership was largely graduates of tertiary education institutions classified as ‘Coloured’ from Cape Town and other towns in the western Cape (Simons 1976: 225). In December 1943, the two organisations federated in Bloemfontein on the basis of a ‘Ten Point Programme’ of ‘minimum’ (Kies 1945: 5) demands for equal democratic rights. Any local or national organisation willing to embrace the Ten Point Programme was welcome to affiliate to the NEUM. The ANC,4 though it had until 1937 participated in the AAC (Simons 1976: 221), never affiliated to the larger formation; nor did the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), despite the NEUM’s courting Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker, leaders of its radical faction5—but the Anti-Segregation Council, a splinter from the Natal Indian Congress, did affiliate in 1948 (Jaffe 1992: 18; Adhikari 2005a: 404). It was expected that white working-class organisations would ultimately join forces with the NEUM, once they realised where their true interests lay (Kies 1945: 9). The overlapping leadership of the NEUM and its two main affiliates was a small group bound by ties of family and marriage, as well as political comradeship. Predominant were Ben Kies, Goolam H. Gool, Hawa Ahmed (wife of Goolam Gool), Janub Gool (sister of Goolam Gool), and—de facto leader of the AAC from 1943 (Hirson 2005: 246 n. 35)—Isaac Bongani Tabata (husband of Janub Gool). All were members of a distinctive South African intellectual milieu,

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  77 whose thinking was as much a response to the questions of identity thrown up by Cape Town society and politics as it was influenced by the Marxism and trade unionism which came to this bustling port from overseas.6 The NEUM’s activism was informed by three guiding principles: (i) nonracialism, (ii) non-collaboration and (iii) unity of all oppressed South Africans. Its non-racialism was unique among South African liberation movements of the time. For the NEUM, non-racialism signified not merely the equality of races, the absence of racial restrictions on organisation-membership or the irrelevance of race in all practical contexts, but the non-existence of race. As early as May 1943, in his address to an Anti-CAD conference, Kies (1943) deplored the ‘vicious racial myths’ with which the ruling class had ‘been able to enslave the mind, the ideas of the non-European’ (4–5). Among these myths he counted not only the notion of racial hierarchy—‘the idea of white trustees and non-white child races’ (1), and, on the other hand, ‘three big non-European tribes, each thinking it was better than the other’ (8)—but the very notion of ‘racial differences’ (14), of discrete racial identities. His reply to teachers who had ‘said that the Coloured People would “lose their identity”’, if taught alongside pupils from other racial groups, was: ‘the sooner the Coloured man loses his identity the better off he will be’ (6). His A.J. Abrahamse Memorial Lecture, published in 1953, likewise critiques ‘the myth of race’. Here the author makes pointed use of inverted commas when dismissing the notion that ‘[i]mperialist conquest’ is ‘proof of the inherent “racial” superiority of the conquerors and the inherent “racial” inferiority of the conquered’ (Kies 1953: 7). Once more, he makes clear that his target is not simply racial hierarchy but the concept race itself, and this time draws on recent work in physical anthropology to substantiate his critique. He sums up: [O]ne thing is quite certain, and that is that mutations in skin-colour, hair texture, shape of nose or skull, and stature, owing to geographical dispersal, isolation and diet, have made not the slightest difference to the biological unity of man as a single species, and provide no scientific basis for a division into what are popularly mis-called “races”. (Kies 1953: 12) This very early7 advocacy of racial ‘nihilism’ or ‘error theory’8 by a South African liberation movement can be put down—in part—to the distinctive social history and demographic character of the Western Cape. Among those classed as ‘Coloured’ in the first half of the 20th century were people of Malaysian, Indonesian, Madagascan and Indian ancestry;9 people whose ancestors were indigenous Khoekhoe, San or Xhosa, or from other parts of Africa; and people whose ancestors hailed from Europe. Many could trace their ancestry to most or all of these sources. Labourers and artisans classed as ‘Coloured’ lived alongside Irish, Italian and East European immigrants in crowded working-class areas such as Woodstock and District Six, and there were marriages between members of all these groups (Bickford-Smith 1995: 176). Though the Muslim religion of the ‘Cape Malays’ set them apart culturally, most Coloured middle-class people were

78  George Hull Christians and did not differ markedly in their values, tastes or aspirations from white middle-class Capetonians; indeed, many were able to advance their fortunes ‘by “passing” into the white community’ (Lewis 1987: 9). In the circumstances, it is not surprising that middle-class Coloured people decried as arbitrary and indefensible not just the discriminatory measures which steadily accumulated on the statute book before and after the 1909 Act of Union, but the very idea that there was a distinct ‘Coloured’ race to discriminate against. Long before the rise of Tabata, Kies and the radical Gools in western Cape politics, the newspaper of the African Political Organisation (APO) had mocked the 1905 School Board Act’s attempt to provide a definition of ‘European’ (Lewis 1987: 68). It also ‘carried letters threatening to publish lists of prominent “whites” defending the colour bar who were in fact “Coloureds”’—since it was well known that many ‘whites’ shared some of the same non-European ancestry as those classed as ‘Coloured’ (op. cit.: 58). In 1925, APO President Abdullah Abdurahman (fatherin-law of Goolam and Janub Gool’s brother, A.H. Gool) had denounced the Pact10 government’s policies as based on unscientific race theories (op. cit.: 134). The Unity Movement’s non-racialism can be understood as the intellectual basis for the other two guiding principles of its activism. Once (i) nonracialism—in the UM’s racial nihilist sense—is in place, there is at least a strong presumption in favour of (ii) non-collaboration and (iii) unity of all oppressed South Africans. Since state institutions such as the Natives’ Representative Council (NRC), the CAC and the Bhunga were premised on the existence of at least four distinct races in South Africa, to participate in these institutions would have been to connive in the perpetuation of an illusion. The NEUM duly boycotted them. But the NEUM’s non-racialism also brought it into conflict with other organisations campaigning for greater equality. NEUM leaders urged oppressed South Africans to unite and act together to overthrow the unjust status quo. They rejected the view that Indian, Coloured and African South Africans were three separate races, each in need of its own distinct national liberation. In the 1940s, the latter was the line taken by the ascendant Africanists, led by Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, in the Congress Youth League (CYL) of the ANC. Their ‘Manifesto’ (CYL [1944] 2015) portrayed the struggle for liberation as being against domination by ‘the White race’ over ‘the Black’, with the goal of placing ‘[t]he African… on a footing of equality with every other South African racial group’ (288–89). Because, in Lembede’s view, no one but an African could ‘ever truly and genuinely interpret the African spirit which is unique and peculiar to Africans only’, the first CYL president committed himself to the following ‘cardinal principle’ of ‘African nationalism’: Co-operation between Africans and other Non-Europeans on common problems and issues may be highly desirable. But this occasional co-operation can only take place between Africans as a single unity and other non-European groups as separate units. Non-European unity is a fantastic dream which has no foundation in reality. (Lembede [1946] 1996: 91–92)

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  79 Consistent with this principle, Africanists in the ANC, such as A.P. Mda and Nelson Mandela, resisted any organising which ‘by-passed’ the ‘established national organisations’ (Everatt 2009: 59). Consistent with its non-racialism, the NEUM denounced them. But the NEUM’s activism was not based solely upon its intellectual acceptance of racial nihilism. Rather, principles (i), (ii) and (iii) (see above) also received independent support from the NEUM leadership’s broadly Marxist interpretation of South African society. V.I. Lenin’s ([1917] 2010) famous pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism had argued that business conglomerates in European nations, once combined into cartels with substantial influence on government policy, were able to realise super-profits by dividing the working class into an ‘upper stratum’—‘members of co-operatives, of trade unions’, bought off with a ‘privileged’, even ‘bourgeois’, lifestyle—and the ‘lower stratum of the proletariat proper’ (133–35). The former—the ‘labour aristocracy’—could be counted on to act as ‘agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement’ (9–10), tempering workers’ demands in a spirit of ‘[o]pportunism’ (136) to preserve the privileged position afforded to it by the status quo; and business could count on colonial authorities to enforce order among the latter—the super-exploited ‘thousand million…  in the colonies and semi-colonies’ (5). In South Africa, argued Kies in the 1940s, the ruling class had effected a similar division within the borders of one country, in great part through the use of a psychological weapon: the idea of race. This psychological weapon first rationalised ‘the basic segregation of the working class into a white labour aristocracy and a black serf majority’ (Kies 1943: 3). The ‘white working-class aristocracy’, ‘bribed to be our overseers’ (2), was largely willing to support the ruling class in the super-exploitation of the majority of the working class, to defend its own privileged position. Meanwhile, the ruling class used its psychological weapon a second time, to divide the non-white working class into mutually antagonistic sections—with great success: The African is told that he is superior because he is “pure blooded”—and he has believed this. The Coloured man is told that he is superior because the “blood of the white man” flows in his veins—and he has believed this. The Indian has been told that he is superior because he belongs to a great nation with a mighty culture—and he has believed this. The Herrenvolk of South Africa have nothing to learn from Dr. Goebbels, for their vicious racial myths have bitten deep into the life and ways of the non-Europeans. (Kies 1943: 5) Even in the absence of myths of superiority and inferiority, the belief in a racial group to which one is primordially attached could divide the oppressed into sections of individuals living by the principle, ‘“Look after your own people first”’ (Kies 1943: 6).11 From the point of view of this social analysis, unity of all oppressed South Africans is a strategic sine qua non. The objection to racial sectarianism, from

80  George Hull this vantage point, is not that it rests on a biological error, but that it dissipates in inter-sectional competition the activist energies which alone—if once they could be gathered together and focused on the common ‘root’ of both ‘economic exploitation and…  colour oppression’ (Kies 1945: 8)—would overturn the inegalitarian status quo. Since the ‘Natives’ Representative Council, the Coloured Advisory Council, the Asiatic Advisory Board, the Bungas’ (NEUM [1951] 2015: 459) and other ‘race’-specific bodies are the institutional machinery with which the ruling class implements its ‘divide and rule’ (457) strategy, to participate in these institutions is to ‘work the machinery of oppression’ (459). Revealing its roots in the era of Second World War anti-fascist resistance (Nasson 1990: 196), the Unity Movement has always deprecated those who participate in racially specific institutions by invoking the name of Vidkun Quisling, head of the collaborationist government in Nazi-occupied Norway (Alexander 1989: 181). ‘Quislings’ such as the CAC members were not physically attacked; instead, they suffered ‘personal and social boycotts’ (Van der Ross 2015: 120), living ‘under the shadow of neighbourhood moral scrutiny, with its turned cheek and quiet contempt’ (Nasson 1989: 103–4).12 No less harmful to the struggle against capitalist inequality than the institutional machinery of division—according to the NEUM’s social analysis—is the ideological machinery. From this vantage point, the problem with the idea of race is not that it is factually inaccurate, but that those in its clutches do the ruling class’s work of division for it, for free. In other words, the belief that South Africa’s population comprises at least four discrete races is a form of intellectual collaboration with the oppressive ruling class. The non-racialism of the NEUM was thus held in place by a double lock. On the one hand, leading NEUM intellectuals were persuaded by their experience in 20th-century Cape Town, and their reading of the scientific literature, that the notion of discrete human ‘races’ marked by significant heritable differences was a fiction. On the other hand, their broadly Marxist social analysis persuaded NEUM intellectuals that the notion of ‘racial’ differences was being used by the ruling class, more or less consciously, as a psychological weapon to confuse and divide the working class and prolong conditions of super-exploitation. To the NEUM, those who thought of ‘race’ as part of their inherent identity—including participants in the government’s CAC, but equally activists in the ANC—were objectionable on two counts. First, they were adherents of a false scientific theory. Second, they were engaged (wittingly or unwittingly) in a form of intellectual collaboration: they were Quislings.

Between racialism and blindness to racialisation: Alexander on ‘colour-caste’ Neville Alexander, scholar, activist and the most accomplished theoretician in the UM tradition,13 sided with the AAC leadership when the NEUM split over the land question in 1959.14 Soon afterwards, he broke with his mentor Tabata over

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  81 the question of armed struggle and was expelled from Tabata’s African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA) in 1961 (Soudien 2016: x). One year later, he founded the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) in Cape Town—‘a small discussion group with members drawn from several political organizations who shared a common interest in theories of guerrilla warfare’ (Trewhela 2009: 190). The YCCC, after metamorphosing into the National Liberation Front, was exposed in 1963. Its members were arrested and imprisoned, leading to Alexander’s conviction and incarceration on Robben Island from 1964 to 1974. His decade in Apartheid South Africa’s infamous island prison was—despite hardships—a time of intense intellectual engagement with other leaders of liberation movements incarcerated there: in particular, prominent members of the Congress Alliance, including Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela. Alexander’s own reflections on the ‘national question’, arising from this lengthy intellectual engagement on The Island, were set down in his important work, One Azania, One Nation (No Sizwe 1979), written during the five years of house arrest which followed his release (Soudien 2011: 58), and published under the nom de plume ‘No Sizwe’ in 1979. In the 1980s, Alexander played a leading role in the Cape Action League (CAL), bringing it into the National Forum (NF) together with the Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO)—a political party with a Black Consciousness (BC) orientation—to form a broad anti-Apartheid front (Dollie 1986). (The official Unity Movement, which emerged in 1983 from a 20-year underground existence as the New Unity Movement [NUM], led by R.O. Dudley, never affiliated to the NF.)15 Alexander’s speeches in activist contexts from this period16—many of them critical of the multi-racialist politics of the NF’s competitor organisation, the ANC-linked United Democratic Front (UDF)17—reiterate and build on the ideas laid out in more scholarly fashion in One Azania. In order to focus in on the distinctive step forward from previous NEUM thinking that Alexander’s theoretical work represents, it is first necessary to outline a feature of the NEUM’s political practice which caused controversy among South African Leftists from the beginning. Despite the NEUM’s commitment to non-racialism, organisationally it was deliberately structured as a federation of ‘three federal bodies representing the three racial groups’ (Tabata 1945: 14): the AAC representing Africans, the AntiCAD representing Coloureds and (from 1948) the Anti-Segregation Council representing Indians. As a result, the NEUM was organisationally very similar to the multi-racial ANC-led Congress Alliance, comprising the ANC, the SAIC, the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) and the (white) South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD), all of which endorsed the Freedom Charter in 1956 (Everatt 2009: 9). The NEUM received stinging criticism on this account from other non-racialists on the Left, especially members of the Forum Club—a Cape Town discussion group created by former members of the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (FIOSA), which had been dissolved in the wake of the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 (Hirson 2005: 220). In its ‘Declaration to the People of South Africa’ ([1951] 2015: 458), the NEUM claimed that its federal structure

82  George Hull was ‘indispensable’ for building a South African nation. Zayed Gamiet of the Forum Club responded in the Club’s journal: Are we now to understand that it is the policy of the N.E.U.M. to fight for “nations” according to each racial group or sub-group in South Africa?…  From this sweeping pronouncement we are quite entitled to assume that the future “nation” will not consist of a single state inhabited by all the different peoples of this country, but of different sub-states constituted on grounds of race and nationality, viz., a sort of Colouredistan, Industan, Bantustan, Zulustan, etc. Here we see a new conception of the South Africa of the future! (Gamiet 1951: 28) For Gamiet—someone sympathetic to both of the arguments for non-racialism presented in the previous section—the NEUM’s ‘Three Pillar structure’ amounted ‘to nothing less than capitulation to the racial theories so assiduously propounded by the ruling class’ (Gamiet 1951: 28). For others, the NEUM leaders were disingenuous, posing as nationalists when their clandestine plan was world revolution.18 In Baruch Hirson’s more rarefied version of the conspiracy, the NEUM’s approach was ‘an inverted entryism in which populist movements had to be formed so that Trotskyists could enter them and even be their leaders. In the process they ceased being Trotskyists, though their opponents regarded the movements as such’ (Hirson 2005: 100–101). Post-1950, the NEUM undoubtedly was more cautious in its public pronouncements, as it wished to continue to operate legally, but in the 1940s, NEUM leaders were quite explicit about framing the liberation struggle in class terms (e.g. Kies 1943: 3; Kies 1945: 8; Tabata 1945: 12). Even in 1953, Kies happily made explicit reference to ‘Capitalism-Imperialism’ as the root of oppression in South Africa (1953: 7). The notion of a radical disjuncture between esoteric and exoteric doctrine is, therefore, difficult to credit. But so is the notion that the NEUM ever favoured separate national liberations for discrete racial groups—the charge from Gamiet, and others (such as Kenneth A. Jordaan)19 on the Left. In the very document criticised so harshly in the Forum Club’s journal, the NEUM answered the question, ‘Who constitutes the South African nation?’ as follows: The nation consists of the people who were born in South Africa and who have no other country but South Africa as their mother-land. They may have been born with a black skin or with a brown one, a yellow one or a white one; they may be male or female;…  they may have long noses or broad noses, they may speak Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, English or Afrikaans, Hindi, Urdu or Swahili, Arabic or Jewish; they may be Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, or of any other faith. So long as they are born of a mother and belong to the human species, so long as they are not lunatics or incurable criminals, they all have an equal title to be citizens of South Africa, members of the nation, with the same rights, privileges and duties. (NEUM [1951] 2015: 456)

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  83 From the beginning, the NEUM’s rationale for its three-pillar structure preserved a clear dividing line between it and multi-racialist organisations. ‘It is not that we wish to see each group separated,’ explained Tabata (1945: 15); ‘this is how we find it.’ Organising in the federal structures ‘on the basis of the 10-Point Programme’ would, he continued, ‘teach the people to forget about their racial groups and think only in terms of their common oppression’ (ibid.). Similarly, in 1953, prominent NEUM member Hosea Jaffe wrote, ‘The federal form means…  that each group must be organised where he is, (for this is where the Herrenvolk have locationised him and where else can he be organised?) not so that he must remain there but so that he can come out and join the other groups in a common unity’ (1953: 20). The Congress Africanists favoured organising in separate ‘racial’ units because they believed each one had its own ‘divine destiny’ and ‘spirit which is unique’ (Lembede [1946] 1996: 92); the NEUM, by contrast, did so because it believed that, in South Africa’s racialised society, these offered the only viable settings in which to begin ‘to change [people’s] whole consciousness’, and educate them to embrace ‘an ever-widening unity of the Non-European oppressed’ (Jaffe 1953: 19). In Jaffe’s formulation, the ‘federal form’ was both ‘necessary’ and ‘transient’: ‘necessary because it proceeds from conditions as they actually are,…  transient because it overcomes the conditions which made it necessary’ (op. cit.: 20). However, despite its cogent rationale for the three-pillar structure, there is reason to believe that the NEUM of the 1940s and 1950s never achieved a fully adequate theorisation of the nature of the social groups to which the racialisation of South African society had given rise. Clear in their minds that the ‘population registration groups’ did not correspond with ‘races’, each possessing a discrete biological identity or national ‘spirit’, the NEUM leaders equally distanced themselves from the idea that the groups were nothing but a classificatory illusion— bound together as groups only in the classifier’s imagination. Yet when they spoke of the groups whose existence, they were convinced, made the NEUM’s federal structure necessary, they consistently slipped back into conceptualisations incompatible with their non-racialism—‘racial group’ (Kies 1945: 10), ‘racial groups’ (Tabata 1945: 15), ‘nationalities’ (NEUM [1951] 2015: 458): as though the only way to home in on the groups’ reality were to connive in propagating ‘the myth of race’ (Kies 1953: 7).20 The absence of adequate conceptual resources is visible in Kies’ 1943 address ‘The Background of Segregation’. ‘[W]hen we speak of a united front of ALL non-Europeans,’ he says here, we do not mean lumping ALL non-Europeans holus-bolus together and fusing them all together in the belief that since ALL are non-European oppressed, the African is a Coloured man, an Indian is an African, and a Coloured man is either Indian or African whichever you please. Only those who are ignorant of both politics and history can believe in this nonsensical type of unity. (Kies 1943: 13)

84  George Hull This passage is naturally understood as asserting that—owing to historical and political forces—Indians, Africans and Coloureds do exist as different social groups, and it invites the question of what the nature of these groups could be, given that Kies had condemned the ‘vicious racial myths’ spread by ‘[t]he Herrenvolk of South Africa’ (5) earlier in the same address. But no explanation is forthcoming. Instead, Kies defers the very question at issue, continuing: When [the non-Europeans] have thrown off the chains, then they can settle whatever national or racial difference they have, or think they have. (op. cit.: 13) It was Neville Alexander who took the crucial next analytical step within the UM intellectual tradition—albeit from outside its organisational structures. The ‘central thesis’ of One Azania, One Nation, states its author, is ‘that the officially classified population registration groups in South Africa are colourcastes and that it is of pivotal political importance to characterise them as such’ (No Sizwe 1979: 141). Alexander was not the first writer with a UM background to use the term ‘colour-caste’. I.B. Tabata had done so in a pamphlet against ‘Bantu education’ published in 1959 (see Tabata [1959] 1980: 22, 55); but Tabata had used the term in passing, without specifying its theoretical role. In Alexander’s hands, the concept colour-caste becomes a precise and illuminating third category, alongside race and class, for making sense of South African society. Crucially, it enabled Alexander to supply the missing theoretical piece which earlier UM theorists had been unable to come up with: a theorisation of the nature of the white, Indian, Coloured and African groups which neither mystified them into something they were not (‘races’, ‘nations’,… ), nor—as Forum Club Leftists were prone to do—wished them out of existence altogether. Alexander makes clear his rejection of the Forum Club position in One Azania, writing that ‘the ultra-left vestiges of the Fourth International’ faced ‘the national question…  with total incomprehension’ (No Sizwe 1979: 112–13). In his address to the first meeting of the NF in 1983, he took the time to consider a ‘view…  held by a very small minority of people’, which says that ‘our struggle is…  a class struggle pure and simple’, and that, ‘[f]or this reason, the workers should be organized regardless of what so-called group they belong to’ (Alexander 1985: 50). Of this view, which ‘seems to say (in theory) that the historically evolved differences are irrelevant or at best of secondary importance’, Alexander said: ‘I find it difficult to take this position seriously’ (ibid.). Following social anthropologist Gerald D. Berreman (Berreman 1967: 48), Alexander in One Azania specifies that a caste system exists when ‘a society is made up of birth-ascribed groups which are hierarchically ordered and culturally distinct’ (No Sizwe 1979: 146). A caste system, writes Alexander, will tend to ‘exhibit two fundamental tendencies, economic integration and non-economic separation within a single politically defined territory’ (ibid.). Economic integration of castes generally occurs within hierarchically ordered work organisations, with ‘a tendency towards job specialisation’ by caste; non-economic separation

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  85 includes ‘caste endogamy and extreme social distance’ (ibid.). Once a caste system is established, ‘the individuals within the system’ are ‘“instinctively” aware of their place in it, a place which they may or may not accept but will generally appear to do so’ (ibid.). A caste system generally needs to be held in place by a set of beliefs and attitudes, held by at least some of the individuals within it. These purport to provide a justification for the existing social hierarchy and motivate behaviour in accordance with it. Alexander proposes that ‘racial ideology has played the same role in countries such as South Africa as the Hindu religion has done in India’ (No Sizwe 1979: 147–48). South Africa’s caste system is, in Alexander’s view, a colourcaste system, because it is held in place by racial ideology, loosely based on skin colour, as opposed to the religious ideology which has held the Indian caste system in place: ‘Whereas…  in India caste rituals and privileges, the mode of life, are legitimised by cultural-religious criteria, in South Africa they are legitimised by so-called “racial” criteria’ (op. cit.: 148). However, a firmly entrenched caste system will not simply disintegrate as soon as some—even, perhaps, most—of the people within it no longer accept its legitimising ideology. Laws and conventions, habits of deference and contempt, and patterns of capital accumulation are capable of sustaining a de facto caste system even when only a minority of those within it believe it is justified. To the opposing view that a set of social relations counts as a caste system only if all those within it accept its hierarchy-legitimising ideology, Alexander responds—again following Berreman (Berreman et al. 1967: 115)—that even in the case of the Hindu caste system (the paradigm case of a caste system), this notion could appear plausible only to someone who had canvassed opinion exclusively among the upper (Brahmin) castes (No Sizwe 1979: 144).21 Like the UM intellectuals before him, Alexander believes the idea of race is without scientific foundation (NEUM non-racialism’s first lock). In other words, he holds that the racial ideology supporting South Africa’s colour-caste system is untrue. In One Azania, he points to the failure of physical anthropology to identify sets of physical traits which cluster systematically in the way markers of discrete races would be expected to, and he notes the rejection by geneticists of ‘race’ as a useful biological concept (No Sizwe 1979: 134–35). Though this entails that, in one sense or other, ‘race’ is a social construct, Alexander rightly rejects the conception of ‘sociological races’ on which, because people believe that races exist, and act accordingly, they therefore do exist: one might as well say that, ‘because a very large number of human beings…  believes that there are “ghosts”, science must accept the reality of “ghosts”’ (op. cit.: 136). Racialisation (a society’s treating groups as though they were races) creates, not races, but racialised groups (groups treated as though they were races). While racialised groups are a socially generated reality, race is a social construct only in the sense that it is a socially generated illusion.22 Again, like the UM intellectuals before him, Alexander believes that the idea of race must be opposed not only because it is false, but also because its use as a psychological weapon to divide oppressed South Africans into mutually antagonistic

86  George Hull groups retards progress towards greater equality (NEUM non-racialism’s second lock). In Alexander’s interpretation of South African society, utilising the categories class, race and caste, the idea of race features as a component of the ideology legitimising a historically evolved colour-caste system. The latter, though not identical to the class structure, ‘articulate[s] with the fundamental class structure of the social formation’ (No Sizwe 1979: 141), working to the advantage of an exploitative ruling class. Alexander’s discussion of the weaponisation of the idea of race exhibits greater nuance than that of the earlier UM intellectuals, and accommodates subsequent historical developments. In the historical sections of One Azania, Alexander describes what can be distinguished as four different types of ruling-class strategy which weaponise the idea of race to serve its class interests. I will label these divide and rule, labour aristocracy, sectional mobilisation and manufactured sectional mobilisation. Divide and rule is the strategy (diagnosed already in Kies 1943) of persuading members of the working class that they are divided into different ‘races’, that their primary loyalty should be to their ‘race’, and that their different ‘races’ are in competition for material resources and advancement. After 1948, Alexander notes, the National Party (NP) government aimed to create ‘even greater fragmentation of the working people’ by ‘encourag[ing] and often forc[ing]’ them ‘to think of themselves in even more microscopic terms as “Xhosa”, “Zulu”, “Malay”, “Muslim”, “Hindu”, “Griqua”, “Sotho”, “Venda”, etc.’ (Alexander 1985: 44). The strategy of creating a labour aristocracy goes further, persuading one section of the working class that it has an important ‘racial’ identity in common with the entire ruling class, and inducing it—with the help of status perks and extra material benefits—to become ‘the right hand…  of the ruling class’ (op. cit.: 4). On Alexander’s analysis, after the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa, the ruling class used a combination of labour aristocracy and divide and rule to depress the cost of mining labour, and extract super-profits, without incurring organised resistance from the working class. Sectional mobilisation occurs when a section of the ruling class, in order to gain a competitive edge over other sections of the ruling class, procures the political support of a section of the working class on the basis of a purported common ‘racial’ identity. Mobilisation on behalf of ‘national capital’ (No Sizwe 1979: 20) from the late 19th century onwards, under the banner of an Afrikaner ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ identity putatively shared by winemakers of German and French descent in the Western Cape, Dutch-speaking mine labourers, and the ‘Afrikaansspeaking frontiersmen,…  semi-nomadic pastoralists’, on the Highveld (op. cit.: 13), is Alexander’s paradigm example of this phenomenon. The 1948 election victory of D.F. Malan’s ‘purified’ NP represented the victory of Afrikaner sectional mobilisation in South Africa (op. cit.: 29). From the 1960s, Alexander believes, the South African ruling class pursued a creative variation on sectional mobilisation. Manufactured sectional mobilisation entails creating a new section of the bourgeoisie in whose interests it is to pursue a policy of sectional mobilisation (as just described), but which will do so

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  87 without doing net damage to the interests of the existing ruling class, on which it remains largely dependent. Manufactured sectional mobilisation may be pursued when the co-ordinated action of a united working class can no longer be headed off by divide and rule, or else when it proves to be less costly than maintaining a pampered labour aristocracy. The NP government’s strategy of manufactured sectional mobilisation involved sponsoring groups of ‘black entrepreneurs’ whose wealth ‘derive[d] from state-supplied credit’ (No Sizwe 1979: 9). These were to become the ruling classes of the ‘Bantustans’—ethnically defined territories which would ultimately be granted national independence, in name at least. It was to be in the interests of each ‘Bantustan bourgeoisie’ (ibid.) to court a section of the working class on an ethnic basis. The overarching aim, on Alexander’s analysis, was to create an economically integrated South Africa in which, through territorial division or ‘a federal or confederal set-up’ (op. cit.: 139), the working class was divided by its political loyalty to different sections of the ruling class. As an added benefit, the ‘Bantustan strategy’ (No Sizwe 1979: 1) enabled the NP government to bring the language of its policy into line with the politically correct post-Second World War discourse of decolonisation. NP policy-makers now talked of ‘nations’ or ‘nationalities’, rather than ‘races’.23 Alexander notes the large degree of alignment between the NP government’s revised conception of the ‘population registration groups’ and the ‘“multi-national” approach’ which prevailed in the Congress Alliance in the 1970s (102). The main point of difference was that, whereas the NP government claimed ‘that the Bantuspeaking people of South Africa consisted of eight different nations’, the Congress Africanists thought that ‘there is only one African nation’, and thus four nations altogether in South Africa (98). Alexander argues that both the NP position and the Congress position misrepresent social reality, because no significant South African group aspires to ‘secede from’ the economically integrated polity as a separate nation, or to ‘cultural autonomy or segregation’ (141); and he argues that both positions, because of the ‘centrifugal dynamic’ (152) they encourage among oppressed South Africans, will tend to work to the advantage of the bourgeoisie—within each of the population registration groups. Indeed, Alexander predicts that, were the multi-nationalism of the Congress Alliance to be followed through consistently,24 it would lead to ‘the privileged classes’ within each of the putative ‘nations’ being ‘pulled in the direction of the ruling classes in the South African state’, and ultimately forging a political alliance with them (99). Neville Alexander’s work in political theory following his release from Robben Island embraces the double lock on non-racialism discussed in the previous section. It provides new arguments for the scientific untenability of the category of ‘race’ and adds nuance to the discussion of its weaponisation by the ruling class. But Alexander’s most distinctive contribution was to articulate the nature of the South African population groups—something earlier UM theorists had conspicuously failed to do. In One Azania, Alexander argues that South Africa’s ‘African’, ‘Indian’, ‘white’ and ‘Coloured’ ‘population registration groups’ are neither ‘races’ nor

88  George Hull ‘nations’, but are real societal groups for all that. Though not bound together as units by primordial ties of ‘race’ or separate nationhoood, African, Indian and Coloured people have been socially constituted as distinct castes through, first, the indignity of being counted and treated as inherently inferior to the white caste and, second, the demeaning and disadvantaging segregatory laws, conventions and barriers to movement, education and employment, with which they have been hemmed in. One can accept Alexander’s analysis of the nature of South Africa’s population registration groups, even if one does not accept the entirety of his account of the bourgeois class strategy to which—in Alexander’s view—South African colour-castes owe their existence. Alexander’s colour-caste interpretation of South African society illuminates Jaffe’s explanation of the NEUM’s ‘federal form’ as both ‘necessary because it proceeds from conditions as they actually are’, and ‘transient because it overcomes the conditions which made it necessary’ (Jaffe 1953: 20). Colour-caste is a genuine, non-illusory social identity, based on conditions as they actually are. However, once an individual appreciates that they are socially constituted as a member of a subordinate caste within a caste system legitimised by a false ideology, this is unlikely to be a part of their identity they want to retain. Rather, since a caste identity is an identity constituted and sustained by demeaning segregation and unjust resource allocation, it will be natural for members of subordinate colour-castes to wish to participate in dismantling the system which makes such an identity possible. Since Coloured, Indian and African South Africans are all demeaned and disadvantaged by the colour-caste system, it is in all of their interests to unite and dismantle it. The NP government and the Congress Alliance agreed that South Africa’s ‘population registration groups’ were real social groups, namely ‘races’ or (later) ‘nations’; the Leftists of the Forum Club held that the ‘population registration groups’ were not real social groups at all. The UM consistently plotted a third way between these positions, operating on the basis that the ‘population registration groups’ were real social groups, but were neither ‘races’ nor ‘nations’. While the UM never formulated a positive account of what the population registration groups were, if they were not ‘races’ or ‘nations’, Neville Alexander did. His colour-caste theoretical framework is both a plausible interpretation of South African society and an adequate theoretical underpinning for the UM’s political practice—its federal structure, in particular. In One Azania, he argues not only that the colour-caste framework is a more accurate conceptualisation of the ‘population registration groups’ than any other, but also that ‘it is of pivotal political importance’ for oppressed South Africans to come to think of themselves as members of colour-castes (No Sizwe 1979: 141). This is because, politically, the concept colour-caste can serve as an effective ideological countermeasure to the ‘centrifugal’ dynamic encouraged by the concepts race and nation: ‘The importance of acknowledging that “race relations” are caste-like lies…  in the fact that castes possess an integrative as opposed to a separatist dynamic’ (op. cit.: 148).

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  89

An unkept promise: Neville Alexander’s post-Apartheid social criticism The theoretical framework for understanding social identities in South Africa pioneered by Neville Alexander in One Azania, One Nation proves its worth, not least through its continued applicability post-Apartheid. The model of a colourcaste hierarchy, as articulated by Alexander, enables us to think lucidly and accurately about the continuing salience of ‘population registration group’ identities in contemporary South Africa, and about some of the important links between these identities and demands of justice. The transition to democracy, culminating in South Africa’s first universalsuffrage election in 1994, brought political and legal equality to all South Africans. An important strut to the colour-caste system was thereby eliminated—the catalogue of laws which effectively made the majority of the population second-, third- and fourth-class citizens. However, the caste hierarchy was not destroyed outright. The pattern of financial, social and cultural capital holdings inherited from the Apartheid era, in conjunction with persisting inferiorising beliefs, and attitudes of scorn and deference, on the part of many individuals, have proved alarmingly capable of sustaining an unlegislated, but de facto, colour-caste system in many spheres of South African life. One of the most significant challenges facing the ANC-led government was— and remains—to complete the work of dismantling the colour-caste hierarchy in South Africa. Policies including targeted taxation and public spending, active desegregation of neighbourhoods and workplace integration, and affirmative action have been used, to varying degrees, and with varying degrees of success, to address this challenge. Dismantling the colour-caste system is, however, not the only public policy challenge in South Africa. Since the distribution of goods and opportunities between white, African, Indian and Coloured South Africans could be equalised (i.e. rendered proportionate to group size) while retaining—or, indeed, creating—extreme distributive inequalities within these groups, an important question of public policy is to what extent dismantling the colour-caste system should be prioritised even when it delays, or obstructs, the overall distributive equalisation of South African society.25 While the colour-caste system remains undismantled—or only semi-­ dismantled—‘Indian’, ‘Coloured’, ‘African’ and ‘white’ remain legitimate and significant identities: not, of course, because they designate a primordial attachment to a race or nation, but rather because in South Africa these identities remain the focus of legitimate demands of justice. As noted in the previous section, to conceive of the population registration groups in South Africa as colour-castes is to conceive of them as injustice-based identities, constituted by social practices of discriminating and privileging. Once the hierarchy these practices hold in place has been fully dismantled—but not until then—the colour-caste identities will expire. A colour-caste identity is unlike a national or racial identity, in that properly to grasp one’s identity as a member of a colour-caste in a colour-caste

90  George Hull hierarchy is to grasp an aspect of one’s identity which ought not to be: something which must, and can, be overcome. However, despite its continuing relevance, Alexander, in his post-1994 writings, largely abandoned the colour-caste framework of analysis. Rather than offering a reinterpretation of the ‘population registration group’ identities (as he had in One Azania), in his post-Apartheid writings, Alexander advocates for the elimination of all mention of them from theoretical and political discourse. In his last (posthumously published) book, Thoughts on the New South Africa, Alexander laments the fact that South Africa’s ANC-led government still collects statistics by ‘population registration group’, thereby ‘using the egregious definitions of the apartheid regime’s Population Registration Act of 1950 to continue classifying the population in racial terms’ (Alexander 2013: 150). Despite granting that ‘[t]he principle of historical redress remains the lodestar of any serious policy of social transformation in the present phase of South African history’ (Alexander 2013: 152), Alexander argues now for ‘the prioritising of class as a measure of disadvantage’ (op. cit.: 129). In doing so, he effectively reverts to one of the two positions between which he had in One Azania so painstakingly mapped out a middle ground: the purist classism of the Forum Club which denies that the population registration groups are in any sense genuine social groups. In doing so, he also obscures a normative fact which the colourcaste framework is singularly well-suited to make visible: that being treated as, by birth, a member of a subordinate caste is a societal wrong which demands redress independent of whether, or how much, an individual has experienced a reduction in material welfare because of it.26 What explains Alexander’s abandonment of the analytical centrepiece of One Azania, One Nation? One factor, I believe, is an ambivalence already discernible when he first introduced the framework, which leads to some conceptual confusion even in the initial exposition. In One Azania, Alexander vacillates as to whether or not his colour-caste framework captures an aspect of the objective social circumstances in South Africa. At times he seems to favour a description of objective social conditions solely in terms of class, relegating the colour-caste concept to ‘the level of consciousness’— ‘what is happening for-itself’, as opposed to ‘what is happening in-itself’ (No Sizwe 1979: 151). Yet this cannot be the correct theoretical place for the colour-caste framework to occupy. After all, at this stage in One Azania Alexander has spent five chapters describing how South Africans think of themselves as members of ‘nations’, ‘races’, ‘classes’, ‘ethnic groups’, ‘national minorities’—never yet as members of castes. The colour-caste concept is One Azania’s theoretical innovation; if it were intended to capture how South Africans already think of themselves, it would be a failure a priori. In fact, the substance of Alexander’s argument in One Azania is that South Africans ought to start thinking of themselves as members of colour-castes, because the concept colour-caste captures the objective social reality of the ‘population registration groups’ much better than race, nation, ethnic group et al. do. If the colour-caste framework were intended to capture a group’s manner of viewing

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  91 itself, rather than its actual nature, then it would be incorrect to say—as Alexander does—that groups like the ANC and the SAIC were ‘caste-based organisations’ which ‘fought for concessions for the elite in their respective colour-castes’ (No Sizwe 1979: 54), because the ANC and the SAIC never viewed Africans and Indians in South Africa as castes. If in the 1970s and 1980s Alexander was hesitant to tamper with the categories of orthodox Marxist social analysis, from the 1990s—when, in Alexander’s (2013: 41) words, ‘[t]he collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, among a few other historic events,…  put all socialists and would-be revolutionaries on the back foot’—he became hesitant to make use of them at all.27 This is, most likely, another factor explaining Alexander’s abandonment of the colour-caste framework of analysis, since he had introduced the latter in the context of the broadly Marxist interpretation of South African society he shared with the UM. In the social criticism written during the final two decades of his life, Alexander deplores solidarity and organisation along ‘racial’ lines not—as he had before— because it risks blunting the fundamental class antagonism which is to be the catalyst of revolutionary social change in South Africa, but instead because it poses a threat to social cohesion. In Thoughts on the New South Africa, he repeatedly warns of the potential for societal conflict, including violence, which ‘racialised identities’ contain within them (Alexander 2013: 133).28 Unlike in One Azania, Alexander in his final book does not advocate for the reinterpretation of these identities as caste identities, but simply for their repudiation. Abandoning the nuanced line he had taken in the 1970s and 1980s, on which there is a place for organising along population registration group lines, as long as these group identities are not misunderstood, Alexander warns that the formation of organisations such as the ‘Bruin Belange-Inisiatief’—set up to further the interests of South Africans classified as ‘Coloured’—is ‘the thin end of the genocidal wedge’ (op. cit.: 166). Social cohesion is a vital policy goal, and extreme violent outcomes such as genocide must certainly be avoided. Yet this goal must be pursued in conjunction with the equally vital goal of social justice, and, indeed, it is far from clear that, when they come into conflict, social cohesion should always trump justice.29 The irony is that, as I have argued in this section, Alexander’s colour-caste framework helps us to make good normative sense of the interlocking and competing demands of justice in a society with a history of racial oppression—such as South Africa, but also many others—even once the Marxist theory of revolution has been discarded. One does not need to be a historical materialist to deplore an inegalitarian social hierarchy. In supplying a firm theoretical underpinning for the political practice of the Unity Movement, Neville Alexander also constructed sharp tools for nuanced and constructive social criticism in post-Apartheid South Africa. He then declined to use them. Nevertheless, his best work remains a valuable resource for others to draw on when addressing the overlapping issues of racial justice and racial identity which arise in many societies today.30

92  George Hull

Notes 1 See, for instance, Alexander 2002: 4–5. 2 An example is Dullah Omar, former Justice Minister (Nasson 1991: 231). 3 Named for the Apartheid regime’s Population Registration Act of 1950 (Alexander 2013: 150). 4 Founded in January 1912 in Bloemfontein under the name ‘South African Native National Congress’ (Gumede 2007: 1–2), the ANC would ultimately eclipse the Unity Movement as the leading South African liberation movement, and form a government in 1994. However, as Alexander (1989: 184) points out, ‘[u]ntil 1950–51, there was…  little to choose between the Congress movement and the Unity movement, as far as numerical strength was concerned’. 5 Instead, in 1947, Dadoo and Naicker took the SAIC into an alliance with the ANC. This was the first step towards the ANC-led ‘Congress Alliance’ (Everatt 2009: 9). 6 Soudien (2011) draws a comparison between the ‘very particular brand of thinking around issues such as race and class…  at the Cape’ by an ‘intellectual community outside the academy’ (46), and the subaltern studies intellectual movement in India (51, 55). 7 As Jaffe writes, the ‘pioneer thinkers of the UM…  den[ied] the existing of “races” decades before the UNO, Neville Alexander and Stephen Gould, in that order’ (1992: 12). 8 Contemporary philosopher of race Charles W. Mills (1998: 49) uses these terms for the view that the concept race does not pick out anything real in the world whatsoever. 9 Between 1652 and 1808, more than 60,000 people from Asia and other regions in Africa were transported to the Cape as slaves (Martin 2000: 103, 119 n. 5). 10 This refers to an alliance between the National Party and the South African Labour Party (SALP), which formed a coalition government in 1924. SALP policy was, in Simons’ (1976: 205) words, ‘to abolish capitalism but retain the colour bar’. 11 For example, R.V. Selope-Thema justified the ANC’s decision to withdraw from the AAC as follows: ‘We had a purpose to fulfil as a united African race. Our aims might be opposed to those of other people, it did not matter. We should follow the law of self preservation. We should love each other first before we loved other people’ (ANC et al. [1949] 2015: 411). 12 The Anti-CAD’s Bulletin provided instructions for the personal boycott: ‘Don’t have any social or personal intercourse with them. Don’t greet them. Don’t have any conversations with them. Don’t visit them, and don’t invite them to your home. Don’t meet them, even if it is necessary to cross over to the other side of the street. Don’t see them, even if you do come face to face with them’ (Lewis 1987: 214). 13 Alexander was born in 1936, in Cradock, eastern Cape. His mother ‘was a descendant of Ethiopian slaves and his father was a carpenter designated as Coloured by the South African government’ (Wilson 1991: 292). He was awarded a PhD by the Eberhard Karls Universitä t Tü bingen, Germany, in 1961 (Soudien 2016: ix), for a dissertation on the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. At the time of his death in 2012, Alexander was leading the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) at UCT (op. cit.: xiv). 14 A significant bone of contention at the time of the split in the NEUM at the end of the 1950s ‘into rival NEUM (AAC) and NEUM (Anti-CAD) bodies’ (Lewis 1987: 271) was the issue of whether the seventh point on the NEUM’s Ten Point Programme required a centralised redivision of agricultural land in South Africa on a socialist basis, or merely that all South Africans have the right to buy and sell land in all parts of the country. Beyond that, cause, motive and details of the course of events are all contested. For conflicting first-hand accounts, see Jayiya et al. 1959: 1–8; Jaffe 1992: 28–33; Fataar 1999: 3–6; Hirson 2005: 172–74; Rassool n.d.: 2–4. 15 On the formation of the NUM, see Brown et al. 2017: 85–86. For details of the political overlaps and differences between AZAPO, the CAL, the NUM and the NF, see Nasson 1991: 222–25.

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  93 16 These are collected in Alexander 1985. 17 Everatt (2009: 5) writes: ‘The United Democratic Front (UDF), which spearheaded legal internal resistance to apartheid in the 1980s (while the ANC was banned and exiled), retained the multiracial approach of the Congress movement’. 18 ‘They were not honest and open with the people,’ writes R.E. van der Ross (2015: 123), ‘in that they did not disclose to them their own ideological aims. As Trotskyites, they aimed for world revolution and worldwide socialism, but they never let this be known as it would probably have been too dangerous and certainly would have been a tactical error to do so.’ 19 On Jordaan’s opposition to the NEUM, see Hirson 2005: ch. 15. 20 As Adhikari (2005b: 113) points out, it was not until the late 1950s that NEUM publications—in particular, its newspaper, the Torch—became strict about avoiding race labels, or putting inverted commas around them. Adhikari suggests the Torch’s use of race terms before then was sometimes ‘tactical’ (op. cit.: 108)—i.e. pandering to its readers’ preconceptions—and sometimes ‘unconscious’ (109), occurring alongside articles ‘in which the writers tried to debunk the myth of race and educate the readership in nonracial ways of thinking’ (111). I think he underestimates the influence of an underdeveloped, sometimes inconsistent, theorisation by the NEUM’s leadership on the language used in its publications. Rassool (n.d.: 3–4) reports there was also some measure of disagreement among the NEUM leadership on these and related matters. 21 Berreman notes that ‘the Harijans or Shudras…  have a very different view of the caste system, including the absence of any conception that it is a result of sacred rules. They see it as strictly a matter of interaction, of numbers and of economic exploitation’ (Berreman et al. 1967: 25–26). 22 In the final two sentences of this paragraph I am indebted to Blum 2010. See also Bickford-Smith 1995: 4; Hull 2016: 43–46. 23 In 1976, R.F. (‘Pik’) Botha told the United Nations Security Council, ‘There is [in South Africa] a White nationalism, and there are several Black nationalisms’ (No Sizwe 1979: 12). 24 Partly on the basis of his interactions with him on The Island over a long period, Alexander concluded that Nelson Mandela’s ‘personal orientation [was] towards an understanding of South African society as consisting of four ‘“races”’. He speculates that, had Mandela’s personal view prevailed in the negotiations of the 1990s, ‘some version of consociational democracy as in the examples of Lebanon, Switzerland and other countries’ might well have been adopted (Alexander 2002: 54–55). 25 For argument that there can, from an egalitarian perspective, be pro tanto moral value to distributive equalising between racial groups, even when the overall level of material inequality across society remains unchanged; see Hull 2016. 26 For elaboration of this point, see Hull 2015: 120–23. 27 See also Alexander 2002: 23, 39, 158. 28 See also Alexander 2002: 40. 29 Blum (2015: 39) makes this point in the course of a critical discussion of Alexander 2013. 30 In writing this chapter, I have profited most of all from conversations over a long period with Kathy Luckett, Lungisile Ntsebeza, Thiven Reddy and Crain Soudien; and more recently with Wilmot James, Karen Press and Mary Simons. I am grateful to them for being so generous with their time, and for their patience with a relative newcomer to South African political history. To Allison Drew I am indebted for particularly constructive criticism of an earlier draft of this chapter. The African Studies Special Collection of the UCT Library, which contains a trove of Unity Movement publications and other primary source documents, has been an invaluable resource. I gratefully acknowledge research assistance from Gabriele Teale-James.

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References Adhikari, M. 2005a. ‘Fiercely Non-Racial? Discourses and Politics of Race in the NonEuropean Unity Movement, 1943–70’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(2), pp. 403–18. Adhikari, M. 2005b. Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community, Athens & Cape Town: Ohio University Press & Double Storey Books. Alexander, N. 1985. Sow the Wind: Contemporary Speeches, Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers. Alexander, N. 1989. ‘Non-Collaboration in the Western Cape, 1943–1963’, in W. James & M. Simons (eds.), The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape, Cape Town: David Philip, pp. 180–91. Alexander, N. 2002. An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Alexander, N. 2013. Thoughts on the New South Africa, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. ANC & AAC. [1949] 2015. ‘Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the National Executive Committees of the ANC and the All African Convention, April 17–18, 1949’, in T. Karis, S. Johns & G. Gerhart (eds.), From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990 (vol. ii, Hope and Challenge, 1935–1952), Johannesburg: Jacana Media, pp. 409–18. Berreman, G. 1967. ‘Stratification, Pluralism and Interaction: A Comparative Analysis of Caste’, in A. de Reuck & J. Knight (eds.), Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches, London: J. & A. Churchill, pp. 45–73. Berreman, G., De Vos, G., Dumont, L., Myrdal, G., Passin, H., Poliakov, L., Sinha, S. & Stirling, A. 1967. ‘The Historical Approach to Caste: Discussion’, in A. de Reuck & J. Knight (eds.), Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches, London: J. & A. Churchill, pp. 106–117. Bickford-Smith, V. 1995. Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town, Cambridge & Johannesburg: Cambridge University Press & Witwatersrand University Press. Blum, L. 2010. ‘Racialized Groups: The Sociohistorical Consensus’, The Monist, 93(2), pp. 298–320. Blum, L. 2015. ‘Races, Racialised Groups and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States’, in X. Mangcu (ed.), The Colour of Our Future: Does Race Matter in Post-Apartheid South Africa? Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 25–44. Brown, B., Giyose, M., Petersen, H., Thomas, C. & Zinn, A. 2017. ‘The Unity Movement and the National Question’, in E. Webster & K. Pampallis (eds.), The Unresolved National Question: Left Thought Under Apartheid, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 77–95. CYL [1944] 2015. ‘Congress Youth League Manifesto’, in T. Karis, S. Johns & G. Gerhart (eds.), From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990 (vol. ii, Hope and Challenge, 1935–1952), Johannesburg: Jacana Media, pp. 288–96. Dollie, N. 1986. ‘The National Forum’, in South African Research Service (ed.), South African Review 3, Johannesburg: Raven Press, pp. 267–77. Everatt, D. 2009. The Origins of Non-Racialism: White Opposition to Apartheid in the 1950s, Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Neville Alexander and the Unity Movement  95 Fataar, A. 1999. ‘Falsification of History: The Role of the Unity Movement in Liberation’ (mimeograph), African Studies Special Collection, University of Cape Town. Gamiet, Z. 1951. ‘“A Declaration to the People of South Africa from the Non-European Unity Movement”: A Critical Analysis’, Discussion, 1(4), pp. 24–35. Gumede, W. 2007. Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (updated edition), London: Zed Books. Hirson, B. 2005. A History of the Left in South Africa: Writings of Baruch Hirson, London: I.B. Tauris. Hull, G. 2015. ‘Affirmative Action and the Choice of Amends’, Philosophia, 43(1), pp. 113–34. Hull, G. 2016. ‘Racial Inequality’, Philosophical Papers, 45(1–2), pp. 37–74. Jaffe, H. 1953. ‘The First Ten Years of the Non-European Unity Movement’ (mimeograph), African Studies Special Collection, University of Cape Town. Jaffe, H. 1992. ‘Signposts of the History of the Unity Movement: Two Lectures’ (mimeograph), African Studies Special Collection, University of Cape Town. Jayiya, S., Kies, B., Kobus, C. & Viljoen, R. 1959. ‘What Has Happened in the NonEuropean Unity Movement?’, Cape Town: NEUM Joint Secretaries. Kies, B. 1943. The Background of Segregation: Address Delivered to the National AntiC.A.D. Conference, May 29th, 1943, Cape Town: Anti-C.A.D. Committee. Kies, B. 1945. ‘The Basis of Unity’, in NEUM 1945, pp. 3–11. Kies, B. 1953. The Contribution of the Non-European Peoples to World Civilisation: A.J. Abrahamse Memorial Lecture, Cape Town: TLSA. Lembede, A. [1946] 1996. ‘Policy of the Congress Youth League’, in R. Edgar & L. ka Msumza (eds.), Freedom in Our Lifetime: The Collected Writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede, Athens, Johannesburg & Bellville: Ohio University Press, Skotaville Publishers & Mayibuye Books, pp. 90–93. Lenin, V. [1917] 2010. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. London: Penguin. Lewis, G. 1987. Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African ‘Coloured’ Politics, Cape Town: David Philip. Martin, D.-C. 2000. ‘The Burden of the Name: Classifications and Constructions of Identity. The Case of the “Coloureds” in Cape Town (South Africa)’, African Philosophy, 13(2), pp. 99–124. Mills, C. 1998. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Nasson, B. 1989. ‘Opposition Politics and Ideology in the Western Cape’, in G. Moss & I. Obery (eds.), South African Review 5, Johannesburg: Raven Press, pp. 91–105. Nasson, B. 1990. ‘The Unity Movement: Its Legacy in Historical Consciousness’, Radical History Review, 46/47, pp. 189–211. Nasson, B. 1991. ‘Political Ideologies in the Western Cape’, in T. Lodge, B. Nasson, S. Mufson, K. Shubane & N. Sithole (eds.), All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s, Cape Town: Ford Foundation & David Philip, pp. 207–232. NEUM (ed.) 1945. “The Basis of Unity” (by B. M. Kies) & “The Building of Unity” (by I. B. Tabata): Two Addresses Delivered at the 3rd Unity Conference Held in the Banqueting Hall, Cape Town, on 4th & 5th January, 1945, Cape Town: Non-European Unity Committee. NEUM [1951] 2015. ‘A Declaration to the People of South Africa from the Non-European Unity Movement’, in T. Karis, S. Johns & G. Gerhart (eds.), From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990 (vol. ii, Hope and Challenge, 1935–1952), Johannesburg: Jacana Media, pp. 455–67.

96  George Hull No Sizwe. 1979. One Azania, One Nation: The National Question in South Africa, London: Zed Press. Rassool, J. n.d. ‘Notes on the History of the Non-European Unity Movement in South Africa, and the Role of Hosea Jaffe’ (mimeograph), African Studies Special Collection, University of Cape Town. Simons, M. 1976. ‘Organised Coloured Political Movements’, in H. van der Merwe & C. Groenewald (ed.), Occupational and Social Change among Coloured People in South Africa: Proceedings of a Workshop of the Centre for Intergroup Studies at the University of Cape Town, Cape Town: Juta, pp. 202–37. Soudien, C. 2011. ‘The Contribution of Radical Western Cape Intellectuals to an Indigenous Knowledge Project in South Africa’, Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, 76, pp. 44–66. Soudien, C. 2016. ‘Introduction: Neville Alexander and the Struggle for Freedom and Social Justice’, in A. Zinn (ed.), Non-Racialism in South Africa: The Life and Times of Neville Alexander, Stellenbosch: SUN MeDIA & CANRAD, pp. vii–xvii. Tabata, I. 1945. ‘The Building of Unity’, in NEUM 1945, pp. 11–15. Tabata, I. [1950] 1974. The Awakening of a People, Nottingham: Spokesman Books. Tabata, I. [1959] 1980. Education for Barbarism: Bantu (Apartheid) Education in South Africa, London: Unity Movement of South Africa. Trewhela, P. 2009. Inside Quatro: Uncovering the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO, Johannesburg: Jacana Media. Van der Ross, R. 2015. In Our Own Skins: A Political History of the Coloured People, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball. Wilson, L. 1991. ‘Robben Island: Introduction’, in T. Lodge, B. Nasson, S. Mufson, K. Shubane & N. Sithole (eds.), All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s, Cape Town: Ford Foundation & David Philip, pp. 289–93.

5

Biko on non-white and black Improving social reality Brian Epstein

Bantu Steve Biko begins his article “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” written in 1971 for the leadership of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), with the following definition and explanation of the category black: We have in our policy manifesto defined blacks as those who are by law or tradition politically, economically and socially discriminated against as a group in the South African society and identifying themselves as a unit in the struggle towards the realisation of their aspirations. This definition illustrates to us a number of things: 1 Being black is not a matter of pigmentation—being black is a reflection of a mental attitude. 2 Merely by describing yourself as black you have started on a road to emancipation …  If one’s aspiration is whiteness but his pigmentation makes attainment of this impossible, then that person is a non-white. Any man who calls a white man ‘Baas’, any man who serves in the police force or Security Branch is ipso facto a non-white. Black people—real black people—are those who can manage to hold their heads high in defiance rather than willingly surrender their souls to the white man.1 This definition—a statement at the core of Black Consciousness philosophy—is at once compelling, provocative, and puzzling. Biko is clearly doing more than defining a word: he is criticizing a category, introducing another, and issuing a call to action. My aim in this chapter is to interpret and develop the intellectual move that Biko is making here and in related writings. In particular, I argue that Biko is engaged in a project that is beginning to attract substantial attention in the analytic literature: the project of the “amelioration” of social concepts and categories. Biko himself—it has been persuasively argued by Mabogo More and Lewis Gordon2—writes in the tradition of existential phenomenology. More and Gordon explore Biko’s continuity with Frantz Fanon, and in this chapter I draw extensively on their interpretations, attempting to complement and elaborate on these

98  Brian Epstein continuities. I also, however, attempt to show how Biko moves beyond Fanon in crucial ways, solving problems that Fanon confronted. This chapter also draws on George Hull’s recent work on Black Consciousness as addressing problems of “hermeneutical injustice.”3 As opposed to the conceptual and epistemological implications of Biko’s work, however, I focus on examining its connections with social metaphysics. Biko, I argue, aims to show how we can transform an existing set of oppressive social categories in the world into new social categories.

Biko’s definitions of non-white and black Biko wrote “The Definition of Black Consciousness” near the midpoint of the apartheid era—twenty or so years after the electoral victory of the National Party and the establishment of apartheid, and twenty years before it began to unravel. He was writing in a context in which racial categories were, of course, central to the concerns of the government. The National Party government made ongoing efforts to define and institutionalize race; however, the apartheid categories not only pre-dated the apartheid system but largely persist today, having been reified over three-and-a-half centuries into identities, family relationships, culture, religion, and geographic divisions. The current census classifies South Africans into five categories: Black African, Coloured, Indian or Asian, White, and Other. “Coloured” is a specifically South African category, applying largely to the descendants of populations from the Cape Colony, populations which included slaves brought from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Madagascar; Khoi and San indigenous people; and Dutch and English colonizers. As with other racial categories in South Africa, the grouping was materially, culturally, and socially reinforced through differential treatment and forced migration. Apartheid policies were often applied across a mix of racial and ethnic lines. In 1959, for instance, the apartheid government outlawed the registration of non-white students at formerly open universities, and created segregated “University Colleges”—separate colleges for Zulu students, for SothoTswana students, for students who spoke Xhosa, for “Coloured” students, and for Indian students.4 Still there was little ambiguity for the architects of apartheid about which lines were ethnic and which racial: the Zulu/Sotho/Tswana/Xhosa lines were ethnic or linguistic divisions within the racial category they called “native” or “Bantu,” and the other groups were distinct races. The apartheid Population Registration Act of 1950 explicitly defined the three largest of the “races”: A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white—and not generally accepted as Coloured—or who is generally accepted as White—and is not obviously a Non-White, provided that a person shall not be classified as a White person if one of his natural parents has been classified as a Coloured person or a Bantu A Bantu is a person who is, or is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa …  A Coloured is a person who is not a White person or a Bantu … .

Biko on non-white and black  99 Even to the authors of this law, it was apparent that these definitions are peculiar and of questionable coherence, as the criteria were changed in six subsequent revisions of the Act. As they stand, these definitions mix a variety of criteria, including appearance, descent, previous classifications, and what is “generally accepted.” Yet despite this mix, the architects of apartheid regarded racial categories as fundamentally biological.5 The complexity of the definitions was understood largely as being a consequence of the government wanting them (along with the racial tests also specified in the Act) to serve as practical guides for assessment and classification, to be implemented by the Race Classification Review Boards.6 An important feature of Biko’s definitions, therefore, is that his categories are clearly political and social. Today, most theorists agree with Biko that racialized categories are complex social constructions, but this was not widely held in South Africa at the time. In this way, the Black Consciousness theorists broke not only with the apartheid architects’ treatment of race, but also with prevailing opposition views, especially those of “Africanist” thinkers. This aspect of Biko’s approach is now close to conventional wisdom. However, other features of Biko’s definitions remain striking and counterintuitive even to a contemporary eye. First, Biko defines black extraordinarily broadly: it cuts across any standard understanding of racial difference, even when it is understood as socially constructed. Black is much more inclusive than an ordinarily understood racial category, including not only people whom the apartheid government would categorize as “natives,” but also at least people whom the government would categorize as “Coloured” and “Asiatic.” Second, Biko’s definitions are explicitly localized to South Africa. The contingencies of South African law, the traditions and practices of separation and oppression, and the political structures that reinforce apartheid are the basis of his categories. In elevating the category black, he follows Africanist movements that reject a kind of post-racial universalism or humanism. But in defining the category as fixed to the local context, he even more starkly departs from their categorizations, which in contrast to Biko’s are designed to unify people across the African continent and the African diaspora. Third and most conspicuous is Biko’s psychological criterion that marks the difference between black and non-white. A person fits the category black only if that person identifies with a unit that is involved in the struggle against oppression. This, for Biko, is a matter of mental attitudes. How, then, does Biko define white, non-white, and black? At first blush, the passage seems to give a simple analysis: 1 (White) Those who are not discriminated against by law or tradition 2 (Non-white) Those discriminated against by law or tradition, and having the attitude of aspiring to whiteness 3 (Black) Those discriminated against by law or tradition, and having the attitude of defiance.

100  Brian Epstein Biko, it seems, marks out three mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive categories of people in South Africa. The non-whites and blacks are those who are discriminated against by law and tradition, and they are distinguished from one another by their mental attitudes. This simple reading, however, does not withstand scrutiny. Biko’s definitions of black and non-white seem parallel to one another, but the two make interestingly different intellectual moves. One indication of this is the vast difference between how the words “non-white” and “black” were respectively used in South Africa during the early apartheid era. Prior to the work of Biko and other Black Consciousness theorists, the term “black” had largely been absent from the South African context.7 The term “non-white,” on the other hand, was ubiquitous.8 Many apartheid laws and policies did draw on finer distinctions, with differential treatment accorded to a variety of racial subcategories. But the physical signage in the country, for the most part, was marked “white” and “non-white,” or equivalently (for the apartheid authorities) “European” and “non-European.” These were the labels painted on signs, walls, and walkways restricting access to trains, businesses, bathrooms, government offices, queues, beaches, park benches, and more. In the apartheid context, the distinction between white and non-white is exhaustive, covering the entire population. It is conceivable that Biko, in his definition, is splitting the category non-white in two: he retains the term “non-white” to refer to people formerly known as non-white and who have the additional characteristic that they have such-and-such an attitude, and he introduces a new term, “black,” for people formerly known as non-white but who have a contrasting attitude. But this, I will argue, is a misinterpretation. In introducing the category black, Biko is not so much introducing a third category as he is transforming one inter-related pair of categories into another pair. He is performing what we might call an “ameliorative project,”9 criticizing and replacing a problematic social construct. The psychological differences between non-white and black are relevant to this transformation, but I will argue that they are not the only—or even the crucial—difference between these two categories. They are as much the product of Biko’s transformation as they are the source of it.

Non-white in the context of Fanon Understanding the ameliorative moves Biko is making with his definition of black, then, depends on clarifying his treatment of non-white. I follow More 2008, 2014 and Gordon 2008 in their claims that Biko’s treatment of non-white is significantly influenced by Fanon and should be understood as a development of Fanon’s views. I will suggest, however—drawing in part on a paradox raised by Gordon—that Biko develops his categories somewhat differently than Fanon does. Doing so gives Biko the tools to accomplish tasks that are not available to Fanon: he avoids the paradoxes that trouble Fanon’s claims, and more importantly, is able to make an ameliorative transformation—i.e., the transformation from non-white to black—that Fanon could not. In Biko’s innovations, we can see a number of ways in which the amelioration of categories can occur, and

Biko on non-white and black  101 in which the construction and re-construction of social categories interact with political aims. A note about terminology: Fanon, writing in the 1950s in France and Algeria and trained by Aimé  Cé saire and other Né gritude thinkers, describes and analyzes “noir” and “nè gre,” both of which are obviously different from Biko’s “black.” Fanon’s term “blanc” is also somewhat different from Biko’s “white,” given Biko’s emphasis on the local specificity of the category, but here the ambiguity is not as problematic. To keep the categorizations discussed by Fanon distinct from those of Biko, I will follow Gordon 2015 in using the terms “white” and “nè gre” when discussing Fanon. Fanon diagnoses these categories as having a kind of built-in negation or opposition: part of the nature of nè gre is to be negative, and to be in opposition to white. Fanon argues that the racist distinction between white and nè gre cannot be understood as simply a division of humanity into groups. He builds on Hegel’s claim that human consciousness, both of oneself and of other people, is built on the mutual recognition of one another as human. There is no consciousness— no self—without mutual recognition. Fanon approvingly quotes Hegel: “Selfconsciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness: that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized.”10 Mutual recognition is the basis for self-consciousness, and hence for humanity. But while Fanon agrees on the centrality of recognition for humanity, he denies that the encounter of white and nè gre is one of mutual recognition. At the time Fanon wrote Black Skin, White Masks, the dialectic of master and slave was regarded by Francophone philosophers as the centerpiece of Hegel’s Phenomenology.11 But Fanon observes that the relation between white and nè gre, or between colonial master and colonized, bears little resemblance to the complex interplay of conflict, independence, and recognition that Hegel develops. “For Hegel,” writes Fanon, “there is reciprocity; here the master scorns the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.”12 For a person to be in the category nè gre is precisely to be unrecognized. It is to have one’s humanity withheld. This failure of recognition manifests itself in the ordinary experience of daily living. Among the most potent illustrations Fanon gives is not the encounter of a slave with a colonial master, or an encounter with a virulent racist, but an encounter with a “well-meaning liberal.” A brief vignette in Black Skin, White Masks recounts a moment of typical daily experience. As Fanon—or any black man—walks by, a white child calls out to his mother, “Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!” The mother reacts: “Ssh! You’ll make him angry. Don’t pay attention to him, monsieur, he doesn’t realize you’re just as civilized as we are.”13 It seems to the mother, in this vignette, that she is calling out the child’s rudeness, correcting his misplaced fears. Her reply is not openly racist, but is a white liberal’s response: she reasons, explains, and justifies her way to acknowledging the humanity of the nè gre. Only, this reply is not so different from that of the open racist. Imagine, by contrast, how the mother would have reacted had her child

102  Brian Epstein called out similarly upon encountering another white: “Look, a White! Maman, a White!” She would have been puzzled about what the child could possibly have meant, and would have assumed the listener to be equally puzzled rather than offended. In that situation, her “just as civilized” explanation would not even make sense. When white encounters white, Fanon observes, there is no need for reasoning one’s way into the humanity of the other person—a justification of the humanity of another human is otiose. That encounter is treated as the “base case” of recognition. White encountering nè gre—even in the case of the well-meaning liberal—is a departure from that base case: it involves a request or demand for justification of the humanity of the other. Only, the issue of that demand itself makes it impossible for the demand to be fulfilled. As soon as person A needs justification that person B has the attributes of humanity, that is exactly for A to undercut mutual recognition—i.e., to refuse the constitutiveness of B’s recognition for A’s own self-consciousness. In short, Fanon argues that the division between white and nè gre is not a matter of classifying people according to their attributes. It is even a mistake to see the division as an illiberal classification of some people as valuable and deserving of privilege, and others as flawed and deserving of servitude. Nor can it be rectified by the liberal project of equalizing resources and privileges: the division is more fundamental than that. The base case for humanity-with-no-need-for-justification is white. The category nè gre is derivative and set up in opposition to that base case. Rather than the categories white and nè gre being a way to divide up humanity, the category nè gre undercuts the humanity of the individual who falls into that category.

Fanon’s paradoxes Fanon is a diagnostician of human tragedy: he reveals the impossible and contradictory condition of a human denied his humanity. At the outset of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon asks, “What does the black man want? Running the risk of angering my black brothers, I shall say that a Black is not a man …  This essay will attempt to understand the Black-White relationship. The white man is locked in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness …  How can we break the cycle?”14 Over the course of the book, Fanon explains the relationship, showing through theory and experience the withholding of recognition. But he does not answer his question—there is no breaking of the cycle, or, at least, no rational path to do so. The person categorized as nè gre faces an unsolvable dilemma. There is nothing he or she can do to force recognition, even (or perhaps especially) in contexts where the white insists that there is no difference between the races.15 As Fanon discusses in the section of The Wretched of the Earth titled “On Violence,”16 there is no way even to raise the issue of colonial injustice without that being perceived as an act of violence. Violence damages all parties, and he does not advocate it, but in a sense violence is inevitable. Still, there is also no reason to have confidence in its success. There is no rational or deliberative route out of a classification built on impossible demands.

Biko on non-white and black  103 This paradoxical position for people categorized as nè gre is an acute problem, even more so for a political activist such as Biko. However, there is also an even more serious philosophical problem in Fanon’s diagnosis of the nature of the category. On Fanon’s account the withholding of recognition precludes self-consciousness. It means that to be placed in the category nè gre is literally to inhabit a state of non-humanity, to fail to be human. This, however, seems like an absurd result—is it even coherent? One way out of the difficulty is to argue that the withholding of recognition is a matter of racist beliefs or ascriptions, rather than genuine withholding of recognition itself. Gordon 1993, 1995 discusses an approach along these lines. He explores the idea that racism involves a kind of Sartrean “bad faith”—a refusal to consciously acknowledge what one knows to be true. Racism, according to Gordon, is dehumanizing; it involves the refusal to ascribe humanity to someone that the racist knows is human. But even the idea of “dehumanizing” someone, Gordon argues, requires the prior acknowledgement of that person’s humanity. Neither racism as bad faith nor racism as dehumanization makes sense if recognition is withheld at the outset. This would mean that anti-black racist categories do not exactly involve a lack of mutual recognition; rather, they involve the failure to acknowledge that there is mutual recognition. This proposal would retain the idea that mutual recognition is constitutive of self-consciousness, but deny that self-consciousness has been undermined by a lack of mutual recognition. Rather, anti-black racism is a kind of misclassification: white involves the incorrect classification of a subset of people as being the base case of humanity, and nè gre the incorrect classification of another subset as lacking humanity. There is much to be said for this account, but it is not clear how compatible it is with Fanon’s claims, including the part of Hegel that he endorses. (I do not take Gordon to be ascribing this view to Fanon, but rather to be exploring the idea on its own merits.) On the “bad faith” diagnosis, racism or the withholding of explicit recognition amounts to making a willful mistake, falsely classifying a person in a category to which she does not actually belong. Only, in that case, it is not clear why this withholding should be so important in the first place. Living in a world pervaded by false beliefs is psychologically corrosive, perhaps even leading people to the point of doubting their own humanity. But it falls far short of Fanon’s argument that their humanity itself is compromised. It also does not seem to line up with Fanon’s diagnosis of the racism of the liberal: after all, the error of the white liberal is the opposite, i.e., to mistakenly believe that she is respecting her interlocutor as human. Nor does it yield an unsolvable dilemma: there would be a rational response, i.e., to correct the false beliefs. My aim here is not to come to resolution on the best way to read Fanon, nor is it to solve these puzzles or to criticize Fanon’s premises. Rather, I suggest that Fanon’s white/nè gre distinction, and the complexities it faces, be seen as a point of departure for Biko and the white/non-white distinction that in turn is the basis for Biko’s category black. Biko comes to the table in a different racist context and with urgent political aims, and armed with Fanon’s approach as a compelling but problematic theoretical framework.

104  Brian Epstein

Biko: from deprivation of recognition to deprivation of agency Like Fanon, Biko regards liberalism as self-deceptive, if not openly hypocritical. Biko largely agrees with Fanon’s diagnosis of its failure: it does nothing to counter the withholding of the humanity of non-whites despite congratulating itself for its enlightened perspective. Worse, in its “enlightened” actions, it insidiously reinforces that withholding of humanity. Biko, however, diverges from Fanon with respect to what exactly is withheld. He is not principally concerned with the deprivation of recognition, but rather the deprivation of agency. The distinction between white and non-white is fundamentally a distinction between those who can act and those who are deprived of the capacity to act. Biko describes the problems with liberalism in the political more than the interpersonal sphere. For example, one of the triggers for Biko and his peers to found SASO in 1968 was their experience with the putatively liberal National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). NUSAS at the time was the main student organization in South Africa, coordinating anti-apartheid activities across campuses. But though it was nominally a multiracial organization, it was run by white students at the leading (i.e., white) universities.17 White domination in the governance of an organization supposedly aiming to counter apartheid was manifestly absurd to Biko. He points out that some of the behavior that exacerbated the disengagement of black students from NUSAS was just open racism: at the 1967 conference, for instance, white students were housed on campus where the conference was held, while black students had to stay in a church building some distance away and take buses onto campus for the meetings. But Biko also discusses structural reasons behind the disparity of agency in the organization. One seemingly minor but telling factor was the fact that NUSAS, like most national organizations, conducted its business exclusively in English, while the “Bantu education system” of the apartheid era was expressly designed to limit English literacy among African youth.18 Working in English was necessary to have political impact in South Africa, but it also affected the internal dynamics in the NUSAS meetings: Unfortunately the books you read are in English, English is a second language to you; you have probably been taught in a vernacular especially during these days of Bantu education up to Standard 6 …  During the old days of NUSAS where [white] students would be talking about something that you as a black man have experienced in your day to day life, but your powers of articulation are not as good as theirs …  you are forced into a subservient role of having to say yes to what they are saying, talking about what you have experienced, which they have not experienced, because you cannot express it so well. This in a sense inculcates also in numerous students a sense of inadequacy.19 This is a case in which liberalism undermines the agency it would seem aimed at promoting. A white liberal might intend to take action to rectify a wrong he sees in the world. And the liberal correctly sees that the optimal route for taking action

Biko on non-white and black  105 in South African society, structured as it is, is in English and in the rhetorical style he learned in prep school and university. Thus, in that social structure, he correctly identifies himself as an effective actor, and conducts meetings in English to achieve what he sees as a moral end. But in doing so, the liberal seizes agency. His acting in a way that is instrumentally effective for accomplishing a supposedly moral aim is simultaneously an act of depriving non-whites of agency. For Biko as for Fanon, the liberal reaction to racism is self-undermining—but it is self-undermining in a different way. Fanon’s liberal reaction involves justification, which itself undermines recognition. For Biko, in contrast, the liberal reaction involves the white taking action—even taking action with the aim of rectifying wrongs—that itself undermines the agency of the non-white. Biko demonstrates his point in a similar way to Fanon—by describing lived experience. Biko’s descriptions, however, include physical systems of oppression as much as they do face-to-face interactions. Among the most powerful repressive mechanisms of apartheid, for instance, was the forced migration of populations to townships. Not only were the living conditions in the townships poor, but the distances alone structured and constrained the lives of their inhabitants: the townships are placed long distances away from the working areas where black people work, and the transport conditions are appalling, trains are overcrowded all the time, taxis that they use are overcrowded, the whole travelling situation is dangerous, and by the time a guy gets to work he has really been through a mill; he gets to work, there is no peace either at work, his boss sits on him to eke out of him even the last effort in order to boost up production. This is the common experience of the black man. When he gets back from work through the same process of travelling conditions, he can only take out his anger on his family which is the last defence that he has.20 The placement of townships—just close enough to commute to work in the cities but distant enough that the commute itself rids people of any free time they might have—is a mechanism for depriving individuals of their ability to act. And that, of course, is just one structure of constraint. Under the apartheid regime, he points out, non-whites are constrained to the point that they live in fear even of actions they may unwittingly have taken. No average black man can ever at any moment be absolutely sure that he is not breaking a law. There are so many laws governing the lives and behaviour of black people that sometimes one feels that the police only need to page at random through their statute book to be able to get a law under which to charge a victim.21 In short, the sort of dehumanization Biko describes is not so much a failure to be recognized as it is a kind of imprisonment—an overwhelming set of constraints that determine action.

106  Brian Epstein As illustrated by the sense of inadequacy of the non-white students in NUSAS discussions, this deprivation of agency has psychological consequences, which feed back into the loss of agency. This idea had already been in circulation for a long time among South African theorists. In his 1946 “Policy of the Congress Youth League”—an African nationalist youth movement in South Africa—Anton Lembede writes: Moral and spiritual degeneration manifests itself in such abnormal and pathological phenomena as loss of self-confidence, inferiority complex, a feeling of frustration, the worship and idolisation of white men, foreign leaders and ideologies. All these are symptoms of a pathological state of mind.22 Biko agrees, but here too he connects it with the material conditions in which non-whites live: The black man in himself has developed a certain sense of alienation, he rejects himself, precisely because he attaches the meaning white to all that is good …  The homes are different, the streets are different, the lighting is different, so you tend to begin to feel that there is something incomplete in your humanity, and that completeness goes with whiteness. This is carried through to adulthood when the black man has got to live and work.23 Such psychological effects are, according to Biko, central to the mechanisms of control of the apartheid system: …  the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. Once the latter has been so effectively manipulated and controlled by the oppressor so as to make the oppressed believe that he is a liability to the white man, then there will be nothing the oppressed can do that will really scare the powerful masters.24 Still, for Biko the psychology is only one aspect of the mechanism of control. It is a part of the larger structure, in which the agency of non-whites is blocked.

Non-white and the inclusiveness of Biko’s categories Biko agrees with Lembede in diagnosing psychological pathologies as a product of living under apartheid. But he and the other Black Consciousness thinkers break in a striking way with a more central feature of the approach of Lembede and other African nationalists. Lembede places the solidarity of a unified African nation at the center of his policy statement: Africa is a blackman’s country: Africans are the natives of Africa and they have inhabited Africa, their Motherland, from time immemorial; Africa belongs to them … 

Biko on non-white and black  107 Cooperation between Africans and other Non-Europeans on common problems and issues may be highly desirable. But this occasional cooperation can only take place between Africans as a single unit and other NonEuropean groups as separate units. Non-European unity is a fantastic dream which has no foundation in reality.25 Black Consciousness thinkers explicitly reject this: the categories non-white and black cut across the different racial categories of apartheid. At the same time, they also reject the view that had hitherto been regarded as its main alternative—a non-racial, post-racial, or multi-racial vision of a liberal society, as defended in particular by the African National Congress.26 Rather, they insist on exactly what Lembede rejects as having “no foundation in reality”: that the fundamental unit in opposition to apartheid is non-Europeans. To be sure, there is obvious political value in unifying the oppressed in opposition to apartheid. A well-worn tactic of colonial powers had been to pit local populations against one another in order to relieve pressure on themselves, and the apartheid government was well-practiced in that skill. The editorial of the SASO newsletter of September 1970 made this point explicitly: Placed in context therefore, the “black consciousness” attitude seeks to define one’s enemy more clearly and to broaden the base from which we are operating. It is a deliberate attempt by all of us to counteract the “divide and rule” attitude of the evil-doers.27 Yet political expediency hardly suffices to explain their approach. It is one thing to form alliances between groups, and another to propose that the fundamental category that defines a movement does not break down along racial lines. A different passage in the same editorial expresses the foundations for the movement’s treatment of “black”: The essence of what I am saying is that the term “black” must be seen in its right context. No new category is being created but a “re-Christening” is taking place. We are merely refusing to be regarded as non-persons and claim the right to be called positively. No one group is exclusively black.28 This builds directly on Fanon’s strategy. Biko recognizes the apartheid authorities as having chosen an uncannily accurate term—“non-white”—for their signs. Unlike the terms “native” or “Bantu,” the term “non-white” openly displays that it is a contrastive term, one that marks a category in opposition to the base case. This term also makes it clear—even more than is apparent with a term like “native” or “nè gre”—that the category it denotes is part of an interdefined pair, white/non-white. In the last section, I stressed one important point of difference between Biko and Fanon. Rather than a lack of recognition, Biko focuses on a lack of agency at the heart of apartheid. This difference, however, is tied to another equally

108  Brian Epstein important one. In Fanon, the lack of recognition is associated with the singularity of anti-black racism. While Biko draws on Fanon’s insight, this singularity is not the foundation on which he builds his diagnosis or categorization. In identifying the category non-white as involving a withholding of agency, Biko identifies a different group as the one whose agency has been withheld: all those whom the apartheid authorities categorize as non-white. Biko’s aim in introducing the category black is to break out of the white/nonwhite dichotomy, replacing the category non-white with one that is neither derivative nor negative. In his agency-centered understanding of that dichotomy, I will suggest, he already avoids the internal paradox that arises for Fanon. But his more important aim is to solve Fanon’s problem of action or remediation: in generating a category that is not the negation of a “base case,” he is also able to show what actions are to be taken.

Fundamentality and negativity in categories In formal logic, negation operates at the level of sentences or formulas: to say “The window is not opaque” is to deny the proposition that the window is opaque. It is not to introduce a new property, not-opaque, and apply that to the window. To be sure, we can make sense of the property not-opaque should we want to—but if so, it is best understood as a complement rather than a negation. That is, given some domain of application (such as the set of windows or the set of objects in general), opaque and not-opaque divide the domain in two. That does not make not-opaque a negation: just as not-opaque is the complement of opaque, not-notopaque (i.e., opaque) is the complement of not-opaque. This point is even clearer if we call the two categories “opaque” and “transparent.” If opaque is the same as not-transparent, and transparent is the same as not-opaque, then which is supposed to be the negative one? It makes no sense to regard one of these categories as “negative” or “a negation.” How, then, are we to understand the “negativity” of nè gre and of non-white? When Fanon reveals that nè gre should be understood as a negative category, he clearly is doing something different than dividing humanity into two groups. As we have noted, the categories white and nè gre are not even complements, since even on a racist categorization many people fall into neither one nor the other. Moreover, even if they were, their complementarity would fail to capture the ontological asymmetry between white and nè gre. Nè gre is not just a different category from white, but one that is ontologically derivative or subsidiary. Recent work in metaphysics gives us tools for exploring the idea that one category may be more “fundamental” than another. We can extend this to help clarify the idea that one category may be a “base case” and another a kind of derivative negation of the first. Categories and properties are often analyzed in terms of the “necessary and sufficient conditions” for an object to be a member of a category or to possess a property. For instance, an object has the property being a bachelor if and only if that object is a man and is also unmarried. To many philosophers, giving necessary

Biko on non-white and black  109 and sufficient conditions has seemed to be the way to give a full accounting of the nature of a category. One problem with this (noted as far back as Plato’s Euthyphro) is the symmetry between the defining properties and the defined properties. With only necessary and sufficient conditions, there would be nothing to stop us from analyzing the category unmarried man in terms of bachelor, rather than the other way around. Yet it seems that these two are not exactly symmetrical: it seems that the property being a bachelor is “built out of” being unmarried and being a man. That is, bachelor seems less “fundamental” than unmarried and man, and for that matter unmarried seems less fundamental than married. One kind of fundamentality that metaphysicians have begun to explore regards certain facts being more fundamental than other facts.29 The fact that John is a bachelor, for instance, obtains because John is an unmarried man. In contrast, the fact that John is an unmarried man does not obtain because John is a bachelor.30 A less-explored but more pertinent kind of fundamentality has to do with the social construction of categories. An inquiry into social construction asks: What explains the fact that bachelor is a social category? What facts about the world and about our society set up bachelor to be one of our social categories? These are questions about a different kind of metaphysical explanation. In contrast to the questions, What are the contours of X? What conditions does an object need to satisfy in order to fall into category X?, the inquiry into social construction asks, In virtue of what is category X carved out to have the contours it does?31 A second and different kind of fundamentality, then, arises in the context of social construction: new categories are not socially constructed out of the blue, but make use of old existing categories. One category is more fundamental than another category, in this sense, if facts about the first are involved in socially constructing the second. These two kinds of fundamentality—in the building blocks of social facts and in the construction of social categories—open the door to several ways that categories can be negations or oppositional. A useful way to understand the fundamentality of white with respect to nè gre, as well as nè gre being a negative or oppositional category, is as a matter of how they are respectively socially constructed. Likewise for the fundamentality of white with respect to non-white and the negativity of non-white. To see this it is useful to elaborate a bit on how the categories white and nè gre are socially constructed following Fanon’s approach, and white and non-white following Biko’s. We can see Fanon’s account as involving a sequence of derivative constructions, starting with the category human, then setting up the category white as appropriating that preceding category, and then building the category nè gre in opposition to white. For each of these categories, we can profile the facts that generate or socially construct them. As I described earlier, Fanon draws on Hegel’s account of the construction of human (or of self-conscious): the facts that generate this category include the processes of struggle and mutual recognition. This constructed category human carries along with it a variety of norms and default ways its members are to be treated. Members immediately belong to the community and are recognized by default. The constructed category white is built

110  Brian Epstein atop the category human: white is set up by attitudes, practices, and structures in which people with white skin are treated according to those norms and defaults. For Fanon, the category nè gre is constructed by more than just the practices and structures by which whites appropriate the category human. The singularity of anti-black racism involves not just a contrast, but a denial or rejection of the applicability of the norms and defaults that accompany humanity specifically to people with black skin. The denial or negativity in the construction of the category nè gre consists in specifically counteracting—through attitudes and face-to-face interactions—the norms and defaults of humanity that white is set up to have. In some ways the case of Biko’s non-white is clearer: the withholding of agency by structures of apartheid is less abstract than the face-to-face withholding of recognition. At the same time, however, it is easier in the case of Biko’s non-white to be misled with regard to the sort of “negativity” or “negation” involved in it. Unlike Fanon’s categories, the South African categories white and non-white are complements in the logical sense: they apportion all people into those two categories without overlap. This risks obscuring the point that Biko’s treatment of the opposition of these two categories is much like Fanon’s: in particular, nonwhite is derivative with regard to white, and it is socially constructed as negative in a similar way. It is true that white and non-white have complementary extensions, but this is not the main way in which non-white is a derivative and negative category. Casting Biko’s approach in a similar sequence, the apartheid category white is constructed with the aim of appropriating agency, i.e., the category to which individuals who act freely in the world, subject to ordinary constraints, belong. Agent, in the base case, is set up by practices and social structures in which individuals understand themselves to act, exercise their own capacities, and accommodate others in their exercise of theirs. Even in struggling against one another, agents understand the agency of others and treat them as such. Connected to this are norms as to how it is rational to act in order to get things accomplished in the world. The category white, then, is set up in such a way as to appropriate agency entirely on behalf of a particular group of people, where the mutual norms associated with agency apply to and only to whites. In apartheid it is clear how this is done: social, legal, and physical structures and practices are put in place so that whites exclusively have the capacities of agents and are subject to the norms of agency. The construction of the category non-white is derivative. Facts about white— that there is such a constructed category, that certain people are marked out as belonging to it, that it is constructed so as to be associated by default with the norms and powers of agents—figure into the construction of non-white. Other features of apartheid society also figure into the construction of the category nonwhite, such as structural impediments to the exercise of agency, laws, business structures, educational institutions, geographic placement of populations, and transportation systems. And psychological facts also figure into the construction of non-white: the alienation and sense of incapacity that are generated by the structural constraints feed back into the construction of a category in which

Biko on non-white and black  111 agency is undercut. Together these construct non-white as a category that counteracts the potential of non-whites to exercise agency. In describing both Fanon’s and Biko’s accounts of social construction, I have left one important aspect of the social construction of the category white to the side: namely, the reciprocal derivativeness of white on nè gre or on non-white. Even if white is constructed to be the “base case,” it is not yet a racialized category, nor is it salient that it is marked, until it is set up in confrontation with the “derivative case.” Moreover, the facts that figure into the social construction of white are affected reciprocally by the social construction of nè gre and non-white. Thus it is a simplification to regard white as strictly fundamental and nè gre and non-white as strictly derivative. Still, it would be a bigger distortion to emphasize the interdefinition of the categories in Fanon and Biko. Fanon is explicitly rejecting the prevailing interpretation of the master-slave relationship in which the two involve genuine reciprocity. Rather, he diagnoses anti-black racism as fundamentally asymmetric. Likewise, Biko regards white apartheid society as making use of non-white labor to its advantage, but the fact that whites are able to exercise agency is not explained to a significant degree in terms of a story of reciprocal definition. Even though the apartheid category white is to some extent constructed by its opposition to the category non-white, that is not a central part of the account. Even more importantly, Biko in particular does not much concern himself with a diagnosis or definition of the category white. His concern is the replacement of the white/non-white field of categories with a different one.

Biko’s category black The inclusiveness of Biko’s category black is one of its most striking characteristics. Some theorists have gone so far as to argue that even whites can be black in Biko’s sense—Xolela Mangcu, for instance, proposes that whites who “pass” as black, or who are born into black communities, fit Biko’s definition.32 But though this interpretation comports with Biko’s rejection of traditional racial lines in the category, the definition explicitly rules this out: the category applies to those who are discriminated against by law or tradition.33 More importantly, to broaden Biko’s definition conflicts with his central philosophical move. The transformation from non-white to black does not change the extension of the category, i.e., the people to whom the category applies. Rather, that transformation is precisely designed to preserve that extension. This is the sense in which, as the SASO editorial clarified, “no new category is being created but a ‘re-Christening’ is taking place. We are merely refusing to be regarded as non-persons and claim the right to be called positively. No one group is exclusively black.” The category black does not divide off certain people from the category non-white according to the color of their skin, or according to the African-ness of their ancestry, or even according to their attitudes. How can the category black have the same extension as non-white—i.e., have the exact same people who fall into one category fall into another—and yet be an importantly different category? And how can we square this idea with Biko’s

112  Brian Epstein characterization of black as involving radically different psychological attitudes than does non-white? Biko sets up black as a non-derivative category. It is not a counterpart or negation of a prior category of whiteness, which was set up as having the powers of agency by default. But he also recognizes that it makes no sense to construct an idealized category out of thin air, pretending that race-based structures of oppression do not exist and that all we need to do is adopt a hopeful non-racial humanism. Like non-white, the category black is historically and geographically situated. It is partly constructed by the apartheid impediments to the exercise of agency—laws, geography, etc. Considering the actual impediments to agency in the context, we see that they apply exactly to those people that apartheid defines as non-white. This explains why the extension of the category black is the same as the extension of non-white. The extension of black is complementary to that of white because social structures and existing conditions are drawn—in the real-world apartheid context—along the lines of white/non-white. These actual conditions and structures in society, as well as the history of discrimination, figure into carving out the category black to have the extension it does. Still, carving out the category black in part on the basis of structures of oppression is different than carving it out as a derivative category to white. Given that they are both socially constructed by the apartheid context, black and non-white are closely related to one another. But they are not constructed by all the same facts, or in the same way as one another. In the construction of black as distinct from non-white, the psychological facts do make a crucial difference, and we need to disentangle several roles that psychological facts play in Biko’s account. The two sets of psychological states Biko mentions are the alienation, self-doubt, and sense of lack of agency associated with living under the apartheid system (what I will call the “negative states”) and the feeling of defiance and sense of agency in the struggle against apartheid (the “positive states”). The negative states are involved in two feedback mechanisms: they are caused by the structures of apartheid and reinforce those structures, and they also causally reinforce themselves. The negative states are also involved in the construction of the category non-white: they are part of what sets non-white up as the nonagentive counterpart to white. Putting forward an analysis of non-white as Biko does also has psychological consequences. Making people aware of the category non-white is jarring and—it must be acknowledged—potentially even hurtful to the people oppressed in the apartheid system. When a person applies the term “non-white” to him- or herself, it indicates acquiescence or even complicity with the apartheid categorization of humanity. Yet people had no choice but to classify themselves as such. Dozens of times a day, in the course of ordinary activities, one would have had to follow the signage and classify oneself as non-white. Under pain of violence, it would have been impossible to avoid this repeated self-classification. Accepting Biko’s definition means being in a continual state of self-reproach.

Biko on non-white and black  113 Biko was not of course suggesting that individuals had the power on their own to ignore apartheid restrictions or that they should pointlessly suffer apartheid violence, only to be forced to conform anyway. He was, however, suggesting that this sort of self-reproach was different from the negative psychology that leads to acquiescence. Recognizing the inappropriateness of this self-classification is already to take on a kind of agency. Biko treats the attitude of defiance not only as the appropriate response to this enforced self-classification, but also as the likely outcome of being made aware of it. The positive psychological states, then, are in part caused by awareness of the negative states and their role in the construction of the category non-white. The positive states are part of what sets up the category black, and here too there is a feedback mechanism: awareness of the character of the category black reinforces the positive states. The positive states, in turn, have causal consequences: they lead to action that challenges apartheid structures, and also counteract the negative states, which diminishes the extent to which those states buttress apartheid. If Biko is correct to claim that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” then it is plausible to hypothesize that provoking a changed psychological response—first the response of being aware of the repeated self-classification into the apartheid category, second the response of defiance—is a potent counter-weapon in the hands of the oppressed. Earlier I stressed Biko’s discussion of practical constraints as central to the deprivation of agency under apartheid. It is not just psychological facts, but material ones, that set up the category white as having the powers and norms of agency by default, and that deprive the category non-white of those powers and norms. Biko’s approach does put significant weight on a changed psychology as setting up a category that overturns these norms and powers. In this he is influenced— perhaps too much—by Sartre’s confidence in the ability of individual choice to affect the nature of the individual. But it is also possible to see Biko as putting forward a causal hypothesis: that changes in attitudes are likely to cascade into changed actions and changed structures, so that while they do not immediately lead to the elimination of structures of oppression, they do at least lead to the genuine exercise of agency even in the face of that oppression. The category black remains problematic: like non-white, it is set up in part by the oppressive structures of the apartheid context, and would not be a category at all without that history and background. Yet, even while acknowledging that context, it aims to strip away from non-white the deprivation of agency which is itself largely a product of those structures. Biko’s analysis also circumvents the two difficulties that Fanon faces. The paradox in Fanon’s analysis arises from humans having their humanity withheld. There is nothing inherently paradoxical, on the other hand, about the idea in Biko that people can be agents and yet be fully deprived of their capacity to act. Likewise, Biko’s approach provides a clearer route to changing this situation, and rectifying the deprivation of agency. Fanon’s analysis left little room for rational improvements to oppressive structures of mutual recognition. Changing a near-complete deprivation of agency—as Biko advocates—may

114  Brian Epstein require radical changes in structures and attitudes, but it is clearer what changes can serve this aim. Even psychological changes alone hold promise in this regard.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that Biko makes two philosophical innovations in his definitions: first, the shift from analyzing the negative counterpart to white in terms of the withholding of recognition to an analysis in terms of the deprivation of agency; and second, the construction of an improved category, one that is neither derivative nor negative (in the senses I have tried to clarify). I want to emphasize the significance of this second innovation. The critique of concepts and socially constructed categories has been central to philosophical inquiry since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Marx and Nietzsche in particular are associated with the “hermeneutics of suspicion”—removing the veneer of naturalness or goodness associated with commonplace social categories and revealing their oppressive cores. Fanon’s work on the phenomenology of Né gritude can be seen in part as a brilliant contribution to this tradition. A continual difficulty with work along these lines, however, is the next move, subsequent to the critique. There is a temptation simply to erase or dispose of a problematic category, without taking a practical look at the plausibility and consequences of such an erasure. Or instead to propose a utopian set of categories that do not reflect the structural conditions on the ground. Or else to retreat to an earlier—often idealized—historical scheme. None of these are options for Biko: if his philosophical work is to have any practical use at all, he needs to replace the apartheid field of categories with one that is an ethical improvement, aspirational without being unrealistic, and sensitive to existing conditions. Magaziner (2010:42) comments that Biko at times appears to forget Fanon’s critique of Sartre, and instead to agree with Sartre’s characterization of Né gritude as the “weak term” in a dialectical process that leads to a non-racial future.34 It is surely right to observe that Sartre’s narrative is distasteful and overly teleological. Still, it is reasonable for Biko to remain uncommitted to a vision of exactly how things will play out in the long term, especially if structures of oppression can be overcome. It is not just unproductive, but counterproductive, to insist on a narrative that predicts and imposes an ultimate or eventual set of social categories. To do so would force the first step—the amelioration of an existing category—to conform to a fanciful narrative about the future. Will structures of oppression be completely eliminated? Will racial categories become irrelevant, and would that be an improvement? Hard to say in the long term, but in the short term it would be foolish to pretend that structures of oppression are not carved into the geography of the nation. For Biko, the category black does not need to be constructed as a component of some ultimate or final scheme, nor as a stepping stone to some other scheme he aims at. Instead, it is an improvement, a replacement of an oppressive set of categories by a better one, as one element of a set of actions to take against South African apartheid.35

Biko on non-white and black  115

Notes 1 Biko 2004 ([1978], p. 52). 2 See, for instance, More (2008, 2014); Gordon (2008). 3 Hull (2016). 4 These colleges, instituted by the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, were Ngoye, Turfloop, Fort Hare (which had previously been somewhat open), Bellville, and Durban Westville. See Lapping (1986). 5 See for instance the Tomlinson Commission report (Tomlinson 1955), Dubow (1995). 6 Horrell (1958). 7 More (2014, pp. 174–5) discusses the appropriation of the term “black” by BCM theorists, in parallel to the re-appropriation of the term “nè gre” by Né gritude theorists in France (cf. Cé saire 1972 [1955], p. 74). Biko discusses the choice and connotations of the word “black” for BCM in his testimony in the BPC (Black People’s Convention)SASO trial of 1976 (see Biko 2004 [1978], pp. 114–18). 8 I am grateful to George Hull and Danwood Chirwa for discussion of this point. 9 Haslanger (2000, 2014). 10 Fanon (2008 [1952], p. 192). 11 This was largely due to the work of Kojè ve and Hyppolite. 12 Fanon (2008 [1952], p. 195 n. 10). 13 Fanon (2008 [1952], p. 93). 14 Fanon (2008 [1952], pp. xii–xiv). 15 Fanon (2008 [1952], p. 196). 16 Fanon (2004 [1961]). 17 Preceding the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, the Afrikaans-language universities were already limited to white students, as was Rhodes University. Witwatersrand, UCT, and Natal, however, had been somewhat open in their admission. The 1959 Act ended that practice. 18 The Bantu Education Act of 1953 shuttered nearly all mission schools, which had educated the vast majority of the black population in South Africa, replacing them with segregated schools funded by a limited tax base and staffed by teachers who had not themselves finished high school. 19 Biko testimony in May 1976 SASO-BPC trial (Biko 2004 [1978], p. 119). 20 Biko (2004 [1978], p. 112). 21 Biko (2004 [1978], p. 83). 22 Lembede (1946); see also Fatton (1986). 23 Biko (2004 [1978], p. 111). 24 Biko (2004 [1978], p. 74). 25 Lembede (1946). 26 There is some evidence that Biko regarded Black Consciousness to be the “true liberalism,” eventually attaining a fully integrated non-racial synthesis (Cf. Magaziner 2010, p. 42). 27 SASO (September 1970, p. 2). 28 SASO (September 1970, p. 2). 29 In the recent literature, this is often treated using the “grounding” relation. (See Rosen 2010; Fine 2012.) 30 In speaking of “because,” it is critical to note that some becauses and explanations are metaphysical, and some are causal. The fact John is an unmarried man does not cause John to be a bachelor. The word “because” in the above paragraph indicates a metaphysical connection—a connection between the nature of bachelorhood and the nature of unmarried-man-hood—not a causal one. Contrast this with the sentence “John is a bachelor because he made a firm decision never to get married.” In that sentence, the word “because” indicates a causal explanation. 31 I discuss this distinction in Epstein (2015, 2016).

116  Brian Epstein 32 Xolela Mangcu (City Press, 5-Jul-2015). 33 Exactly how this point goes may actually depend on which South African laws we consider, as they do not all define the legal categories equivalently. The “general acceptance” condition in the Population Registration Act of 1950, for instance, might rule out the possibility of “passing.” The overall point, however, is that while Biko rules out skin color as a criterion for blackness, it nonetheless enters the definition by the inclusion of discrimination according to the law, which is at least in part done on the basis of skin color. 34 Sartre (1948). 35 I am grateful to George Hull for extensive discussion and for stimulating many of the ideas explored in this chapter. I also am grateful to audiences at the University of Cape Town, especially Danwood Chirwa, Bernhard Weiss, and Josh Davis, and at the University of Oslo.

References Alcoff, L. M. (2006). Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. New York: Oxford University Press. Alcoff, L. M., R. R. Sundstrom, G. Beckles-Raymond, M. A. Oshana, J. L. Vest, N. Zack, J. Garcia, C. Simpson, T. J. Golden and J. D. Hill (2016). Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Biko, B. S. (2004 [1978]). I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Picador Africa. Cé saire, A. (1972 [1955]). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Cherki, A. (2006 [2000]). Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dubow, S. (1995). Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Epstein, B. (2015). The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press. Epstein, B. (2016). A Framework for Social Ontology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 46(2), 146–76. Fanon, F. (2004 [1961]). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (2008 [1952]). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fatton, R. (1986). Black Consciousness in South Africa. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Fine, K. (2012). Guide to Ground. In F. Correia and B. Schnieder (eds.), Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality (pp. 37–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gendzier, I. (1973). Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Pantheon. Gordon, L. R. (1993). Racism as a Form of Bad Faith. APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience: American Philosophical Association. Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. New York: Humanity Books. Gordon, L. R. (2008). A Phenomenology of Biko's Black Consciousness. In A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N. Gibson (eds.), Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko (pp. 83–94). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, L. R. (2015). What Fanon Said: An Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Haslanger, S. (2000). Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them To Be? Noû s, 34(1), 31–55. Haslanger, S. (2014). Race, Intersectionality, and Method: A Reply to Critics. Philosophical Studies, 171, 109–19. Haslanger, S. and J. Saul (2006). Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 80, 89–143.

Biko on non-white and black  117 Horrell, M. (1958). Race Classification in South Africa: Its Effects on Human Beings. Johannesburg: Institute of Race Relations. Hull, G. (2016). Black Consciousness as Overcoming Hermeneutical Injustice. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 33(4), 573–92. James, M. (2017). Race. In: E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Jones, K. (2014). Intersectionality and Ameliorative Analyses of Race and Gender. Philosophical Studies, 171(1), 99–107. Lapping, B. (1986). Apartheid: A History. London: Grafton. Lembede, A. (1946). Policy of the Congress Youth League. In Freedom in Our Lifetime: The Collected Writings of Anton Muziwakhe Lembede (ed. R. Edgar & L. ka Msumza), Athens, Johannesburg & Bellville: Ohio University Press, Skotaville Publishers & Mayibuye Books, pp. 90–93. Lloyd, V. M. (2003). Steve Biko and the Subversion of Race. Philosophia Africana, 6(2), 19–35. Lotter, H. (1992). The Intellectual Legacy of Stephen Bantu Biko (1946–1977). Acta Academica, 24. Magaziner, D. (2010). The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciouness in South Africa, 1968–1977. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Mangcu, X. (2014). Biko: A Life. London: I.B. Tauris. McPherson, L. (2015). Deflating ‘Race’. Journal of the American Philosophical Associa­ tion, 1(4), 674–93. Mills, C. W. (1998). Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. More, M. P. (2008). Biko: Africana Existentialist Philosopher. In A. Mngxitama, A. Alexander and N. Gibson (eds.), Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko (pp. 45–68). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. More, M. P. (2010). Gordon and Biko. Philosophia Africana, 13(2), 71–88. More, M. P. (2014). The Intellectual Foundations of the Black Consciousness Movement. In P. Vale, L. Hamilton and E. Prinsloo (eds.), Intellectual Traditions in South Africa (pp. 173–96). Pietermartizburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Peller, G. (2012). Critical Race Consciousness. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Read, A. (ed.) (1996). The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Seattle: Bay Press. Rosen, G. (2010). Metaphysical Dependence: Grounding and Reduction. In B. Hale and A. Hoffman (eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, Logic, and Epistemology (pp. 109–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J. P. (1948). Orphé e Noir. In L. S. Senghor (ed.), Anthologie de la nouvelle poé sie nè gre et malgache de langue franç aise. Paris: É ditions des PUF. SASO (September 1970). SASO Newsletter. Durban: South African Students Organization. Sithole, T. (2016). Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Tabensky, P. A. (2008). The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27(4), 285–95. Tomlinson, F. R. (1955). Summary of the Report of the Commission tor the SocioEconomic Development of the Bantu Areas within the Union of South Africa. Pretoria: The Government Printer. Woods, D. (1978). Biko. New York: Paddington Press.

6

Black autarchy/white domination Fractured language and racial politics during Apartheid and beyond via Biko and Lyotard Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi

1 – Sergio – Jean-Franç ois Lyotard defines the concept of differend in his book The Differend: Phrases in Dispute as follows: “as distinguished from a litigation, a differend [diffé rend in French] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (Lyotard 1988: xi). A litigation in Lyotard’s universe can always be resolved because both parties implicitly acknowledge each other’s claims to be legitimate. In this sense, the “damage” of a litigation can be quantified and compensated since both parties share and agree on the same judging criteria. As such, the philosophical form that best illustrates the presupposition of mutual recognition at work in a litigation is “dialogue”. A “wrong”, which structures a differend, is produced when the plaintiff does not own one or more genres of discourse which would enable the wrong she suffered to be established. Or again, there is a wrong every time a plaintiff has to prove in court the injustice she suffered by only using the genre of discourse of her perpetrators. 1 – Mbongisi – The differend is defined as “a case of conflict …  that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both parties”. Biko, I suggest, would have been most interested in the last part, the lack of a universal rule. Indeed, it is the non- applicability of a universal rule between the oppressed and the oppressor that is at the heart of the black consciousness (BC) philosophy. If the “first truth”, the grounding principle of a BC philosophy, is both that the oppressed exists in an emptied-of-humanity state, and that this philosophy requires that the oppressed starts from this emptiness if she is to be her own liberator, then we can begin to appreciate how deep the lack of a universal rule reaches between the black oppressed and the white oppressor. When the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) was founded, with this emptiness as an ideological basis for its liberation efforts, the Apartheid government mistakenly assumed that the BC was accepting of its ideological position. From Apartheid’s ideological perspective, the African was incapable of philosophy in general, let alone a philosophy capable of formulating first principles. And so, as far as they were concerned, Black Consciousness was nothing more than the kaffir awakening to the wisdom of Apartheid ideology. For them, then, separate development, and

Black autarchy/white domination  119 not emptiness, was the basis of the BC philosophy. If we accept that the BC first truth is a perspective that must be occupied “before …  start[ing] on any program designed to change the status quo” (Biko 1978: 29, emphasis mine), we might have some sympathy for the Apartheid mistake. Without the perspective afforded by the “first truth”, we could not expect the proponents of Apartheid to have seen the world as it appeared to those who had it as their basis. 2 – Sergio – I understand Lyotard’s general approach to epistemology, language and politics as tragic: every time we need to take a decision about the legitimacy between two conflicting claims, we find ourselves in a position in which “a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general”. It is this universal lack of legitimacy that gives a tragic tone to The Differend. A specific end determines a specific genre of discourse, which in turn organises the phrase regimen rules. Phrases and sentences are positioned by phrase regimen rules, whatever the end may be—ethical, cognitive, logical or narrative. An end sets up its own argumentative chains, employing phrases which are easily linked together as they arise and remain in the chosen genre of discourse. Within the same genre of discourse, a conflict on how to link phrases is tempered as they serve the same end, the very same master. But the moment a phrase has been linked to the previous one, it always carries in itself the possibility of a differend, as the arbitrariness of parataxis is the backbone of what we name Lyotard’s agonistic atomism: [i]n the absence of a phrase regimen or of a genre of discourse that enjoys a universal authority to decide, does not the linkage (whichever one it is) necessarily wrong the regimens or genres whose possible phrases remain unactualized? (Lyotard 1988: xii) 2 – Mbongisi – If, as Biko, quoting Kaunda, approvingly suggests, it is true that Africans “allow both the rational and non-rational elements to make an impact upon them” (Biko 1978: 44, all emphasis mine), then we can begin to understand why the same African does not “recognize any conceptual cleavage between the natural and the supernatural” (ibid., emphasis mine). The difficulty of expressing such a world consistently in language is also immediately visible. Such a world is a shifting unidentifiable nothing. If we centralize these concepts—“experience”; “recognize”; “allow”—in Biko’s thinking, we might be able to suggest the point Biko is making: the African recognizes the world he experiences because he conceptually allows himself that world. Central to grasping the expression of this world, then, is the man who allows, and what he allows, over the identifiability of the object so expressed. If the African is to express that world in language, the African will need a conceptual apparatus that centralizes this allowance. Language is, here, subordinated to allowance. Now, one of the main difficulties facing the black consciousness philosopher has always been linking this experience to a language tailored for a discriminating and dis-allowing experience of

120  Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi the world. Biko also reads Aimé  Cé saire’s resignation letter approvingly, when he writes: The peculiarity of our place in the world is not to be confused with anyone else’s. The peculiarity of our problems which aren’t to be reduced to subordinate forms of any other problems …  the peculiarity of our culture, which we intend to live and to make live in an ever realer manner. (Biko 1978: 67, quoting Aimé  Cé saire’s 1956 letter of resignation from the French Communist Party) If we centralize these concepts—“peculiarity”; “confusion”; “subordinate”—and the intention to “make live” in Biko’s thinking, we might further stretch Biko’s suggested point: the reduction of the African’s world to either one of the two, natural or supernatural, is the same as not allowing himself one or the other. Language, though still subordinate to allowance, will reflect this non-allowance of one or the other. Language will make “ever realer” a world that will reflect this allowance that dis-allows the making of one or the other, but not both. If “we” decide that a problem is, for example, natural and not supernatural, a decision about both what the problem is and what the problem is not, has been reached. A natural problem must be expressed in a grammar consistent with the natural. 3 – Sergio – Genres of discourse are simply political decisions on how to link phrases and sentences. In this sense, politics becomes the problematic conflict of how phrases have been linked, of how to do it. In the book The Differend, phrasal linkage is an ontological necessity: what exists always needs to be discussed and validated through phrases and sentences. And this ontological necessity implies an agonistic politics as its unavoidable consequence. Validation, that is a norming judgment or, better, a legitimising judgment, instead of reconciling the political dispute, increases the conflicts it should supposedly neutralise. The conflict between a prescriptive phrase and a cognitive one is deep-rooted, according to Lyotard: “simply because a referent is established as real it does not follow that one ought to say or do something in regard to it” (Lyotard 1988: 30). 3 – Mbongisi – Since this chapter is not doing black consciousness philosophy, it can put the various ways in which that philosophy grapples with solving its chosen difficulty aside. This chapter is not, for example, arguing for the conceptual apparatus needed to express a world that lacks identifiable individuals, nor is it going into an “infinite regress” that would allow for the emergence of such a world. This chapter turns, instead, to foregrounding Biko’s liberal i.e. to foregrounding a world that is linear and progressive. In other words, a world in which “[the oppressed] will compete with [the oppressed], using each other as rungs up a step ladder leading them to [the oppressor’s] values” (Biko 1978: 91). Biko’s liberals are “that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms” (op. cit.: 20). Because they “too feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks”, they argue that they, too, “should be jointly involved in the black man’s struggle for a place under the sun” (ibid.). In actual fact, Biko’s liberal is a “black soul …  wrapped up in [a] white skin” (ibid.).

Black autarchy/white domination  121 4 – Sergio – Any linguistic happening calls for a decision on what name or genre of discourse should be used to link it. Thus, when that decision has been made, it necessarily does wrong to what it excludes from the “actuality” field. Delegitimation is the unseen laterality of a political decision about what name should be used and which genre should be put into effect in order to give face and directions to phrases. Politics becomes the problem of the concatenation of phrases as their delegitimation may happen at any connection. Moreover, Lyotard’s agonistic atomism could not be atomistic had not it been an untranscendental field of conflict between phrases. Phrases in the book The Differend emerge from nothing: “phrasing takes place in the lack of being of that about which there is a phrase” (Lyotard 1988: 22). An atomism that presents toujours dé jà  (always-already) a clash in every emergence of phrase. In this sense, the void between phrases puts them on the same level. Both Biko’s phrase and apartheid’s phrase emerge from the same void of legitimacy, no matter how hard the apartheid genre of discourse tries to delegitimise Biko’s phrase for its lack of scientific development, semantic precision or logical validity. 4 – Mbongisi – Is Biko’s liberal notion too strong? If it is, Biko’s liberal also gives a strong response to Biko’s central concern: why should the oppressor help the oppressed in removing the oppression that privileges the oppressor? This strong version responds: “I, like you, am as oppressed by these conditions. I too seek liberation; it is in my best interest to remove these conditions.” It is difficult to see how weaker versions could respond without appealing to a notion of justice that, ultimately, masks the privileged position from which they argue. When Biko asks his liberal to practice his identification with the oppressed, to “do something like stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs like all blacks or deny …  and denounce all provisions that make [him] privileged”, and gets the answer, “but that’s unrealistic!” (Biko 1978: 23), it is doubtful that the weaker-version liberal would even get to the point where asking that question would be anything but a non sequitur. Now, having declared black actuality to be unreal, the liberals start “playing their old game …  claiming a monopoly on intelligence and moral judgment”, by “setting the pace and pattern for the realization of the black man’s aspiration” (op. cit.: 21). The liberal now starts at the beginning, at the root of the problem, the mess that is the inchoate, contradictory, devoid-of-identifiable-individuals black world. The liberal imposes order on it, through a language that fosters a discriminatory, progressive world. Now, he tells Biko, “the situation is a class struggle rather than a racial one” (op. cit.: 89). If a “Hegelian theory of dialectical materialism” (op. cit.: 51) tracks the progression of an Idea, or a social formation as it rationally progresses, the black experience, reduced into this form, is also shaped by this new language capable of expressing this progression. And so, though sympathetic, the leading liberal must insist that this new language better expresses a real historical problem. So expressed, the liberal adds, the black experience is divested of distracting imprecisions that impede a march into the future. 5 – Sergio – Lyotard’s agonistic atomism would not be agonistic without a phrasal conflict that is unavoidable in itself: “contact is necessary ..., it is necessary to link onto a phrase that happens (be it by a silence, which is a phrase) ...

122  Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi How to link is contingent” (Lyotard 1988: 29). Regarding a phrase, or what Lyotard calls “the undoubted”, we only know that it presents one or more universes, whereby the four instances it enables (the referent, the addressor, the addressee and the sense) are always subjected to equivocity in terms of meaning and intentionality when they move from one sentence to another, from one regimen and genre to another. Any metalanguage, even the one employed by Lyotard in his book The Differend, works on phrases understood as definitions or “occurrences” always-already neutralised in their happening qua phrases. The first presentation or originary occurrence always needs another phrase to be isolated, explained or defined. This linguistic act is what deprives the very first phrase of actuality as first event-phrase, a phrase that in order to happen had to necessarily veil, obscure and eclipse every other possible phrase. The metalinguistic request of reading a phrase according to the definitional code is legitimate; but, for this reason, it orders logical and cognitive regimens as privileged. Thus, Lyotard explains: “you command me to link onto it with a metalinguistic definitional phrase. You have the right to do so. But know that you are making a command” (Lyotard 1988: 69). Apartheid racial politics can claim to link its phrases to black phrases according to their best possible implementation that is logical and cognitive, but when it does that, apartheid is already neutralising the occurrence of black phrases as any metalanguage does. 5 – Mbongisi – But the problem of whites clarifying black problems, as if only white understanding is clear enough to be expressed, is the very reason Biko moved away from the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to form SASO. The language of a clearer, whiter problem comes with an either/or world that made no allowances for choice, and certainly had no space for contradictions. These contradictions based on emptiness were at odds with the contradictions based on the preservation of progress. And so, while the rest of the world was progressing, and in the process entrenching solveable problems that the liberal is equipped to solve if he were to take the BC philosopher seriously, the liberal would have been expected to spend time grasping, not solving, the contradictory world of black allowances. Says Biko: An example of this … was again during the old days of NUSAS where students would be something you as a black man have experienced in your day to day life, but your powers of articulation are not as good as theirs … You may be intelligent, but not as articulate, you are forced into a subservient role of having to say yes to what they are saying, talking about what you have experienced, which they have not experienced, because you cannot express it so well … You tend to think it is not just a matter of language, you tend to tie it up also with intelligence … . (Biko 1978: 107) And so the black experiencer is silenced at the level of language. It is as if just because she is struggling to articulate her experience of her world to language, she is not experiencing at all. This linguistic silencing, through reduction and confusion, forces the black experiencer into a white world.

Black autarchy/white domination  123 6 – Sergio – What genre should be privileged to link, then? Here is politics. Politics understood as a judgment of opportunity on the specific linkage chosen against any other—a judgment put forward in the general absence of legitimacy. Each decision on how to link and sort phrases out can follow a rule, but these decisions rest on a constant void of legitimacy—how to judge, then? Not to mention ambiguous phrases and sentences that “co-present several universes”. Lyotard asks us: “Which is the pertinent linkage?” (Lyotard 1988: 81). For us, here is politics, again. How should we link black phrases to white phrases during and beyond apartheid? 6 – Mbongisi – In the white world, the black student is forced to accept that the white student grasps the thing that is experienced better. Otherwise, why is the white student able to express all experiences so much better? The black experience, first reduced, then disappears in the grammar of the white student. This disappearance is just one more thing that makes up the black experience of a white world, a world in which “There is no [questioning] the validity of white values” (Biko 1978: 89). If we centralize the concept of validity in Biko’s thinking, we might be able to argue here that the disappearance is facilitated by form. We know, from elementary logic, that the form of the argument precedes, and structures, the truth of the propositions that are the content of the form. The truth of propositions can so easily disappear in, or be masked by, invalid forms. But, argues Biko, so much more has disappeared for the oppressed in the valid forms of the white liberal. 7 – Sergio – No genre can mirror better than others a supposed essence of language—not even idiolect, since a private language avoids the prerequisites to make public what it utters or expresses as real.1 Genres of discourse are “stakes” that rank what phrase regimen should be linked. Genres of discourse operate according to opportunity or lack of it. In particular, genres of discourse employ phrase regimens as means, and in this regard Lyotard states: “teleology begins with genres of discourse, not with phrases” (Lyotard 1988: 84). A phrase-atom can always be linked to another one, and for this reason it can always be ranked in a phrase regimen as its primal happening is unpresentable. Phrasing means linking according to a set of rules employed by a specific phrase regimen which in turn is operated by choosing the genre of discourse. It is for this reason that there will always be differend. What needs to be emphasized here is that every phrase regimen (cognitive, prescriptive, evaluative, descriptive, etc.) is incommensurable to another in Lyotard’s philosophy of language: the discursive enactment (mode d’emploi) and presentation of what, for instance, is good and evil (the ethical) treats its addressor, addressee, meaning and referent in a way that is untranslatable when they are being phrased in the cognitive regimen (what is true and false) or in an aesthetic regimen (what is beautiful and ugly). Every phrase regimen “presents” a (phrase) universe in a way that is heterogeneous and untranslatable into any other phrase regimen that has been employed or that has been neglected.2 We can always translate a normative sentence into an aesthetic one, but if the relations of power between the four instances are not negotiated according to the new regimen set of rules—the normative regimen does not

124  Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi treat, in fact, the referent in the same way the cognitive regimen does—then we are wronging the previous regimen as we are performing an asymmetrical negotiation between the regimens and genres of discourse we decided to use. In the book The Differend, the “general agonistics” works on how genres of discourse use and merge together one or more incommensurable phrase regimens in order to achieve their purposes. In this sense, genres of discourse link and connect regimens and phrases in every possible way to be successful and “win” (gagner). To win equals to defeat all the other possible genres of discourse we could have used; to repress ab initio as illegitimate every possible option that could have been chosen; to delegitimise every other possibility that could have been actualised. Genres of discourse need to defeat every other conflicting genre, so they bend, “seduce” and move phrases and phrases’ four instances (addressor, addressee, referent and meaning) according to the best tactics to achieve their ends. The apartheid genre of discourse, deciding that Afrikaans and English were the only available languages with which to construct meaning and truth, had always-already defeated every other black genre of discourse. Of course, during apartheid there were Africans who were masters of either Afrikaans or English. But this is not the issue here—what we want to emphasise is how a wrong suffered by a black victim had, for instance, to be phrased into Afrikaans in order to be acknowledged by the Apartheid judiciary: that particular black wrong then became just a matter of litigation within the Afrikaans genre of discourse. 7 – Mbongisi – Biko, quoting Kaunda, says: The Westerner has an aggressive mentality …  He cannot live with contradictory ideas in his mind; he must settle for the one or the other or else evolve a third idea in his mind which harmonizes or reconciles the other two. And he is vigorously scientific in rejecting solutions for which there is no basis in logic. (Biko 1978: 44) The oppressed, if he was to make it in the white world, had to also choose either the one, or the other, but never both. If, therefore, black consciousness aims to “completely transform the system and to make of it what [the oppressed] wish” (op. cit.: 49), then the world given him must be rejected. That rejection starts not at the truth contained in the world he lives in, but at the allowances that go into constructing a world that will contain one set of truths over another. 8 – Sergio – The political exclusion we observed operating with phrasal atoms is the same with genres of discourse. In this sense, the legitimacy of a genre, when it ranks phrases and phrase regimens, rests on a differend among genres—on a general differend. Every linkage takes place, excluding every other possible one. There is no neutrality in linking, ever. Phrase regimens group up rules to create and then rank phrases according to their particular ways. On the other hand, genres of discourse create specific “modes of linking” to achieve their strategies— whether or not these strategies may observe the regional borders of the phrasal regimens. The negative principle of Lyotard’s The Differend—the absence of a

Black autarchy/white domination  125 “universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres”—has one main consequence: there is neither a genre of genres nor a “supreme genre”. In this sense, politics in Lyotard’s philosophy cannot be the first genre. 8 – Mbongisi – And so, by questioning the validity, and not simply the truth, of white values, Biko takes the first necessary step towards placing the black experience outside the structures, the forms, which give meaning to white values. Long before the oppressed have to make a decision about whether this proposed value is right, or wrong, if this proposed value is founded on the right thinking, or the wrong thinking, the only possible answers are inscribed in the forms that make this and not that world possible. If, then, black consciousness philosophy is to articulate the black experience to a language, black consciousness must allow the oppressed a choice that does not start with the truth already given by the oppressor. And that choice is at a more fundamental level than the truth already operative in the given, oppressive world. 9 – Sergio – Politics in Lyotard is the place where the differends reproduce themselves. In particular, politics is the act of linking and, at the same time, the decision to tie atom-phrases together. In other words, politics is the act of judging how to pass through the vacuum between one atom-phrase and another. Since every linkage takes a particular shape and structure, it necessarily implies a wrong to any other neglected linkage. Every chosen name, every chosen phrase regimen and genre of discourse necessarily produces a harm on a transcendental level: if we decide to phrase “the cat is on the mat” to represent what I see in my room, we are already privileging the cognitive over the ethical, over the aesthetic, over the political etc. Why? And for what purpose? What are the philosophical consequences of this transcendental injustice? In Lyotard’s agonistic atomism, each act of linking results from a decision and, as such, every linkage is produced by a political judgment: “[e]verything is political if politics is the possibility of the differend on the occasion of the slightest linkage” (Lyotard 1988: 139). As we saw, politics is not a genre: politics cannot claim to be a genre because it is only the functional dimension of every linkage, an agonistic feature that always-already takes place in the social. 9 – Mbongisi – Note: this chapter was not aimed at the articulation of the black experience to language as a vehicle of expression. Black consciousness philosophers might yet turn away from language as a vehicle of expression. It might yet be that the African body, as an example of an oppressed body, is the vehicle of expression. Perhaps the broken limbs of the victims of the Apartheid state violence were the vehicle of expression. Perhaps the many forceful thrustings of defenseless bodies into positions where violence can be done to them are a way of trivializing the dominant language. 10 – Sergio – The agonistic dimension of politics in Lyotard is a direct result of the paradoxical and untranscendental nature of the social—there is simply no space in his philosophy where the social can be transcended through something that is not always-already socially constructed. In other words, there is no philosophical space in which the social is not always-already fractured by a general agonistics. The nexus between language, politics and sociality marks the

126  Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi concept of diffé rend. As soon as an atom-phrase appears, it is structurally social because of its four instances, that is, its linguistic hooks (addressor, addressee, referent and sense). The social is already implicated in every atom-phrase and in its relative linkage. A phrasal universe is social ab initio as it calls for alterity and equivocity through its four instances—this is the reason why sociality is untranscendental. As Lyotard explains: “[a] ‘deduction’ of the social presupposes the social. …  The social is always presupposed because it is presented or copresented within the slightest phrase”. How should we judge what allows us to judge without presupposing it? Without prejudging and prejudicing it? The untranscendental dimension of the social epitomises how genres work and clash with each other. Consequently, politics is the articulating field of judgments on how to tie and untie phrases according to the end pursued. When we investigate the social as a permanent presupposition, we approach the object and subject of a “meta-differend”: the social is the referent of a judgment to be always done over again. It is a “case” pled contradictorily before a tribunal. And in this “case”, the nature of the tribunal that must pronounce upon the case, is itself the object of a differend. (Lyotard 1988: 140) 10 – Mbongisi – Even though Biko had long ago seen that “The basic problem in South Africa has been analysed by liberal whites as being apartheid …  Black Consciousness defines the problem differently” (Biko 1978: 90), the actual fall of the system has left other, deeper levels of oppression exposed. Suddenly this small oppression here, or that particular oppression there, is found to rest upon a deeper, necessary oppression. We realize now that the second-order organization of a world that values truth depends on a first-order organization that makes a distinction between truth and falsity. The man who never questions the value of truth might just be avoiding his own, personal dissolution should he find that the distinction between truth and lies is an arbitrary allowance. We might sympathize; there is no telling what a man will allow himself should he realize that he could allow himself anything. Still, in a world where discriminations, even between truth and falsity, leave entire sections of society perpetually oppressed, the oppressed might no longer allow themselves to be subjected to the arbitrariness. 11 – Sergio – What we like most in Lyotard is that he politicizes the epistemic repression of what has not been chosen to be phrased. What we mean by epistemic repression is the repression that takes place every time phrases and sentences emerge from a void of legitimacy and get ranked and ordered through phrase regimens and genres of discourse. It is as if Lyotard makes the epistemic/transcendental repression the fabric of the social. As such, the epistemic/transcendental repression becomes the presupposition of the social. This is where we think the book The Differend shows its philosophical center, the core of its political dispositif. The squared differend epitomised by the social—and the constant (politics of)

Black autarchy/white domination  127 delegitimation it implies—is a powerful way to look at political philosophy as well as philosophy of language in post-apartheid South Africa.

Notes 1 On this matter see, for instance, Rorty (1979). 2 Lyotard writes: “The addressor of an exclamative is not situated with regard to the sense in the same way as the addressor of a descriptive. The addressee of a command is not situated with regard to the addressor and to the referent in the same way as the addressee of an invitation or of a bit of information is” (Lyotard 1988: 49, my ­emphasis).

References Biko, S. 1978. I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings, ed. A. Stubbs, Harlow: Heinemann. Lyotard, J.-F. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans G. Van Den Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press [original edition: Jean-Franç ois Lyotard, Le diffé rend, Paris: Les é ditions de Minuit, 1983]. Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Postscript to Chapter 6 Barney Pityana

This fascinating dialogue between Sergio Alloggio and Mbongisi Dyantyi has introduced me to Lyotard, whom I had been aware of but had never read. It has made some connections for me with the work of Wittgenstein, whom I studied in my undergraduate years. I also appreciate the dialogical method. There are points, though, at which the connections are not made when they could be between Mbongisi’s astute reading of Biko in the light of Lyotard and vice versa. In other words, there are points at which the philosophical dialogue starts to look like parallel lines. I do not have much to add to Mbongisi’s reading of Biko, save the following. It is always important for one to take note of Biko’s context. It was at the height of the apartheid system, a time of intense repression. He was also part of a movement that was addressing the student constituency primarily. It is accordingly important to point out that Steve Biko was not pretending to be doing philosophy. He was not a professional philosopher. He was doing politics, and his analytical tools were intended to advance the political project. He wrote in a manner that the student constituency could understand, and he was addressing the barriers to militancy among the oppressed and how to overcome them. Consciousness, therefore, was not an end in itself, but was a necessary prelude to freedom of the mind that becomes a tool towards freedom as a way of life, a state of mind, as the SASO Manifesto reads. In the light of that, it is important also to remember that Biko was deliberate in making clear that BC did not seek to address or articulate whiteness, except insofar as it enabled the oppressed better to understand the challenge they had to face. Somehow, he made it clear that BC should not address white people as such. For all those reasons, words in BC mattered very much. They were the principal means of communication and of definition. The words employed were verbal and non-verbal; they were poetry and drama; but they were also a way of life, including dress culture: “I am black and I am proud … ” or “to be young, gifted and black!” But in that environment words were both expressive and also idiomatic. A lot of the idiom would be difficult to understand unless one understood some of the Xhosa expressions—translated into English, they obscure meaning! It is, however, true that while Biko and BC were not paying close attention to language and words as such, it is noticeable that the words were as emotive as

Postscript to Chapter 6  129 they were intellectual. I may just say also that speech-acts as in “Amandla” and a raised fist or the logo of a black man in chains but breaking the chains were symptomatic of the exhibitionism of BC militancy and language. I think Mbongisi could advance this thesis further because I am not aware that anyone has meticulously examined the socio-political linguistics of BC.

7

Impartiality, partiality and privilege The view from South Africa Samantha Vice

I We care about living a life that is both good and moral – we want to ‘live well’ and ‘do right’, in Thomas Nagel’s terms (1986: 193). However, sometimes the demands of morality do not coincide with what we value and desire for ourselves, and we can find ourselves on different sides of the conflict at different times, or feel the normative tug of both. I want to explore this common moral phenomenon in the context of racial inequality, using South Africa as my example. In the still economically and socially unequal situation of post-apartheid South Africa, whites are undeniably better off than their non-white fellow citizens, a position that is commonly labelled ‘white privilege’. There are different ways of responding morally to this fact of privilege and to whites’ apparent unwillingness to voluntarily give it up: We could, first, assess those who live privileged lives as merely selfish or morally obtuse, failing in obvious ways to respond properly to injustice and desperate need; in living well, they ignore what is right. Second, we could see this situation in psychological terms, as a fact of human nature – that people just do cling to what they have and what they value – which ought to be managed but can hardly be condemned. Finally, we could see their desire to keep their goods as at least sometimes rational, a reasonable response to the value of what they have. I will argue that the third option has more to recommend it than is usually thought, and so we need a more nuanced response to the situation of the privileged.1 While they are certainly privileged relative to others, while this may be a result of injustice in direct or indirect ways, and while the inequality needs urgent rectification, we cannot simply dismiss their valuing their positions as irrational, simply selfish, or a brute but unfortunate fact of human nature. This is because of the evaluative nature of (many) privileges, and what the activity of valuing properly calls for. To frame this discussion, I will use Nagel’s (1986, 1991) influential account of the two perspectives that humans can take towards themselves and their world: the ‘impersonal’ and ‘personal’ perspectives.

II Being able to take up both the impersonal and personal perspective is a fundamental feature of human lives. Each one of us lives from here, a particular point of view and subjectivity from which our lives matter to us. From this personal

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  131 perspective we are concerned to lead a flourishing and meaningful life, to care for ourselves and those we love, to devote ourselves to projects and people who matter to us. But we can also take a step outside of ourselves and view ourselves as just one of numerous others, all as important to themselves as we are to ourselves. From this impersonal perspective – Nagel’s ‘view from nowhere’ – we can balance our concerns with those of others; we can recognise the moral significance of each of the millions on our shared earth and see that their suffering matters; we can recognise that our own personal concerns might sometimes have to be sacrificed for the sake of those countless others. For Nagel, the impersonal perspective is the point of view of morality and one of his central concerns is how and to what extent it can accommodate the concerns of the personal point of view.2 Since Nagel’s influential exploration in The View from Nowhere (1986), the debates about whether one perspective is essentially the moral perspective, when the reasons generated from one perspective override those of the other, and which type of reason is fundamental, are often discussed in terms of the proper roles of impartiality and partiality in moral theory and practice. The two distinctions (impartial/partial and impersonal/personal) are not quite the same though they are often used interchangeably, and their relation to morality is not straightforward. Roughly, to be (morally) impartial is to be fair and unbiased, to treat the interests of all concerned as morally equal, and not to be swayed by morally irrelevant considerations. To be partial in the most general sense is to be inclined favourably towards something, but in the debates with which I am concerned it means more than this: to be partial is to show special concern, or to favour some over others in one’s deliberations, practices, or emotional reactions. This is a neutral account of partiality; whether and when partiality is justified is left open. Reasons and principles (and the values that give rise to them), deliberations, actions, and the choice and application of rules can all be impartial or partial in this general sense.3 I shall speak of ‘being impartial’ or ‘partial’, where I mean either treating everyone as equals, or treating some as special or more significant; and of ‘impartial’ or ‘partial’ reasons, deliberations or principles. In this latter use, we can distinguish two kinds of partiality: one kind requires, in John Cottingham’s terms, a “non-eliminably particular, self-referential element” (1986: 359). That is, a description of one’s reasons (etc.) must include what Max de Gaynesford (2010: 95) calls a ‘self-object’: the first-person in a relation to the object – for example, the child is mine; it is my life’s work. I shall call this ‘strong partiality’. A second, ‘weak’, partiality picks out an ‘other-object’ for preferential treatment “for reasons independent of oneself” (de Gaynesford 2010: 96) – for example, ‘tax policies should give relief to the poor’; ‘give preferential treatment to citizens in allocating state resources’. The agent need stand in no intimate or historically significant relation to the poor or to citizens, yet is clearly favouring them. When I discuss partiality in this chapter I will use the term generally for ‘favouring’ or ‘giving special consideration/treatment’, as well as for instances of strong partiality, where what one favours is significantly related to oneself. (For the most part, I set weak partiality aside.)

132  Samantha Vice Nagel’s impersonal perspective is the ‘point of view of morality’,4 from which we consider everyone as moral equals and impartially deliberate about what we have most reason to do. Nagel understands moral objectivity, then, as “a method of understanding” (1986: 5) in which we ‘step back’ from our initial views and try to form a new understanding of the world that includes ourselves as one among others – a process that will always be a matter of degree. This capacity for detachment from the personal, and transcendence from oneself, he says, is the only alternative to relativism (1986: 187). The notion of the impersonal therefore includes that of the impartial. The personal, in contrast, is characterised by partial concerns. From the personal point of view, we favour and are emotionally attached to particular people and things over others. The two distinctions can nonetheless come apart: first, what we personally value may be moral goods, like justice or fairness, and we can care about the success of something and acknowledge its value without having an opportunity to favour it in practice. For instance, I may value and hope for deepening knowledge of mental illness, without being able to contribute to that project myself (I am not a medical professional). Second, the impersonal perspective recognises partiality and gives it normative weight. However, while they are not equivalent, both distinctions open up the possibility of the impartial moral demands of the impersonal perspective conflicting with what each one of us values and orients our lives around personally, whether these are moral or non-moral values. The partial domain of special relationships to others and oneself, and to the projects that define one’s identity, is the most urgent site of conflict. We are naturally inclined to protect this dimension of life, sometimes at the expense of moral values. That what is good from my perspective and what is impartially right can diverge, and that morality is fundamentally impartial, are characteristically modern philosophical views. Utilitarians take into account each person’s interests or welfare equally; Kantians demand that we treat everyone with respect, and never use anyone as a mere means to some further personal or social goal; Contractualists consider moral principles to be justified if they (or reasons in their favour) could be agreed on (or not rejected) by reasonable agents. Furthermore, some contemporary theorists of all these persuasions argue that taking the commitment to impartiality seriously requires that we consider everyone who will be affected by our actions, however far removed. Ethics is global, not local, and if utility or respect or justifiability demands it, I must be prepared to sacrifice some of the goods of life to assist others less fortunate, however distant. The moral life takes precedence over the good life, locally and globally.5 I have so far stated the debates and these normative theories crudely; there are sophisticated variants which permit some partial concern on impartial grounds. For example, Kantians use the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, with the latter allowing us leeway in how and when we fulfil our positive duties.6 Some deontologists will argue that morality itself contains partial duties – caring for your child, for instance; or that impartiality at the level of theory or rule choice does not always require impartiality at the level of deliberation and action.7 Indirect or ‘sophisticated’ consequentialists permit partial motivation and action

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  133 insofar as doing so maximises overall utility.8 However, it remains the case that conflicts between impartial reasons and what is valued personally cannot be ruled out in principle, and when they occur, these theories require us always to act according to the impartial reasons, whatever the personal cost. This, critics say, is unreasonably demanding.9 Given that our world is characterised by injustice and suffering, partial reasons will never have a chance of outweighing the impartial reasons of the impersonal perspective, and agents will never be off-duty from morality. I shall return to this objection in Section IV. I accept a view of morality as largely impartial, as well as Nagel’s general view of objectivity in morality as plausibly understood in terms of taking up the impersonal perspective, although I need not be committed here to any of the details of his complete theory. His account of the two perspectives we take up and the inevitable conflicts between them seems exactly right. These tensions are inherent to the moral life, able to be ameliorated if we are lucky, but never eliminated. I will explore the tensions from a local South Africa setting, concentrating on the partiality of white South Africans towards their goods or privileges, and suggesting that valuing them is at least reasonable from both perspectives, even if the impersonal perspective would, all things considered, demand some sacrifice.10 In order to do so, however, I need to briefly explore the connection between partiality and our practices of valuing. As Samuel Scheffler reminds us (2010: 101), we are valuing creatures, and morality needs to discuss not merely value, but our practices of valuing. The verb is as important as the noun.

III With Scheffler, I shall understand valuing as a complex of dispositions and attitudes, which include “dispositions to treat certain characteristic types of consideration as reasons for action” (2010: 102). We do not value arbitrarily; we value what we take to be worth valuing because of their characteristic properties, and the reasons these give us structure and justify our responses. We are disposed to have certain emotions towards what we value (fear or sorrow at the prospect of losing it, satisfaction or joy at possessing it or relating to it, caring about its welfare); to act in certain ways towards it (protect it, seek it out, honour it, promote it); and to have certain beliefs about it (that it is worth preserving, that others should see in it what you do, that one’s life is better with it, that it should guide your decisions and organise your goals). Some things we value intrinsically or for their own sake; some instrumentally, as means towards intrinsically valuable things; some we value as necessary components of complex intrinsic values. The objects of our valuing (‘goods’ or ‘values’) can be various: objects, other people and one’s relationships with them, animals and nature, art or physical excellence, or personal projects and commitments. We often care about what we value in a way that affects, to different degrees, our own flourishing and the verdict we pass on our lives. This means that if I value something, I cannot – just like that – relinquish it or stop caring about it. If something has properties that justify its being valued, then my not being able to have it does not take away the justification. I might

134  Samantha Vice not be able to act as it recommends, and I might have to sacrifice it because of conflicting commitments or demands on me, but as long as the object remains valuable in my eyes, doing so will be felt as a loss. I might be mistaken in what I value – perhaps it is worthless or trivial – but even here, given that I value it, my favouring it is not unreasonable. Returning to the notions with which I began, a description of what one values will often be strongly partial, requiring a first-person reference – my child, not any child; our project; my loved ones and plans; myself. I pick out something as related to me in a relevant manner, and special and valuable to me partly because I stand in that relation. A different relation to a person or project will be valued differently. For most people, strongly partial values give meaning and substance to their lives, and human life would be impoverished (or inconceivable) without them. In principle, all kinds of values are apparent from the impersonal perspective and can thus be objective. As Nagel writes, things “do not simply cease to matter when viewed impersonally”, and what each one of us values personally may not be valuable only for us, but from any perspective and for anyone (1991: 11). An impersonal observer gazing upon the human world will recognise that humans reasonably favour what is worth valuing, and will give that due consideration. However, even so, not everything we value “will be accorded an impersonal value corresponding to its personal value to the individual whose life it is” (Nagel 1991: 12; cf. Scheffler 1994). We may value what is not valuable objectively, or value it more than is warranted from that perspective, or fail to weigh it against other values. We can be wrong about what and how we value in various ways. This then opens the possibility of conflict, as judgements from the impersonal perspective on what is objectively valuable might not match our personal views on what we value. Impersonal, impartial moral judgments can therefore feel demanding, because we can be asked to give up or lessen our commitments, and because partiality towards certain people or projects is both psychologically natural and, importantly here, reasonable. Our partiality is often neither wrong, arbitrary, nor trivial, even it if is ultimately outweighed by impartial considerations. As we have seen, we can be partial towards objects that are reasonably valued, our partiality and valuing can be the proper responses towards certain objects, and those responses can be part of a valuable complex object – for example, my favouring my child is part of being a parent, and parenting is itself valuable. Reasonable partiality must be taken into account by the impersonal point of view, even if its demands ultimately override that partiality. So while we can be mistaken in our value judgments and practices, my point is that it is prima facie reasonable from both perspectives to value and favour what seems valuable. Sometimes we will nonetheless be required to act in ways that do not support or promote those values, if their personal value to us is not matched by their objective value. We may assent to the impersonal perspective’s judgment that we give them up, but it will be felt as a sacrifice and from the impersonal perspective it will be registered as one. While it is reasonable to want to retain the values one has, the distribution of goods and their acquisition may not be just,

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  135 for instance. One may have genuinely good things one does not deserve, or which one has only at the expense of others, or because of an unjust system in which one is – however unwillingly – embedded. Many think that this is the case with white South Africans. The higher standard of living they generally experience and the goods they possess are ill-gotten, dependent on the inheritance of wealth from the days of apartheid. Their reluctance to relinquish their privileged position is easily seen as mere selfishness and their reasons mere rationalisations. In the rest of the chapter, I explore these issues, though tentatively and with continual uncertainty, despite the appearance of a conclusion. I concentrate on the experiences of white South Africans because I am one myself, and because they raise starkly some fundamental ethical issues, not because the experiences of a white South African are of any more interest or significance than the experiences of black South Africans. I live ‘from’ (though not solely from) my whiteness, and ethical exploration has become increasingly an exploration of my racial perspective. Living here is, for me at least, an ongoing oscillation between Nagel’s personal and impersonal perspectives.

IV Given the distressing recalcitrance of inequality, poverty, and injustice, all of us who are relatively well-off and minimally reflective feel the urgent needs of others pressing on us. In South Africa, the privileged and those with very little jostle each other daily, even as patterns of habitation remain racialized in ways similar to those of the years of formal segregation. White people, a significant minority, are still far better off than blacks, despite the official end of the apartheid system, which set up the patterns of ownership and wealth that largely remain today.11 Morally conscientious white people in South Africa experience the tension between personal values and impersonal moral demands starkly, and it is exacerbated by proximity. The people who are in need of impartial assistance are not the ‘distant needy’. They are next to one, fellow citizens who are more than anyone entitled to complain that their lives are not better in the democratic South Africa. How should white people balance their reasonable desire to lead flourishing lives with the moral facts of poverty and inequality, against the historical backdrop of apartheid? My interest is in those people who feel the conflict between Nagel’s perspectives, who live in relative material comfort but spiritual discomfort next to those whom their parents’ generation, if not their own, oppressed. They still benefit from the economic legacy of apartheid, and some feel that as a result they are implicated in that injustice, if not causally, then as ongoing beneficiaries. As I am one of these white people, I shall sometimes talk in the first-person, aware that attempts to understand privilege from this point of view risk offering mere self-serving exculpations.12 Discussing the psychological and moral tensions experienced by the relatively privileged can sound self-indulgent next to the difficulties of those other lives. I certainly do not want to imply that the perturbations of white people are of the same order as the hardships experienced by so many of their black compatriots.

136  Samantha Vice Nor do I expect blacks to have much interest in white anxieties. However, I want to risk criticism and think about the difficulties, for a number of reasons beyond the personal, and which relate to the objection that impartial moral theories are too demanding and do not give enough weight to the personal and partial: First, if moral theories are to respond to the charge that their impartial prescriptions are too demanding to be realistically followed, the psychological dimension of relatively privileged lives needs acknowledgement. Some of the duties that become apparent from the impersonal standpoint are duties that will fall mainly on the privileged, and how those duties resonate and are understood is at least relevant to the discussion. Second, we cannot understand or respond to the worry as it plays out in a particular case without understanding the psychological difficulties and genuine ethical conflicts that cause the worry to begin with. Philosophers can be rather too quick in dismissing these. Third, if our concern in ethics is not only theoretical but also practical and motivational, we should acknowledge what people care about and wish to protect if we hope to motivate them to act on the demands of justice. I take the demandingness objection seriously and doing so adds nuance to discussions of white – or any – privilege. Let us return to Nagel. From both perspectives, I – like anyone – have a reasonable desire to lead a flourishing life and I personally value certain objects, projects, and relationships as constituents of or means towards that life. Living as I is partly a process of pursuing what I reflectively value, and of spending time and resources on it. In addition, I live from the perspective and evaluative framework provided by my history and social circumstances. I am a white woman, for instance, living in a racialised and gendered world, who grew up during the last decades of apartheid. I can do nothing to alter these origins, although I ought now to work on their distorting effects. From our personal perspective, we are not only oriented around ourselves and certain special others. While we may care deeply about certain people and projects and want to protect them, we know too, from here as much as from the impersonal standpoint, that many others care equally about their intimates and special projects, and that we are not alone in wanting our lives to go well. From our personal perspectives, most of us care about the moral standing of others; we are not usually crudely selfish and we can be fierce in our denunciations of unfairness or cruelty. However, the practical force of our recognition of others is often diluted next to our partial concern for certain projects and people, including ourselves. Their importance often carries a motivational force stronger in the moment than considerations of impartial justice, and it can take repeated occupations of the impersonal standpoint to remind us of the urgent needs of others. But then their reduced ability to lead the lives they would choose, the paucity of hope and opportunities, the material squalor and poverty, demand some attempt at alleviation. While the partial domain of life is central and weighty, I recognise that there is a luxury in leading my particular life, in being a person who, among millions of other people, and aside from many other identifying properties, is relatively privileged on the arbitrary and contingent ground of race. In such conditions, it is difficult to persuade myself that the impersonal observer, picking out the person

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  137 I am – a woman who, among her many distinguishing marks and her manifold identity, is relevantly white – will judge that my commitments and concerns carry much weight. The usual strategy of impartial theories, of permitting some groundlevel partiality, seems justified only up to a point. Despite this, however, the privileged cannot but matter to themselves – as any person matters to herself – and that means that the ingredients of a flourishing life cannot but matter. We all want to lead lives that are not merely bearable; we want lives that express and contain some of the many values that are available to humans, the idiosyncratic choices and combinations of which distinguish each of us from others and fashion us into particular persons. We judge our lives partly on how faithful we are to our values. This is both a psychological point about human nature and a normative point – that valuing brings partiality with it and that our everyday practices of valuing and favouring are reasonable, even though sometimes overridden. The consequence of this is that those who are relatively privileged and whose lives contain more valuable things are not unreasonable in wanting to retain (at least some of) them. This point has repercussions for how we understand and evaluate the notion of ‘privilege’, which is so prevalent in discussions of race and social justice. I turn now to this.

V When white South Africans (or, for that matter, white people in most of the world) are said to be racially privileged, what does this mean? In these debates, the term ‘privilege’ is used in many senses, not always distinguished, some overlapping or related. First, it refers to anything valuable that people of a certain group generally have and people of others do not, because of their group membership and within a certain socio-political context. So with racial privilege, whites still have more goods than blacks generally have, in a system of racial inequality that supports and partly explains that disparity – for example, wealth, property, or security; access to culture and education; and more quotidian goods like an attractive home or clothing, some spare money for entertainment, holidays, or treating one’s friends. At least some of these are constituents of a good life; while they are not strictly necessary, they are hardly luxuries reserved for only the very wealthy.13 Second, ‘privileged’ is sometimes used to describe a habitual way of being in the world: a privileged person is complacent or entitled, or assumes that her view of the world is the norm. When white people respond in these privileged ways, they are said to be ‘whitely’.14 In a third sense, ‘privilege’ is used for what everyone should have or to which they have a right, for example, adequate food and shelter, and education. In this sense of what we should all be able to claim as our due, the term is misleading, as they are not strictly privileges at all.15 Some are, however, still not adequately possessed by all South Africans, despite being recognised in the Constitution as fundamental rights, and for that reason are still considered the privileges of the few. Fourth, ‘privilege’ sometimes picks out status goods and the benefits that go with them – being deferred to and treated as an authority, higher salaries, wealth

138  Samantha Vice and property ownership, and the power all of this brings. Finally, in a sense familiar to those in higher education, you are privileged if your values and needs are taken as the norm, if they are taught and researched, and if you feel comfortable in institutions because your needs and worldview are recognised and accommodated (Matthews and Tabensky 2014). In debates about racial injustice, ‘privilege’ is a relative and pejorative notion, and assumes systematic inequality and injustice. One group of people is privileged relative to another, and the term is meant to refer to morally problematic habits and to goods that are unearned, unjustly possessed, or gained to the detriment of others. Their distribution is embedded within and enabled by unjust structures and institutions. So, for instance, the kind of epistemic advantages that being oppressed might cultivate (for example, sensitivity to threat, the enhanced ability to interpret others’ behaviour, street savviness) would not count as privileges, as their possession is not unjust or unearned.16 Whites and blacks can therefore be privileged or less privileged in a number of ways and with respect to different values, and this complicates the evaluation of privilege. Setting aside privilege as problematic habits of character and action, some of the others are goods that are intrinsically valuable – education, access to knowledge and culture, a safe home. These are reasonably valued for their own sake by anyone, and from both the personal and impersonal perspectives. Others are means to sustaining a life that is more than minimally bearable – some spare income, a private space of one’s own or for one’s family, healthy and sufficient food. Still others are constituents of or means towards a more richly meaningful life – education again, leisure time, and spare income for non-necessities. Some of the goods to which they contribute are partial goods like relationships, succeeding in one’s career, or pursuing what is meaningful or identity-­constituting. A decent education for one’s children is reasonably valued as part of being good parents, and ‘feeling at home’ in an institution or corporation facilitates work success. In the light of these connections between privilege and value, my interest is in the proper attitudes towards them in a racially unequal country like South Africa. The attitude of some black people here is straightforward (especially those aligned with the Economic Freedom Fighters Party and the Black First Land First movement17): The privileges of whites should be taken away from them if they will not be voluntary renounced. There has been no compensation for the harms of apartheid, whose beneficiaries are as well off as they used to be. Usually they have in mind property, wealth, and power, which have been unjustly acquired (in the years of apartheid, or earlier, in the colonisation of southern Africa) or maintained (if they were inherited). Their possession prevents a more equitable distribution of economic, social, and political benefits. Sometimes their target is a broader transformation of institutions, for instance the transformation (‘decolonisation’) of university curricula and culture. White people in South Africa are undeniably privileged in most senses, and some form of transformation and reparations for apartheid is required; what I go on to say now denies none of this. However – and this is a trite point – even in the

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  139 face of moral demands people will not stop valuing what they consider valuable. After all, others want those goods precisely because they are valuable, or because they are entitled to them as citizens or human beings. Value does not evaporate because of its origins or the contingencies of its possession, however problematic they are, and so our valuing practices will not halt either, even though they will almost certainly become ambivalent or mixed with other attitudes like regret or guilt. We cannot expect white people to stop valuing the goods that they and not others have, on the grounds that those others do not have them, or to stop valuing what they might possess unjustly. This is unrealistic and borders on prescribing corrosive envy (for the less privileged) or sour grapes or asceticism (for the privileged). It is appropriate to value what is valuable. Importantly, this point says nothing yet about the substance of an objective judgment from the impersonal perspective: whether the privileged ought to retain their goods, whether the psychological facts about what they care for carry any political (as opposed to ethical) significance, and which responses from the less privileged are reasonable. Less tritely however, and as we have seen, valuing brings with it characteristic dispositions and attitudes. It includes protecting and caring about the object, and sometimes favouring some things over others in practice. We cannot value something and not care in some degree about what happens to it and how we stand in relation to it, especially if it is a part of or means towards a worthwhile life, not just for oneself, but for those we love and for whom we might be partly responsible. Scheffler (2010: 106) reminds us that partiality is a deeply entrenched feature of human valuing. To value one’s projects and relationships is to see them as sources of reasons for action in a way that other people’s projects and relationships are not. Personal projects and relationships by their nature define forms of reasonable partiality, partiality not merely in our preferences or affections but in the reasons that flow from some of our most basic values. These reasons are of course defeasible, but they are in the ethical domain from the start, and are definitive of what matters to us. The partial relationships and projects that give rise to these reasons also give rise to instrumental considerations about what their protection or welfare requires. It is not unreasonable to care about the resources that would help one to sustain what one properly values, whether for oneself or others. Caring for one’s friends, and spending what resources one can spare on them when they need help, is part of friendship; helping one’s parents financially, or rearranging one’s home so that they can live with one when they are elderly is part of being a loving adult child; providing as rich and challenging an education for one’s children as one can is part of being a good parent. And so on. The other parties to a relationship – one’s children or friends or partners – might have reason to complain if you did not favour them, and would certainly have reason to complain if you did not do what was necessary to sustain the relationship. It is also reasonable to pursue special projects and to spend resources and time on them, when this is constitutive of a flourishing human life

140  Samantha Vice and perhaps of human agency at all, and when one’s success might be relevant to how one evaluates one’s life. My point is not that the less economically privileged cannot have good relationships or meaningful lives. It is, rather, that in this non-ideal world it is unhelpful to condemn all material comfort and resources, because they are often instrumentally or constitutively related to sustaining a meaningful life. It is uncontroversial that good education, shelter, access to more than bare necessities, and so on are valuable and that our lives would be worse without them. And it is indisputable that these should not be dependent on financial status, and the fact that they are is part of the problem in which the privileged are implicated. At the same time, however, the majority of the relatively privileged are more-or-less comfortable, not fantastically wealthy. They have what in our kind of world are the bases or constituents of a more than simply bearable life. Again, this is why we want everyone to have them. My point, then, is not conceptual but practical. It concerns the requirements for a flourishing life in the kinds of societies many of us inhabit now; it is not that money and property and non-essential material goods are necessary for a flourishing life in any circumstances. In short, it simplifies the ethical terrain unhelpfully to condemn privilege without making the relevant distinctions. It matters, for instance, whether we are assessing the possession of ‘privileges’ that are anyone’s due, or privileges that are luxuries; whether the privileges are really valuable or mistakenly valued. We must also assess the kind of society which the privileged and less privileged inhabit together – for example, whether it makes a decent life possible beneath a certain threshold of material welfare. The target of critique must be social as much as individual, and to dismiss the privileged as simply covetous is to misunderstand the nature of valuing.

VI Nagel insists that relevant facts about human beings must remain in the descriptions of the world given from the impersonal perspective. One of these facts is that we value and care about people and things. But for all I have said so far, it is unclear how much weight this should be given from the impersonal perspective when set beside the other facts about us – our race or gender or religion or class – and the facts of the society in which we live. In my case this is post-apartheid South Africa, where race cannot be ignored in any discussions of justice and the good life. White South Africans are, however, not only relevantly white (and black South Africans are not only black), and it can seem that picking out whiteness (or blackness) from the impartial perspective as the only or most significantly relevant feature of us would be neither true to the facts nor fair.18 We have professions and social roles; we are directly responsible for the wellbeing of certain people; we have projects that mean much to us and values that define us. These are as much a part of ourselves as our whiteness, even as it would be disingenuous to deny the significance of race in a racialized world.

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  141 This line of thought will seem a luxury to those who have very little and for whom my ‘relatively privileged’ whites seem absolutely privileged. I am not defending the ongoing possession of unjustly gained goods, nor the glaring inequality of South Africa. Rather, I hope to understand the moral psychology, ethical complexities, and social context of people in a position of relative privilege. I do not think this psychology is always as crudely selfish as critics often assume. As I have argued, it is reasonable to care for and favour what one values. Furthermore, people can find themselves in positions they would not choose under more ideal conditions; they can find themselves in economic and social structures that may be problematic in numerous ways but which are difficult to work outside of or dismantle. If plausible, these remarks require us to complicate our responses to white privilege. It is easy enough to accuse people of selfishness, greed, and worse when what they are holding onto is obscene wealth, or ostentatious luxury, or unchecked power. However, what they are reluctant to relinquish might be genuinely good things that it is right for anyone to value, or the material means to protect them. In turn, whites are often equally quick in their dismissal of all considerations of reparations or redistribution, and there is undoubtedly panic and prejudice in this. Their reluctance to admit that justice may require them to give up some of their good fortune might indeed be selfish, but it might also (and at the same time) be an understandable desire to protect what is good. Again, this does not yet settle any questions about justice. It is a separate point whether one can be said to deserve the goods that really are privileges – those that are not one’s due as a citizen or human being. And it is a separate point whether one should be permitted to keep them, or to keep them without paying a penalty. One can think it is unfair for whites to have so much, without also denying that they are reasonable to want to retain at least some of their goods. What this line of thought does, however, suggest is that morally at least (even if politically this might not be feasible), a more complicated response to privilege is called for. Of course, anyone may have an entirely wrong-headed idea of flourishing and what is valuable. Human beings are troublingly prone to error in all realms of value. Our circle of concern can be constricted, and our sense of self isolated from those broader communities in which our identities are formed. We often favour some in ways that do not merely ignore others, but harm them or perpetuate injustice. Our circle of concern should ideally expand, and with it the boundaries of what counts as ‘mine’ and ‘ours’.19 Certainly, if we can expand ourselves in these ways, the tension would be eased somewhat; but I think it will not disappear. However expansive the circle of our concern (and there will be psychological and maybe moral limits to this), there will always be a boundary, and some people will fall outside it. And as long as we love people and care about ourselves, the possibility for conflict between impartial moral demands and our own flourishing will continue. If we take the partial sphere of life seriously and think it makes its own legitimate demands on us, it is not at all clear what the correct moral responses should be in a country like South Africa. I have offered no solutions to the problem of

142  Samantha Vice privilege, and no prescriptions about what the privileged ought to do and how they ought to balance the judgments of the two perspectives. What needs to be redistributed and how to do it are enormously complicated questions. To be a moral agent, it seems to me, is to be perpetually pulled between the personal and impersonal points of view, to be both immersed in our personal worlds and able to abstract away from them. I have concentrated on South Africa, but although the situation is stark here, it is not unique. Perhaps this exploration has been too pessimistic. Near the end of The View from Nowhere, Nagel discusses two practical possibilities for resolving the conflict between the good life and morality. The first is personal conversion: Someone who finds himself convinced of the truth of a morality that makes impossible demands on him …  may be able by a leap of self-transcendence to change his life so radically from the inside that service to this morality …  becomes his overwhelming concern and his dominant good. (1986: 206) Few will achieve this, however,20 and so a second possibility is political change: “…  perhaps the most important task of political thought and action is to arrange the world so that everyone can live a good life without doing wrong, injuring others, benefiting unfairly from their misfortune, and so forth” (1986: 206). The world we should aspire to would be one “in which the great bulk of impersonal claims were met by institutions that left individuals …  free to devote considerable attention and energy to their own lives and to values that could not be impersonally acknowledged” (1986: 207). Any possible resolution of the conflict must therefore include political and institutional changes, a claim resonant with my earlier point that we need both a social and individual critique of privilege. Given the significance of the partial dimension of our lives, given that our valuing and favouring are often reasonable and meaning-conferring, given that most of us are not saints, the burden should be taken up by our institutions. Nagel’s ‘institutional turn’ removes some of the moral pressure on us, and it is supported by others who defend the view that morality is essentially, and appropriately, impartial. Marcia Baron (1991: 856–7) writes that because it is both natural and good for people to be partial, and, for instance, to want to pull strings to protect those they love, we need rules and institutions that prevent us from doing so, and which take some of the options away from us: We want people to be tempted, in such circumstances, to do what we in fact regard as wrong. It is for this reason that we want our institutions to be arranged in such a way as to make it very difficult for people to be able to pull strings. We want the institutions to ensure, as far as is possible …  impartiality in the allocation of resources, but not because people are less impartial than they should be. Rather, it is to allow us to be partial in our sentiments – to enable us to have fairness without our having to retrain our sentiments to make us less partial – that we want rules and procedures to be unbending.21

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  143 In a better world this would, I agree, be part of a solution. Given that our ‘temptation’ to favour what is valuable is not only psychologically natural but reasonable, requirements to act impartially should not be harshly punitive, and should not assume that we are, simply, selfish or corrupt. If our institutions and government are just and if they facilitate equality locally and globally, then when it comes to it, the need to give up our personal values or their material conditions for the sake of impartial moral requirements would at least feel fair, if not welcome. One problem with this attractive ‘institutional turn’, however, is that the very institutions and governments called upon to help us with the conflict between the good and the right can often be part of the problem we are trying to solve, or can block the necessary change through inertia or incompetence. We are to rely on our institutions to ensure that we do what we morally ought to, but they are too often mired in their own inadequacies and in the larger economic systems that make inequality so obdurate. In South Africa, a legacy of racism and privilege has contributed to institutional failures, and so whites are perhaps implicated in the inability of institutions to take up the moral slack for them. In any case, can we ask significantly imperfect institutions to make us less imperfect? I am therefore pessimistic about the likelihood of white privilege being dislodged any time soon. As our institutions fail to take up the burden, whites certainly need to work on improving them, but also on improving ourselves, even if Nagel’s moral conversion is unrealistic for most of us. Appreciating that we can adopt two perspectives on our world may help us. We can accept that much of what we have is valuable, that our partial loves and concerns are reasonable and good; and we may also be brought to see that their value is precisely a reason to support institutions and initiatives that give everyone a share in them. In an imperfect social world, a degree of personal conversion, however limited, is a requirement for coming to a liveable accommodation between the demands of the right and the demands of the good.

Notes 1 I am grateful to George Hull for suggesting this as a way of setting up the problem, and for his helpful comments throughout. 2 I am assuming with Nagel that the impersonal point of view represents an ideal towards which we can sensibly strive. For worries on both aspects – that it is a valuable achievement and that it is possible – see Friedman (1989) and Walker (1991). 3 See Hooker (2010) for an account of this variety. 4 See Taylor (1980). 5 The classic article is Singer (1972). 6 From Kant (1797/1996). 7 Baron (1991). 8 Railton (1984). 9 Williams (1973) and (1981); Wolf (1982) and (1992). 10 I use ‘white’ and ‘black’ in the inclusive sense familiar in South Africa, to pick out those groups that were benefitted and oppressed by the apartheid regime. Both groups therefore include identities that in other contexts would be importantly distinct.

144  Samantha Vice 11 According to the latest statistics, whites make up 8.3% of the population. On the uncertainties around assessing white wealth, see Haffajee (2015). 12 I explore the personal dimension of this predicament in Vice (2010; 2016). Also cf. Nagel (1986: 187). 13 What we consider necessary for a decent life shifts. Not too long ago, mobile phones and computers would have been considered luxuries; now, most people, even the very poor, have phones, and the lack of computer and internet access is deemed a social problem. A decent life requires effective and recognised participation in one’s society and what is required for that is context-dependent. 14 The term is originally Marilyn Frye’s (1992). 15 See Gordon (2004) and Blum (2008). 16 On the epistemic advantages of oppression, see Medina (2013). As George Hull pointed out in correspondence, the racially advantaged may lack certain characteristics that perhaps they morally ought to possess, but which their privilege has prevented them from developing. For example, they might lack the morally important awareness that their view of the world is not the only valid one, that others might not live like they do, that their interests matter no more than others’ – the recognition attained from Nagel’s impersonal perspective. Privilege in my third sense focussed on rights, but perhaps the chance for moral development is owed to everyone as moral agents. However, their overall privilege means they would not count as lacking a privilege in the sense relevant here. 17 The Economic Freedom Fighters is a political party (formed in 2013 and led by Julius Malema, the one-time leader of the ANC’s youth league); it describes itself as a “radical, leftist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement” (https://www.effonline.org/ about-us). Black First Land First (formed in 2015 and led by Andile Mngxitama) is always described as a “pan-Africanist and revolutionary socialist political party”. Both parties are committed to radical economic transformation and land redistribution. 18 I have discussed this in more detail in Vice (2016). 19 See Singer (2011). Thanks to Jesse Moore, Michael Pitman, and Vasti Roodt for reminding me of this. 20 Larissa MacFarquhar’s (2015) Strangers Drowning is a collection of portraits of people who have managed such conversions and dedicated themselves to the wellbeing of others. 21 And see Railton (1984: 161–62).

References Baron, Marcia. 1991. ‘Impartiality and Friendship.’ Ethics 101 (4): 836–57. Blum, Lawrence. 2008. ‘White Privilege: A Mild Critique.’ Theory and Research in Education 6 (3): 309–321. Cottingham, John. 1986. ‘Partiality, Favouritism and Morality.’ The Philosophical Quar­ terly 36 (144): 357–73. De Gaynesford, Maximilian. 2010. ‘The Bishop, the Valet, the Wife, and the Ass: What Difference Does It Make if Something is Mine?’ In Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, eds. Brian Feltham and John Cottingham, 84–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedman, Marilyn. 1989. ‘The Impracticality of Impartiality.’ Journal of Philosophy 86 (1): 645–56. Frye, Marilyn. 1992. ‘Willful Virgin.’ In White Woman Feminist, 147–69. Freedom, CA.: The Crossing Press. Gordon, L. 2004. ‘Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness.’ In What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy, 173–93. New York: Routledge.

Impartiality, partiality and privilege  145 Haffajee, Ferial. 2015. What If There Were No Whites in South Africa? Johannesburg: Picador Africa. Hooker, Brad. 2010. ‘When is Impartiality Morally Appropriate?’ In Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, eds. Brian Feltham and John Cottingham, 26–41. New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1797/1996. The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and tr. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacFarquhar, Larissa. 2015. Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity. London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. Matthews, Sally, and Tabensky, Pedro (eds.). 2014. Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press. Medina, José . 2013. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1991. Equality and Partiality. New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 1986. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Railton, Peter. 1984. ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality.’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 13 (2): 134–71. Scheffler, Samuel. 2010. ‘Morality and Reasonable Partiality.’ In Partiality and Impartial­ ity: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World, eds. Brian Feltham and John Cottingham, 98–130. New York: Oxford University Press. Scheffler, Samuel. 1994. The Rejection of Consequentialism (revised edn). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Singer, Peter. 2011. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Singer, Peter. 1972. ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality.’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (3): 229–43. Taylor, Paul. 1980. ‘On Taking the Moral Point of View.’ In Studies in Ethical Theory: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol 3, eds. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., Howard K. Wettstein, 35–61. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vice, Samantha. 2016. ‘Essentialising Rhetoric and Work on the Self.’ Philosophical Papers 45 (1–2): 103–131. Vice, Samantha. 2010. ‘How Do I Live in this Strange Place?’ Journal of Social Philosophy 41 (3): 323–42. Walker, Margaret Urban. 1991. ‘Partial Consideration.’ Ethics 101 (4): 758–74. Williams, Bernard. 1981. ‘Person, Character, and Morality.’ In Moral Luck, 20–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1973. ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism.’ In Utilitarianism: For and Against, by Bernard Williams and J.J.C. Smart, 77–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Susan. 1992. ‘Morality and Partiality.’ Philosophical Perspectives 6: 243–59. Wolf, Susan. 1982. ‘Moral Saints.’ Journal of Philosophy 89: 419–39.

Part III

Moral debates

8

Making sense of survivor’s guilt Why it is justified by an African ethic Thaddeus Metz

1 Introduction For a good 200 years, utilitarianism and Kantianism have dominated Western philosophical thought about morality. Although the former has recently been in decline and alternatives to both have arisen over the past 30 years, they continue to influence much ethical reflection, even beyond the sphere of right action where they have been at home. For example, they are the source of the two central approaches that Euro-American-Australasian ethicists and laypeople generally have towards what is commonly called ‘survivor’s guilt’, the negative emotion often experienced by innocent parties who, unlike many of their associates, were lucky enough not to die. On the one hand, many would say, ‘It will do no good to feel survivor’s guilt’, while, on the other hand, many others would say, ‘You did nothing wrong, and so have nothing to feel bad about’. Both reactions suggest that one should not experience survivor’s guilt, that it would be unreasonable to do so. In this chapter, I argue that there is in fact some good moral reason to experience survivor’s guilt, specifically, because one would be a better person for doing so. I believe that an ethicist from any tradition should be able to feel some pull from my reasoning, the gist of which is that survivor’s guilt can be a welcome, virtuous manifestation of one’s being tied to those who perished.1 Herbert Morris briefly suggested this idea about 30 years ago, saying that survivor’s guilt can both ‘mark one’s attachment to principles of fairness and justice and manifest one’s solidarity with others’ (1987: 237). However, he did not seek to defend this approach thoroughly, let alone by anchoring it in a basic account of virtue, which are my aims here. My main defence of survivor’s guilt consists of articulating a theoretical approach to moral virtue salient in the African philosophical tradition, suggesting that it is a prima facie attractive ethic, and then showing that it entails that a person disposed towards survivor’s guilt could exhibit good character thereby. The reason the African2 conception of moral virtue readily entails and plausibly explains this conclusion is that it is a relational, and specifically communal, ethic. According to it, the more one honours relationships of (roughly) sharing with others, the more human excellence one has, or the more ubuntu one displays,

150  Thaddeus Metz to use the Nguni vernacular of southern Africa. Drawing on this globally underexplored, but nonetheless plausible, theory of moral virtue, one is led to question conventional wisdom in Western ethics about what is good and reasonable and what is not. In the following section, I explain what I mean by ‘survivor’s guilt’ in more detail, which sort of justification I aim to provide for it, and why utilitarianism, Kantianism and virtue ethical theory in the contemporary Western tradition entail that it is generally unreasonable (or at best provide limited explanations of why it is reasonable) (section 2). Next, I advance my favoured African conception of moral virtue in terms of honouring communion, spelling it out and motivating it as an auspicious theory from which to derive more particular judgments of what makes someone a good person (section 3). I then derive from the Afro-communal ethic the judgment that survivor’s guilt is often a kind of virtue (section 4), after which I conclude by briefly extending it to similar kinds of negative emotions (section 5).

2 Survivor’s guilt: unreasonable by Western moral theory In this section, I say more about what survivor’s guilt is and why the major theoretical approaches to morality in the contemporary Western tradition do not easily account for the judgment that it is often appropriate. My claim is not that no Western philosophers have contended that survivor’s guilt can be reasonable, for a few have; it is rather that the main Western philosophies, in the sense of comprehensive and basic accounts of morality, cannot easily entail and powerfully explain that contention. I work with an intuitive sense of the phrase ‘survivor’s guilt’, and do not devote space to the intricacies that now pepper the philosophical literature about its nature and logical conditions. For example, I do not address what guilt in general would have to be in order for survivor’s guilt to count as a genuine instance, e.g., whether it is true that ‘one can feel guilt only about actions’ (as per Hurka 2001: 106; see also Williams 1993: 89–93; Adams 2006: 7) or whether that is much too narrow so that one can in fact logically feel guilty about one’s attitudes and even mere states (Greenspan 1992; Teroni and Bruun 2011: 230–233). Similarly, I do not consider whether certain kinds of moral norms must exist in the background for survivor’s guilt to be possible (Deigh 1999), or how it might be related to, and perhaps even constituted by, other emotions such as shame (Griffioen 2014). For my purposes, it is enough to define the phrase ‘survivor’s guilt’ in this way: an emotional disposition to feel bad about oneself for one’s associates having died, for not having died along with them or for not having saved them, even though one did no culpable wrong in contributing to their deaths. This definition implies that ‘guilt’ in the present context picks out an emotion, something subjective, and so is to be distinguished from guilt as something objective, i.e., the fact of having done something culpably wrong. Survivor’s guilt includes the feeling of guilt (or something similar to guilt if one prefers to construe that in a narrow sense as strictly about actions one has performed) despite

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  151 not being guilty, at least not for having been responsible for failing to perform a certain duty that led to others dying. There are emotions similar to survivor’s guilt, such as what one might feel consequent to having negligently caused the deaths of others or having failed to rescue them when one could have, but they are not the focus of this chapter; here, I presume that an agent did no wrong, or at least was utterly faultless for having done so. The clearest case of what I have in mind is one in which a survivor neither caused (not even accidentally) the deaths of others with whom he identifies, nor could have done anything to save them, even if he had taken many earlier steps differently. I am also not interested in cases in which one had (merely) wished that others would die or felt good upon learning of their deaths. Still more, I set aside situations in which one has benefited in certain ways from others’ deaths, say, by having received an inheritance when family members died or been given a promotion when co-workers did. Lastly, I do not consider a scenario in which one has failed to perform some duty in respect of the dead, e.g., neglected to look after their children adequately. Although there need not be culpable wrongdoing for having contributed to deaths in these kinds of cases, they involve complications that I bracket here. I do not want to address subjective guilt for having manifested vice, benefited from others’ misfortunes or failed to do right by the dead, and I instead focus strictly on the emotion of feeling bad for having survived when one’s fellows did not. Guilt upon such a condition appears to have been common among the Japanese who luckily survived a tsunami some years ago. So reports Tatsuya Mori, a filmmaker who decided to make a documentary about its aftermath. On the day of the earthquake I was drinking beer with my friends in Roppongi. Thousands of people lost their lives, but I was drinking beer. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but when I realised, I was ashamed. I felt guilty … . ‘Why did I survive? Why couldn’t I save my mother?’ We call it ‘survivor’s guilt’. I think this time all Japanese people felt survivor’s guilt. We were all survivors – we had places to sleep, food to eat. (quoted in Arpon 2012; see also Osaki 2015) Note that I do not seek to justify all instances of survivor’s guilt, so construed. Obviously, like any negative emotion, it could be disproportionately great relative to its object, or it could overly inhibit someone from moving forward and doing important things for herself or others. It is hardly my intention to suggest that one should undergo years and years of depression that would render one bedridden. My goal is to show that some manifestations of survivor’s guilt can be appropriate, not that all of them are. In claiming that survivor’s guilt can be appropriate, I am contending that there is often some moral reason to exhibit it. That is not the claim that it would be unreasonable not to exhibit it. I am sympathetic to this stronger claim, which would entail that, say, feeling sad about others’ demise and missing them would

152  Thaddeus Metz be morally insufficient responses.3 However, I do not defend it here, instead aiming to show that survivor’s guilt is merely one reasonable response to having survived when one’s associates have not. My strategy for showing that survivor’s guilt can be reasonable is to demonstrate that it can be a manifestation of good character. My basic claim is that survivor’s guilt is a moral virtue, where I presume that such an attitude grounds normative reasons. Although one could hold the view that virtue is not always reason-giving, I do not, and rather contend that if exhibiting a certain attitude would make one a better person, then one has (some) moral reason to do so. It is difficult for influential Western theories of morality to account for the judgment that survivor’s guilt is a form of good character or otherwise reasonable to exhibit. First off, from a standard utilitarian perspective, one has moral reason to feel bad (or at least to perform actions that bring such a feeling in their wake) insofar as doing so would be expected to produce good, perhaps by preventing one from doing wrong in the future. However, surely few survivors of the present sort (viz., who have done no culpable wrong) need such a heavy emotion to keep them on the straight and narrow. Utilitarians might suggest that survivor’s guilt would prompt one to go out of one’s way for others, or to appreciate the life one luckily has to live, and so is morally desirable for these reasons. As one survivor of the Japanese tsunami has remarked, ‘(H)aving survived the tragedy made me feel like I have to do something for the good of society’ (quoted in Osaki 2015). Even though he does not say that it is feeling bad that prompted him to contribute to the general welfare, it plausibly could have. In addition, it might be that experiencing survivor’s guilt would serve the function of indicating to others that they have no grounds to envy the survivor, ‘keeping social frustration from focusing – as it naturally might – on him’ (Greenspan 1995: 180; cf. Velleman 2003). These are fair suggestions. However, I trust the reader shares some non-forward-looking intuitions with me, and so is inclined to hold that, if survivor’s guilt can be appropriate, it is not merely when and because it would make the future better for someone, whether that is the survivor or others in her society. Or at least that is the case I shall make below. Probably the default position among Kantians, and most ethicists in general (as Morris 1987 pointed out a while back), is that guilt ought to track blame, where the latter, in turn, tracks responsible wrongdoing. If one’s basic duty is to treat people with respect in virtue of their capacity to make moral decisions, then it is plausible to think that one ought to respond to them in the light of how they have mis/used it. For most Kantians, that means some kind of retributive outlook, where the amount of blame, including punishment, that is right to dish out towards others should be proportionate to the degree of wrongful action they took in combination with the degree of their responsibility for it (e.g., Nozick 1981: 363–393). It is natural to think that guilt should be based on the same factors, so that the more wrongful one’s act, and (roughly) the greater one’s control over it and the more central to one’s plan it was, the more the offender should feel guilty for having performed it.

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  153 This approach entails that, where there has been no wrong done, or at least no responsibility for a wrong, one is factually innocent such that there should be neither punishment nor guilt. Typical is the following: ‘Strictly speaking, survivor guilt is not rational guilt, for surviving the Holocaust, or surviving battle …  is not typically because a person has deliberately let another take his place in harm’ (Sherman 2013: 185).4 While survivor’s guilt might be understandable from a standard Kantian perspective, it is not justified in the sense of there being good moral reason for a person, who is ex hypothesi utterly innocent, to exhibit it. Finally, consider virtue theory in contemporary Western philosophy. Of course, many virtue ethicists favour particularism, denying that any general principle can adequately capture the nature of all the forms of human excellence. As I advance such a principle in this chapter as promising, it is appropriate to contrast it with its closest rivals, namely, salient Western theories about the essence of virtue. One such theoretical approach to virtue is the view shared by Thomas Hurka and Robert Adams, that virtue consists (roughly) of loving or being for the good and hating or being against the bad, where these dis/values can be constituted by one’s own actions and attitudes (Hurka 2001; Adams 2006). When it comes to moral virtue, one has it (roughly) insofar as one performs right acts (good) and likes doing so or does so for their own sake. Conversely, if one has acted wrongly (bad), then one exhibits moral virtue insofar as one feels guilty for having done so and perhaps is willing to submit to punishment. There is no reason, at least within this framework as normally expounded, for a survivor to think of either herself or her survival as bad. Although neither Hurka nor Adams addresses survivor’s guilt, Hurka does take up the related case of someone who accidentally strikes another with his car, noting, ‘If the driver was driving safely, his action was not wrong and involved no vicious attitude, so he has no ground for guilt’ (2001: 204). Similar remarks surely apply to someone who was, say, merely lucky enough to survive a tsunami. Another prominent virtue ethical theory is Rosalind Hursthouse’s view that the virtues are constituted by settled dispositions of human persons that advance individual survival, continuance of the species, characteristic enjoyment and freedom from pain, and the good functioning of the social group (1999: 197–216). Hursthouse contends that charity, justice, honesty and courage plausibly count as virtues insofar as they reliably foster these four ends. Does survivor’s guilt also count as a virtue for doing so? Of these four ends, one might suggest that being disposed towards survivor’s guilt would promote the good functioning of the social group. After all, it surely does not reliably foster individual survival, reproduction of the species or enjoyment; if anything, the opposite might be true. However, by ‘good functioning of the social group’ Hursthouse means merely that the group is such as to promote the other three ends (1999: 201–202), and, so, if survivor’s guilt does not do so directly, it is unlikely to do so indirectly, i.e., by enabling the group to do so. Furthermore, note that Hursthouse’s own interpretation of her theory entails that survivor’s guilt is unreasonable, as she remarks that guilt in general is ‘inappropriate when the agent is blameless’ (1999: 77; see also 76).

154  Thaddeus Metz In sum, normative ethical theories prominent in recent Western philosophy have difficulty entailing and explaining the judgment that survivor’s guilt is typically reasonable. My claim is that there are theoretical resources in the African tradition that promise to do much better.

3 An African theory of moral virtue There are three major accounts of virtue in contemporary African philosophy,5 of which I favour the one that is fundamentally relational. According to this approach, communal or harmonious relationships are not merely instrumental (Gyekye 1997) or epistemic (Bujo 2001) conditions for good character, but rather constitute it (in part). By this view, what it is for one to have ubuntu, i.e., humanness or virtue, is roughly for one to live communally or in harmony with others. This appears to be Desmond Tutu’s view when he says of indigenous southern Africans, When we want to give high praise to someone we say, ‘Yu, u nobuntu’; ‘Hey, he or she has ubuntu.’ This means they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate … . We say, ‘a person is a person through other people’. It is not ‘I think therefore I am’. It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong.’ I participate, I share … . Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum – the greatest good. (1999: 34, 35) In this section, I spell out a conception of moral virtue that is inspired by the remarks of Tutu and those with similar interpretations of the African tradition.6 Note that it is a philosophical construction that, while informed by salient subSaharan mores, is intended to be of prima facie interest to an ethicist working in any major tradition across the globe, and is not meant to reflect, in detailed anthropological or sociological fashion, the views of any specific traditional subSaharan people or group of them.7 As alluded to in the quote above from Tutu, many times the African ethic of ubuntu is summed up with the maxim, ‘A person is a person through other persons’. Although this phrase is sometimes used to express a metaphysical claim, to the effect that one could not have become who one is without living in a certain society, it is also routinely meant to express an evaluative claim. In particular, it is a prescription to become a real person or to live a genuinely human way of life (see Nkulu-N’Sengha 2009 for a survey of the views of several sub-Saharan peoples). Such an approach is a eudaimonist or self-realization perspective, similar to the foundations of the most influential classical Greek ethics and East Asian Confucianism. The ultimate answer to the question of why one should live one way rather than another is the fact that it would make oneself a better person. There is a distinctively human and higher part of our nature, and a lower, animal self, where both can be realized to various degrees. One can be more or less of a human or person, and one’s basic aim in life should be to develop one’s

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  155 humanness or to cultivate one’s personhood as much as one can. Indeed, it is common for indigenous Africans to describe those who are wicked as ‘non-persons’ or even ‘animals’ (Bhengu 1996: 27; Letseka 2000: 186; Nkulu-N’Sengha 2009). Turning to the second part of the maxim, one is to become a real person ‘through other persons’, which I interpret to mean insofar as one prizes communal relationships with others. As Augustine Shutte remarks of an ubuntu ethic, ‘Our deepest moral obligation is to become more fully human. And this means entering more and more deeply into community with others. So although the goal is personal fulfilment, selfishness is excluded’ (2001: 30). It is common for ethicists working in the African tradition to maintain, or at least to suggest, that the only comprehensive respect in which one can exhibit human excellence is by relating to other (innocent) parties communally or harmoniously. What do such relationships essentially involve? In addition to Tutu’s mention of ‘I participate, I share’, consider these characterizations from some additional southern African thinkers: (H)armony is achieved through close and sympathetic social relations within the group, thus the notion umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other persons—ed.). (Mokgoro 1998: 17) Individuals consider themselves integral parts of the whole community. A person is socialised to think of himself, or herself, as inextricably bound to others … . Ubuntu ethics can be termed anti-egoistic as it discourages people from seeking their own good without regard for, or to the detriment of, ­others and the community. Ubuntu promotes the spirit that one should live for others. (Mnyaka and Motlhabi 2005: 222, 224) If you asked ubuntu advocates and philosophers: What principles inform and organise your life? What do you live for? What motive force or basic attitude gives your life meaning? … . the answers would express commitment to the good of the community in which their identities were formed, and a need to experience their lives as bound up in that of their community. (Nkondo 2007: 91) (P)ersonhood is defined in relation to the community … . A sense of community exists if people are mutually responsive to one another’s needs …  (O)ne attains the complements associated with full or mature selfhood through participation in a community of similarly constituted selves … . To be is to belong and to participate. (Mkhize 2008: 39, 40) Such construals of ubuntu, of how to realize oneself by relating to other persons, suggest two logically distinct elements of communion (harmony). On the one hand, there is participating, being close, considering oneself part of the whole, experiencing oneself as bound up with others, and belonging, which I label

156  Thaddeus Metz ‘identifying’ with others or ‘sharing a way of life’ with them. On the other hand, there is sharing (one’s resources), being sympathetic, living for the sake of others, being committed to others’ good, and responding to one another’s needs, which I call ‘exhibiting solidarity’ with others or ‘caring for’ them. I have worked to distinguish and reconstruct these two facets of a communal (or harmonious) relationship with some precision (see, e.g., Metz 2015b). It is revealing to understand identifying with another (or being close, belonging, etc.) to be the combination of exhibiting certain psychological attitudes of cohesion and cooperative behaviour consequent to them. The attitudes include a tendency to think of oneself as a member of a group with the other and to refer to oneself as a ‘we’ (rather than an ‘I’), a disposition to feel pride or shame in what the other or one’s group does, and, at a higher level of intensity, an emotional appreciation of the other’s nature and value. The cooperative behaviours include being transparent about the terms of interaction, allowing others to make voluntary choices, adopting goals that cohere with those of others, acting on the basis of trust, and, at the extreme end, choosing for the reason that ‘this is who we are’. Exhibiting solidarity with another (or acting for others’ good, etc.) is similarly aptly construed as the combination of exhibiting certain psychological attitudes and engaging in helpful behaviour. Here, the attitudes are ones positively oriented towards the other’s good and include an empathetic awareness of the other’s condition and a sympathetic emotional reaction to this awareness. The actions are not merely those likely to be beneficial, that is, to improve the other’s state, but also are ones done consequent to certain motives, say, for the sake of making the other better off or even a better person. This specification of what it is to commune (or harmonize) with others grounds a fairly rich, attractive and useable African virtue ethic. Bringing things together, here are some concrete and revealing principled interpretations of ‘A person is a person through other persons’: one should become a real person, which is matter of prizing identity and solidarity with others; or, an agent ought to live a genuinely human way of life (exhibit ubuntu), which she can do if and only if she honours relationships of sharing a way of life with others and caring for their quality of life.8 Conceiving of moral virtue in this comprehensive and basic way makes good sense of the particular instances of it that have often been extolled by African thinkers and that many in other traditions will find intuitive. Recall Tutu’s remark that one with ubuntu is ‘generous, hospitable, friendly, caring and compassionate’. Similarly, Mluleki Mnyaka and Mokgethi Motlhabi, two South African theologians, maintain that the following traits are best associated with ubuntu: ‘kindness, compassion, caring, sharing, solidarity and sacrifice’ (2005: 227). And in a survey of the African tradition, Peter Paris highlights the virtues of beneficence, forbearance (i.e., patience and tolerance), practical wisdom, forgiveness and justice (1995: 130–154). Most of these cited virtues are well captured by the solidarity dimension of communion, although friendliness, forbearance and sacrifice plausibly amount to ways of identifying with others, in which one enjoys a sense of togetherness and does what one can to support cooperative projects.

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  157 In addition, greeting others, keeping promises and upholding customs, which are also characteristically African virtues (e.g., Mbiti 1990: 208–209), appear to be manifestations of shared identity. I do not have the space to argue that prizing communion captures the nature of moral virtue in its entirety, or better than rival theoretical accounts. At the core my claims are that, at least insofar as moral virtues are other-regarding, a great many of them are well accounted for by a basic conception of human excellence as constituted by attitudes (and actions consequent to them) that prize communal relationship, and, as I now argue, that an implication of this conception is that a person could be virtuous for exhibiting survivor’s guilt.

4 Survivor’s guilt as prizing communion In previous sections I argued that salient theoretical accounts of morality in the contemporary West cannot easily account for the idea that survivor’s guilt is reasonable, and sketched an alternative conception of moral virtue grounded on ideals of communion and harmony prominent in the African tradition. In this section, I show that this Afro-communal theory of virtue plausibly entails that and explains why one would often be a better person for experiencing survivor’s guilt. Roughly, feeling bad upon the dumb luck of survival when one’s associates have perished is a virtuous instance of honouring one’s ties with them. First, part of communing with another person means exhibiting emotions proportionately to her condition. Emotions characteristically have either a positive or negative valence (perhaps constituted by a wish that their object obtain or not, as per Gordon 1987) that comes in degrees. Emotional communion means experiencing positive emotions in respect of another’s valuable states and negative emotions in respect of her disvaluable ones, and then either sort to an extent comparable to the amount of dis/value she is undergoing. Most often this is cashed out in terms of sympathy, whereby one feels good for others to the degree they are judged to flourish, and one feels bad for them to the extent they are deemed to founder. In addition, recall that identifying with others can mean taking pride in them when they do well, and feeling ashamed when they do poorly. Now, survivor’s guilt is analogous to these emotional states; it is another way in which one’s emotions can track the condition of others. Specifically, one feels very bad because one’s associates have undergone what is presumably the great harm of death. It is therefore not merely an epistemic sign (or a ‘mark’, to use Morris’ term) of one’s communal attachment, but also a form of the attachment itself. One might object by pointing to a difference between negative sympathy and survivor’s guilt, namely that, while in the former case one feels bad for the other, in the latter one feels bad about oneself. However, both still have in common a negative emotional state in response to the disvalue of an other’s condition, which is, I submit, enough similarity for the analogy to work. Furthermore, notice that the full parallel is encountered in the case of shame. Suppose your adult brother has a racist outburst. When one feels ashamed about what he has done, the object of shame is in part oneself, even though one did not manifest shameful character.

158  Thaddeus Metz Survivor’s guilt appears similar, as the object of guilt is oneself, even though one did not perform a wrongful act for which one was responsible. Another query is why guilt might be appropriate upon others having died in ways for which one is not culpable, as opposed to some other negative emotions such as embarrassment, loneliness, bewilderment or disgust. Part of the answer to this question involves reminding the reader that my claim is neither that guilt is the only proper attitude to have, nor that it is a necessary one. Guilt is merely one form that communal virtue can take; perhaps, in addition, it would be good of one to feel embarrassed at having survived, or to feel lonely in the face of so many others having perished, or to feel bewildered at the absence of an explanation as to why one lived and others did not. Another part of the answer involves reminding ourselves that the appropriateness of an emotion is a function of not merely its valence and degree, but also its kind. So, for example, disgust is normally considered to be a proper response to what threatens contamination or pollution, which is not essentially present in cases of the sort that I submit reasonably occasion survivor’s guilt. There is a second emotional respect in which survivor’s guilt is plausibly a form of communion. A characteristic part of survivor’s guilt is feeling bad for having survived, but another is blaming oneself for others having died. That is, in addition to being negatively affected in a certain way, one experiencing survivor’s guilt sometimes makes a disapproving judgment; one treats oneself as responsible for another’s fate, indeed fatality, even though one had not been causally, or at least not morally, responsible for it. I submit that such an appraisal is to ‘think of oneself as inextricably bound to others’ and a manifestation of ‘the spirit that one should live for others’, to echo Mnyaka and Motlhabi’s remarks above. Readers will be tempted to object that it is incorrect to blame oneself when one’s associates have perished, supposing that one could not have rescued them or otherwise was not responsible for their death. However, one might be making a similarly factually incorrect imputation of responsibility when one takes pride in the accomplishments of one’s adult relatives, and yet that is rarely viewed as inappropriate. More deeply, the responsibility need not be interpreted as about the failure to have performed a certain action or fulfilled a particular duty, but rather the failure to have been a specific sort of person, namely, one who in fact met the needs of one’s intimates. Any plausible interpretation of African morality will include a partial dimension, according a principled priority to those to whom one is related, where, traditionally speaking, that meant going out of one’s way to aid those with whom one shares blood ties (Appiah 1998). However, a philosophically attractive reconstruction of ‘family first’ and ‘charity begins at home’ is the idea that one is a better person insofar as one does a lot for those with whom one has already exhibited identity or solidarity (on which see Metz 2017c). From this perspective, not merely is it bad for one’s family or compatriots to die, but also one is not good if one was unable to save them from that, even supposing it was not one’s fault. Insofar as human excellence is centrally constituted by meeting the urgent interests of one’s family, one is lacking it upon having been unable to do so for

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  159 whatever reason, and that arguably makes the blame element of guilt apt to some degree. The disapproval need not be about having performed a culpable wrong, or even having failed to uphold an imperfect duty to others (as per the interesting suggestion in Sherman 2011), but rather for not having been one who helped one’s intimates in a time of great need and for now being one who can never help them again. In short, one is less of a person than one might have been (due to bad moral luck). A third respect in which survivor’s guilt is a way of prizing communion concerns the idea that one has not shared the same fate as one’s intimates. That is, the disapproval involved in survivor’s guilt might not merely be about not having been a person who met their needs, but also about not having been in the same boat with them, where the latter is a distinct facet of communion. Recall that by the interpretation of ubuntu above, one is a good person, in part, insofar as one cooperatively participates with one’s fellows. Salient forms of participation in the African philosophical tradition are residing with a family and engaging in the rituals and customs of one’s society. For an additional respect in which one should live with others and do as they do, return to the case of sympathy. In emotionally attuning oneself to the other’s state, one is sharing in the latter to some degree. If, to realize their humanness, individuals ought to experience psychological pain upon awareness of another’s suffering, then virtue means feeling another’s pain with her, com-miserating. When one suffers, so do her friends and family to some degree – ideally! ‘Ubuntu calls on us to believe and feel that: Your pain is My pain, My wealth is Your wealth’ (Nussbaum 2003: 21). Consider, too, the resistance to great inequalities among traditional African peoples and in the philosophies inspired by their worldviews and practices (on which see Metz 2015b). If there were a choice of distributing two units of a burden on ten people or ten units on one person, friends of ubuntu would characteristically opt for the former, despite the fact that there would be double the overall amount of harm. As Kwame Gyekye says of one strand of African ethics, ‘Communitarian moral and political theory, which considers the community as a fundamental human good, advocates a life lived in harmony and cooperation with others, a life of mutual consideration and aid and of interdependence, a life in which one shares in the fate of the other’ (1997: 75–76). I submit that undergoing survivor’s guilt similarly honours the value of participation, both by including the judgment that one should have shared the same fate and by feeling bad, thereby in fact coming to share a bit of it. Patricia Greenspan has addressed something like this rationale (albeit not in the context of African virtue ethics), and she has objected to it as follows: ‘Part of showing that one identifies with others in a way that makes inequalities unwelcome involves the willingness to make up for inequalities by way of self-inflicted emotional distress. But this is an unachievable aim in many cases; and according to the account I have offered it is based on an illusory feeling of responsibility’ (1992: 302; see also 301). In reply, the aim need not be construed as fully ‘levelling down’ to what one’s associates have undergone, but instead as undergoing a taste of what they have. Furthermore, the judgment that it would have been, or

160  Thaddeus Metz would still be, good to experience something of the burden of one’s fellows need not be grounded on the false belief that one is responsible for their burden. Again, the view that one would have exhibited more ubuntu in one respect to have shared the same fate as others, or would exhibit more now to do so to some degree, does not imply that one is objectively guilty for their fate. The first three rationales for the appropriateness of survivor’s guilt have drawn on an Afro-communal conception of moral virtue to flesh out Morris’ intuition, mentioned in the introduction, that survivor’s guilt is a way to ‘manifest one’s solidarity with others’.9 The fourth rationale instead aims to underwrite his comment that it is also a way to ‘mark one’s attachment to principles of fairness and justice’. It is a standard part of a sub-Saharan ethic to maintain that elders, i.e., those who have displayed much virtue by having communed with others substantially over time, should be accorded greater respect than non-elders. Not only is their testimony to be given more weight, but they are thought to deserve more from life, for instance by being served first at mealtimes and being greeted in a particular way. Now, when those without as much ubuntu, say, those who have been distant or selfish, are instead the ones to get more by surviving, it would be apt for them to feel guilty. And even when some with a lot of ubuntu are the ones to have survived, it would arguably be sensible for them to feel guilty, as they were no more special than others with much ubuntu who did not survive. In sum, it can be apt to feel bad for enjoying an unjust distribution of a benefit, even if its allocation was not the result of an unjust action, but rather a tsunami or something similar.

5 Conclusion My aim has been to provide a moral-theoretic grounding for the judgment that it can be reasonable to exhibit survivor’s guilt. Prominent Western ethical philosophies entail that it would typically be unreasonable, and so I have explored resources in a non-Western tradition that promise to make better sense of it. In particular, I have advanced a conception of moral virtue with a sub-Saharan pedigree according to which one is a better person, the more one honours communion with others, relationships of sharing a life with others and caring for their quality of life. And I have argued that feeling bad upon the dumb luck of surviving where others were not so fortunate is one way of honouring communion, so construed. I conclude by noting that the arguments for deeming survivor’s guilt to be an expression of moral virtue can be extended to a wide range of other cases in which others experience less-than-fatal burdens and one does not. It is common for those reared in an impoverished neighbourhood to feel guilt upon ‘making it’ when many others from it have not, and for those who did not experience sexual or physical abuse to feel guilt when others with whom they identify have.

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  161 All four arguments for the aptness of survivor’s guilt apply with comparable force to these and similar cases. Guilt would be a way to experience feelings attuned to the condition of others, to judge that one has not exhibited the excellence of helping them, to acknowledge that one has not shared a particular fate with them and to impart something of that fate, and to recognize that one has received benefits that one deserves no more than those with comparable or even greater excellence who did not receive them. In short, to feel bad in these situations is reasonable insofar as it is an emotional expression of a person being bound up with, and committed to, other persons.10

Notes 1 For other attempts to capture why survivor’s guilt can be reasonable, see Velleman (2003), Sherman (2011) and Christensen (2013). I provide some criticism of them in Metz (2018). 2 I use geographical labels to signify properties that have been salient in much of a certain region for a long while (see Metz 2015a). To call something ‘African’, then, means that it is characteristic of that continent (and especially the sub-Saharan region), and is not meant to suggest that it is present only there or in every part of it. 3 Cf. Morris’ remark that not feeling guilt ‘may signal insensitivity, a lack of humility, a failure to grasp emotionally how much of the good one possesses cannot be tallied on the credit side of our personal moral ledger sheet’ (1987: 237). 4 However, there are other places in Sherman’s work where she contends that survivor’s guilt can be reasonable, in particular, for having violated an imperfect duty (e.g., 2011, 2013: 182). 5 On which see Metz (2017a). 6 I initially advanced this account of virtue in Metz (2012, 2013, 2014, 2017b), and crib from these works when recounting it here. 7 Probably most indigenous African peoples believe in life after the death of the body, but this and other highly contested metaphysical claims are not essential to the account of moral virtue I advance. 8 Sometimes prizing or honouring these relationships will mean acting in the opposite, or discordant, ways, e.g., when necessary to prevent a greater discord. 9 Note that Morris’ use of the word ‘solidarity’ is broader than mine in this chapter. 10 Some paragraphs in this chapter have been borrowed from Metz (2018). For written comments that have improved this chapter, I thank George Hull and Frans Svensson, and for oral comments I thank Samantha Vice and the audience at a colloquium organized by the University of Cape Town Department of Philosophy. Special thanks to Neil Horne for a particularly penetrating point.

References Adams, Robert. 2006. A Theory of Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press. Appiah, Anthony. 1998. ‘Ethical Systems, African’. In Craig, Edward, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Arpon, Yasmin Lee. 2012. ‘Tsunami of Guilt’. The Nation, 30 March. http:​//www​.nati​ onmul​timed​ia.co​m/lif​e/Tsu​nami-​of-gu​ilt-3​01790​02.ht​ml. Bhengu, Mfuniselwa John. 1996. Ubuntu: The Essence of Democracy. Cape Town: Novalis Press.

162  Thaddeus Metz Bujo, Bé né zet. 2001. Foundations of an African Ethic. McNeil, Brian, trans. New York: Crossroad Publishers. Christiansen, Anne-Marie. 2013. ‘The Role of Innocent Guilt in Post-Conflict Work’. Journal of Applied Philosophy 30(4): 365–378. Deigh, John. 1999. ‘All Kinds of Guilt’. Law and Philosophy 18(4): 313–325. Gordon, Robert. 1987. The Structure of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenspan, Patricia. 1992. ‘Subjective Guilt and Responsibility’. Mind 101(402): 287–303. Greenspan, Patricia. 1995. Practical Guilt. New York: Oxford University Press. Griffioen, Amber. 2014. ‘Regaining the “Lost Self”: A Philosophical Analysis of Survivor’s Guilt’. In Gerner, Alexander and Gonç alves, Jorge, eds. Altered Self and Altered SelfExperience. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 43–57. Gyekye, Kwame. 1997. Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Hurka, Thomas. 2001. Virtue, Vice, and Value. New York: Oxford University Press. Hursthouse, Rosalind. 1999. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Letseka, Moeketsi. 2000. ‘African Philosophy and Educational Discourse’. In Higgs, Philip, Vakalisa, Ntombizolile, Mda, Thobeka and Assie-Lumumba, N’Dri Thé rè se, eds. African Voices in Education. Cape Town: Juta, 179–193. Mbiti, John. 1990. African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd edn. Oxford: Heinemann. Metz, Thaddeus. 2012. ‘Ethics in Aristotle and in Africa’. Phronimon 13(2): 99–117. Metz, Thaddeus. 2013. ‘The Virtues of African Ethics’. In Van Hooft, Stan, ed. The Handbook of Virtue Ethics. Durham: Acumen Publishers, 276–284. Metz, Thaddeus. 2014. ‘Ubuntu: The Good Life’. In Michalos, Alex, ed. Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Dordrecht: Springer, 6761–6765. Metz, Thaddeus. 2015a. ‘How the West Was One: The Western as Individualist, the African as Communitarian’. Educational Philosophy and Theory 47(11): 1175–1184. Metz, Thaddeus. 2015b. ‘An African Egalitarianism’. In Hull, George, ed. The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 185–208. Metz, Thaddeus. 2017a. ‘An Overview of African Ethics’. In Ukpokolo, Isaac, ed. Themes, Issues and Problems in African Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 61–75. Metz, Thaddeus. 2017b. ‘Confucianism and African Philosophy’. In Falola, Toyin and Afolayan, Adeshina, eds. The Handbook of African Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 207–222. Metz, Thaddeus. 2017c. ‘Ancillary Care Obligations in Light of an African Bioethic’. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38(2): 111–126. Metz, Thaddeus. 2018. ‘Survivor’s Guilt’. In LaFollette, Hugh, ed. International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1–8. Mkhize, Nhlanhla. 2008. ‘Ubuntu and Harmony’. In Nicolson, Ronald, ed. Persons in Community: African Ethics in a Global Culture. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 35–44. Mnyaka, Mluleki and Motlhabi, Mokgethi. 2005. ‘The African Concept of Ubuntu/Botho and Its Socio-Moral Significance’. Black Theology 3(2): 215–237. Mokgoro, Yvonne. 1998. ‘Ubuntu and the Law in South Africa’. Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal 1(1): 15–26. Morris, Herbert. 1987. ‘Nonmoral Guilt’. In Schoeman, Ferdinand, ed. Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 220–241.

Making sense of survivor’s guilt  163 Nkondo, Gessler Muxe. 2007. ‘Ubuntu as a Public Policy in South Africa’. International Journal of African Renaissance Studies 2(1): 88–100. Nkulu-N’Sengha, Mutombo. 2009. ‘Bumuntu’. In Asante, Molefi Kete and Mazama, Ama, eds. Encyclopedia of African Religion. Los Angeles: Sage, 142–147. Nozick, Robert. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Barbara. 2003. ‘Ubuntu: Reflections of a South African on Our Common Humanity’. Reflections 4(4): 21–26. Osaki, Tomohiro. 2015. ‘Survivors Speak of Grief, Guilt and Life after the Tsunami’. The Japan Times, 10 March. http:​//www​.japa​ntime​s.co.​jp/ne​ws/20​15/03​/10/n​ation​al/ su​rvivo​rs-sp​eak-g​rief-​guilt​-life​-tsun​ami/#​.Vyxo​bmNWd​ca. Paris, Peter. 1995. The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Sherman, Nancy. 2011. ‘The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt’. New York Times, 3 July. http:​//opi​niona​tor.b​logs.​nytim​es.co​m/201​1/07/​03/wa​r-and​-the-​moral​-logi​c-of-​survi ​ vor-g​uilt/​?_r=0​. Sherman, Nancy. 2013. ‘Guilt in War’. In Deigh, John, ed. On Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 179–197. Shutte, Augustine. 2001. Ubuntu. Cape Town: Cluster Publications. Teroni, Fabrice and Bruun, Otto. 2011. ‘Shame, Guilt and Morality’. Journal of Moral Philosophy 8(2): 223–245. Tutu, Desmond. 1999. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Random House. Velleman, J. David. 2003. ‘Don’t Worry, Feel Guilty’. In Hatzimoysis, Anthony, ed. Philosophy and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 235–248. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

9

African philosophy and nonhuman nature Edwin Etieyibo

Introduction Some scholars suggest that when it comes to the question of the moral status of nonhuman nature (animals and inanimate entities), African philosophy (i.e. African value system, thought, metaphysics or worldview) is committed to anthropocentrism. By this, they mean that on some dominant African metaphysical worldviews, nonhuman nature is not intrinsically valuable, or if it is valuable its moral worth is derivable from human characteristics or considerations.1 Or stated differently: nonhuman nature is to be valued and prized only insofar as it is of benefit to humans.2 I think these scholars are mistaken and I think this characterization is wrongheaded. In this chapter, I question this interpretation and in doing so I gesture towards the view that on some dominant African metaphysical worldviews, African philosophy could be said to be conceivably closer to biocentrism or ecocentrism than to anthropocentrism. The nub of my argument in this chapter comes in the following broad form: the ontological belief embedded in some dominant African metaphysical worldviews regarding beings and the ethical standpoint flowing from this is not committed to the view that we ought to promote “anthrospherical egalitarianism,” namely, the intrinsic value of only humans, which is essential to anthropocentricism. In short, the dual position which I argue for is (a) that if we focus on some aspects of African worldview or metaphysical description, i.e. ontologically and ethically speaking, individual beings that make up nature as well as the environment (i.e. particular entities of nonhuman nature) constitute the locus of intrinsic value; and (b) that in African communalistic description, what makes up the locus of intrinsic value are the community and beings in community.3 In both (a) and (b), intrinsic value is not human centred but is either the individual beings or the community or beings in community (the value of individual beings arises in virtue of their being the sorts of things or beings that are embedded in the community and the value of the community is derived from its individual or being-furthering and enhancing characteristics). This way of characterizing beings, community and nature, I contend, is not an anthropocentric worldview.

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  165

Anthropocentrism and its ethical standpoint The term anthropocentrism or anthropocentric entered the literature in the 1860s. This was following the controversy over Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was coined to represent the idea that humans are the centre of the universe (see Campbell, 1983). For anthropocentrism, humans are taken to be the most important life form and other life forms are important only to the extent that they affect humans or are useful to them (Kortenkamp and Moore, 2001, 2). The ethic it promotes is a human-centred one. That is, in an anthropocentric ethic, moral consideration is extended to nature only insofar as degrading or preserving it can either harm or benefit humans. On this view, it will be morally wrong to clear-cut a particular large tract of land because it will lead to ecological problems which will affect or harm humans or undermine their interests. In addition to these basic elements of anthropocentrism, there are other aspects to it, some of which are captured in the following themes: a Natural order is hierarchically ordered with humans holding a coveted position. b An ontological and existential divide exists between human and nonhuman nature. c Nature as a system of inanimate particles which operates deterministically. d Human beings alone are intrinsically valuable. e Only human beings constitute the moral community. We can draw out the ontological belief of anthropocentricism from its basic elements and the five themes above, and this is that there exists an ontological and existential divide between human and individual nonhuman organisms/nonhuman nature that is sufficient to lead us to the position that humans are (1) the single and most important bearers of intrinsic value or (2) individual nonhuman organisms/ nonhuman nature possess no intrinsic value. The ontological belief leads to the following ethical claim: we ought to promote “anthrospherical egalitarianism” (simply put, we should promote equally the intrinsic value of only humans).

African (Bantu) metaphysical worldview: Placide Tempels’ force thesis In this section, I want to argue that on an African (Bantu) metaphysical worldview, African philosophy can be taken not to be anthropocentric. This is the view that takes beings to form a hierarchy or, simply, the force thesis which we find in Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy.4 The idea of the African hierarchy of beings that we find in Tempels is underpinned by the force thesis, which is drawn from Bantu metaphysics. On the force thesis, beings are hierarchically ordered, namely, there is a causal dependence and relationship of forces. The hierarchy is this: God is at the top, followed by spirits and then ancestors (nameless dead and living dead), humans, animals and

166  Edwin Etieyibo inanimate beings. As Tempels notes, the Bantus conceive of entities or beings as essential energies or vital forces. That is, force is not just a necessary element in being, it is inseparable from the definition of being, meaning then that force is the nature of being, force is being and being is force. What are we to take from this description of the hierarchy of beings? First, that beings occupy different positions in the hierarchy. Second, that all beings in the hierarchy are the same in virtue of being forces. Or simply, that their very essence is that of force or vitality. From both of these ideas, the following claims (which I will argue for throughout the chapter) can be made: (a) that the hierarchy is not one that confers intrinsic value to some of the beings and denies it to others, and (b) that beings are not independent of one another but rather are in a causal dependence and relationship with one another. One may raise a number of issues for this African hierarchy of beings worldview. One might claim, as Kai Horsthemke has done, that as long as human beings are construed as being “above”5 nonhuman animals (which is reflected in their position on the hierarchy), nonhuman animals can be considered inferior to humans. This can be said to be further reinforced, as Horsthemke will remind us, by the fact that as a way of establishing a link with the ancestors and God, animals are used in sacrifices and rituals (Horsthemke, 2015: 44–62). In summary, the issue here is that, from the observation that humans are above animals in the hierarchy and that they are used in sacrifices and rituals, the conclusion can be drawn (and Horsthemke certainly did draw such a conclusion) that the African hierarchy of beings worldview and certain practices such as animal sacrifices and rituals in Africa are anthropocentric (Horsthemke, 2015). I would like to make some comments in response to the above point, which expand on comments that I have made elsewhere.6 To say that a being is above another being does not by that mere fact mean that such a view is anthropocentric. Of course, the response here will be that Horsthemke’s reference is not just to any being as being above another being but that a particular being, the human, is above animals. But even to say that humans are above animals in the hierarchy does not, in my view, translate into anthropocentrism. That is, to claim that humans are above animals in the hierarchy of beings does not mean that one is representing animals as not having any intrinsic value or that their moral worth is less than that of humans, or simply that nonhuman nature seems to morally matter only in terms of human values and interests or their value or utility to humans. As I have argued elsewhere (Etieyibo, 2017a), firstly, to say that A is above B does not translate into a denial of intrinsic value to B (as I have pointed out in note 5); and secondly, to use animals in ceremonies as part of attempts at establishing a link with the ancestors and God does not mean that these practices and ceremonies embed an anthropocentric belief. Two objections can be raised to my view in particular and the hierarchy of beings worldview in general. The first is that my use of the analogy of a house in note 5 to tease out the difference between above and superiority and to argue for the non-anthropocentric nature of the hierarchy of beings worldview is misguided. The second objection, which is related to the first, is that the hierarchy of

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  167 beings worldview is problematic for nonhuman nature insofar as a contrast can be made between “hierarchy,” on the one hand, and “egalitarianism,” on the other. The point of the first objection is that although it is correct to say that A is not more valuable than B, when we say that A is above B because they live on a higher floor the analogy does not apply in the case of beings being above some beings in the hierarchy. In the case of the hierarchy of beings, one being is above another being not simply in virtue of being higher up but in the amount they have of the thing which makes beings valuable, namely, vital force. Since this can be said to be the case, saying that humans are above animals or nonhuman nature becomes a matter of saying that they have more of what is of value, and surely that is the same as saying they are more valuable in that relevant respect.7 Let us grant that this is the case and that even though beings have the same kind of thing or are the same kind of thing, they have vital forces in different degrees, and since humans have more vital forces compared to animals and inanimate beings, they are more valuable in that relevant respect. That will still not still give us anthropocentrism. Recall the two crucial elements of anthropocentrism: (a) underpinning values or characteristics that are values in terms of the features or interests of humans or anthropos or anthropus (human being)8, and (b) the ethical commitment or claim to promote “anthrospherical egalitarianism”. Let me begin with (a). Nowhere in the description of the hierarchy of beings worldview is it suggested that the value or characteristics that underpin the view are values in terms of the features or interests of humans or anthropos. Firstly, the worldview is that all the beings are forces or, simply, that what they are, are vital forces. Secondly, although the hierarchy of beings worldview takes humans to have more vital forces than nonhuman nature, it does not thereby commit itself to the conclusion that humans are more valuable in that relevant respect. Let me explain this by using the example of a typical anthropocentric view according to which rationality is the feature that confers intrinsic value on beings. The general position of this sort of anthropocentric view is to take every human to be valuable insofar as they possess the feature of rationality. That is, one does not generally find that this view takes some humans to be more valuable or less worthy in respect of the degree they possess of the feature of rationality. What morally matters on this view is that every being is valuable and equally so insofar as they possess rationality, notwithstanding the fact that they possess rationality in varying degrees. My point is that if the degree of rationality plays no moral role in the ascription of value to humans and if what morally matters or counts is only the possession of rationality, why, then, do we want to commit the hierarchy of beings worldview to the conclusion that just because it takes some beings to have more vital forces than others, humans must be more valuable than nonhuman nature simply by virtue of having a greater amount of vital forces. Thirdly, the hierarchy of beings worldview takes the defining feature to be vital force, but vital force or vitality is not a human characteristic. Since it is vital force that underpins the demarcation of value and not human features such as rationality, it is misleading to call the hierarchy of beings worldview anthropocentric. Simply put, the vital force feature

168  Edwin Etieyibo that is employed by the hierarchy of beings worldview to designate value and what is valuable is not a distinctively an anthropos feature, and accordingly, the worldview cannot be said to be anthropocentric. I now come to (b). I do think that one has to go beyond the idea of humans being above animals and nonhuman nature in the hierarchy of beings in order to succeed in the claim that the African hierarchy of beings worldview is anthropocentric. For one to succeed in the claim, one has to show that the African hierarchy of beings worldview leads to the ethical claim that we ought to promote “anthrospherical egalitarianism” (i.e. only promote equally the intrinsic value of only humans). Another way of stating this is that one has to show that the African hierarchy of beings worldview is committed to the view that there is an ontological and existential divide between human and individual nonhuman organisms/nonhuman nature that is sufficient to lead us to the position that humans are (1) the single and most important bearers of intrinsic value or (2) individual nonhuman organisms/nonhuman nature possess no intrinsic value. Given what I have outlined above about anthropocentrism and what we know about the African hierarchy of beings worldview, I don’t think one will be able to succeed in doing this. The point is that if on the African hierarchy of beings worldview we take God as essentially characterized by vitality and take him to have distributed this life force (in varying degrees) to everything in the universe, from ancestors to human beings, animals, plants and inanimate entities, and if we take a naturalist reading of vitality by settling for an “energy oriented” conception of vitality as “liveliness” or “creative power” (see Metz, 2012), then the obligation is not one about promoting “anthrospherical egalitarianism” but rather promoting values that go beyond humans. Once we settle for this as the proper moral demand of the African hierarchy of beings worldview, then various aspects of nature will be taken to morally matter not for the sake of human characteristics, benefits or interests, but for their own sake. The main thrust of the second objection is that egalitarianism is usually used to refer to situations where beings, things, entities or people are equally valuable in relevant respects. However, on the vital force model of the African hierarchy of beings, humans, animals, plants and rocks are not viewed as having equal amounts of vital force. In which case, as the objection goes, it is misleading to say or suggest that the African hierarchy of beings worldview is egalitarian, for even though humans and nonhuman nature have the same kind of thing, they have it in different degrees, and accordingly can be said not to be equal. I do find the objection persuasive if one focuses simply on the hierarchy; that is, if what one looks at is only the way that the beings in the hierarchy are lined up or what distinguishes one being from another being or the amount of vital forces that each being has. But this will be a wrong way to look at it and analyse the African hierarchy of beings worldview or to appreciate its ontology. As soon as one begins to properly analyse the African hierarchy of beings worldview (the way it should be done), which is, I suggest, to look at it the way we do when we discuss egalitarianism in political philosophy, namely, egalitarianism in respect of the equal moral worth of human beings or persons, then the objection strikes us as no longer persuasive.

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  169 In moral and political philosophy, when we talk about egalitarianism in respect of the equal moral worth of human beings or persons, we do not focus on physical differences. If we focus on physical differences among humans, we won’t be able to talk about egalitarianism. This is because, as we know, humans in many ways are not physically equal. Some humans are more intelligent, beautiful, smarter, taller, stronger, bigger etc. than others. Despite these physical differences, we still say that (from a moral point of view) all humans are equal. Their equality does not derive from their distinguishing physical qualities but from something common to all humans, what we might call the “common human element,” i.e. their “humanity.” I suggest that our analysis of the African hierarchy of beings worldview should proceed in similar fashion, as is the case with our analysis of the equal value of humans in the midst of their varying or vast physical differences. Doing so preserves the notion of egalitarianism for the African hierarchy of beings worldview despite the differences among beings. That is, beings may have different degrees or amounts of vital forces, and humans may have more vital force than nonhuman nature, but such physical differences are not morally significant; the differences play no moral role in our ascription of equality to the beings. Just like our analysis of the egalitarianism of humans in moral and political philosophy is done not in terms of any distinctive human physical qualities but on the basis of the “common human element” or their “humanity,” so also should our analysis of the equality of beings in the hierarchy be done. It should be done not in terms of any distinguishing physical qualities of beings, i.e. not on the basis of some beings possessing more vital forces than others, but on the basis of something common to all beings, namely, what we might call their being-ness, or “vitality.” In summary, the point is that we can meaningfully dismiss any talk of anthropocentricism for the African hierarchy of beings worldview, and talk about moral egalitarianism and all beings possessing intrinsic value on the worldview, if we think about the way one might, for whatever reasons, separate humans. One may ascribe superiority to some humans and inferiority to others. We could say that, physically speaking, some humans are superior to others: taller, stronger, more intelligent or beautiful etc. If we are to place humans in some sort of hierarchy using the feature of intelligence or physical/emotional strength, we would have some at the top on the basis of their high IQs or strength and others in the middle or bottom on the basis of their low IQs or strength. However, this division does not mean that, morally speaking, humans on the lower rungs of the hierarchy have no intrinsic value or that humans are not equal. If this were the case, then we wouldn’t be able to talk about the equal value of humans, notwithstanding their physical differences. The point is that despite such physical differences we are still able to say that every human is valuable in and of itself and that all humans are equal in virtue of their humanity or beingness. What matters morally in this case are the features that speak to the intrinsic nature of humans, i.e. humanity or beingness, and not accidental features or features that don’t speak to their intrinsic nature, such as strength, beauty and intelligence (even when on a physical evaluation one might say some humans are “superior” to other humans

170  Edwin Etieyibo in virtue of possessing more of certain physical attribute such as strength, beauty and intelligence). So, one could also say that although beings occupy different positions in the African hierarchy of beings worldview because they possess forces (to different degrees), they have intrinsic value and are moral equals insofar as the characteristic or distinguishing physical qualities are being-ness or vitality. In conclusion, I want to note that although my discussion was on the intrinsic value of beings in the African hierarchy of beings worldview, the beings should not be taken to exist in isolation or independently of one another. As Teffo and Roux (1998) have noted, in terms of the African hierarchy of beings worldview of the existence of beings or forces, there is an interconnectedness of the various forms of beings: African metaphysics is holistic in nature. Reality is seen as a closed system so that everything hangs together and is affected by any change in the system …  African metaphysics is organised around a number of principles and laws which control the so called vital forces. There is a principle concerning the interaction of forces, that is between God and humankind, and material things. These forces are hierarchically placed, they form a chain of beings. In this hierarchy, God, the creator and source of all vital forces, is at the apex. Then follow the ancestors, then humankind, and the lower forces, animals, plants, and matter. (Teffo and Roux, 1998: 138) One may describe the picture presented by Teffo and Roux in the language of Godfrey Tangwa, who called such a metaphysical view of interdependence “eco-bio-communitarianism,” which he draws from the Nso worldview.9 In this worldview, “the distinction between plants, animals, and inanimate things, between the sacred and the profane, matter and spirit, the communal and the individual, is a slim and flexible one … . One might say, in short, that they are more disposed toward an attitude of live and let live” (Tangwa, 2004: 389). The attitude of live and let live is one according to which the outlook towards “nature and the rest of creation is that of respectful coexistence, conciliation, and containment,” which involves “frequent offerings of sacrifices to God, to the divine spirits, both benevolent and malevolent, to the departed ancestors and to the sundry invisible and inscrutable forces of nature” (Tangwa, 2004: 390). One implication of this worldview is that human beings do not own the animate and inanimate world or nonhuman nature (animals, the environment, land or other entities) as property, since they are not independent from and separate from nonhuman nature as well as not having any special privilege bestowed upon them that gives them the right to own, dominate or exploit nonhuman nature (Tangwa, 2004: 389–390). In the section that follows, I will exploit and harness some of these ideas of Teffo and Roux and the eco-biocommunitarianism worldview presented by Tangwa.

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  171

African metaphysical worldview: beings and community Teffo and Roux point us to the interconnection and interdependence of beings and forces, and Tangwa describes this as an eco-bio-communitarian outlook. This outlook, I think, suggests the idea of the community of beings. And this idea of the community of beings is consistent with how African philosophy is generally understood, i.e. as a communitarian or communalistic or communocentric philosophy. By communitarian philosophy, it is meant that the philosophy is one whereby community is important as much as beings are important. In other words, it is a view or a metaphysical worldview of the primacy of beings and community. Elsewhere, I have discussed this idea of a communitarian philosophy and how it is implicated in various aspects of African philosophy and African life and practices such as the education of children, resource distribution and the environment (Etieyibo, 2017b; 2017c and 2017d). But what I want to do now is to point to how various writers in African philosophy have captured the ontology of beings and community, namely, the communitarian idea of the interconnection and interdependence of beings. I have elsewhere described this African ontology as “psychophysical harmony” (Etieyibo, 2014). Given that I have presented what some of these writers have said about the communitarian idea of the interconnection and interdependence of beings in another paper, I will simply take the ideas from there (Etieyibo, 2017d). 1 Harvey Sindima (from Malawi) talks about an African worldview according to which “the bondedness, the interconnectedness, of all living beings” is deeply emphasised (Sindima 1990: 137). 2 C. O. Ijiomah (from Nigeria) describes the African ontology in terms of “harmonious monism” (2006: 50). 3 Innocent Onyewuenyi (from Nigeria) talks of the ontology in terms of an ethical worldview that suggests that the wellbeing of humans cannot be separated from human dependence on the environment or interdependence with all that exists (1991: 29–46). 4 Munyaradzi Murove (from Zimbabwe) also speaks of the ethical outlook by pointing to the fact that the dependence and interdependence of all that exists is mutual and deep insofar as we are talking of one immediate “environment on which all humanity depends” (2004: 195–196). 5 Kofi Opoku (from Ghana) speaks of the holistic and communitarian ontology and claims that, “There is community with nature since man is part of nature and is expected to cooperate with it; and this sense of community with nature is often expressed in terms of identity and kinship, friendliness and respect” (Opoku 1993: 77). 6 Lé opold Sé dar Senghor (from Senegal) traces the African’s tendency towards communitarianism to a way of life rooted in his experience of the world in his discussion of negritude and community. He notes that the way the African feels and thinks is one that is in union not only with all other people around him but “indeed with all other beings in the universe: God, animal, tree, or

172  Edwin Etieyibo pebble” and that the naturalness with which Africans embrace and participate in nature is a way of relating cognitively to it (cited in Masolo, 2004: 489, 490). 7 Benezet Bujo (from Congo) takes “The African [to be] …  convinced that all things in the cosmos are interconnected. All natural forces depend on each other, so that human beings can live in harmony only in and with the whole of nature” (Bujo 1998:22–23). What seems clear from what all these writers have said is that in African philosophy (ontology, ethical outlook or worldview) the relationship between beings in the universe, and certainly between humans and other beings, is a symbiotic one. A symbiotic ontology of beings, or what I want to call beings and community or beings in community, is contrary to an anthropocentric ethic or worldview. On a beings-in-community (communitarian or communalistic or communocentric) view, the individual beings have intrinsic value because they are beings as embedded in the community. That is, the individual beings are the locus of intrinsic value specifically in virtue of their rootedness and embeddedness in the community. This is in sharp contrast to anthropocentricism. In an anthropocentric worldview, the characteristics that underpin the view are values in terms of the features or interests of humans or the anthropos. Furthermore, humans are said to be placed at the centre of the universe. This is not all. Anthropocentricism also holds the view that there is an ontological and existential divide between human and nonhuman nature. This is the very opposite of what we find in what these writers have said about the African communitarian ontology of the interdependence of beings. Rather than saying that African philosophy is anthropocentric, it is best to say it is closer to biocentrism or ecocentrism.10 Before I conclude this section, there are two related issues that I need to respond to. The first is about where the locus of intrinsic value lies on my communitarian ontology or beings-in-community. And the second concerns whether this communitarian ontology or beings-in-community is egalitarian. Both issues are related insofar as they are concerned with how we are to understand the relationship between the community and individual beings. As we know, communitarian ethics can sometimes entail non-egalitarianism in the sense that where the issue of communal harmony is at stake and a conflict between the interests of the individual and communal needs and traditions arises, the latter is sometimes preferred. There may be a number of ways or approaches to spelling out the relationship between individual beings and the community in terms of intrinsic value and priority. One approach is to say that the individual beings are the most important and that the community is of subordinate importance, and when there is conflict between the interests of the individual and the community or communal needs, the former takes priority. And the importance and significance of the individual beings could be cashed out in terms of their specifically communing-related capacities.11 Another way of spelling this out is to say that it is the community that is more important specifically and simply in virtue of its individual-furthering

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  173 and enhancing characteristics. A final approach is to take both the individual beings and the overarching community as being of equal moral importance and significance. I do favour the third way of spelling out the relationship between individual beings and the community in terms of intrinsic value and priority. I favour it over the other two approaches for two reasons. Firstly, it seems to me less problematic. The first way of spelling out the relationship is problematic because it is difficult to understand how, strictly speaking, it is a communitarian view if individual beings are the most important and the community is of subordinate importance.12 The second approach falls into the same sort of worry that anthropocentricism falls into. For if it is the community alone that is the locus of intrinsic value or if it has more intrinsic value compared to the individual beings, then protection of the interests of individual beings will be at the consideration of communal interest (needs, harmony etc.). Of course, advocates of this view might respond by saying that even though they take the community to have more intrinsic value and to be more important than individual beings, this does not mean that they deny any intrinsic value or any moral consideration to non-human entities. Even at that, one may still raise the worry as to whether individual beings have less moral worth compared to the community in cases of conflict between individual interests and community needs, or in the most important cases, the interests of individual beings can be overridden by the different concerns or needs of the community, or simply that the interests of individual beings would always or in most cases be secondary. A second reason why I favour the third approach over the other two approaches is that it is more consistent with the view that takes African philosophy to be closer to biocentrism or ecocentrism. On this view, the locus of intrinsic value is the individual beings and the community. Individual beings have intrinsic value not simply because of their communing-related capacities but because of being the sorts of things or beings that are embedded in the community. And the community is the locus of intrinsic value because of its individual or being-furthering and enhancing characteristics.

Worries for my views and some responses I now want to end my discussion about the status of African philosophy in the context of nonhuman nature by examining some criticisms and worries that could be raised against some of my views.13 One may frown at my use of “African” in this chapter. The critic may claim that it smacks of a homogenizing tendency. That is, what I am doing in this chapter is generalizing from a locale in respect of African philosophy and saying that it applies to the whole of Africa or all Africans. This point becomes more poignant when one considers a secondary but related worry, namely, my drawing on works by people like Tempels and other cultural works. The objection will be that I can’t do that since ethnophilosophy, properly speaking, is not philosophy. The two objections are related both in their object and in the fact that they speak to

174  Edwin Etieyibo the issue of the methodology of my chapter. Let me begin with the ethnophilosophy objection. There is a lot of debate as to whether ethnophilosophy can pass muster as African philosophy. I think it can, and I have argued this elsewhere (Etieyibo, forthcoming). Part of my argument in this chapter is that (a) philosophy is always philosophy of place, i.e. all philosophy involves as a starting point the gathering of cultural elements and templates; (b) this is not only a preliminary to critical evaluation of the cultural elements and templates; and (c) when ethnophilosophy is properly unpacked, one will see that it meets the salient features of philosophy. Simply put, the position I defend is that ethnophilosophy is important not only because there is no “culture-less” African philosophy and that African philosophers invariably draw on African culture to create, develop and calibrate African philosophy, but also because ethnophilosophy is philosophy proper insofar as such an approach is in itself part of the unpacking of some critical features of philosophical sagacity. With regard to the generalizing and homogenizing objection, my response is that it is wrongheaded for two reasons. Firstly, I do believe that it is proper to call an idea or view that originates from the African continent African even if the idea or view comes from one particular traditional African society or some part or region of Africa. What else will such a view or idea be if not African? It is certainly not American, neither is it European nor Asian. When people wear a dress from an African country (say Ghana, South Africa or Nigeria), they say I’m wearing an African dress (even though they can also say I’m wearing a Ghanaian, South African or Nigerian dress). They do not say I’m wearing an American or European or Asian dress. Similarly, a restaurant may be called an African restaurant even though not all the cuisines on the African continent are represented in its menu list. If it is proper to call the dress African although it comes from one particular African country or the restaurant African although many cuisines from other African countries are not on the menu list, it is also proper, I think, to call an idea or view African even though it comes from one particular traditional African society or a specific region in Africa. In any case, the metaphysical worldview that I have appealed to here is not one that is limited to one traditional African society or specific region in Africa. The scholars on African philosophy that I have cited and who wrote from their specific African ethnic and cultural background (and others that I haven’t cited but who also say the same thing about their cultural background) come from various parts of Africa—from Congo, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Malawi etc. Not only do they come from various regions in Africa or speak from their cultural backgrounds, their presentations also suggest that they are appealing to some common strands and features that are shared more broadly by many sub-Saharan societies in Africa. As Metz has noted, when we speak of African philosophy we are not speaking of ideas that are found in every nook and cranny of Africa but rather we are speaking of features, ideas, tendencies or recurrent themes that are, at least over a substantial amount of time, found in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (Metz, 2007a: 375. See also Metz, 2007b: 369–387). Indeed, for Metz, the

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  175 geographical terms “Western” and “African” refer to features or properties that have been salient in a particular cultural milieu or locale or have, for a long while, been recurrent in a specific place or region in a way they have tended not to be in other regions (Metz 2015: 1176). I now come to a third worry. A critic might point to the fact that, given that rituals of animal sacrificial slaughter are widespread on the African continent, the view that animals and indeed other nonhuman entities are as valuable as humans seems implausible, and the fact that these practices are prevalent suggests that African value systems and metaphysical, religious and ethical positions and perspectives on animals are anthropocentric. Part of the thrust of this criticism is that the practices of animal slaughter and sacrifices in African societies clearly highlight the point that those that engage in these practices and the societies do not attribute enough or the right kind of intrinsic value, or moral standing, to the animals, and that it is this lack of sufficient moral valuing that warrants their being used for sacrifices. I think this view is mistaken, and I will outline below some reasons why I make this claim.14 Firstly, it is not clear to me the sense in which rituals of animal sacrificial slaughter are widespread in Africa. Is the objection that these practices are a stable part of cultural life in many, most or all traditional or modern African societies? In any case, even if one grants that the practice is common in African societies, it does not thereby suggest that African philosophy or indeed African value systems and metaphysical, religious and ethical positions and perspectives on animals are anthropocentric. Those who engage in such practices or rituals of animal sacrificial slaughter—if we assume that these practices and rituals indicate that nonhuman animals are valued less or that their use in sacrifices and rituals is not because of the need to form some bond between the physical and spiritual worlds—may simply be mistaken about African value systems and metaphysical, religious and ethical positions and perspectives on animals, or they know what it is but choose to behave differently. Secondly, the stated purpose of animal slaughter, rituals and sacrifices doesn’t seem to establish the claim of anthropocentrism. We are told that one of the aims of these rituals and sacrifices is to institute and maintain some communion with the ancestral and spiritual worlds. That is, the use of the animals in rituals and sacrifices is so as to forge some linkage between the material or physical and spiritual worlds. Given this aim, it is not clear why one would refer to animal slaughter, rituals and sacrifices as anthropocentric as it is the interests of the community or beings as embedded in the community and not that of the anthropos that are being promoted in the rituals and sacrifices. I think the mistake made by those who look at animal slaughter, rituals and sacrifices as pointing to an anthropocentric worldview for African value systems, thought and metaphysics is that they focus too much on the practices of animal slaughter, rituals and sacrifices, rather than on their symbolism, in other words, what those practices mean. Once the proper object is sharply brought into focus—the symbolism rather than the practices of animal slaughter, rituals and sacrifices—we immediately realize that African philosophy is not anthropocentric. As an example, take the practice of hunting

176  Edwin Etieyibo among some indigenous or Native American groups (Canada’s First Peoples or Nations), the Northern Athapaskan. The Athapaskan, we are told, take the spirits of animals to be among the most powerful spirits in existence. One of the reasons for this is that survival depends on the animals and animal spirits (Glenbow Museum, 1987: 140). Of course, this is understandable, given the environment where these people live and their continuous dependence on animals for survival (food, skin for clothing etc.). Concerning the way that the Athapaskan view hunting, we are told: “When man was successful in the hunt, it was because the spirit of the animal permitted it to be taken. A hunter returning home empty-handed would not say, ‘I had no luck with bear or beaver,’ but rather, ‘bear or beaver did not want me.’15 Good relations with animal spirits were critical to survival, and much time and energy was invested in ritual and taboo designed to please and placate these spirits” (Glenbow Museum, 1987: 140; see also Morice, 1905: 204). The reason I brought this example up is to suggest that anyone who merely focused on the practice of hunting among the Athapaskan would conclude that the Athapaskan are anthropocentric. But this would be mistaken, superficial and a hasty conclusion to draw. A much more plausible conclusion, one that is richer and more nuanced, will take the metaphysical worldview and value system of the Athapaskan into account. And once this is done, one will realize that hunting, as a way of life, for the Athapaskan goes beyond just killing animals for food and clothing; that it involves a whole range of symbolisms among which are the way in which they understand their relationships with the animals and animal spirits, other spirits and beings and the universe, as a whole. Thirdly, it is also important to highlight that a number of the traditional African societies that can be said to practise animal sacrifices also engage in human sacrifices in ritual ceremonies. In their rituals of sacrificial slaughter, in addition to animals, they have (and do) use humans. Such sacrifices may be motivated by personal or community rituals—the latter which is done to cleanse the community (See Olupona 1991 and Igwe, 2011). The point is that just as animals are used for sacrifices, so also humans are used. But that is not all. For in order to be consistent, if we take the use of humans in sacrifices as not suggesting or implying that such humans lack intrinsic value or are valued less, we also must take the use of animals in sacrifices as not necessarily suggesting or implying that they are considered morally less worthy. Still, the critic might push further and claim that the mere fact that both animals and humans are used in sacrifices suggests that not enough or not the right kind of intrinsic value or moral standing is attributed to the individual animals and humans in question. However, I think it is difficult to defend this claim. This is partly because it turns on an empirical question, namely, what is in the head of those that engage in such sacrifices, and in particular, whether they consider the individual animals and humans in the sacrifices they perform to be morally less valuable or not. Certainly, we can ask some of these people what is in their head, but that will not answer the question in the case of others that we have not asked, since they might have a different take regarding why they engage in these sacrifices and their view of the moral place of the individual animals and humans that they use in the sacrifices. But, in any case,

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  177 for some of those that engage in animal and human sacrifices, it may well be the case that they are simply mistaken about African value systems and metaphysical, religious and ethical positions and perspectives on animals, or that they know what they are but choose to behave differently (that is, if we assume that the reasons they engage in these practices go beyond the symbolism of linkage between the physical and spiritual worlds). A final objection that can be mounted against my view is that my gesturing towards the third way of spelling out the relationship between individual beings and the community does not resolve the problem of the conflict between the interests of individual beings and the needs of the community. There is sense in which this criticism is right. For sure (conceptually and practically), conflict is bound to arise in situations where one appeals to two things that, although symmetrical or equal, are not identical. Such conflicts may have to be resolved sometimes in favour of one party and other times in favour of the other. But I don’t think that such a way of resolving the conflict entails that less moral value is assigned to one or the other. In any event, one could argue that there is no significant moral difference between the way I have spelt out the relationship between individual beings and the community and a biocentric or an ecocentric view regarding environmental actions meant to preserve or protect the environment. A biocentric view would approve the killing of other sentient individuals in order to preserve particular endangered organisms (for the action promotes the interest of the community of organisms or life). And an ecocentric view would approve the killing of other sentient individuals in order to preserve a particular endangered nonsentient species (such as a plant species) or other features of an ecosystem (the action promotes the interest of the community species or the ecosystem). On both the biocentric and the ecocentric worldviews, there are times when the conflict between the individual being and endangered nonsentient species or features of an ecosystem is resolved in favour of the endangered nonsentient species or ecosystem, and other times when it is resolved in favour of the individual being. In all of this, no one jumps at the proponents of biocentrism or ecocentrism for being anthropocentric or for peddling anthropocentric attitudes or for valuing less either the individual being or endangered nonsentient species or features of an ecosystem.

Conclusion Scholars are divided regarding the question of the moral status of nonhuman nature in African philosophy. While some argue that African value systems, thought, metaphysics or worldview accord an anthropocentric status to nonhuman nature, others including myself are sympathetic to the view that accords African philosophy a non-anthropocentric outlook. What I have attempted to do in this chapter is to argue that the ontological belief embedded on some dominant African metaphysical worldviews regarding beings and the ethical standpoint flowing from this is not anthropocentric.16 As I have argued, my position, which takes African philosophy to be communitarian, according to which the relationships that exist between and among beings is one that is symbiotic or interdependent,

178  Edwin Etieyibo does not suggest a perfect or one “happy” community and universe. That is, my position does not imply or advocate a world where the interest of every being is never overridden by other considerations or the interest of other beings. So, on this view, for example, and in the context of inter-species or inter-being conflict, it is perfectly right to resolve conflicts between individual species or beings or between individual beings and the community by prioritizing the interest of one over the other. Stated more precisely, my view allows the interest of some particular individual or being to be overridden by the interest of other individuals or beings, or sometimes it prioritizes the interest of individual beings over those of the community and at other times prioritizes the interest of the community over those of the individual. Such ways of resolving moral conflict imply neither anthropocentrism nor that individual beings or the community are not the locus of intrinsic value or that either is morally less worthy.17

Notes 1 See Calicott (1994), LenkaBula (2008), Behrens (2010) and Horsthemke (2015) for different characterizations of African philosophy, animals and nonhuman nature and reasons for thinking that African thought and values are anthropocentric and not able to justify and ground animal rights. 2 I will be using nonhuman nature here to refer both narrowly to animals and inanimate entities or beings and more broadly to the environment as a whole. 3 The discussion for (a) is provided in the section after next, while that of (b) comes up in the section immediately following it. 4 While the English translation of Bantu Philosophy was published in 1959, the French translation was published in 1945 in Zaire under the title La Philosophie Bantoue. The book was originally written in Flemish and in it, Tempels attempts to show that SubSaharan Africans have a distinctive philosophy and what it is that underpins such a philosophy. Following its publication, it has received diverse reactions. See Okafor (1982). 5 I prefer to use the term “above” rather than “superior,” which Horthemke uses. This is because while the latter may mistakenly carry the notion of moral worth, the former is neutral to this idea. So, for example, one may say that since A is superior to B, A is more valuable than B. But on the idea of above, A can be above B without A being said to be more valuable than B. So, for example, in a many-floored building, A may live on the second floor and thus above B, who lives on the first or ground floor. Yet, despite the fact that A is above B, we wouldn’t say that A has more value than B, or indeed that the second floor is intrinsically more valuable than the first or ground floor. 6 See Etieyibo (2017a). 7 I am grateful to George Hull for directing my attention to this objection. 8 Anthropos is Greek and anthropus is Latin. 9 The Nso are one of the largest ethnic groups in Cameroon. They refer to the people of the Bamenda Grassfields in the Northwest Region in the Bui Division of Cameroon. 10 For some more recent discussion of how to think of African philosophy as closer to biocentrism or ecocentrism, see Kevin Behrens (2010: 465–484; 2017) and Etieyibo (2017a). 11 For some discussion about how this might look, see Metz (2012: 387–402; 2017). 12 For some argument for thinking that an individual-oriented and sensitive account of being is incompatible with a community-oriented and sensitive account of beingness, see Oyowe (2013: 103–124) and Etieyibo (2011; 2016).

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  179 13 I want to thank George Hull for raising some of these worries for my chapter. 14 For discussion of some other reasons for thinking that this view is mistaken, see Etieyibo (2017a). 15 Emphasis in original. 16 Unquestionably, by arguing that African philosophy is not anthropocentric and that it accords intrinsic value to nonhuman nature as it does to humans, I can be taken to be gesturing towards the view that it is closer to either biocentrism or ecocentrism. Some other scholars that I haven’t engaged with here—writers like Patricia Ojomo (2010, 49–63; 2011: 101–113) and Munamato Chemhuru (2016)—suggest a different ethical standpoint: a teleological African metaphysical worldview, but one which is certainly not anthropocentric. 17 I presented a version of this chapter at the Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy 2016 series of academic research seminars hosted jointly by the Philosophy Department and the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town. The feedback that I received from participants at my seminar presentation was quite helpful in revising the chapter. Many thanks to George Hull for spearheading and organising the seminar series.

References Attfield, Robin (2014), Environmental Ethics: An Overview for the Twenty-first Century, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity Press. Behrens, Kevin (2010), “Exploring African Holism with Respect to the Environment,” Environmental Values 19(4): 465–484. Behrens, Kevin (2017), “The Imperative of Developing African Eco-philosophy,” in Isaac E. Ukpokolo (ed.), Themes, Issues and Problems in African Philosophy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bujo, Benezet (1998), The Ethical Dimension of Community, Nairobi: Paulines Publications. Callicott, J. Baird (1994), Earth’s Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback, Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, Elisa K. (1983), “Beyond Anthropocentrism,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19: 54–67. Chemhuru, Munamato (2016), “Using the African Teleological View of Existence to Interpret Environmental Ethics,” Philosophia Africana 18(1): 41–51. Etieyibo, Edwin (2011), “The Self, Individual Moral Responsibility and Community,” Testamentum Imperium, 3: 1–26. Etieyibo, Edwin (2014), “Psychophysical Harmony in an African Context,” Symposium on The Metabolism of the Social Brain, Akademie der Kü nste, Berlin, October 25–26, 2014. Etieyibo, Edwin (2016), “African Philosophy in the Eyes of the West,” Phronimon 17(1): 84–103. Etieyibo, Edwin (2017a), “Anthropocentricism, African Metaphysical Worldview, and Animal Practices: A Reply to Kai Horsthemke,” Journal of Animal Ethics 7(2): 145–162. Etieyibo, Edwin (2017b), “Moral Education, Ubuntu and Ubuntu-Inspired Communities,” South African Journal of Philosophy 36(2): 311–325. Etieyibo, Edwin (2017c), “Ubuntu, Cosmopolitanism and Distribution of Natural Resources,” Philosophical Papers 2017 46(1): 139–162.

180  Edwin Etieyibo Etieyibo, Edwin (2017d), “Ubuntu and the Environment,” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Philosophy, Afolayan, Adeshina, Falola, Toyin (eds.), pp. 633–657, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Etieyibo, Edwin, (forthcoming), “Ethnophilosophy, African Culture and African Philo­ sophy,” Footmarks on African Philosophy. Glenbow Museum (1987), The Sprit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Horsthemke, Kai (2015), Animals and African Ethics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Igwe, Leo (2011), “Ritual Killing and Human Sacrifice in Africa,” International Humanist and Ethical Union, available at: http:​//www​.iheu​.org/​ritua​l-kil​ling-​and-h​uman-​sacri​ fice-​afric​a. Accessed June 16, 2014. Ijiomah, Chris (2006), “An excavation of Logic in African Worldview,” African Journal of Religion, Culture and Society 1(1): 29–35. Kortenkamp, Katherine and Moore, Colleen (2001), “Ecocentrism and Anthropocentrism: Moral Reasoning about Ecological Commons Dilemmas,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 21: 1–12. LenkaBula, Puleng (2008), “Beyond Anthropocentricity–Botho/Ubuntu and the Quest for Economic and Ecological Justice in Africa,” Religion and Theology 15(3/4): 375–394. Masolo, Dismas A. (1994), African Philosophy in Search of Identity, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Masolo, Dismas A. (2004), “Western and African Communitarianism: A Comparison,” in Kwasi Wiredu (ed.) A Companion to African Philosophy, Oxford, Blackwell. Metz, Thaddeus (2007a), “Toward an African Moral Theory,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15(3): 321–341. Metz, Thaddeus (2007b), “Ubuntu as a Moral Theory: Reply to Four Critics,” South African Journal of Philosophy 26(4): 369–387. Metz, Thaddeus (2012), “Developing African Political Philosophy: Moral-Theoretic Strategies. Philosophia Africana 14: 61–83. Metz, Thaddeus (2012), “An African Theory of Moral Status: A Relational Alternative to Individualism and Holism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15(3): 387–402. Metz, Thaddeus (2015), “How the West Was One: The Western as Individualist, the African as Communitarian,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 47(11): 1175–1184. Metz, Thaddeus (2017), “How to Ground Animal Rights on African Values: A Reply to Horsthemke,” Journal of Animal Ethics 7(2): 163–174. Morice, Aldrien G. (1905), The History of the Northern Interior of British Columbia (Formerly New Caledonia, 1660–1880, 3rd ed. Toronto: William Briggs. Murove, Munyaradzi Felix (2004), “An African Commitment to Ecological Conservation: The Shona Concepts of Ukama and Ubuntu,” Mankind Quarterly 45(2): 195–215. Nash, Roderick Frazier (1989), The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Obiajulu, Mulumba I. (2015), “The Question of Moral Paradigm in African Philosophy: A Case for Communocentric Ethics,” in Atuolu Omolu: Some Unanswered Questions in Contemporary African Philosophy, Jonathan O. Chimakonam (ed.), Lanham: University Press of America, pp. 53–67. Ojomo, Patricia A. (2010), “An African Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (P.A.K.) 2(2): 49–63. Ojomo, Patricia A. (2011), “Environmental Ethics: An African Understanding,” The Journal of Pan African Studies, March 4(3): 101–113.

African philosophy and nonhuman nature  181 Okafor, Stephen O. (1982) “Bantu Philosophy: Placide Tempels Revisited,” Journal of Religion in Africa 13(2): 83–100. Olupona, Jacob Obafemi Kehinde (1991), Kingship, Religion, and Rituals in a Nigerian Community, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Onyewuenyi, Innocent (1991), “Is There an African Philosophy” in African Philosophy: The Essential Readings in Tsenay Serequeberhan (ed.), pp. 29–46, New York: Paragon. Opoku, Kofi Asare (1993), “African Traditional Religion: An Enduring Heritage,” in Religious Plurality in Africa, Jacob K. Olupona and Sulayman Nyang, (eds.), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Oyowe, Anthony (2013), “Strange Bedfellows: Rethinking Ubuntu and Human Rights in South Africa,” African Human Rights Law Journal 13: 103–124. P’Bitek, Okot (1998), “The Sociality of the Self,” in African Philosophy: An Anthology, Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (ed.), pp. 73–74, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Limited. Sindima, Harvey (1990), “Community of Life,” in Liberating Life, Charles Birch, William Eakin, and Jay B. McDaniel (eds.), Maryknoll: Orbis. Tangwa, Godfrey B. (2004), “Some African Reflections on Biomedical and Environmental Ethics,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, Kwasi Wiredu (ed.), pp. 387–395, Oxford, Blackwell. Teffo, Lesiba J. and Roux, Abraham P. J. (1998), “Metaphysical Thinking in Africa,” in Philosophy from Africa: A Text with Readings, Pieter Hendrik Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (eds.), pp. 134–148, Johannesburg: International Thomson Publishing Southern Africa. Tempels, Placide (1959), Bantu Philosophy, Paris: Presence Africaine (first published 1945).

10 On cultural universals and particulars Uchenna Okeja

Introduction An interesting discussion in African philosophy centres on the question r­ egarding the nature of cultural universals. Two prominent participants in the discussion of this problem are Kwasi Wiredu and Odera Oruka. In Wiredu’s discussion of the problem, it is postulated that there are some cultural universals, namely, cognitive universals and sympathetic impartiality. Odera Oruka examined what he regarded as “cultural fundamentals” in order to point out a way in which we can broaden the notion of cultural universals articulated by Wiredu. Oruka consequently argued that we ought to expand the scope of cultural universals postulated by Wiredu to include intuition. Furthermore, he argued that, in addition to cultural universals, there are also cultural fundamentals which operate to hinder philosophical dialogue. Although Oruka did not dismiss, but rather added to, the scope of Wiredu’s understanding of cultural universals, he nonetheless disagreed with Wiredu’s thought that, as a cultural universal, morality must be conceived as sympathetic impartiality. In his later writing, Wiredu has responded to Oruka’s critique by pointing out that human beings are not beings that can “get by with impartiality without sympathy”. Wiredu’s argument here is that human beings need both impartiality and sympathy to be truly moral human persons. To see the importance of revisiting this discussion in African philosophy, it should suffice to notice how diversity in philosophy relates to the notion of cultural universals. The diversity of philosophical traditions raises the question of cultural universals because cultural universals serve as the vehicle for cross-­ cultural philosophical discourse. It seems to me that Wiredu and Oruka applied their minds to the question regarding the nature and scope of cultural universals precisely because they realized that understanding the nature of cultural universals is necessary for the transcendence of the twin extremes in philosophy, namely, cultural arrogance and uncritical assumption of universality in philosophical discourses. This thought seems to me to explain why Wiredu, in his consideration of cultural universals, focused on providing a justification for the proposition that intercultural communication will be impossible in the absence of cultural universals. Oruka, on the other hand, seems to have considered intuition a worthy addition to the two types of cultural universal put forward by Wiredu because he considered intuition a way of knowing that is not culture-specific.

On cultural universals and particulars  183 In this chapter, I aim to re-examine the perspectives on cultural universals articulated by these two philosophers against the background of the ubiquity of the factors Oruka termed “cultural fundamentals”. The main proposition I seek to advance and demonstrate is the insufficiency of Wiredu’s response to the critique articulated by Oruka, namely, that morality as a cultural universal must not be conceived as sympathetic impartiality. To do this, I will reformulate Oruka’s critique so that it takes adequate notice of the grounds for Wiredu’s response. To attain this goal, I will reformulate Oruka’s critique and provide arguments to show that Wiredu’s proposal is vulnerable to a stronger version of Oruka’s critique. Although a very important discussion, the perspectives put forward by Wiredu and Oruka regarding the possibility and nature of cultural universals have not received the attention they deserve from contemporary writing on African philosophy. My examination of this issue therefore aims to demonstrate the merits of the propositions put forward by Wiredu and Oruka. In addition, I attempt in this chapter to spell out some of the ways the discourse on cultural universals relates to contemporary events within and outside African philosophy. Notwithstanding these aims, it is important to note that the scope of what is offered here does not go beyond the perspectives offered by Wiredu and Oruka. Aside from aiming to take seriously the fact that African philosophy is a domain of theorizing in its own right, this limit on the scope of the chapter is necessary in order to ensure that the trajectory of the discourse on cultural universals in African philosophy is deepened rather than distorted. The chapter has four parts. The introduction, which constitutes the first part, situates the discussion. The aim I pursue in the second part is to define the meaning of the central concepts of the discourse in this chapter. The third part will aim to reconstruct the thoughts of Wiredu and Oruka on cultural universals. This section will also include an examination of Oruka’s critique of Wiredu’s suggestion that morality, in the sense of sympathetic impartiality, is a cultural universal. This leads to the concerns of the fourth part, which aims to demonstrate the insufficiency of Wiredu’s response to Oruka’s critique and also includes discussion of the implications of the notion of cultural universals for the contemporary practice of African philosophy.

Cultural universals, particulars and fundamentals It seems pertinent to begin with a clarification of the central concepts of our discussion for the sake of clarity and contextualization. Although Wiredu does not explicitly provide a definition of the notion of cultural universals, he postulates in his discussion that a cultural universal “is a human universal transcending culture” (Wiredu 1990: 16). From this, we can infer that the notion of a cultural universal implies a sort of universal human disposition which is foundational to any human culture. Thus, cultural universals are not necessarily norms that should be applied to every culture. Rather, Wiredu’s idea of cultural universals seems to me to refer to the basic dispositions that are part of human cultures by the very fact that the culture is human. The reason for this understanding of Wiredu’s notion of cultural

184  Uchenna Okeja universals should become clearer in the discussion of his justification of the cognitive and ethical universals he postulated. It suffices in this context, however, to note that the validity of this explanation is borne out by Wiredu’s insistence that cultural universals are universal in the sense that they are necessarily implied by the very mode of existence of human cultures. The notion of cultural particulars does not simply designate the opposite of cultural universals in the sense that it refers to the non-necessary dimensions of human cultures. We can glean Wiredu’s perspective on cultural particulars by considering the point he made regarding the conventional way we regard culture, namely, “as the social forms and customary beliefs and practices of human groups” (Wiredu 1990: 14). Wiredu underscored that this conventional construal of culture, “while not the most fundamental way of conceiving it”, is the most frequent (Wiredu 1990: 14). Against this background, the notion of cultural particulars denotes the sense of culture as “a patterned accumulation of contingencies of social thought and action in the context of a specific type of physical environment” (Wiredu 1990: 15). I take this observation to mean that Wiredu uses cultural particulars to designate the “humanly contingent” dimension of culture. And this contrasts with the “humanly necessary” aspects he considers as cultural universals. Related to cultural universals and particulars is the concept of a cultural fundamental, which was employed by Odera Oruka. By a cultural fundamental, Oruka means “a concept, a style of language, a method of work or a psychological expectation that helps to mark one culture from another” (Oruka 1990: 32). He contends that, “among the sub-cultures of philosophy, the cultural fundamentals are very important as signs to be watched in assessing the possibility of a success or failure in philosophical dialogue” (Oruka 1990: 32). Thus, just like Wiredu, whose understanding of cultural universals and particulars unfolds within the context of intercultural dialogue, the sense of cultural fundamentals is embedded within the context of dialogue, specifically, within philosophical dialogue. Oruka considers cultural fundamentals as the “mirrors” or “positions” that define the boundaries of the non-identical bodies involved in a philosophical dialogue. Having explained the basic senses of the categories of the discourse, let me now turn to the reconstruction of cultural universals and particulars in the works of Wiredu and Oruka. My goal here will be to delineate Wiredu’s characterization of the dispositions or actions that qualify as cultural universals. I will focus mainly on his thoughts regarding the demonstration of the plausibility of these dispositions or actions as cultural universals, and what difference it makes to establish that one or another feature of human culture is a cultural universal.

Wiredu and Oruka on cultural universals: a reconstruction Wiredu’s discussion of the idea of cultural universals is programmatic. This is the case because he started off with an exploration of the basis of intercultural communication. In this regard, his aim was to articulate the “the nature of the meaning presupposed by the very possibility of human communication” (Wiredu 1996: 1).

On cultural universals and particulars  185 It is on the basis of this discussion that Wiredu was able to provide an account of the dispositions and actions he considered as instantiations of cultural universals. To underscore the pertinence of his understanding of cultural universals, Wiredu considered further the foundational assumption of his perspective that “the possibility of cultural universals is predicated on our common biological identity” (ibid.). Pursued over the course of almost two decades, Wiredu’s idea of cultural universals represents a sustained attempt at formulating an original understanding of the nexus between the claims of universalism and particularism. The implication of the programmatic nature of Wiredu’s work on cultural universals is that any attempt to consider his views by focusing on his text on cultural universals alone is apt to lead to distortion of his perspective. What this means is that we are better served by the adoption of a systematic approach because of the complexity involved. To this end, I will begin with a summary of Wiredu’s consideration of human communication. Thereafter, I will consider his account of cultural universals, before going on to discuss his thoughts on the biological basis of universal norms. A fundamental presupposition of communication according to Wiredu is shared meaning. This implies that we can come to the core of the presupposition of communication by considering the nature of “meaning” and how it is shared. Wiredu finds the thought that meanings are “independently existing, abstract entities” deficient. This perspective is “radically invalid” in his view because “if meanings were entities, differences between them could never, in principle, be grasped; which is absurd” (Wiredu 1996: 14). He considers this understanding to be flawed because insisting that meanings are entities would lead to two problems. The first is that this view would imply that meanings cannot be referred to, while the second issue would be that meanings would lose their generality (Wiredu 1996: 15). In Wiredu’s view, the first situation is absurd, while the second is ironic because it is theoretically self-defeating. Thus, he rejected the notion that meanings are entities because of the absurd and ironic consequences of such understanding. Further, Wiredu proposed that nominalism is also an inadequate way to comprehend the nature of meanings. This is the case because, although nominalism rejects the view that “meanings are any kind of entities whatever”, it “goes further to try to eliminate the category of signification from semantic analysis”, with the consequence that, in effect, only “the symbol and the referent” are recognized by “nominalistic analysis of designation” (Wiredu 1996: 16). For him, the problem with this approach is that “when no referent is available, as in the case of the word ‘nonexistence’, no plausible account of its status as a vehicle of communication is forthcoming”. Communication, Wiredu proposed, is “transference of thought-content” (Wiredu 1996: 19). It presupposes a “correlation of experiences” whose basis of possibility is biological. The thought here is that “it is the biological affinity between one person and another that makes possible the comparison of experiences and the interpersonal adjustment of behavior that constitute social existence” (Wiredu 1996: 19). Thus, “the development of mind is the development of communication. We do not first develop a mind which then has to learn how

186  Uchenna Okeja to communicate”. Given that “the objectivity of concepts is guaranteed by their social provenance”, the disparities in communication arising from cultural particularities can be resolved because of “our fundamental biological similarity” (Wiredu 1996: 20). And this is the case because the foundation of all communication, in Wiredu’s account, is biological. Now, if this is the nature of meaning presupposed by human communication, what, then, are the universal aspects of human culture, and how can we know them? In short, if the foundation of all human communication is biological, what cultural universals can we point to, in order to demonstrate this claim? The foregoing question seems to me to account for the reason Wiredu approached the articulation of the meaning and scope of cultural universals through consideration of human communication. Against the background of intercultural communication, he began his discussion by proposing a reductio ad absurdum proof he considers capable of demonstrating the futility of a general denial of the existence, or even possibility, of cultural universals. The core of this proof is the idea that there is no possibility of intercultural communication in the absence of cultural universals. Given, however, that we notice almost everywhere the occurrence of intercultural communication, this claim cannot be sustained. The conclusion, therefore, is that there must exist some cultural universals that make possible intercultural communication (Wiredu 1996: 21). To understand the notion of a cultural universal, one must notice the centrality of communication to human beings. As Wiredu argued, “in the total absence of communication we cannot even speak of human persons” (ibid.). Since human beings are products of culture, communication for them is, according to Wiredu, an “existential necessity” (Wiredu 1996: 21). Thought and communication are interconnected in the sense that “a being capable of judgment and inference” is ipso facto “capable of communication” (Wiredu 1996: 23). To uncover the cultural universals embedded in communication, Wiredu underscored that there are “species-wide” implications that arise from the interconnections between thought and communication. Essentially, our “common human identity” implies that the capacities that make thought possible – reflective perception, abstraction and inference – are the same for all members of the human species. Thus, the “facts, which underlie the possibility of communication among kith and kin, are the same facts that underlie the possibility of communication among the various people of the world. The same facts make all human beings kindred” (Wiredu 1996: 23). The possibility of intercultural communication implies the existence of conceptual universals because “conceptual understanding”, which is implicit in the instances of intercultural communication, “plainly presupposes the existence of conceptual universals” (Wiredu 1996: 26). This obviously invites the interrogation of incommensurability. This is because it might be granted that the basic capacities that make thought possible can be counted as universal, yet still argued that the ways the culturally situated people of the world apply these capacities are radically different. If this is the case, then all conceptual understandings must be seen as contingent. Wiredu’s argument in this regard is that “it is inconsistent

On cultural universals and particulars  187 to grant the possibility of conceptual universals and deny that of the cognitive variety” (Wiredu 1996: 27). Even if we grant that Wiredu’s response to incommensurability is cogent, this still does not tell us how these cognitive universals are cultural universals. In other words, how are conceptual and epistemic universals reflective of the existence of cultural universals? To explain why one might think that conceptual and epistemic universals do not account for what one could mean by cultural universals, Wiredu pointed out that this thought is based “on a quite narrow conception of culture” (Wiredu 1996: 28). His view is that “culture is not just the social forms and customary beliefs and practices of a human group”, but something much more fundamental (ibid.). In the main, this conventional understanding of culture is itself dependent “on the existence of language, knowledge, communication, interaction, and methods of transmitting knowledge to the born and the unborn” (ibid.). Thus, the fundamental understanding of culture is marked by the possession of language. And “possession of one language or another by all human societies, is the cultural universal par excellence” (ibid.). Are cultural universals then only possible at the level of cognition? In other words, can we decipher other forms of cultural universals? Wiredu frames this question as one having to do with lack of clarity regarding the existence of criteria for the identification of “normative universals of human conduct” (Wiredu 1996: 29). To account for such criteria, he proposed that we only need to “specify a principle of conduct such that without its recognition – which does not necessarily mean its invariable observance – the survival of human society in a tolerable condition would be inconceivable” (Wiredu 1996: 29). This criterion for him is the principle of sympathetic impartiality, which is essentially the imperative: “let your conduct at all times manifest a due concern for the interest of others” (ibid.). The criterion that should help us to decide what due concern for others’ interests means is the following: “A person may be said to manifest due concern for the interests of others if in contemplating the impact of his actions on their interests, she puts herself imaginatively in their position, and having done so, is able to welcome that impact” (ibid.). No society, according to Wiredu, could get by if “everyone openly avowed the contrary of this principle and acted accordingly” (ibid.). Thus, “the principle of sympathetic impartiality is a human universal transcending cultures … . In being common to all human practice of morality, it is a universal of any non-brutish form of human life” (ibid.). In Odera Oruka’s discussion of the cultural universals proposed by Wiredu, at the centre of his attention was Wiredu’s suggestion that sympathetic impartiality is reflective of a cultural universal. Appealing to the principle of rational egoism proposed by John Rawls, Oruka attempted to assess Wiredu’s thoughts on sympathetic impartiality. Oruka considered sympathetic impartiality to imply a supposition that “there is something in the psychology and physiology of being human which makes a person secretly respect the interest of others” (Oruka 1990: 27). On this basis, one who “respects the interest of others only (1) when appearing in the public eyes or (2) because he fears being suspected of not showing this respect, or else (3) because he sees this as the only way in which he could protect

188  Uchenna Okeja his own interest” would fail to be true to Wiredu’s principle of sympathetic impartiality (ibid.). From this, Oruka inferred that “[s]uch a person conforms and appears human as everybody else only because he is rational not because he is sympathetic” (ibid.). In Oruka’s estimation, individuals in Rawls’ state of nature “lack ‘sympathetic impartiality’ and they do not even acquire it in a civil state, otherwise there would be little need for police, prisons and class wars” (Oruka 1990: 27). Essentially, they remain rational egoists. He thus posited that one could claim that Wiredu’s “principle is not a necessary condition that explains the fact of the existence of at least a minimum degree of moral order in a society”, given that “this role can perfectly be fulfilled by the principle of rational egoism” (ibid.). Although Oruka agreed with Wiredu that being human entails being rational, he nonetheless underscored that “to be rational must be shown to be human” if the objection stemming from the consideration of rational egoism is to be adequately addressed. Going beyond this point, however, Oruka added the intuition to the list of cultural universals proposed by Wiredu. Although Wiredu postulates human biological similarity as the basis of the cultural universals discussed above, it is not clear what he means by this postulation of a biological foundation for cultural universals. Clarity, in this regard, can be found in Wiredu’s chapter ‘The Biological Foundation of Universal Norms’, where he sought to show what he means by the claim that universal norms of thought and action have their basis in the biological identity of human beings. It is to this issue that we turn in what follows below. How, then, is the biological foundation of universal norms demonstrated? Norms of thought, in Wiredu’s consideration, are the “necessary condition for the very possibility of a human community” (Wiredu 1996: 34). The reason is that “without communication community is impossible, and without thought communication is impossible. But without some common norms of talk communication is impossible and without common norms of thought common norms of talk are unavailable” (ibid.). On this basis, Wiredu concluded that, in the absence of “some common norms of thought a human community is impossible” (ibid.). And, given the commonplace communication of people from different geographic regions of the world, Wiredu inferred further that the very fact of human communication across cultural borders implies that “the whole species must have some norms of thought in common” (ibid.). It is important to note in this regard that the commonality of the norms of thought among human beings, for Wiredu, cannot be based on culture, history or ideology, “for these are the causes of the diversity rather than the unity of the species” (ibid.). Rather, the basis of this commonality is “our common basic biology that underlies the particular mental affinity of all the members of the human race” (ibid.). Wiredu proposed that the principles of non-contradiction and induction are supreme laws of thought that demonstrate the biological basis of universal norms. Furthermore, he considers the norm of human conduct – sympathetic impartiality – a supreme principle whose basis is also decidedly biological. Now, the question is the nature of this biological foundation postulated for these principles. The principle of non-contradiction is biological in the sense that, without it, “individual

On cultural universals and particulars  189 human survival would be in jeopardy” (Wiredu 1996: 38). This is the case because total disregard of this principle would mean that “there would be no telling when a message is affirmed or denied, and the possibility of communication would be out of the question” (ibid.). Abnegation of this principle would jeopardize individual human survival because, essentially, that would mean losing our “powers of thought, and with it (our) continued membership in the club of humans” (ibid.). This is why the biological nature of this principle consists in the fact that compliance with the principle is “a naturally selected factor in our equipment for survival as a species, a selection too crucial evolutionally to have been left to the tender consistencies of the individual psyche” (ibid.). Harking back to Hume to characterize the nature of the biological basis of the principle of induction, Wiredu proposes the following formulation of the principle: “in a wide and varied experience, constant conjunction of events or characters constitutes a good reason for expecting a similar conjunction in unobserved cases” (Wiredu 1996: 40). This formulation of the principle of induction which he considers to, in a way, exemplify a “definition of empirical reason …  expresses, at the level of conscious cognition, an intellectual norm for which the evolutionary principle of custom provides a biological basis” (ibid.). Wiredu contends that human society would not survive if every individual in the society disregarded the basic tenet or proposition of the principle of sympathetic impartiality. Human society can survive, he says, “in the face of quite a lot of defaults and defections from the observance of the ethical principle” but not when it is completely disregarded by everyone (Wiredu 1996: 41). This means that the biological nature of the universal norms Wiredu suggested has to do with our relationship with our environment and other human beings. Thus, the principle of non-contradiction, induction and sympathetic impartiality signify that we are “organisms in necessary interaction with the environment and with our kind” (ibid.).

Appraisal of Wiredu’s response to Oruka Although there are many issues one can raise about Wiredu’s insights regarding the biological foundations of the cultural universals he proposed, the limited scope of the consideration in this chapter would not, it seems to me, profit form such digressions. What should be noted, however, is that Wiredu’s fundamental sense of culture, whence his cognitive universals spring, is not without problems. Lansana Keita, for instance, pointed out that the three cognitive universals proposed by Wiredu, namely, “the human capacity for abstraction, reflective perception and inference would not be cultural at all” if we understood a cultural universal as “some item or practice that was instantiable in divers (sic) forms in all human cultures” (1997: 170). Lansana proposed that “Wiredu’s universal trio are functions of the human brain that manifest themselves subjectively in the forms that he suggests” (ibid.). In fact, these capacities are, in Lansana’s view, also demonstrated by animals. Wiredu of course anticipated this sort of objection to his understanding of cognitive cultural universals. This was why he proposed that it is erroneous to

190  Uchenna Okeja suppose that conceptual and epistemic universals are not per se cultural universals. He argued that this objection arises from a narrow understanding of culture which limits culture to mean “just the social forms and customary beliefs and practices of a human group” (Wiredu 1996: 28). Given that these beliefs and practices of human groups are dependent on language, Wiredu argued that there is a fundamental understanding of culture that goes beyond the narrow conception. I agree with Wiredu that the beliefs and practices of human groups, often taken to be what culture designates, are dependent on language. However, the mere fact of their dependence on language does not suffice to show that the activities that are bound up in the use of language for communication – capacity for abstraction, reflective perception and inference – imply a fundamental sense of culture. What Wiredu designates as the fundamental sense of culture seems to me to be the understanding that language is a presupposition of culture which designates a capacity of the human mind. As such, language in this sense can hardly count as a part of what we can understand culture to mean, given that this sense of language is something totally different from its particular instantiations in various forms in different human groups. Summarily put, an un-instantiated, abstract notion of language cannot bring forth the activities Wiredu considers as evidence for the existence of cognitive universals. The reason is that language as a capacity that is not yet actualized in a particular form – Swahili, Xhosa, Igbo, French – does not provide any grounds for the inference of the activities of abstraction, reflective perception and inference. Such inference can only be made from the workings or use of language in its instantiated form. Against this background, therefore, it seems to me that language in use might be accounted a part of culture but not language as a presupposition of culture, that is, as the abstract capacity of the human mind which might take any particular form among the different human groups. On the basis of this point, it seems plausible to me to infer that the foundation for the cognitive cultural universals postulated by Wiredu is problematic. And the reason is that he has not supplied a sufficient explication of the way his fundamental sense of culture, which serves as the basis for his cognitive universals, applies. Now, let me return to the goal of this chapter, namely, the demonstration of the insufficiency of Wiredu’s response to Odera Oruka’s critique of his claim that sympathetic impartiality is a cultural universal. As we have seen in the preceding section of this chapter, Oruka does not agree with Wiredu that sympathetic impartiality is a cultural universal, his overall agreement that there are cultural universals notwithstanding. Wiredu considered being true to the principle of sympathetic impartiality on rational grounds alone insufficient. The reason is that, in Wiredu’s view, both the rational impartial dimension and the humane sympathetic dimension are essential aspects of the moral norm we can consider to be reflective of a cultural universal. Thus, a moral norm that has only one aspect, say, the rational impartial dimension as in the case of rational egoism, is deficient and cannot be considered a moral norm that is reflective of a cultural universal. Although Oruka is certain that we can claim, like Wiredu, that “to be human entails [being] rational”, he nonetheless thought that being “rational must

On cultural universals and particulars  191 be shown to be human”. The implication of this is that Wiredu must demonstrate that being rational implies being humane if he “wishes to forestall the objection from rational egoism”. In his response to Oruka’s critique, Wiredu noted that he “counts it a blessing” that his good friends have been his most “persistent critics”. So, “[g]oodwill being taken for granted on all sides, the genuine issues can be pursued wherever they lead in a spirit of give-and-take free from petty cavilling” (Wiredu 1996: 201). Regarding Oruka’s addition of intuition to the list of cultural universals, Wiredu underscored that he “can find no ground of objection to according it the status claimed by Oruka” (Wiredu 1996: 202). However, he does not agree with Oruka’s suggestion that it might well turn out, given the possibility of rational egoism, that sympathetic impartiality is not a necessary norm of human conduct; that is, that “rational egoism alone, that is, a calculating impartiality sans sympathy, may well do the trick” (ibid.). Wiredu’s reason for disagreeing about this is that it is “a highly plausible psychological hypothesis, not at all recondite, that a human being without a trace of sympathy in his or her own breast, or hope of the same from any other, will inevitably suffer the gravest type of breakdown” (Wiredu 1996: 202). In his view, “the problem of morality is not that human beings don’t have sympathy, but rather that they don’t always have enough of it” (ibid.). Given that “morality is an ideal, and a special one”, Wiredu inferred that “we cannot do without a modicum of it, but we must do without its maximum” (ibid.). In sum, his reply to Oruka is that “some beings can get by with impartiality without sympathy. But we humans need both” (ibid.). Thus, if we need both, then sympathetic impartiality should be considered a necessary principle of conduct. In its absence, human community will be impossible, hence the reason Wiredu considers it a norm reflective of a cultural universal. There are two ways we can understand Wiredu’s response to Oruka’s objection. One way is to understand his postulation of a “psychological hypothesis” regarding the consequence of humans being totally stripped of sympathy as a move that is embedded in a specific understanding of moral psychology. The other way is to look at his postulation that humans cannot do without both the sympathetic and the rational impartiality dimensions of the moral principle of sympathetic impartiality as a firm assertion of a basic presupposition regarding the constitution of human nature. This presupposition is that the constitution of human nature implies that human beings are beings that are distinguished by their humaneness and rationality. The cogency of Wiredu’s reply to Oruka should become clearer when we put these possible understandings in perspective. In the main, the first understanding would mean that Wiredu considers rational egoism an outlook on the moral life that is ultimately flawed because of the terrible consequences it will produce. Thus, he sees rational egoism as insufficient or even undesirable because it does not take adequate notice of the nature of the moral needs of human beings – namely, to maintain a tolerable form of balance that makes survival possible. This balance, for Wiredu, has both inward (psychological) and outward (harmonization of the

192  Uchenna Okeja conflicting interests within the society) dimensions. The second understanding mentioned above implies that the constitution of human nature is something we ought to pay close attention to when we conceive the sort of moral principle we consider the most useful for the regulation of human conduct. The point here is that we should ensure that moral principles are realistic in the sense that they are not divorced from those things we consider to be the essential dimensions of human nature. Although I see the cogency of Wiredu’s response to Oruka, it seems to me that his response is vulnerable to a stronger version of Oruka’s argument. This stronger version would be the thought that sympathetic impartiality is either a cultural universal or a justified principle of morality. In this sense, Oruka’s critique can be reformulated thus: if sympathetic impartiality is a cultural universal because human beings need both the rational impartiality dimension and the humane sympathetic dimension, then it is not a principle of morality. However, if it is a principle of morality, then it is not a cultural universal but strictly a universal rule of human conduct. In this sense, the universality implied is the philosophical notion of universality – the intersubjective recognition of first principles. Given that this notion of universality is different from the meaning implied by the idea of cultural universals – the necessary presuppositions of human actions and conduct in Wiredu’s consideration – sympathetic impartiality cannot be taken to be both a cultural universal and a principle of morality. Wiredu’s response is vulnerable to this stronger version of Oruka’s critique for two reasons. The first is that this version of the critique makes clear that what is demanded by Oruka is not a stipulation of the sort of things human beings need but rather the demonstration of why it is reasonable to propose that “calculating impartiality” is not sufficient for the regulation of human conduct, hence the need for the sympathetic dimension of Wiredu’s principle. The second point is that this version of Oruka’s critique shows that sympathetic impartiality is not ipso facto a universal principle of human conduct simply because it is a cultural universal. The claim here is that the universality of sympathetic impartiality does not inhere in its being accounted a necessary ground for the survival of the society. To be sure, the survival of human society is one thing, but the universality, that is, the plausibility of the principle of sympathetic impartiality as the norm for human conduct, is quite another thing. In other words, the former does not imply the latter. And, even if the latter can be derived from the former, the cogency of such a derivation must be demonstrated, not simply presumed. The foregoing should, however, not be interpreted to mean that I consider the idea of rational egoism a better principle of human conduct. Far from that, my aim has been to show the step that must be taken to develop further Wiredu’s proposal that sympathetic impartiality is a cultural universal. This further step is to demonstrate the sense in which Wiredu’s notion of sympathetic impartiality is both a cultural universal and a principle of morality. Thus, the point of this chapter’s discussion is not that rational egoism is more justified than Wiredu’s proposal but rather that Wiredu has not sufficiently demonstrated the grounds for his claims regarding sympathetic impartiality as a universal moral principle that is reflective of a cultural universal.

On cultural universals and particulars  193

Conclusion The current sensitivity to diversity makes it difficult for any philosopher today to propose that any one tradition of philosophy embodies philosophical insights in ways that immediately translate to value judgments, such as that that tradition is better than others or that it is the most desirable tradition of philosophy for human beings. Often, it is supposed that the disregard of this sensibility of according respect to the different traditions of philosophy is an indication of cultural arrogance. Against this background, the notion of cultural particulars and universals challenges philosophy in two ways. On the one hand, cultural particulars demand that philosophy should provide plausible justification for its claims to universality in a way that is not parochially limited to the assumptions of particular traditions of philosophy. On the other hand, however, cultural universals demand that philosophy should account for the possibility of dialogue among philosophers from diverse backgrounds. Wiredu’s work on cultural universals is located within the context of these challenges posed by cultural particulars and universals. His vision, I believe, was to articulate the particulars and universals embedded in intercultural communication and his own Akan cultural norms and practices. This vision is a thread that runs through Wiredu’s work, providing, as it were, the central locus of his entire corpus. This is why the ability to “shift tactically from the traditional African framework to that of Western philosophy, appropriating whatever [is] of worth in it” brings to the fore for Wiredu what the universality of philosophy denotes (Wiredu 1996: 36). His articulation of cultural universals is to this end invaluable for the discourse on African philosophy today because it demonstrates one vital way African philosophy can be imagined as a cogitation on global human concerns. If African philosophy is to reinvigorate itself today, it has to pay attention to the problem of dialogue between its practitioners and the practitioners of other traditions of philosophy. Given its peculiar historical circumstances, African philosophy will not be positively served by attempts to close the tradition off from constructive engagements and inputs from non-African traditions of philosophy. African philosophy also cannot afford the luxury of conceiving the dialogue of its practitioners as mutual admiration or denigration. To this end, the recent attempts to create pseudo, autarkic schools of African philosophy should be accounted as a very poor exercise in mimicry that is of little consequence for the field. Viable engagement with the substantive problems of African philosophy does not require a cordon sanitaire between the African tradition of philosophy and other traditions of philosophy. The most important aim, I believe, is the exploration of fundamental questions of African philosophy in a manner that will show the universal character of those questions. This in effect means demonstrating the sense in which African philosophy is a contextually rooted but globally relevant endeavour which transcends the boundaries of specific cultures or contexts. Its shortcomings notwithstanding, Kwasi Wiredu’s articulation of cultural universals and particulars is a model for anyone wishing to engage creatively with African philosophy in the sense I just described.

194  Uchenna Okeja

References Keita, L. 1997. ‘Cultural Universals and Particulars’ (Review), Quest: An International African Journal of Philosophy, 11: 1–2, pp. 169–174. Oruka, O. 1990. ‘Cultural Fundamentals in Philosophy: Obstacles in Philosophical Dialogue’, Quest: An International African Journal of Philosophy, 4: 2, pp. 20–37. Wiredu, K. 1990. ‘Are There Cultural Universals?’ Quest: An International African Journal of Philosophy, 4: 2, pp. 4–19. Wiredu, K. 1995. ‘Are There Cultural Universals?’ The Monist, 78: 1, pp. 52–64. Wiredu, K. 1996. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

11 The Metz method and ‘African ethics’ Tom P. S. Angier

We all stand in Thaddeus Metz’s debt. No one has done more in recent years to sift the wheat of Africa’s philosophical resources, in particular as these bear on ethical and political theory. His work on ubuntu, especially, is a rich source of systematic reflection on this elusive yet somehow magnetic concept, which continues to attract many in the academy and beyond.1 And Metz’s overall project has thrown up key questions of philosophical method, which are no less significant than the substantive moral and political questions he addresses. For instance: is there an ethics which is univocally African? If so, is it simply there, as it were, waiting to be discovered? Or is its determination more a matter of recovery or construction? If so, how are we to go about determining its content? These are tough questions, and an engagement with Metz helps us, in turn, to engage with them. In what follows, I want to embark on such an engagement, proceeding through four dialectical stages. First, I want to raise the question whether there is a genuinely ‘African’ ethics at all. Second, even if there is, have writers on African ethics nonetheless given us too selective, formalistic and tendentious a rendition of its content, thereby denaturing it? Third, can the charge of denaturing be avoided by the claim to be constructing an African ethics, despite prescinding from central anthropological and historical data? Fourth, even if this constructivist approach is legitimate, can we arrive at a more adequate construction, one which is not only more African, but also ethically deeper and more fruitful? This last stage of the dialectic will occupy the remainder of my chapter, in which I outline an alternative construction of African ethics. This will constitute both a challenge to Metz, and, I hope, food for ethical thought per se. First, then, is there a genuinely African ethics? (I’ll assume for present purposes that we are talking primarily about normative ethics, as opposed to either meta- or applied ethics – though normative claims are likely to have an intimate relation to applied issues.) There are prima facie grounds for thinking the whole idea of an African ethics is not only unpromising, but also highly suspect. For the same question raised in a European context – ‘Is there a European ethics?’ – would raise more than a few eyebrows. The objections would be quick in coming: what historical period are you referring to? What part of Europe are you concerned with? Don’t you know the immense variety of European ethical

196  Tom P. S. Angier thought and practice? If these questions have some traction in the European case, we should expect the same in the African case (a fortiori, perhaps, given the far greater geographical expanse of Africa). Indeed, the suspicion arises that the question of African ethics is taken seriously only because of certain homogenising and difference-blind assumptions that are themselves European in origin. In other words, the assumption of a univocally ‘African’ ethics is cognate with the historical treatment of Africans as generically ‘other’, any differences between them paling into insignificance compared to their overwhelming difference from Europeans. Whatever the merits or demerits of this ‘inter’ – as opposed to ‘intra’ – perspective, it seems singularly unhelpful in giving us a descriptively adequate picture of anything African. We seem in the realm of W. E. Abraham’s The Mind of Africa (Abraham 1962), rather than Daryll Forde’s empirically more accurate African Worlds (Forde 1954). Surely we want to get away from any homogenising conceptions of Africa, with their incipiently (or even manifestly) colonial assumptions and habits of thought. This form of critique finds many echoes in the secondary literature. D. A. Masolo, for example, speaks of ‘monolithic’ as opposed to ‘hybrid’ African identities (Masolo 1997, 288), suggesting that talk of ‘African ethics’ is merely another way of being ‘heralded by a new crop of philosopher-soldiers into the cages of identity Bewusstsein [consciousness]’ (ibid. 287). Kwame Anthony Appiah speculates whether ‘the postulation of a unitary Africa over against a monolithic West – the binarism of Self and Other – is the last of the shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to live without’ (Appiah 1992, 155). And he points out that ‘if we could have travelled through Africa’s many cultures in [precolonial times] …  we should have felt in every place profoundly different impulses, ideas, and forms of life’ (ibid. 174). Appiah allows that ‘there is no doubt that now, a century later, an African identity is coming into being’, but enters the sharp qualification that ‘the bases through which so far it has largely been theorized – race, a common historical experience, a shared metaphysics – presuppose falsehoods too serious for us to ignore’ (ibid.). It follows, he adjures, that ‘[i]f an African identity is to empower us …  what is required is not so much that we throw out falsehood but that we acknowledge first of all that race and history and metaphysics do not enforce an identity’ (ibid. 176). Should we add, in line with this argument, that race and history and metaphysics do not enforce an African ethics? In other words, is there simply no foothold in the ‘African story’ (Menkiti 2004, 325) for such a univocal notion? I do not think so. There is no a priori reason for thinking indigenous African cultures have no norms in common,2 norms which are substantive and ‘thick’ enough to warrant interest and attention from philosophers. Merely because colonialism may have encouraged a monolithic conception of Africa – a name that is itself Roman in origin – it does not follow that all universal, or at least strongly generalisable, claims about African ethics are false and/or themselves indicative of a colonial mentality. As Masolo writes, there are certain ‘patterns’ which characterise Africa, at least over long stretches of time, and discounting clearly external influences (see Masolo 1997, 297). And as Kwame Gyekye holds, ‘There is

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  197 of course no pretence made that the moral values of various African societies are the same across the board, but there are some values that can be said to be shared in their essentials by all African societies’ (Gyekye 1996, 55–6). Granted, what is shared may have parallels elsewhere, and Gyekye is in no doubt that it would be a serious error to posit a wholly unique traditional ethics shared by all the subcontinent’s peoples (Gyekye 1995, xvi). Nevertheless, it remains true that, at least at the level of the combination and interrelation of norms, Africa can be said to display a broadly shared and distinctive ethics. The same can, moreover, be said of Europe. What binds Europe together, ethically, is a shared inheritance derived from ancient Israel, ancient Greece and ancient Rome. These three cultural ‘tectonic plates’ may push against each other in various respects, but it is this (sometimes fraught) interaction which makes European ethics distinctive, and rich in its own way. The second stage in our dialectic concerns the adequacy with which shared African values are characterised. My argument will be that the literature here tends to focus too much on one African value, while (in Metz’s case in particular) questionably sidelining or ignoring others. On the first score, we find an overwhelming concentration on ubuntu, understood variously as friendliness, harmony, solidarity, communal feeling or consensus. Metz highlights this valueset as characteristically African, citing its grounding in a metaphysics of personhood: ‘A person is a person through other persons’, ‘I am because we are’ (see, e.g., Metz 2012a, 101). The basic idea is that African ethics privileges social harmony, in such a way that both community-service and community-belonging are essential and central goods. Not that Metz takes this view to be without costs: he thinks that acknowledging purely individual and thus non-social goods is one respect in which Aristotelian is superior to African ethics (see Metz 2012a). But this qualification notwithstanding, Metz finds the ubuntu ethic both genuinely African, and generally worth affirming. As he puts things in his encyclopaedia entry on ubuntu, ‘standard sub-Saharan conceptions of the good life cash out selfrealisation strictly in terms of communal, harmonious, or cohesive relationships with others’ (Metz 2014, 6762–3). And he unpacks the latter as follows: ‘community (harmony) in sub-Saharan ethics is usefully analysed as the combination of two logically distinct kinds of interaction, identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them’ (ibid. 6763; cf. Metz 2011, 537–40). This concentration on ubuntu is a pervasive trope in writing on African ethics. Kwasi Wiredu, for example, holds that ‘in interpersonal relations among [African] adults consensus as a basis of joint action [i]s taken as axiomatic’ (Wiredu 1995, 53). Although Wiredu acknowledges that consensus is not always attained, ‘if and when a resolution [of conflict] [i]s negotiated, the point of it [i]s in the attainment of reconciliation rather than the mere abstention from further recriminations or collisions’ (ibid.). This positive vision of social harmony is spelt out in many ways. It can be spelt out figuratively or symbolically, as in the Ashanti art motif of the crocodile with one stomach yet two heads, which are engaged in a struggle over food. As Wiredu comments, ‘[i]f they could but see that the food was …  destined for the same stomach, the irrationality of the conflict

198  Tom P. S. Angier would be manifest to them’ (ibid. 57). It can be conveyed proverbially, as in the Ashanti (and more generally Akan) dictum that ‘Two heads are better than one’, or that ‘There is …  no problem of human relations that cannot be resolved by dialogue’ (ibid.). It can be conveyed also in the rarefied language of theory, as when Mogobe Bernard Ramose writes that ‘we prefer the ontological point of departure that recognises motion as the principle of “be-ing” and conceives of beings as originally interrelated albeit to different degrees’ (Ramose 2013, 1). More commonly, the ubuntu ethic is elaborated as a positive alternative to what is perceived as the corrosive individualism of Western industrial societies. Take Chisanga N. Siame, for instance, who speaks favourably of Zambia’s anti-prostitution laws as putting ‘the country’s cultural autonomy’ before the so-called ‘individual right’ to privacy (Siame 2000, 64). Or take Lé opold Sé dar Senghor, who lauds socié té s communautaires, which supposedly act as a bulwark against the financial model of ‘capitalist individualism’ (see Tá í wò  2004, 255).3 What is dubious in all of this? I suggest it is the fact that ubuntu and its cognates are being construed in such an elastic manner as to accommodate everything from political collectivism to Western-style individualism. The African political embodiment of ‘social harmony’ has, after all, devolved often into collectivist forms of governance, such as (e.g.) Nyerere’s Ujamaa (or ‘familyhood’) policy, or Kaunda’s conception of political consensus as excluding any ‘loyal opposition’. And one could point out that Plato’s hierarchical social ideal, conveyed in the Republic, is often expressed in terms of social harmonia. Even if we find such collectivist and/or hierarchical ideals antipathetic, it is unclear why the notion that ‘a person is a person through other persons’, or that ‘I am because we are’, or indeed any of the historical and cultural sources cited above definitively exclude them. Equally, however, ubuntu has been corralled in support of what looks like generically Western individualism. Take, for example, Metz’s paper, ‘Ubuntu and the value of self-expression in the mass media’ (Metz 2015). Here Metz argues that ‘even though self-expression is normally understood to be an individualist value par excellence, it has a clear place in an Afro-communitarian ethic’ (Metz 2015, 389). How so? Because, Metz maintains, ‘to express oneself need not be mere narcissism …  but can instead be a morally important form of sharing with and caring for others’ (ibid.). He supports this by defining ‘self-expression’ as ‘revealing one’s mental states’ (ibid. 397), rather than anything necessarily selfregarding. It follows that ‘ubuntu, a certain kind of civic-mindedness or otherregard includes self-expression as a component’ (ibid.): for without revealing one’s mental states, civic-mindedness would be impossible. Metz concludes that ‘by ubuntu revealing one’s mental life can be a kind of gift, when it promises, say, to broaden others’ horizons, to help them understand themselves or their society better, or just to make them feel closer to someone else’ (ibid. 398). African ethics is being parsed here in such formal and capacious terms that it can admit of practices that no Western, liberal, individualistic audience could object to. To cite just one example, Metz claims that ubuntu ‘means giving people forums in which to express themselves, viz. airtime on television and radio, and space in newspapers and on websites’ (ibid. 399). The only limit on

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  199 self-expression Metz suggests is one on ‘racist and sexist views’ (ibid. 400), which, again, is wholly in line with the moral priorities of current liberal egalitarianism. The suspicion arises, therefore, that what we are being offered is a highly selective understanding of African ethics, one whose formalism is, furthermore, tendentious, since it allows an implicitly Westernising conception of the good to prevail. And this suspicion is only heightened by what Metz does exclude from his account of African ethics. He strongly downplays, for instance, the extent to which ubuntu is tied to solidarity with and within one’s lineage. As Richard Bell holds, the latter explains why it is generally so shameful within African cultures to ‘close’ one’s line of descent by not having offspring (see Bell 1997, 201). Or, as Segun Gbadegesin puts matters, solidarity in the African context is directed first and foremost at the survival of one’s kin-group.4 Besides the ethical salience of lineage, Metz also affords no place to the martial virtues within African ethics. This seems a significant oversight, for these virtues are a key part of the African ethical inheritance, from the fighting techniques of the Khoi-San to the codes of military discipline elaborated by Shaka Zulu.5 Most strikingly, perhaps, Metz occludes the entire religious or spiritual nexus of African thought and practice. He asserts, for example, that ‘one should not try to ground normative prescriptions on highly controversial claims about the existence of supernatural beings’.6 I shall say more about this occlusion below, but for the present it is sufficient simply to note Metz’s highly prejudicial attitude to vast swathes of African ethical life and thought. I have argued, then, that although it is legitimate to speak of a generically African ethics, ubuntu has been hypostatised within that ethics, and made to do far more – and far more questionable – work than is warranted. Ubuntu is hardly exhaustive of the field, and even when placed merely centre-stage, is given such vague interpretations that it can support (or at least be consistent with) any number of ethical positions. At this third stage of the dialectic, however, a novel and apparently hopeful option emerges: viz. the proposal that African ethics be understood not as responsive to all the historical, anthropological and cultural evidence – where this includes especially African literate traditions – but rather as a constructivist enterprise. According to this option, we should not try to incorporate all the material relevant to African ethics, which would anyway be an unwieldy task, and involve countenancing manifold contradictions. Rather, we should admit that our enterprise is straightforwardly constructivist in nature: drawing on notable and attractive aspects of African traditions, our aim should be to arrange these in a coherent and cogent structure. The result will be African in inspiration, but not lay claim to strong empirical accuracy, let alone empirical comprehensiveness. This proposal captures, I take it, the spirit of Metz’s work on African ethics (at least in its recent incarnations). Take, for example, his claim that ‘[t]he present interpretation of ubuntu is a philosophical construction, and is not intended to mirror any traditional people’s beliefs. However, it is meant to be grounded on indigenous African worldviews, and to cull out what is morally compelling about them, at least to a broad, multicultural readership’ (Metz 2015, 398). Or take his avowal that he is ‘focusing on some dominant ideas from the African tradition

200  Tom P. S. Angier about how to live, particularly as they have been given philosophical expression by literate sub-Saharan thinkers …  Those relational ideas neatly fit together to create a tight and interesting philosophical package, one aptly labelled “Afrocommunitarianism”’ (Metz 2012a, 108). Now this approach clearly circumvents the criticism that focusing on ubuntu, and giving it a latitudinarian reading, is a betrayal of African ethics. For what I will call the ‘Metz method’ disavows the anthropological method, and does not claim to be offering a precise account even of ‘literate sub-Saharan’ ethical thought. It is its own method, albeit one with echoes elsewhere in the philosophical literature. Kwame Gyekye, for instance, has blazed a similar methodological trail. According to Barry Hallen, Gyekye’s ‘vision of “modern” African society …  becomes one which incorporates and interrelates the best elements of other cultures in the world, with those elements of Africa’s cultural heritage that deserve to be similarly valued. The …  criterion on the basis of which the positive contribution of any of these elements can be rated is …  humanistic: “bringing about the kinds of progressive changes in the entire aspects of human culture necessary for the enhancement and fulfilment of human life” [Gyekye 1997, 280]’ (Hallen 2004a, 113). Despite the primarily ethical, rather than political, import of this project, Gyekye’s method here has strong Rawlsian overtones (see Political Liberalism (Rawls 1993)). In this text, Rawls puts forward the idea of an ‘overlapping consensus’: according to this idea, liberal democratic societies can arrive at an adequate political consensus by highlighting and promoting the liberal aspects of their diverse communities (some of which also propound various illiberal norms). I suggest that the Metz method is also a form of late Rawlsianism. Like Rawls and Gyekye, he hopes to quarry different traditions for appealing norms and practices, on the basis of which he can build bridges between diverse communities. But unlike both of them, he is more willing to prescind from the actual content of those traditions, arriving at consensus more through construction of norms, rather than instruction by them.7 There is nothing overtly objectionable about the Metz method. It is admirably honest about the limits of its ambition: it does not set out to deliver an anthropologically accurate account of African ethics, but is boldly constructivist instead. At the same time, it openly proclaims its wider ethical ambition: namely, to ‘cull out what is morally compelling about [indigenous African worldviews] …  to a broad, multicultural readership’ (Metz 2015, 398). In this way, Metz appears to avoid the Scylla of producing amateurish anthropology, while also avoiding the Charybdis of providing a substantially unfounded and capricious ethical theory. But the question remains whether avoiding these twin dangers is sufficient. For even if Metz manages to elaborate an ethical theory which is African in inspiration, it is less than clear whether anything tolerably rooted in ‘indigenous African worldviews’ can, at the same time, be compelling to ‘a broad, multicultural readership’. A third danger looms, viz. that – in order to secure the endorsement of his Western, i.e. broadly liberal and egalitarian readership – Metz must make the latter his inspiration, rather than any ‘worldviews’ originating in Africa. This would, I submit, be a far worse betrayal of African ethics than anything we have

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  201 encountered so far: it would be to trumpet one’s African credentials while simultaneously putting Western values in the interpretative driving seat. Put bluntly, it would be to retail an ethics which is effectively non-African, while giving it the patina of an African heritage. If one inspects Metz’s case above for the value of self-expression in the mass media – a case made under the rubric of ubuntu – I suggest that something close to this diagnosis obtains. At the very least, the onus is on Metz to demonstrate that it does not. My claim here is not that the Metz method is necessarily committed to privileging the ‘multicultural’ (viz. Western, liberal egalitarian) side of the hoped-for overlapping consensus. It is that – as employed by Metz – this is how it actually functions. And the evidence for this is not confined to his argument for the good of self-expression. Many other arguments in his extant oeuvre point in the same direction. There is Metz’s contention, for example, that ubuntu is best construed as excluding a retributive conception of punishment: ‘Retributivism is largely alien to an African ethic’, he avers (see Metz 2012b, 9; cf. Metz 2014, 6764). In particular, ubuntu is supposedly hostile to the death penalty (Metz 2014, 6764). While retributive conceptions of punishment are not unpopular in current Western academic literature,8 they are distinctly unpopular among mainstream Western liberal commentators. So espousing anti-retributivism dovetails well with the latter’s moral ethos. (Indeed, the main evidence Metz cites for African anti-retributivism is from South Africa’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ and Constitutional Court, two bodies continually feted within the Western liberal media.) Or take Metz’s systematic occlusion of both solidarity with one’s lineage and the martial or warrior virtues. These values are hardly anathema to traditional African thought and practice, yet they are to current liberal egalitarianism – at least in its mainstream embodiment. Or take Metz’s refusal to engage with any norms or practices he deems reliant on the ‘supernatural’, itself a term of modern European origin (and, as I shall argue, one difficult to apply in an African context). Such anti-supernaturalism finds few echoes in the African past, or even present, but is de rigueur among the secularised opinion-formers of the West. Once again, it seems that the ethical agenda is being set largely, if not exclusively, outside Africa, while little more than descriptive terms (ubuntu, etc.) are being found within it. The upshot here, to repeat, is not that the Metz method is itself faulty or suspect, but rather that Metz’s employment of it is. It is perfectly possible, in other words, that his method can yield more genuinely African values, while at the same time engaging a non-African audience, and leading it in ethically fruitful directions. Indeed, the rest of my chapter will be devoted precisely to showing this is the case. In what follows, I will outline five bona fide African values, which I think deserve more consideration among Western liberals, egalitarians and individualists (or any combination thereof). It will be my contention that such consideration leads properly to reconsideration of certain older (and perhaps forgotten) European values, values which are close to characteristically African ones, but which have generally lost out to liberalism, egalitarianism and individualism. It should be noted, moreover, that if I am successful in this task, that success

202  Tom P. S. Angier will be a vindication of the Metz method, and thus a tribute (albeit indirect) to Metz himself. The first value I want to highlight is the proximity in African ethics between the moral and the aesthetic. Wiredu, for example, writes that ‘There is an aesthetic strain in [Akan] traditional ethical thought that is worthy of special mention …  what is good is conceived to be what is fitting …  what is fitting is what is beautiful’ (Wiredu 1980, 6). This claim is borne out by Yoruba culture in particular: Gbadegesin holds that a ‘list of major Yoruba beliefs about the world will include [the belief that] …  good character is beauty’ (Gbadegesin 2004, 322). He elaborates this belief as follows: ‘The Yoruba expression Iwà  l’ewà  depicts their understanding of existence itself as constituting beauty, while the cognate expression Iwà  rere l’è só  è nì yà n (Good character – good existence – is the adornment of a human being) depicts the significance attached to good character’ (Gbadegesin 2000, 204).9 John Bewaji singles out the Yoruba concept of egbin, which, he claims, ‘expresses two polar ideas. On the one hand, superlative beauty in a person or thing is characterised by comparing the person or thing to a beautiful animal by the name egbin. On the other hand, when an act is despicable and odious to the senses …  it is said to be egbin’ (Bewaji 2004, 400). Despite these comparisons between physical and moral beauty (or ugliness), Hallen maintains that ‘the Yoruba make an explicit distinction between outer (or physical) beauty and inner (or moral) beauty. The former is considered comparatively superficial and therefore unimportant. The latter serves as a measure of a person’s moral character, and is said to involve one of the most important observations that can be made about any human being’ (Hallen 2006, 242). Quoting Robert Farris Thompson, he notes, in illustration, that ‘Yoruba …  assume that someone who embodies command, coolness …  is someone extremely beautiful and like unto a god’ (ibid.). Prima facie there is a strong disparity here between the African willingness to make value judgements in moral-cum-aesthetic terms, and the Western tendency to mark the moral and the aesthetic as categorically distinct. But if one probes deeper, one finds that the characteristically African approach has intimate connections with the European past, particularly in its Greek-derived aspect. After all, Plato makes much of the fact that Socrates was physically ugly, but displayed a beautiful soul. The Symposium is a paean to the integration, at least at the level of the Forms, between moral goodness and beauty. The soul attains insight to the degree to which it realises this integration, both per se and in its own mode of being. Aristotle inherits this Platonic rapprochement between the ethical and the aesthetic, even though he is less interested in erō s as their mediator. Instead, he takes up the notion of the kalon, the ‘beautiful’ or ‘fine’ – but also ‘noble’ – making it pivotal within his ethical theory. He holds, for instance, that the pleasant, kalon and beneficial ‘belong to the best activities, and these, or the best among them, we say is happiness’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1099a, 22–3); ‘A character which finds virtue congenial …  clings to the kalon and recoils at the aischron [shameful, ugly]’ (ibid. 1079b, 29–31); ‘The various actions which spring from virtue are both kalon and done for the sake of the kalon’ (ibid. 1120a, 19–20). This Greek notion of virtue as an ‘adornment’ of character has clear connections with

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  203 traditional African thought. Moreover, it is not confined to the ancient European past. The German Romantic tradition of the schö ne Seele, the ‘beautiful soul’, preserves echoes of the Greek past. It is hardly a solecism in current English, even, to talk of morally admirable action as ‘fine’ or ‘beautiful’ – ‘she did a beautiful thing’ – or to refer to the morally opprobrious as ‘ugly’, ‘twisted’, etc. And at the level of ethical theory, Colin McGinn has proposed an ‘aesthetic morality’, according to which aesthetic designations actually ground moral ones: see his Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (McGinn 1997). Second, African ethics supplies valuable reflections on poverty. Much current Western moral philosophy is devoted to condemning and eradicating the evils of poverty – one thinks here, in particular, of the work of Peter Singer and Thomas Pogge. Insofar as poverty amounts to real deprivation, this is surely well-taken, and something African traditions also affirm. As Godfrey Tangwa remarks, ‘the culture within which I was born and …  grew up took great pains …  to ensure that no one should die out of sheer poverty’ (Tangwa 2004, 393). But where Western thought tends to view poverty as a purely negative condition, with no redeeming features, African thought tends to be more subtle, affording the poor more dignity, and even a form of insight denied those who are materially well-off. According to Bessie Head, ‘[p]overty has a home in Africa – like a quiet second skin. It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with an unconscious dignity’ (Head 1989, 41). Or as Tangwa relates, ‘[i]n Lamnso`, my mother tongue, we have the following common sayings and proverbs: A si vishong bong kitan (Better to be poor than to steal); Wir yo` yi kpuh kitan (No one dies of poverty); Kitan ki yo` dze lii wir (Poverty does not belong with blameworthy actions); Bong ke ngah kitan (The poor person is better off)’ (Tangwa 2004, 393). This openness to the idea that being poor can have value, or at least have valuable corollaries, both grants those in inevitable poverty more self-respect, and impugns the general Western assumption that being poor is a wholly worthless condition. It also recalls, once again, the European past, which had far more room for the notion that poverty has value. One thinks, for example, of the Christian ideal of voluntarily giving up one’s worldly goods, the better to serve God and one’s fellow humans. This constitutes a strong bridge to African ethics, and may well become popular again in the West, the more people tire of material comforts and see their inevitable limitations. At the very least, it should give Westerners pause, and alert them to the dignity and rich cultural resources of the poor. Third, there is the value of hierarchy. This is perhaps the most controversial African value from a Western egalitarian perspective. Metz, for one, steers clear of it, maintaining that his construction of ubuntu precludes the value of class hierarchy, and even of age hierarchy. ‘[R]espect for elders’, he holds, ‘ …  makes sense [only] supposing an elder just is one with ubuntu’ (Metz 2015, 398). But this inverts the typical African view, which is that respect for elders conditions and partly constitutes ubuntu; the latter cannot be rendered independently of the former. John Mbiti, for example, writes that one of the central values within African cultures is to ‘respect the elders …  behave in a humble way toward those senior to you’ (Mbiti 1990, 208). Ifeanyi Menkiti confirms this, arguing that in

204  Tom P. S. Angier ‘African thought’, ‘the more of a past one has, the more standing as a person one also has’ (Menkiti 2004, 325). He refers to this as the ‘ontological progression’ view of aging, citing the Igbo proverb that ‘What an old man sees sitting down, a young man cannot see standing up’ (ibid.). As Menkiti presses, moral wisdom, unlike technical skill, requires a lifetime’s development: while there are 18-yearold mathematical giants, ‘we would have a great deal of difficulty talking about an 18-year-old moral giant’ (ibid.). There are simply ‘no short cuts’ here, on the standard African view. One key reflection of the age hierarchy in African cultures is the ceremonial marking of the transition to adulthood. This is ‘a process of social and ritual transformation’ (ibid. 326), says Menkiti, which bears witness to the assumption of new ‘moral function[s]’ (ibid. 329). And another key reflection of it is the acceptance that children ‘may be punished by any older member of the household for misbehaving’ (Gbadegesin 2000, 293).10 What most Western commentators find so inimical about hierarchy is its class embodiment, and African societies certainly have their fair share of this (though perhaps ‘clan’ hierarchy would be a more accurate description). As Bell maintains, ‘African …  communally based societies are usually structured hierarchically with the “Headman”, then other men, then women, then children in order of rank value’ (Bell 1997, 213). Whatever one makes of such social stratification, I do not propose to defend (or criticise) it here. What I think Western egalitarians can clearly learn from is the emphasis placed in African societies on age hierarchy. The idea that age per se deserves respect and even deference has been relentlessly criticised by egalitarians; likewise, the notion that the transition from childhood to the life of adult responsibility should be at all codified or marked by social ceremony and ritual has been all but jettisoned by the liberal egalitarian consensus. Again, the contrast with the European cultural inheritance is striking, an inheritance which is far closer to the African norm. Take, for instance, Aristotle’s claim that ‘we think our powers correspond to our time of life, and that a particular age brings with it intuitive reason and judgement …  Therefore we ought to attend to the undemonstrated sayings and opinions of experienced and older people …  because experience has given them an eye, they see aright’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1143b, 8–14).11 The Judaeo-Christian tradition, too, lays emphasis on a rationally founded age hierarchy, adding a set of cultural markers that lend public recognition to the key transitions of life. It might well be asked whether the modern Western indifference to or even depreciation of these markers has been an ethically salutary development. Arguably, it has not, and reaffirming the European-cum-African heritage here would make for a more mature and responsible social world. Fourth, there is the value of spirituality. Metz’s work on African ethics is wholly in line with the secularising assumptions of the Western academy. As we saw above, he holds that any ‘supernaturalism’ is too controversial to be admitted into a rigorous ethical theory (cf. Metz 2012b, 6–7). But this puts him once again at variance with the African mainstream, where what might be called ‘spiritual’ values are widely embraced. As Bell puts things, ‘The ordinary experience of Africans accepts “God being present” among, and sometimes within, the

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  205 proximate environment of people’s day-to-day lives’ (Bell 1997, 205). Gyekye concurs, noting that ‘a crucial aspect of Akan metaphysics is the world of spirits [asamando], a world inhabited by the departed souls of ancestors’ (Gyekye 1995, 86). Some writers on African ethics do, admittedly, repudiate the spiritual framework of much African thought and practice. Olusegun Oladipo, for example, contends that African divinities or deities are ‘man-made’, in the sense of answering human needs; they are thus abandoned, he claims, when felt to be useless or unresponsive (see Oladipo 2004, 357–8, 361; cf. Gbadegesin 2000, 300). But this rather dismissive attitude towards African spirituality is hard to square with the evidence, which points to widespread reverence for ancestors and other spiritual beings. What lies behind such attitudes may be irritation at the European missionaries’ association of religiosity with civilisation (see Oladipo 2004, 358). Alternatively, it may be the more recent tendency to view all religiosity as noncritical, unscientific and purely emotional (see Hallen 2004a, 120; Hallen 2004b, 296–7, 300). Either way, however, there is not much mileage in denying the generally positive cultural environment which Africa affords spiritual belief and practice. What can we learn from this, and how might it help build, rather than burn, bridges with the West? I suggest that what is valuable about African spirituality is that it does not reduce to ‘religion’ or ‘supernaturalism’, in the sense of rarefied beliefs and practices which prescind from everyday human needs and interests. As Mbiti maintains, ‘[b]ecause [African] traditional religions permeate all departments of life, there is no formal distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the religious and the non-religious, between the spiritual and the material areas of life. Wherever the African is, there is his religion’ (Mbiti 1990, 2). Or as Gyekye expounds matters, ‘religion enters all aspects of African life so fully …  that it can hardly be isolated. African heritage is intensely religious …  all actions and thoughts have a religious meaning and are inspired or influenced by a religious point of view’ (Gyekye 1996, 3). If this is even close to the truth, it points to a very different cultural nexus to that which characterises much current Western religiosity, which is confined to mere personal ‘belief’, or activities at the end of the week. By contrast, the typically African cross-fertilisation of the natural with the supernatural recalls older European traditions, traditions in which a sense of the divine is thoroughly integrated into ordinary life. One could cite Celtic spirituality, Franciscan spirituality, eating fish on Fridays or any number of ‘embeddings’ of the spiritual within everyday practice. Perhaps philosophers like Metz are so far removed from such cultural practices that they cannot see their value, and anyway assume they are irrelevant to Western life. But both of these stances represent a failure, I think, to discern a key respect in which African and ‘multicultural’ audiences can learn from each other. Fifth and lastly, there are the values of what could be called ‘African bioethics’. Here I take my bearings from Godfrey Tangwa, who has done much to uncover the riches of African attitudes to human life and the care which it deserves. Tangwa takes the example of the Nso` people of Cameroon, and characterises their attitude to life as one of ‘respectful coexistence, conciliation, and

206  Tom P. S. Angier containment’ (Tangwa 2004, 390). In the cases of illness and death, ‘there is no insistence [among the Nso`] that illness, in itself, should not exist. If illness did not exist, how would people die? In Nso` thinking, death, as an inevitable end, is not considered necessarily a bad thing, especially when it is timely and relatively painless and neither premature nor overdue’ (ibid.). This way of thinking does not reject technology, but rather counsels its ‘cautious and piecemeal use’ (ibid.). And this attitude pervades the general African bioethical approach: there is a duty to care for people when they are suffering, rather than to eradicate suffering at all costs, and there is a duty to safeguard life, rather than to force it into or out of being. This approach means there is great reluctance among most Africans to engage in euthanasia or assisted suicide, to artificially prolong life, to sell human organs, to bank and sell human eggs and sperm, to allow surrogate motherhood or widespread abortion or human cloning (see ibid. 391). Most striking, perhaps, is Tangwa’s claim that ‘[African] culture bestows greater value on handicapped children. Within Nso` culture, for example, a handicapped child is considered mbuhme, a special gift (of God). Such children are generally believed to possess psychic powers and extraordinary “depth”. They are also thought often to be messengers of God or disguises of spirits. For this reason, they are treated with great care and respect’ (ibid. 392). The contrast between African and Western bioethics could not be starker. For what we see in the latter is the increasing inability to rationalise suffering, and thus the concerted attempt to prevent or stamp it out, whatever the wider risks. The most serious risk, arguably, is that euthanasia and assisted suicide become the default method of coping with serious illness (physical or mental) and the dying process. We also see the increasing commodification and commercialisation of life, with the recourse to surrogate mothers from poorer countries, the setting up of egg-freezing facilities and sperm banks and the harvesting of organs from those who have not given their express consent. Since the 1960s, moreover, we have seen rates of abortion which have alarmed even those who sought its legalisation, and who never anticipated the exponential rise in its use. Most dramatically, there has been the rise of a new eugenics – under the title of human ‘enhancement’ – which has licensed the use of abortion (and post-birth euthanasia, in countries like the Netherlands) in the case of children with disabilities, notably spina bifida and Down’s syndrome. In France, for instance, almost no children with Down’s are born today, their lives being judged simply not worth living. What a contrast with the Nso` attitude to such children, which counsels care and respect. And what a contrast, furthermore, with the moral heritage of the West, which was informed by a Judaeo-Christian (not Greek or Roman) reverence for the vulnerable. Indeed, along all the dimensions I have outlined, African bioethics is far more in line with the Judaeo-Christian past of the European and European-derived nations than with their present. Should the former really be wiped away, to make room for a brave new bioethical world? Maybe we should listen, instead, to the voices of people like the Nso`, and remind ourselves of the wisdom of the ‘respectful coexistence, conciliation, and containment’ of human life.

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  207 In conclusion, I have argued that the Metz method of constructing norms grounded in African traditions – norms which also have the power to speak to a Western audience – is perfectly sound. Where I differ from Metz is in his employment of that method. If one attends to his construal of ubuntu in particular – as precluding a retributivist ethic, the martial virtues and ‘supernaturalism’ (on the one hand), and as warranting self-expression, and an under-textured ‘solidarity’ and ‘identification’ with people (on the other) – it seems clear that the inspiration for his construction of African ethics lies far less in Africa than in the nostrums of Western liberal egalitarianism and individualism. By contrast, I have tried to construct an African ethics that is not only truer to the cultural and philosophical resources of Africa, but also speaks more profoundly and with greater ethical import to audiences in the West. The examples I drew on were the African tendency to see the ethical as infused with the aesthetic, to see value and dignity in poverty, to preserve hierarchies tied to age, to allow a pervasive role for spirituality and to safeguard human life, especially at its beginning and end. True, to affirm these values involves challenging many moral attitudes, beliefs and practices that have gained currency in the Western world. But, as I hope I have shown, to affirm them also reconnects us with a set of values which are very much at home in the West, values which derive from the great axiological storehouse of Greece, Rome and Judaeo-Christianity. Indeed, if there is one lesson the Metz method teaches with peculiar clarity, it is that African ethics enjoins a reassessment of that Western inheritance – a reassessment far more generous, perhaps, than Metz himself permits.

Notes 1 To some extent, Metz has moved away from direct engagement with ubuntu, preferring to concentrate on the related notion of ‘harmony’ (see Metz, forthcoming). For a summary yet informative treatment of ubuntu, see Metz (2014). 2 In this chapter, I am restricting the term ‘African’ to indigenous cultures, practices, ideas etc. This excludes both Christianity and Islam, which, although hugely influential within Africa – arguably more influential than any indigenous tradition – are not only of non-African origin, but also comparatively late arrivals on the scene. 3 For other sources that contrast ubuntu with Western individualism, see (e.g.) Bell (1997, 205, 213) and Tangwa (2004, 389). 4 See Gbadegesin (2000, 293, 296, 314–15). Cf. Bewaji (2004, 396) on Yoruba culture and Appiah (2004, 27–8) on Akan culture. 5 See, e.g., John Laband’s Zulu Warriors: The Battle for the South African Frontier (Laband 2014). 6 Metz (2012a, 113 n. 12). See Metz (2008) for a detailed defence of this position. 7 One could add that, unlike Rawls – but like Gyekye – Metz hopes to build bridges, not between communities within a single, liberally structured nation-state, but between whole continents. 8 See, e.g., Matthew Kramer’s The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and Its Consequences (Kramer 2011). 9 Roland Abiodun documents in detail the connection between good character and beauty in Yoruba culture (see Abiodun 1983).

208  Tom P. S. Angier 10 NB the Yoruba proverb that ‘A child who makes an abusive face at his mother will die in abject penury’, or that ‘A child who habitually disobeys his mother and pays no heed to his father’s admonitions, will need to seek refuge with the same parents, when chased – from outside – by malevolent strangers’ (Gbadegesin 2000, 302). 11 It is worth noting that whereas Aristotle spends a significant amount of time analysing moral habituation or development, modern Western moral philosophers rarely do. Indeed, they tend to present the moral life as a matter of applying rational formulae, such as Kant’s categorical imperative, or Bentham’s utilitarian calculus. This technicising of moral practice is of a piece with their lack of regard for the transitions of age, since technical formulae can, of course, be applied by technically proficient youngsters. Menkiti’s dictum about the difficulty of ‘talking about an 18-year-old moral giant’ – a dictum found also in Aristotle – is germane here.

References Abiodun, R. 1983, ‘Identity and the Artistic Process in Yoruba Aesthetic Concept of Iwa’. Journal of Cultures and Ideas 1 (1): 13–30. Abraham, W. E. 1962, The Mind of Africa (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Appiah, K. A. 1992, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Appiah, K. A. 2004, ‘Akan and Euro-American Concepts of the Person’, ch. 2 of L. M. Brown (ed.), African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (translated by W. D. Ross; edited and revised by J. Barnes), in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2 (the revised Oxford translation (Bollingen Series LXXI)) (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Bell, R. H. 1997, ‘Understanding African Philosophy from a Non-African Point of View: An Exercise in Cross-cultural Philosophy’, ch. 8 of E. Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd). Bewaji, J. A. I. 2004, ‘Ethics and Morality in Yoruba Culture’, ch. 31 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Forde, D. 1954, African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and the Social Values of African Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gbadegesin, S. 2000, ‘Individuality, Community, and the Moral Order’, ch. 6 of P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (eds), Philosophy from Africa: A Text with Readings (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gbadegesin, S. 2004, ‘Toward a Theory of Destiny’, ch. 23 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Gyekye, K. 1995, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Philadelphia: Temple University Press). Gyekye, K. 1996, African Cultural Values: An Introduction (Philadelphia and Accra: Sankofa Publishing Company). Gyekye, K. 1997, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hallen, B. 2004a, ‘Contemporary Anglophone African Philosophy: A Survey’, ch. 6 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Hallen, B. 2004b, ‘Yoruba Moral Epistemology’, ch. 21 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd).

The Metz method and ‘African ethics’  209 Hallen, B. 2006, ‘“Handsome Is as Handsome Does”: Interrelations of the Epistemic, the Moral, and the Aesthetic in an African Culture’, ch. 13 of B. Hallen, African Philosophy: The Analytic Approach (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, Inc). Head, B. 1989, Tales of Tenderness and Power (Johannesburg: A. D. Donker). Kramer, M. H. 2011, The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation Of Evil And Its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Laband, J. P. C. 2014, Zulu Warriors: The Battle for the South African Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Masolo, D. A. 1997, ‘African Philosophy and the Postcolonial: Some Misleading Abstractions about “Identity”’, ch. 13 of E. Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd). Mbiti, J. 1990, African Religions and Philosophy (2nd edn) (Oxford: Heinemann). McGinn, C. 1997, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Menkiti, I. A. 2004, ‘On the Normative Conception of a Person’, ch. 24 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Metz, T. 2008, ‘God, Morality and the Meaning of Life’, ch. 9 of N. Athanassoulis and S. Vice (eds), The Moral Life: Essays in Honour of John Cottingham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Metz, T. 2011, ‘Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa’. African Human Rights Law Journal 11: 532–559. Metz, T. 2012a, ‘Ethics in Africa and in Aristotle: Some Points of Contrast’. Phronimon 13 (2): 99–117. Metz, T. 2012b, ‘“Giving the World a More Human Face” – Human Suffering in African Thought and Philosophy’, ch. 6 of J. Malpas and N. Lickiss (eds), Perspectives on Human Suffering (Dordrecht: Springer). Metz, T. 2014, ‘Ubuntu’, in A. C. Michalos (ed.), Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research (Dordrecht: Springer). Metz, T. 2015, ‘Ubuntu and the Value of Self-Expression in the Mass Media’. Communicatio 41 (3): 388–403. Metz, T. (forthcoming), Relational Ethics: An African Moral Theory. Oladipo, O. 2004, ‘Religion in African Culture: Some Conceptual Issues’, ch. 27 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Ramose, M. B. 2013, ‘Transcending Cosmopolitanism’. Diogenes 0 (0): 1–6. Rawls, J. 1993, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press). Siame, C. N. 2000, ‘“Two Concepts of Liberty” through African Eyes’. The Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (1): 53–67. Tá í wò , O. 2004, ‘Post-Independence African Political Philosophy’, ch. 17 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Tangwa, G. B. 2004, ‘Some African Reflections on Biomedical and Environmental Ethics’, ch. 30 of K. Wiredu (ed.), A Companion to African Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd). Wiredu, K. 1980, Philosophy and an African Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wiredu, K. 1995, ‘Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics: A Plea for a Non-Party Polity’. The Centennial Review 39 (1): 53–63.

Part IV

Meta-philosophy

12 The edges of (African) philosophy Bruce B. Janz

Philosophy instinctively explores its edges. Those edges may be the interrogation of its own beginning, source, or impetus; they may be its boundaries or demarcations from other human activities, rational or otherwise; or they may be its questions of applicability, practice or practicality – what does philosophy produce and how does it engage its world? Socrates’ daemon, Plato’s khora, Kant’s noumenal, Husserl’s lifeworld, Freud’s unconscious, Wittgenstein’s unspeakable, Oruka’s sage, and Mudimbe’s line – in different ways these and many more are the edges of what is or can be thought and what is or remains unthought. While we can identify different modes, practices, and traditions of philosophy, the investigation of edges seems to be a common feature of all. My goal here is to describe an African philosophy that does not take as its starting point or seek to gain its permission for existence from other traditions of philosophy. Even putting it this way is inexact – I will be questioning the idea of a tradition of philosophy itself, and how it has come to be an organizing and ordering device that makes sense of the philosophical world for philosophers. Western philosophers have this longstanding and, I think, problematic distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, and after that distinction is made, we add African philosophy to this as if it is another style, flavor, or type of philosophy. Perhaps, we think, it is a regional variation, and all the weaker for it, just as the art world has often reacted with suspicion toward regional art. Clearly these are not different things of the same sort, different members of a set, but as soon as we say that, we inevitably move to the question of demarcation – which is “real” philosophy? And, from there, we find ourselves in a quandary. Either there is a real philosophy, and it is one of these or something else, or there is not, and we find ourselves in a kind of relativism concerning the nature of philosophy itself. I regard this approach as a kind of blind alley of reasoning, although one that lies behind a great many attempts to do any of these forms of philosophy (again, language traps us – it seems as if we have members of a set again, just by calling them forms). We find ourselves forever faced with what I call “spatial philosophy”, that is, the task of defining and determining who is in and who is out, what the laws of the land are, and so forth. Philosophy becomes a country, and we become preoccupied with defining and protecting boundaries and, at best, establishing “international” relations with other countries.

214  Bruce B. Janz I want to proceed differently, to avoid the blind alley. To do so, I will focus on two central aspects of philosophy: the formulation and critique of questions and the creation and activation of concepts. I will argue that African philosophy, far from being a latecomer trying to carve out space on the philosophical map, is in fact engaging in what all philosophy must do, but has often forgotten how to do – it returns to the edges of thought by interrogating the source of philosophy. This, I will argue, is not yet a clear agenda within African philosophy – it has been too often tied up with questions posed from elsewhere. It has too often been Western philosophy’s other, its “problem”, the philosophical area that does not neatly fit any taxonomy, and to some extent has internalized that neurosis. But it also shows the promise and the reality of asking questions anew, questions that arise from its own places but which are not restricted to one specific place. They are questions which both work with and create what I call “activated concepts”, or concepts that have currency in a place and which have led to or describe practices, institutions, or patterns of life. All philosophy, including that of the West, emerges from places and, in particular, from the conversations that happen across the edges of places, but much of that emplaced conceptual work has become elided. Philosophy, I want to argue, always exists in places, but is not reducible to or determined by those places. It strives for the universal. I wish to reposition African philosophy as it exists in the minds of many in the West, from being something that has to be accommodated (that is, on the permanent edge of Western philosophy) to being the living memory of philosophy itself. And, in the process, I want to reimagine the ways in which African philosophy can interrogate Western and World philosophy while at the same time creating and activating concepts that are adequate to a place. In what follows, I want to make some observations on how to work at the edges of philosophy, without simply assuming, as has often been done in the past, that African philosophy is that edge. What would it mean for any philosophy, including African philosophy, to explore its edges? An oversimplified summary would be as follows: 1 Ask real questions. 2 Make new concepts. 3 Don’t be stupid. In what follows, we will give some context to these recommendations, expand on each of these, and then consider an example.

1 On questions and philosophy No matter which philosophic tradition one inhabits, practitioners are usually taught that philosophy is about questions. Great questions, big questions, profound, perhaps perennial questions. And yet, the further these practitioners proceed into research, the less they behave as if their questions are actually the central focus of philosophy. The focus shifts to claims and propositions as being central,

The edges of (African) philosophy  215 at least in analytic philosophy, and in continental philosophy the move is typically to narratives. Territory is defended, positions are supported, and everyone tries to convince everyone else that they are correct. While there is nothing wrong with this, the first gesture toward the edges of philosophy would be the shift to recentering the question as the focus of philosophy. A range of philosophical fields have a history of interrogating questions as a central form of philosophical thought. There has, for instance, been a recent renewed interest in what Richard Whately in the 19th century called Zeno’s “erotetic method of disputation”, or the logic of questions, and his distinction between verbal and real questions (Whately 1849). Mary and Arthur Prior (Prior and Prior, 1955) gave a more rigorous version of this erotetic logic, and it has more recently been explored by Andrzej Wiś niewski (Wiś niewski and Leszczyń ska-Jasion 2015, among others), Philipp Koralus (Koralus 2014; Koralus and Mascarenhas 2013), and others in relation to questions about the nature of cognition. In continental philosophy, Heidegger famously had his Seinsfrage, the question of being and the question that uncovered our being (of many places, probably the bestknown is Heidegger 1962: 21–32), and Gadamer took up the question of questions as well in Truth and Method (Gadamer 1975 1989: 362ff). Michel Meyer (Meyer 1995, among many others) proposed what he called “problematology”, which recentered the question in the philosophy of science, epistemology, and continental thought. Sylvain Bromberger wrote extensively about the place of why-questions in scientific method (Bromberger 1992). Collingwood considered the place of questions in historical inquiry (Collingwood 1994), and Gabriel Marcel distinguished between problems and mysteries, two forms of questions (Marcel 1950). In rhetoric, Hans Robert Jauss looked at the dynamic of questions and answers (Jauss 1989). And of course, we all look back to Socrates, who built questioning in as a central feature of his dialectical method. So, questions are widespread as a topic of philosophical reflection, but I would contend that they are nevertheless ignored in most areas of philosophy when it comes to thinking about how philosophers actually work. It is as if they are elided once we reach a desired conclusion, which is a satisfactory claim, proposition, or narrative. The answer, almost as an Hegelian Aufhebung, erases the question. We only revisit the question if one of these turns out to be inadequate. In this, questions are like places. While we might be willing to admit that philosophy happens in place, we often quickly render that place irrelevant to philosophy qua philosophy. It is at best a moment on the way. I would like to reverse the usual pattern of philosophy, and argue that our claims, propositions, and narratives are moments on the way to new and better questions. Why should this matter? Because the move away from the model of defending intellectual space toward a model of philosophical exploration which has an element of self-critique attached to it lays the groundwork for a productive and creative engagement with areas outside of one’s own background. I have argued at length elsewhere that the central question in African philosophy was not, in fact, an African question (Janz 2009: 7ff). In other words, it was not a question which came from this place, but from another place, and it served

216  Bruce B. Janz a set of interests that were not African interests. It was the question “Is there an African philosophy?” This seems like an innocent question, simply a request for confirmation and definition. The very thing that starts philosophy off. But it is not as innocent as it seems. The question comes with an onus – it is up to the African to demonstrate that he or she is doing “real” philosophy, however we define that. Does it measure up? These implications might not be intended that way by those asking the question, but just as is true with structural racism, the individual intention does not have to be racist for a question to leverage an entire structure that makes it almost impossible to address adequately. We could subject this question to questioning, as I have suggested. That, though, is not all that interesting. The most we could establish would be that the question does not allow an interesting or useful problematic to be established. “Problematic” here designates the nature of the space of inquiry that is opened up by a question. It might be a restricted space, or an expansive one, but even in philosophy, a problematic opened up by a question is not a universal space. Questions make available lines of thought. Even what seem to be the most seemingly universal questions – “What is being?”, “What is truth?” – can still have their edges. Questions delimit a space, even inasmuch as they assume concepts not present, even as they establish unspoken contrasts and contradictions. It is easy, when one stays within a particular philosophical place, to think that there is no problematic opened by questions, or rather, that the problematic has already been established and defined over the centuries. This attitude is more difficult to maintain once one starts to deal with multiple philosophical places, or perhaps more to the point, once one recognizes the multiple places that everyone is engaged in at all times.

2 Creating concepts Creating concepts means, in part, questioning our questions. We are, of course, far from some discussions of concepts which would regard them as mental representations and nothing else, or solely as abstract entities. This is not a version of concepts which assumes that they pick out features of the world. The intention here is different. It is not to account for concepts as the centerpiece in a philosophy of mind. It is rather to think about them as contingent but crucial engines of and locations for thought. Concepts connect elements of human experience, but do not precede that experience. They allow us to think about the experience in new ways. The move from the placefulness of concepts to their placelessness means doing a certain kind of violence to and with those concepts, a violence which may be creative or destructive, but which always is present when they travel. We can perhaps best see this through some examples. As one example, we can think about the history of African philosophy itself. That history is fairly widely known among scholars working in the field. After a few years and a lot of reading, one need only mention the name “Hountondji”, for instance, and a particular position on ethnophilosophy and the nature of African philosophy comes to mind. Likewise with Mbiti on time, or Oruka on sage

The edges of (African) philosophy  217 philosophy, or Wiredu on truth, or Gyekye on tradition – in each case, the story of the development of contemporary African philosophy has been told often enough that its contours are familiar. This well-known narrative has become a set of propositions about African philosophy. They have become markers that stake out a narrative. The questions that animated those studies pale in comparison to the positions that these scholars have taken, and it is these landmark ideas that form our sense of the history of the field. If what I have said about questions is correct, though, different questions will make available different narratives. The purpose these writings served was tied to the question being asked at the time, which as I have already suggested was often a problematic question. We tell the story in African philosophy of the slow emergence of the field as an academic discipline out of its secondary status into a current robust state, and use these texts as the markers of that narrative. There is more, though, that is potentially interesting in these writings than the position they stake out in a narrative. These writings might yield other insights, if we take them out of that overall narrative, which ultimately was to answer the illegitimate question posed by non-Africans to African philosophy: “Is there an African philosophy?” The point here is not to reassess whether their arguments in these papers were correct after all, but rather to pick up on conceptual moves they were making which, taken out of the familiar narrative we have placed them in, might be an indication of activated concepts in this place. Here are some examples: 1 Ubuntu is usually understood as a metaphysical system that forms the basis for ethics and politics. Almost all approaches attempt to find an African ethic or politics based in some communalist formula rooted in African lived experience, or in the metaphysics of subjectivity. Mogobe Ramose, though, suggests something else (Ramose 1999). He seems to present Ubuntu in metaphysical terms (it is “be-ing”, a kind of fluidity in existence), but we might see his move as one toward a cognitive system, that is, a system which tells us something about the strategies and capacities for creating new knowledge and new concepts, rather than a system which looks back to a metaphysical grounding for action. We will expand on this example later in this chapter. 2 A reconsideration of the version of vitalism that we see in some of the earliest and most problematic works in modern African philosophy, in people like Tempels (1945) and Kagame (1956). We have tended to approach these thinkers as advancing a metaphysical claim about African society, that there is a kind of life force which binds together those on the continent. What if this is not about metaphysics at all? Or, what if it is not a spiritualist metaphysic? There are materialist versions of vitalism (e.g., Gilles Deleuze, and arguably also Henri Bergson) which have more to do with the organization of chaotic systems than with some sort of spiritual foundation of culture. Tempels and Kagame are often dismissed as thinkers early in the development of contemporary African philosophy, but it may be that the sense African philosophy has made of them has been limited by the place they have in a narrative about the development of African philosophy.

218  Bruce B. Janz 3 There could be a reconsideration of John Mbiti’s much-criticized account of time in African cultures (Mbiti 1969). Again, what if we start from somewhere other than the place that most critiques begin – at either the metaphysical level (that is, the question of whether this in fact reflects the nature of time, whether it is really about temporality and not time at all, and whether this can be called “African” in some sense) or the ethnographic level (is it really true that Mbiti’s description of sasa and zamani as modes of time can be found across Africa in more or less that form, and have the implications about futurity or its lack that he claims)? Is Mbiti giving us something closer to a phenomenology of temporality, and if that is possible, what implications might that have for the construction of social narratives within the African cultures where something like sasa and zamani are operative? 4 There was a set of concepts that formed a kind of scaffolding at the time and which activated a particular approach to being Black African in the world, which came to be known as Negritude. This was again heavily criticized by many African thinkers (“a tiger does not proclaim its tigrity”, as Wole Soyinka famously said). And yet, we can see negritude as a conceptual ecology which accomplished something in its time, whether or not it could be justified metaphysically. Instead of thinking about the question of its adequacy as a conceptual system which articulates some metaphysical fact of black existence, we might instead think about what problematics were opened up by the presence of this movement. The journal Third Text had a special issue in 2010 that proposed to do just that. Guest edited by Rasheed Araeen and Denis Ekpo, it brought together a number of thinkers whose goal in writing was to move past the well-known dismissals of negritude, and to consider the doors that might have been opened by the movement, even those doors that were not entered at the time but might still be. Negritude too has a place in the story we tell about the history of African philosophy, and as with the other examples here, if it is taken out of that narrative and questioned anew, it may yield new problematics. 5 One would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to endorse nativism, either in Africa or elsewhere, and yet we see it enacted everywhere in political life. Kwame Anthony Appiah writes against it in, among other places, In My Father’s House (1992). Throughout this chapter and elsewhere, I have argued for the importance of place in African philosophy. Nativism seems to be a kind of attachment to place. Is this a real attachment, or something else? Is it a deep feeling for place, or a fundamental misunderstanding of it? And, if we reject it, what are we left with? Some form of cosmopolitanism? Afropolitanism? Globalization? Placelessness? Can we care about place without becoming xenophobic? Again, we have a “settled” concept in most of the literature of African philosophy. Rethinking Appiah’s argument about nativism, along with those of others who write about this, such as Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2010), would help to understand expressions of nativism, not only in Africa, but elsewhere in the world.

The edges of (African) philosophy  219 6 In The Invention of Africa (Mudimbe 1988) and later work, V. Y. Mudimbe outlines the ways in which “Africa” is an invented concept, and that it was largely invented for European and colonial interests, not African ones (we see others making similar arguments, such as Lewis and Wigen’s The Myth of Continents, 1997). Again, we have a place designation, and in this case one which has been adopted by a great many thinkers across the continent. It has, in other words, become an activated concept. And yet, it remains a problematic one, as a designation of place. Are there other concepts in the geography of reason which might produce new problematics? Notice what is happening in these examples. We are not taking one of the well-worn paths that philosophy has taken. There is an existing narrative about African philosophy, but rethinking these examples and others moves them from being settled knowledge to the site of active questioning. We are, furthermore, not simply finding a way to add in African “perspectives” (whatever those are) to existing narratives in the West, as if we could have an African perspective in a continent of over a billion people plus a very active diaspora. Having such a thing would assume that we can identify an African philosophical stance, and that seems unlikely in the extreme and, in any case, uninteresting from the point of view of addressing lived experience. We are not reducing the engagement with philosophy to themes or areas either. We are using this place to enable us to ask new questions and establish new problematics. We are not first asking whether a concept is worthy of philosophical consideration. We are looking at those which have gained currency, either at an academic level or at a cultural level, and then asking why and how they have done so, and what it would mean to create new concepts adequate to our contemporary situation. In most cases here we are shifting the question away from a particular kind of metaphysical assumption, but this need not be the direction that new questions and new concepts go. It is, though, a shift away from a transcendent orientation of the questioning, the assumption that our concepts exist behind, underneath, beyond, or outside of the realm of human experience. One might wonder where philosophy ends and other pursuits begin. Some of these examples draw on material from geography, postcolonial studies, politics, and a host of other areas. Are we still doing philosophy when we naturalize the production of concepts, that is, when we think about where they come from and what makes them vital? I believe these issues are still part of the purview of philosophy. It is possible to have too broad a view of philosophy, and we don’t want to make philosophy equivalent to every kind of conceptual analysis. But it is also possible to have too narrow a view of philosophy, to identify its activity solely with a particular kind of conceptual analysis, or to limit its objects of analysis too tightly. Both tendencies undermine the creative potential of philosophy, and its ability to ask new questions. It is tempting to think that philosophy happens only in philosophical texts. My argument here is that philosophy happens in the questions we ask about those texts, not in some inherent quality that they have. There is no philosophical text

220  Bruce B. Janz which could not simultaneously be another kind of text – political, sociological, psychological, for instance – depending on the questions we ask of it, and there is no text we could not in principle question philosophically (although obviously some would be more amenable to such questioning than others because of a prior history of questioning). The point is that doing philosophy will require us to return to the beginning, return to what it means to do philosophy, and only then will we be able to find a way to creatively and robustly engage African philosophy. Until then, we will have two solitudes, each vying for intellectual territory, and the best intentions on each side will not make for a real engagement.

3 How to not be stupid Being stupid is a rather specific state of affairs. It is not the same as lacking knowledge (that is ignorance), or being unable to use the tools of intelligence (that is dull-wittedness), or being poorly trained (that is incompetence). It is not the same as being illogical, nor the same as making mistakes. Very intelligent, well-trained people can nonetheless be stupid. It is not even the same as being unreflective or un-self-aware. It is possible to know something so well, such as a cognitive task, that one is no longer aware of doing it. Indeed, we can imagine an expert who is unreflective but for whom reflection would actually compromise their activity (e.g., the basketball player who thinks about making free throws, the guitarist who focuses on fingering, the free-climber who thinks about the climb). We might confuse the stupid with the mad, but it isn’t exactly that either. Madness has a long history of being theorized, from Plato on up through Freud and Lacan to Foucault and beyond. These seem like edges of thought, the edge of the problematic in which thought can make its way. It seems like it is what cannot be thought. So if stupidity is not all that, it is something else. In the terms I have tried to develop here, it is simply this: It is what is not asked. It is not that which cannot be asked – that merely shows our own limitations. It is not that which we refuse to ask – that just shows our obtuseness, or perhaps our investment in certain knowledge not coming to light, or perhaps just our fear. This is not a lack of information, or even a lack of will, but an inability to frame a question in a new way when circumstances demand it. Jason Wirth, in a book on Schelling, put it this way: Let us be clear: the violence of la bê tise lies in a madness, but a very particular one and one that is supremely destructive. namely, the insanity of the self-grounded ego to still the ground of thinking with grand conclusions, lest it stupefy one with the abyssal force of death itself. Was this not Pé cuchet’s greatest desire, standing before the noose, of utterly mastering philosophy so that he could solve all problems by solving a problem so vast that it contained and thereby simultaneously resolved all other possible problems? Derrida picks up on the same concern. ln his critique of Auguste Comte’s positivistic bê tise, Flaubert warns that “ineptitude consists in wanting to conclude …  . It is not understanding twilight, it’s wanting only noon or midnight … . Yes, bê tise consists in wanting to conclude” (BS, 161). Bê tise is the rule of the result. (Wirth 2015: 107)

The edges of (African) philosophy  221 Bê tise is, then, also an orientation toward propositions, narratives, or positions as if they are the only intellectually existing thing, as if they do not exist in a world of further questions, or for that matter, of people who hold them and places from which they come. It is a form of dogmatism for Schelling. We see this as far back as the Stoics, and in a variety of figures up to the present, including Deleuze. We think of stupidity as a kind of intellectual moral failing – how could we not? There is a potency to the concept, like the concept of race. It is overwhelmingly the charge used against others in online chat boards and comment areas – I’m smart and you’re stupid, although as we have seen, it is probably used incorrectly most of the time. That potency is exactly the reason it is useful here, rather than other options we might have available. The fact is, though, that everyone is unavoidably stupid, at certain times and in certain ways. It is very hard to ask a question that has not been asked before, to create a new problematic. And, the rule of the result is almost irresistible, whether that result is the well-formed position on some issue or the result of productivity in a professional environment. For Schelling and others, it is more than just remaining open to possibilities. Openness in itself is inert, passive. There is no necessary problematic created. There are examples of philosophers who push beyond the rule of the result like this. Hilary Putnam, for instance, famously resisted the fixed position throughout his long career. His thought was always under revision. Paul Ricoeur similarly always found new spaces of thought, usually by going directly for the most difficult dialogues he could find. It is evident outside of philosophy – Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis would be two more examples of this commitment to taking new paths whenever possible, to question even what they themselves established earlier. Most people have their moments in which new paths are taken, but the point here is not so much a personal one as a systemic one, concerning a more generalized stance toward African philosophy. The standards of spatial philosophy have been that there must be some concepts or intellectual practices that can be identified as truly African and truly philosophical. It has been understood as a demarcation problem, a way of establishing propositions or narratives that can sort out the philosophical world map. It is, in other words, the rule of the result in the sense described above by Wirth. While at least some African philosophers have gone along with this game, my sense is that this is not what animates the vast majority of them. What is compelling is to work on concepts which have debts to the places from which they come, and which, when activated, can bring about a new problematic. The problem, when it comes to the question of how to incorporate African philosophy into an existing structure of philosophy, is that it is very hard to find a way to ask a new question. Furthermore, it is very hard to set aside an image of African philosophy as a set of beliefs rooted in tradition and history, rather than seeing it as a mode of questioning rooted in this place. It is easy, on the other hand, to think that the terms of reference for all the questions have already been set. We already know what metaphysics is, and epistemology, and ethics, and now we just look to African philosophy to provide its own approach or twist on these things. We might find it, or we might not, but this is not yet African philosophy, because it does not activate anything.

222  Bruce B. Janz This has little to do with the level of intelligence of anyone involved, or their good will, or their commitment, or anything else. These things are not stupidity. We might speculate on the reasons why someone might be stupid – it might be smart to be stupid, in the sense that it defers questioning a position of power or status. Or, it might be inertia. But the question of the cause of stupidity is not very interesting from a philosophical point of view. It is more productive to simply recognize its pervasive existence, and ask what to do about it once it is recognized. We ourselves are an aggregate of the questions we find compelling. We don’t start with identities and accrue characteristics. We activate concepts, ask questions, activate more concepts, connect with other like-minded people, spar with others, and do it all again. And the well-worn paths of these practices start to look like identities for us, but in fact they are just habits. The thing about actually asking new questions and activating new habits is that we can find that what we think is our identity need not be that. We invest a great deal in a set of connecting concepts. We scaffold them with our institutions, our language, our political structures, and so forth. The scaffolding makes them look real, and more to the point, makes us think that things could not be otherwise. But they can be. And we can be as well.

4 The edges of thought: Ramose and Ubuntu We began this discussion by talking about the edges of thought. I want to return to that now. If my characterization of the situation is correct, everything interesting in thought is at its edges. This does not mean that there is not a place for careful analytical work. It is also not a plea for a particular kind of philosophical method or rhetorical approach. It is, perhaps, a recognition of what I have come to call “scholarly cognition”. As philosophers (or really as anyone producing academic knowledge), we have come to rely on our methods, honed over centuries, rooted in things like logic. What we sometimes overlook is that the concepts we use those methods on do not drop from the sky, or come pre-packaged with a label that says “philosophy inside”. This can be seen in the example of Ubuntu, mentioned earlier, in particular the ways in which we might take a different line of flight on this concept than is normally taken. Starting from Ubuntu as a free-floating concept gives us little to question, which is why we will start with a specific characterization of it. Mogobe Ramose’s version of Ubuntu is widely known, but it also raises some questions. I think these questions, far from simply being inconsistencies, are perturbations in an existing conceptual flow which can take us in a new direction. Ramose gives us a version of Ubuntu which has a decidedly metaphysical character to it. As was the case for Tempels and Janheinz Jahn, there is a dependence in defining Ubuntu on linguistic features of a large-scale language group. This might also be thought of as a dependence on at least a weak version of SapirWhorfianism. If one is trained in Western metaphysics, there are some jarring elements to Ramose’s account. He seems to conflate Being and Becoming, for instance, when he talks about Ubuntu as “be-ing”, which has a kind of fluidity to it.

The edges of (African) philosophy  223 One steeped in Western thought might think that these two are fundamentally different, and to speak about both, one must have a way of relating them. Hegel had his dialectic, for instance, and indeed other versions of dialectic accomplish similar tasks. Aristotle had his way of relating permanence and change. Others deemed one or the other of these to be illusory. And so, metaphysically, we have questions, but that assumes that we start from a set of issues embedded in the conversations from the Western tradition. Every philosophical tradition tends to erase its path to the present and regard its activities as connected to the pursuit of universal truth. Each of these traditions is, though, deeply indebted to its own set of questions, raised and honed over time, and a different set of questions would have suggested a different line of development. We can see this in both 20th-century analytic and continental philosophy. In other words, especially for those starting from a set of questions asked within Western metaphysics, the initial reaction to Ramose should not be to say that what he is doing is philosophically ill-informed or naï ve or wrong, but rather to ask what questions he is asking that are not immediately obvious or available to us. We might find that he is asking something entirely new. We might ultimately decide that he is wrong, but that he opens doors to the creation of new concepts. More likely, though, we might find that he is addressing a different question than we assumed he was, or is addressing a question which came from a different place. This is still philosophical questioning, it should be said, no different from what we can identify at many points in the history of philosophy. What is his question? Our initial reaction might be that he is simply asking “What is Ubuntu?” This is a request for a definition, but most requests of this sort mean to ask for much more than a simple definition. And a question posed in that manner is clearly ambiguous, especially in the South African setting. The term Ubuntu is used in a wide range of places, for many different things. It has become a quasi-official national philosophy, and for some it has become code for supporting a rising black elite. It sometimes serves as a marker of difference, a justification for bearing up under personal hardship in the interests of the greater good, and so forth. Ramose is doing something more than asking for a vague definition. He is presenting a reading of Ubuntu that is transversal to the common understanding. It is not contradictory – he is not particularly undermining or arguing against some other versions (while he does argue against some versions in other places, his point is not to establish a new version superior to all the others). He is transversal. He presents a version of Ubuntu that changes the frame for all the usual things we think of Ubuntu as doing. Is Ubuntu relevant to ethics and politics? Yes, but not because it is a metaphysical theory which yields propositions that can turn into maxims or rules. It is not a theory of subjectivity, purportedly telling us something unique about “real” Africans. It is, rather, a way of thinking about the cognitive strategies that have emerged over the centuries among Africans, at various levels of action and reflection. It is a theory of cognition and a theory of place, rather than a theory of metaphysics, ethics, or politics.

224  Bruce B. Janz What would it mean for Ubuntu to be a cognitive strategy rather than primarily either a metaphysical or ethical one? As mentioned earlier, it means that it is a strategy and capacity for creating new knowledge and new concepts. In the contemporary cognitive sciences, especially those influenced by phenomenology and, in different ways, by thinkers like Deleuze, we see a great deal of discussion about the emerging idea that cognition is not simply a matter of an individual acquiring mental representations about the world. It is, rather, the recognition that cognition goes well beyond those representations, and is extended into the world (that is, our technology scaffolds our memories and practices, among other things), embodied (in other words, we are not ghosts in a machine, but we live materially in the world, and that makes a difference to how we come to knowledge), enactive (that is, dependent on the actions of the organism), and embedded (that is, our surrounding environment matters to how cognition works). Furthermore, we know a great deal more about team cognition, that is, the ways in which groups of people collectively know or come to knowledge through cooperative, competitive, or reactive action. Studies of cognition increasingly blur the boundaries between philosophy, psychology, modelling and simulation, biology, and a host of other areas. Are we still doing philosophy under these conditions? I would say, unequivocally, yes. Philosophy does not somehow lose its way when it starts dealing with other disciplines. Just as with texts, it simply asks different questions of a phenomenon, and it is creating something new that enables us to see that phenomenon in a new way. Ubuntu, understood as Ramose suggests, might well be seen as a term for the ways in which Africans have historically and currently found to come to useful knowledge. Ramose starts African Philosophy Through Ubuntu with an extensive discussion of the roots of racism in European thought (1999: 13–40), before spending the rest of the book looking at the structure and locations of Ubuntu. What does racism have to do with Ubuntu? If we think of Ubuntu as a metaphysical attribute of African people, very little. Racism obviously existed and continues to exist, but Ubuntu would have the status of a metaphysical foundation for the constitution of African subjectivity, and as such would precede colonial incursions. If Ubuntu is a cognitive strategy, though, then racism is highly relevant, because it stands as a disruption to that cognitive strategy by another one, and further than that, by a fundamentally illegitimate one for that place (and, as it turns out, for its own place, but that is another story). Ubuntu is a set of cognitive strategies rooted in longstanding practice, both intellectual and visceral. It is an ecosystem. This is most clear in Ramose’s programmatic chapter “The Philosophy of Ubuntu and Ubuntu as a Philosophy” (49–66). Umuntu, the specific form of Ubuntu, manifests itself in human institutions such as politics, religion, and law – in other words, areas which scaffold human cognition at the individual and collective level, which are embedded and enactive. Ubuntu and umuntu have a reciprocal relationship, the chaos of individual action harmonized and organized autopoietically in the order of the whole. Ramose borrows David Bohm’s little-known term

The edges of (African) philosophy  225 “rheomode” to designate the “philosophical language of Ubuntu”. Bohm used it to refer to an experiment in language, one which overcomes the limitations of existing language, and which is oriented toward movement and flow (hence the Greek rheo). It is a creative reconfiguration of the structures of language, to allow for spontaneity and creativity. There is insufficient space here to fully develop Ramose’s use of the term and its implications for Ubuntu (this will be done in upcoming work). We can say this, though – this approach makes Ubuntu future-oriented rather than past-oriented. In other words, it is not a metaphysical foundation, but an openended structure for new creation. The violence done by colonialism, then, is to solidify that flow, to insist that specific concepts be in place first, before anything else can be done. It is a way of capturing one way to think and insisting that it is the only way. Ramose’s version of Ubuntu anticipates enactivist cognition, the ability to make actual the virtualities of the flow. What is interpreted as communalism is in fact the interrelation of these forces along with their umuntu scaffolding. It is, in fact, a recipe for freedom, not based in a liberal understanding of abstract rights, but in a complex and chaotic system which has nevertheless developed patterns and structures that scaffold, for the moment, human action. Treating Ubuntu as cognitive also brings it within the orbit of philosophy-in-place. It is the expression of a particular platial approach to philosophy. It is not a reflection of the essence of a race. It is also important to note that seeing Ubuntu in this manner changes how we think about the edges of African philosophy. The operative edge is not between philosophy and non-philosophy, or between African and non-African philosophy. The edges are rather about what is cognitively available, and how it can be cognized, and how we create new rheomodes. Ethics is, then, about flourishing rather than right or correct action, and flourishing is renewal and recreation rather than expansion and growth. We see this even in some forms of Western ethics, for example in some forms of feminist ethics that privilege birth and creative diversity rather than abstract ideals. Ubuntu as cognition is a transversal move away from the standard understanding. It is the basis for a new problematic. It does not necessarily argue against propositions established by other Ubuntu theorists, but it does argue against the questions to which those propositions are answers. What kinds of questions might be asked about lived African experience if this is what Ubuntu looks like, rather than what we usually think it looks like? How might we think about ethics with this approach? If Ubuntu looks like this, I would suggest that we have an inoculation against stupidity of the sort discussed earlier.

5 Conclusion The point here is not, in fact, to argue for a specific view on Ubuntu. That would require a great deal more development. The point is to argue for a way of doing African philosophy which does not stand as a zero-sum game with other platial

226  Bruce B. Janz philosophies, but which instead asks new questions and creates new concepts adequate to its place, and activates them as appropriate. And this, I submit, is far from stupid.

Sources Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bromberger, Sylvain. 1992. On What We Know We Don’t Know: Explanation, Theory, Linguistics, and How Questions Shape Them. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collingwood, R. G. 1994. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1975, 1989. Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Originally Sein und Zeit, 1927. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1989. Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Janz, Bruce. 2009. Philosophy in an African Place. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Janz, Bruce. 2015. “Philosophy-in-Place and the Provenance of Dialogue”, in South African Journal of Philosophy 34:4: 480–490. Kagame, Alexis. 1956. La philosophie bantu-rwandaise de l’Ê tre. Brussels: Acadé mie royale des Sciences coloniales. Koralus, Philipp and Mascaranhas, Salvador. 2013. “The Erotetic Theory of Reasoning: Bridges Between Formal Semantics and the Psychology of Deductive Inference”, in Philosophical Perspectives 27: 312–365. Koralus, Philipp. 2014. “The Erotetic Theory of Attention: Questions, Focus, and Distraction”, in Mind and Language 29:1: 26–50. Lewis, Martin W. and Wigen, Kä ren E. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marcel, Gabriel. 1950. Mystery of Being Vol 1: Reflection and Mystery. South Bend, IN: Gateway Editions. Mbiti, John. 1969. African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann: African Writers Series. Meyer, Michel. 1995. Of Problematology: Philosophy, Science, and Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis. Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (African Systems of Thought). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2010. “Do ‘Africans’ Exist? Genealogies and Paradoxes of African Identities and the Discourses of Nativism and Xenophobia”, in African Identities 8:3: 281–295. Prior, Mary and Prior, Arthur. 1955. “Erotetic Logic”, in The Philosophical Review 64:1: 43–59. Ramose, Mogobe. 1999. African Philosophy Through Ubuntu. Harare, Zimbabwe: Mond Books. Ronell, Avital. 2002. Stupidity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2015. States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tempels, Placide. 1945. La Philosophie bantoue. Elizabethville, Congo: Lovania.

The edges of (African) philosophy  227 Whately, Richard. 1849. “Logic”, in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, 2nd Edition Revised. London: John Joseph Griffin & Co. Wirth, Jason. 2015. Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time Art Imagination. New York: SUNY Press. Wiś niewski, Andrzej and Leszczyń ska-Jasion, Dorota. 2015. “Inferential Erotetic Logic Meets Inquisitive Semantics” in Synthese 192: 1585–1608.

13 Is philosophy bound by language? Some case studies from African philosophy Bernhard Weiss

Introduction In this chapter I look at three quite different cases which appear to furnish an ­argument based on putative differences between (some) African and (some) Western uses of language and which plausibly provide a basis for saying that philosophy is to some extent bound by language, either in its problems or in its methodology and conclusions. I argue that none of the examples provides a successful example of such a case. Though I look at the cases in some detail, I try to show that my counter-arguments are not completely restricted by the particulars of each of the cases I consider. A more general conclusion might thus be in the offing and, in closing, I offer some speculation about this.

How might philosophy be bound by language? In part, I’d like the notion of being bound by language to emerge in more detail through the cases I study below. But it may help to anticipate some broad senses in which philosophy might be dependent on its linguistic setting. Philosophers are concerned with the nature of certain key concepts, and possession of those concepts will likely depend on mastery of some linguistic apparatus. So, if different languages embody different concepts, then philosophers working in those languages might wind up investigating different concepts. I’ll call this ‘(linguistically induced) conceptual relativism’. Philosophers often measure their theories against linguistic intuitions, against what is taken as obviously or trivially true or as unpacking linguistic intuitions which seem to be pregnant with philosophical insights. If the status of a truth varies from one language to another because these linguistic intuitions vary, then the methodology of a philosopher in one language will differ from that in another. I’ll call this ‘(linguistically induced) methodological relativism’. Language might also incorporate a set of values, and the values in one language might differ incommensurably from those in another. So the values articulated by a philosopher might be dependent on her linguistic context. I’ll call this ‘(linguistically induced) value relativism’. More radically, I suppose, a philosopher might think that the reality portrayed in language is dependent on the language itself. So what is, is

Is philosophy bound by language?  229 itself determined by the character of one’s language. I’ll call this ‘(linguistically induced) ontological relativism’. We encounter claims about all these relativisms below.

Hallen and Sodipo on knowledge Hallen and Sodipo1 (H&S) are interested in propositional attitudes, that is, states in which a subject seems to adopt an attitude to a proposition, states such as ‘believing that’; ‘knowing that’; ‘wishing that’. More specifically, they are interested in apparent incongruities between the expressions of propositional attitudes that operate in Yoruba and those that operate in English. Noticing this difference, they conclude that propositional attitudes are not universal. So this appears to be a form of conceptual relativism. Their methodology is intriguing. They begin from Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of radical translation,2 which they expose at great length before moving on to an empirical investigation of the function of relevant vocabulary in Yoruba. The latter they prosecute via a series of interviews with wise men (onisegun) whose remarks on the use of the terms are liberally reported in the text. The strategy is intriguing because it is far from clear how Quine’s argument, a thought experiment in abstract, theoretical philosophy, is to be supportive of a practical conclusion about the understanding of specific terms in Yoruba. Moreover, were it to play a definite supportive role, H&S’s conclusion would have little impact on those (many) of us who find Quine’s argument and conclusion hard to accept. Let’s begin then with a brief look at Quine. Quine asks us to imagine a field linguist tasked with the job of constructing a translation manual from a foreign language into her own. The translation manual ought to be completely justifiable on objective grounds. So, even if the linguist knows of affinities and historical links between her language and those of the foreigners—links and affinities which might suggest apt translation schemata—she cannot use this information in constructing her translation scheme. This is what makes the translation radical. Why is Quine interested in this thoroughly impractical exercise of radical translation? The answer is that he isn’t primarily interested in translation; rather, translation is the vehicle he uses to investigate the notion of meaning. His thought is that meaning, if it is a (scientifically) respectable notion (and if there’s to be a credible epistemology of meaning), must be determined by overt behavioural displays of using language. If so, then these displays will be observable by the radical translator and will, moreover, be all she needs to construct and justify her choice of translation manual. What are these behavioural displays of the use of language? Quine takes these to be captured entirely by speakers’ dispositions to assent to or dissent from a sentence in reaction to environing stimuli. The ordered pair of a sentence’s stimuli prompting assent and those prompting dissent he calls the sentence’s stimulus meaning. We can now jump to Quine’s conclusion. Quine concludes that the radical translator will not be able to justify a particular choice of translation manual over indefinitely many others. Those others are genuine alternatives because they will involve translation

230  Bernhard Weiss of particular foreign sentences by sentences in the home language which aren’t in any respect equivalent, that is, aren’t even synonymous in terms of stimulus meaning. Importantly, two premises play a role in generating this conclusion: one is that Quine severely restricts the evidence available to the translator in the manner just described, and the other is that we fail to limit translation schemes to those which are equivalent in terms of stimulus meaning because a speaker’s disposition to use (assent to or dissent from) a sentence will not purely be a product of environing stimuli but will also be a product of her beliefs. So we can (indeed, are forced to) compensate for the different dispositions we come to ascribe to native speakers as a consequence of adopting different translation schemes by attributing to them differing beliefs. Quine’s conclusion is that our usual notion of meaning ought not to play a role in a proper account of the world—it has no place in science—and even his ersatz notion, stimulus meaning, is of limited value. The argument is highly controversial. It has been questioned unsympathetically by those who reject Quine’s restriction of the evidential base. But it has been questioned sympathetically also by Davidson, who questions the second plank of the argument. Quine concedes that, in practice, we are likely to choose a translation manual which leads us to ascribe beliefs to the natives which largely agree with our own. But this application of what he calls (following Wallace) the principle of charity is not objectively justified (is not justified by doings of the native speakers) but is justified only in terms of our aim to make the native speakers as intelligible to us as possible. Davidson here demurs; for him the status of the principle of charity is as an essential methodological tool and thus it is not merely subjectively useful. Secondly, the argument is highly theoretical. It is not aimed at giving advice to those engaged in the practice of translation, but at arguing for a conceptual point about the notion of meaning. So it is odd to find H&S recruiting Quine’s work here in aid of a practical enterprise, and odd too to find them billing their ‘analytic experiment in African Philosophy’ as a practical working through of Quine’s ideas. But the puzzle only grows when one works through their methodology to arrive at their conclusion. For the methodology conflicts with Quinean prescriptions and the conclusion contradicts Quine’s views. Let’s consider H&S’s methodology, which, as I said, is to interrogate people identified as wise men. On a strict Quinean view, they should rather be looking at ordinary language users’ dispositions to use relevant pieces of language. But, of course, H&S are not about to engage in the real business of radical translation. Why should they, and why would anyone expect them to? No, their practice is far more sensible than that: they engage those whom they regard as relevant experts. But, in engaging with the wise men, H&S take an awful lot of language for granted in the sense that they assume translations for whole swaths of Yoruba vocabulary. In fact, they make this assumption for almost any term that falls outside their area of concern, which is restricted to epistemic and some semantic concepts. The use of certain Yoruba terms—mo and gbagbo, primarily—is amply illustrated in comments made by the wise men, and H&S offer fair comments on these illustrations, pointing out similarities and differences with English terms—know

Is philosophy bound by language?  231 and believe, primarily—and, finally, offer accounts of mo and gbagbo. This isn’t the indeterminacy of translation; quite the opposite. It is an explanation in English of some Yoruba terms through a variety of means, accompanied by no sense that incompatible explanations might be equally acceptable. H&S spend a couple of pages (1997: 81–3) taking issue with the extent of indeterminacy that Quine claims exists, concluding that ‘[t]here is still a gap between empirical content and assigned theoretical meaning, but it is not so indeterminate’ (op cit: 83). Now, it is hard to know what to make of this. It cannot be a criticism of Quine because their whole methodology begs the question against him; it cannot be based on an argument against Quine’s view because none is given. So what role does Quine’s work play? Arguably: none. What role does indeterminacy play? Arguably: none. H&S seem to think that they need a sense that translation is indeterminate because it is difficult to find neat and obviously correct translations of mo and gbagbo in English. But this isn’t indeterminacy. As I’ve just mentioned, these terms are explained, and explained well, in English by means of illustrations and paraphrase. If they cannot be neatly captured in a word or phrase, they can be taken into English through illustrative explanation. Put another way, someone who believes in the determinacy of translation need not think that each language is a mere notational variant of any other. No, she can admit that, for any number of reasons—cultural, historical or ecological—languages might vary in the concepts expressible in their basic vocabulary. What she claims is that the concepts expressible in one language can be expressed in any other, even if the other language might need extension via various standard means of doing so. So the possibility of linguistic extension undermines conceptual relativism. Are we supposing here that meanings are extra-linguistic entities in a way which Quine would object to? No. We’re supposing that we can make sense of attributions of sameness of meaning in terms of similarities in use. That notion is perfectly acceptable to Quine and he spends quite some time giving it a clear interpretation from his own particular perspective. What he argues is that it has no application. Here, H&S’s methodology belies that final Quinean conclusion, because they rely on the interpretation of a good deal of one language by means of another. And this presupposes that we can speak of relations of synonymy between languages. Let us then set aside Quine, set aside indeterminacy of translation too, and move on to the interesting aspect of H&S’s work: the understanding of mo and gbagbo. The upshot of a long and involved discussion is roughly this. The terms mo and gbagbo are traditionally translated as knowledge and belief, respectively. But H&S compile a weighty body of evidence against this construal, which they conclude is incorrect (whither the indeterminacy of translation?). Instead they show that mo picks out knowledge which is based on first-hand experience whereas gbagbo relates to knowledge transmitted by others and so includes knowledge accruing through an oral tradition, book learning and testimony. Gbagbo is paraphrased by them as ‘agreeing to accept what one hears from someone else’. It comes in two varieties: there are those pieces of gbagbo which can be verified and so can become pieces of mo and others which the possessor couldn’t verify,

232  Bernhard Weiss either because she lacks the expertise or does not and will not have the opportunity. Interestingly, there are different values attaching to mo and gbagbo, with mo being held to be more valuable. H&S draw the interesting and plausible conclusion that, in view of this, an established, general conception of traditional cultures needs to be rejected, namely that traditional cultures have knowledge systems which are based on and privilege inherited knowledge derived from oral traditions. In fact, they point out, in Yoruban culture this is not so at all. Yoruban use of epistemic concepts reveals that first-hand and directly verifiable knowledge is given primacy. In one sense, no doubt, this is right, but it may still be the case that in the operation of the society, and given that abstruse truths are seldom capable of direct, first-hand verification, those beliefs prevalent in the society about religion, metaphysics, morality and the structure of society might still be dominated by an inherited belief system. Until a society finds ways of basing abstract beliefs on ratiocination and regimented experience (experiment and observation), it cannot fully exploit its privileging of mo. So, in another sense, the established conception may be correct. I make no judgement on that and merely point to a gap in H&S’s argument. H&S also conclude that propositional attitudes are not universal. The claim is unclear. It might mean that different cultures operate with different conceptions of propositional attitudes. And this seems clear: there is no straight mapping of the Yoruban epistemic concepts onto the English ones and vice versa. However, this, without the claim of conceptual relativism, can be accommodated by appropriate linguistic extension. However, the claim might also be taken to mean that thinkers in different cultures have different propositional attitudes, which would be a version of ontological relativism. And this there is no evidence to support. I can be said (by a Yoruba speaker) to mo that my bicycle is in my office but only to gbagbo that Yoruba speakers use the terms ‘mo’ and ‘gbagbo’. Likewise I can say (of a Yoruba speaker) that she knows Abuja is the capital of Nigeria but only believes that Accra is in Benin. The plain fact is that in order to have a propositional attitude one needn’t be master of a term which expresses that attitude (cf. pre-linguistic children and animals) nor need one be a member of a community which uses a term expressing that attitude (cf. animals). And without that assumption, no conclusion about speakers’ propositional attitudes follows from the observed differences in English and Yoruba uses of language. This has an important consequence because it means that when philosophers philosophise about knowledge (let’s say in English), their conclusions—if they’re right, and that’s a big ‘if’—apply universally. The results are absolutely general conclusions about the concept of knowledge (not the English concept of knowledge). Of course, not every society need employ that concept but—though see below for more on this—that need never have been part of the philosopher’s conclusion. So let’s go back to the first way of understanding H&S’s denial that propositional attitudes are universal: that different communities employ different concepts of the propositional attitudes. Again we might interpret what we mean by ‘different concepts’ in more than one way. We might mean that the concepts are incommensurable, that there’s no understanding the one set of concepts in

Is philosophy bound by language?  233 terms of the other and vice versa. But we’ve no evidence for this. Indeed we’ve noted quite the reverse, since it has been by means of expressing mo and gbagbo in terms of concepts expressible in English that we’ve learned that and how mo is different to knowledge and gbagbo is different to belief. No evidence of some inadequacy in what we’ve learned is presented. So we’re left with this. Propositional attitudes are not universal in the sense that different communities might employ different basic concepts of the propositional attitudes. How might this matter for philosophy? Well, the answer will largely depend on one’s methodology. It won’t matter to conceptual analysis because conceptual analysis can operate in English as it does in Yoruba, but it will operate on different basic concepts. Indeed, H&S try to use their ‘experiment’ to argue for the value of applying analysis as a way of revealing conceptual difference. Their claim is, I think, good, though the justification is belied by the fact that their methodology has more kinship with ordinary language philosophy than it does with conceptual analysis. The results of analysis won’t be philosophically of great moment since we’ve already conceded that the one set of concepts is expressible in terms of the other. So, though the Yoruban philosopher and her English counterpart would start in rather different places, their conclusions about the nature and relations of concepts ought to be in agreement. It is possible that a philosopher telling a genealogical story which aims to show why a given concept must make an appearance in a community (let’s say) of inquirers might be frustrated by these results. But the frustration would be in terms of encountering a counter-example. And a counter-example would illustrate a fault in the implementation of the methodology, not in the methodology itself. In point of fact, genealogists of epistemic concepts are rare, Edward Craig being a notable exception3. But so far as I can see, Craig’s genealogical account is not compromised by H&S’s findings. The issue needs more space than I can give it here, but the brunt of Craig’s account is that any community of inquirers will need to operate with a concept like knowledge in order to mark out other inquirers as informants (as opposed to mere sources of information). It is no part of his story that such a community of inquirers might not wish to distinguish between original informants (those who have mo) and second-hand informants (those who have gbagbo). Indeed, since the putative source of an informant’s information is relevant to gauging her reliability and the reliability of the information, there’s every reason why these distinctions might be made either through the use of basic concepts or in more complex ways. This brings me to a final issue. As I noted, according to H&S some epistemic values go along with the concepts of mo and gbagbo. Do English and Yoruba epistemic values chime with one another or are they in disharmony? The fact that English speakers don’t make any distinction in their use of ‘know’ between those who know first-hand and those who know through testimony or in some other second-hand fashion is not itself evidence that the former way of knowing is not valued epistemically4 over the latter. We’ve already noted that English speakers can make the relevant distinctions (without which they would be incapable of distinguishing in value), so the question is whether the appropriate values translate.

234  Bernhard Weiss The issue is complicated because other values, in particular, practical values, will conflict with epistemic values. So the system of epistemic values can’t be read directly off behaviour. It’s also difficult to know how to test the values. One way might be to see whether putative instances of mo are valued over putative instances of gbagbo. There may be some evidence that, on occasion, English speakers do value in this way. In court, for instance, we distinguish between knowledge which is hearsay from a witness’s testimony and privilege the latter. But more generally, I don’t think that there is, among English speakers, a blanket preference for a piece of mo over a conflicting piece of gbagbo. (H&S don’t push this way of testing the epistemic value system, but unless the values have such implications I’m not sure what sense to make of them.) Knowing one’s lack of expertise in an area, would one stick with one’s own judgement that p over a reliable reporter who reports a reliable observer and who asserts that not-p? I think not. And my guess is that, in general, when we gauge one piece of putative knowledge against a conflicting piece of putative knowledge, we look at the general reliability of the source of each piece. There is reason to think that, other things being equal, the more direct source is likely to be more reliable than the less direct and so, other things being equal, first-hand claims to know are to be valued over second-hand claims to know. This may mean that there is a difference between English and Yoruba epistemic values but perhaps it does not; H&S do not give enough information about how the values operate in Yoruba to make a judgement. But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that it does. Does this mean that we are compelled to do Yoruba epistemology and English epistemology as quite distinct enterprises? Do we have a case of epistemic value relativism? I don’t think so. Epistemology is a normative, not a descriptive, discipline. Given that description has revealed these differences in epistemic values, there would be a genuine question as to which set of values ought to be adopted. I don’t see any problem in prosecuting that sort of debate and every reason why the possibility of doing so provides a strong motive for the descriptive enterprises in African Philosophy and elsewhere. Without them we lose many a strong provocation of these debates. It is too easy to take one’s parochial way of speaking to be universally valid and thus as exempt from questioning. Confronting one’s own framework with an alternative forces the question of justifying a choice between competing value systems. But we need adequate descriptions of the choices as a prelude to the justificatory enterprise. But isn’t this a kind of cultural imperialism? Not at all: for a start, the clash ought not to be seen as, say, a clash between English and Yoruba epistemic values. Rather, it is a clash between two sets of epistemic values—one of which, as it happens, is a feature of English communities’ use of the concepts and the other which, as it happens, is a feature of Yoruba communities’ use of the concepts— but the clash is played out in terms of philosophical reflection on the aptness of each set of values. Given that there is no bar to understanding the opposing sets of values, English and Yoruba philosophers can alike engage in the business of appraising them and discussing each other’s appraisals.

Is philosophy bound by language?  235

Wiredu on truth Kwasi Wiredu thinks that certain, though not all, philosophical problems are, as he says, tongue-dependent5. In other words, some philosophical problems are not universal but only arise in certain languages. Unlike H&S’s claim, which is really one about the translation of sub-sentential expressions from one language to another, Wiredu arrives at his position not from a view about translation but from a view of the effects of translation. More specifically, he thinks that a sentence can have its status changed when it is translated and thus what may start off in one language as a point of departure for philosophical theorising—a key philosophical insight—may end up being a banal triviality, incapable of supporting philosophical theorising, in another language. So here we have an example of methodological relativism. A methodology, apt in one linguistic setting, disintegrates on relocation elsewhere. I want to consider Wiredu’s example in some detail before returning to this general claim. The example occurs in his paper ‘Truth and an African Language’. Despite its title, the vast bulk of the paper is a standard engagement with classic Western theories about truth: correspondence, coherence and pragmatist. But in the final few pages, the paper opens up a fresh approach to these issues. Having defended a pragmatist view of truth as warranted assertibility (in Dewey’s sense), Wiredu turns to attack the correspondence theory as language-bound, as not being exportable to philosophical theorising in Akan. Here is Wiredu’s thought. Correspondence approaches to the concept of truth begin with acceptance of the following equivalence: (CE) ‘p’ is true if and only if it is a fact that p. Of course, theorising does not end here, but it begins here with each theorist then explaining her metaphysics of facts and of the referential relations which relate linguistic items to facts, in a manner which constitutes their truth. Let’s pause here to clarify Wiredu’s thinking. It might well seem that he regards (CE) as a fundamental tenet of Correspondence theorists and thus as distinctive of the creed. But I don’t think this is right because he says, ‘[c]ertainly, nobody moderately instructed in English will be tempted to deny it’ (2004: 48). This suggests that he sees (CE) as spelling out a conceptual relation between the concepts of truth and of fact; so (CE) is an analytic truth but he thinks it is an analytic truth which spells out this relationship in a fashion that is ‘conceptually informative’. However, when (CE) is translated into Akan, we get (loc cit): (CA) ‘p’ te saa if and only if nea ete ne se p ‘p’ is so if and only if what is so is that p And this, Wiredu claims, is not conceptually informative because it is merely trivial, it doesn’t make explicit any conceptual relation: the concepts of truth and fact are no longer related. So if one thinks of philosophical theorising as aimed

236  Bernhard Weiss at explicating the conceptual relation, there is work to do in English, but none in Akan. The problems are tongue-dependent. He puts to himself the response that all that this reveals is an expressive inadequacy in Akan, which presumably would entail that one could extend the language and then theorise much as before (2004: 48–9). But his reply is swift: if (CE) holds (he should say as a matter of conceptual necessity), then whatever can be expressed by ‘is true’ can be expressed by ‘is a fact’—he seems to presume that (CE) establishes that these mean the same—but, since one of these notions can be expressed in Akan, so can the other. So Akan does not lack expressive power. Let me begin my examination of the argument with the issue about the expressive resources of Akan. To claim that whatever can be expressed by using ‘is true’ can be expressed by using ‘is a fact’ instead is to claim that these terms are synonymous. But (CE), even if it is taken to be a conceptual truth (as Wiredu requires), does not establish this. Indeed it cannot, because ‘is true’ is a predicate of linguistic items whereas ‘is a fact’ seems to be a predicate applied to propositions (reading ‘it is a fact that p’ as ‘that p is a fact’). So what (CE) does establish is a conceptual truth relating the application of a predicate applicable to (terms for) sentences to one applicable to (terms for) propositions. We are in the province of the Paradox of Analysis, which will not be solved here, but even if we concede that (CE) holds because of synonymy, the relevant synonymy is between the left hand side (LHS) and the right hand side (RHS), as wholes, and this does not require that the components are synonymous6. So it does not follow that if Akan can express the one it can express the other. So I don’t think Wiredu’s argument is good. Nonetheless, I strongly suspect that his conclusion, namely, that there is no expressive inadequacy in Akan, is right. Here is why I think so. What (CE) does is to express a conceptual relation between a sentence’s possession of a certain property and a proposition’s possession of a certain property. (Presumably each side will sustain a version of the equivalence schema, so one might say that the LHS enables us to say something about the world by saying something about a sentence, while the RHS enables us to say the same thing about the world by saying something about a proposition.) In doing so it establishes a conceptual relation between the property of sentences and the property of propositions. This is all (CE) achieves. But (CA) achieves the same. And since it does so, Akan suffers from no expressive inadequacy. However, if this is the right way of looking at things, then the difference between Akan and English is this. Whereas English uses quite different words for the property of sentences and the property of propositions, Akan uses very similar (though not the same) words in each case. But choices of words in a language are purely conventional and thus what is revealed is something merely terminological and of no philosophical interest whatever. Wiredu’s observation that (CE) and (CA) have different statuses is just an observation about the different psychological status they each have: one appears to be more interesting than the other. So I don’t think that (CA) is vacuously trivial, any more than I think that ‘p’ is true if and only if it is true that p is vacuously trivial. I’ve just detailed what I think each manages to do.

Is philosophy bound by language?  237 ‘Okay, okay’, my reader may want to interject, ‘But then, if all that is established is a conceptual relation between a property of sentences and one of propositions, neither (CE) nor (CA) is a fit basis for correspondence theorising’. And I agree wholeheartedly. The correspondence theorist is not interested in (CE) precisely because she is interested in explicating truth as a relation between sentences and worldly items—facts, say. So, pace Wiredu, she’s interested in something of the form: (CR) ‘p’ is true if and only if ‘p’ corresponds to the facts or: ‘p’ is true if and only if there is a fact, x, such that ‘p’ corresponds to x I don’t speak Akan, but the one Akan speaker I’ve consulted has confirmed that this is not a triviality in Akan,7 and though there might be problems in expressing it, there are obvious ways of introducing the means to do so: we encounter linguistic extension, once again. What (CR) does is to spell out a conceptual truth which identifies the property of truth with a relation between its possessor and some other item. Of course, it is possible to treat this as a basic conceptual truth admitting of and needing no explication—as most deflationists will do—but what marks out a correspondence theorist is her attempt to give philosophical explications of the notions of fact and correspondence. At least this is what the English correspondence theorist will do. I see no reason why her Akan colleague should not do likewise. Let’s consider the general from of Wiredu’s claim. Suppose the following equivalence holds of conceptual necessity in one language: (E1) P if and only if1 Q Let’s now think about translating P and Q into a second language. It may be that, since (E1) is conceptually true, each is best translated by the same sentence, R. So (E1) becomes: (E2) R if and only if2 R So it seems possible that a potentially conceptually informative equivalence goes over into the merest of trivialities. And Wiredu’s general suspicion would be vindicated. But let’s think this through a bit more carefully. A first case to consider would be when P and Q have the same logical structure. In this case, P and Q would include synonyms whose similar embeddings in each of P and Q would sustain the equivalence. If language 2 fails to include synonyms for the relevant terms, as it well might, then (E2) might result. But in this case

238  Bernhard Weiss (E1) would be of, at most, linguistic interest: a record of synonymy. Translation wouldn’t leach conceptual informativeness. A second case to consider is when P and Q have different logical structures, though express the same content. Conceptual analysis, as a method in philosophy, seems to presuppose that we can have examples of this. Hume, for instance, analyses statements of the form ‘The number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs’ (call this NF=NG) as ‘There is a one-to-one correlation between the Fs and the Gs’ (F1–1G). Each statement deploys different concepts to express the same content. Suppose, now, that we are translating the statement about numerical identity, NF=NG, into a language with no terms for numbers but with terms expressing such things as one-to-one relations between instances of concepts. Then, the right translation of it—right because it preserves content—would be a statement of the form F1–1G. And, in this case, the translation of (H1) NF=NG iff F1–1G would be something of the form (H2) F1–1G iff F1–1G So, if the former has any cognitive content (as a resolution of the Paradox of Analysis requires), then we do have a case of translation leading to a leaching of cognitive content. In a way this is unsurprising, because the business of translation in these cases accomplishes the same work as that of conceptual analysis: each requires expression of the same content by means of a different set of concepts. And indeed we often talk of conceptual analysis in these terms, e.g., how one would translate talk about ordinary objects (or mental states) into talk about actual and possible sensations (or behaviour). So this is a kind of tongue-dependency. But note that whereas Wiredu portrayed himself as finding examples of the phenomenon which involved no conceptual lack in one language, here the phenomenon precisely depends on differences in conceptual resources. Secondly, it is a restricted version of the phenomenon because the languages achieve philosophical parity when one is conceptually amplified and, indeed, the cognitively significant conceptual truths available only in one language might precisely provide the means for extending the other language. H1 might provide a means of introducing numerical terms into a language which hitherto lacked them. Finally, the account depends on assumptions about the applicability of conceptual analysis as a method in philosophy and a resolution of the Paradox of Analysis. Though this restricts the phenomenon somewhat, it also nicely explains its particular pertinence to philosophical questions: translation can be a means of carrying out conceptual analysis. To translate is, on occasion, to do philosophical work.

Is philosophy bound by language?  239 To conclude, I don’t think that Wiredu has provided an example of a tonguedependent problem. This is not because there cannot be such things—there can. In languages which differ in conceptual resources, translation from one into the other forces a kind of conceptual analysis which can result in loss of cognitive significance, given the assumption that conceptual analysis can yield anything of cognitive significance. However, the examples we have concern relations between one philosophically circumscribed region of language and another; they do not concern natural languages. So whether the phenomenon has the cultural significance that Wiredu claims it has is still a moot point. Furthermore, it is hard to see how the phenomenon might provide an interesting observation about differences in philosophical practice. To be sure, someone who spoke a language enabling talk about behaviour but not about mental states would not be philosophically taxed by the relation between mental states and behaviour, whereas someone who spoke a language which enabled talk about both might well be. But this doesn’t strike me as anything but a statement of the obvious.

Verran on numbers As a final foray, I want to consider Verran’s Science and an African Logic, a rich and, at times, bewildering book which takes off from classroom observations in the teaching of elementary mathematics. Now, Verran is an Australian philosopher and educationalist whose interests, although partially philosophical, are primarily to do with teaching, with the sociological and political implications of how we teach number and how number systems are used, and with decolonisation at an epistemological level. So the discussion exits the classroom and finds its way into the market place and onwards into colonial systems of imposing taxation and conducting censuses. I cannot possibly do justice to this work in the few pages I’ll utilise here, nor do I have the expertise to properly engage with it all. In addition, it is not obvious that her work is intended as a contribution to African Philosophy. So let me begin by motivating and focusing my discussion. My focus in this chapter has been work of an African origin which uses observations about differences between Western and African languages to draw philosophical conclusions, often about the scope of at least some philosophical enterprises. Verran does something analogous: she uses differences between Yoruba and English number systems to argue against universalist conceptions of number and to argue for a kind of pluralism in relation to number and its logic. So there’s an implicit accusation here, namely, that those of us who base our philosophy of mathematics (or, better, arithmetic, since number, not shape, is at issue) purely on an understanding of Western arithmetic are offering, at best, a partial account of the enterprise—because an account of the Western conception is an account of but one conception—and, at worst, a deceptive account—because the Western conception may be presented as the conception. Let me start at the shallow end, with an example from a Yoruba classroom. The planned lesson is one on length and its measurement. The teacher is supposed to take the students through the following exercise: a length of string is to be held

240  Bernhard Weiss level with the top of a student’s head and dropped till it just reaches the floor. Then it is to be held taut on the floor with each end being marked by chalk. The distance between the chalk marks is then to be measured by repeatedly placing a ruler with its base to where its tip had just been so as to reach from one chalk mark to the other. The number of repeated placings is to be counted and the length thereby determined. In the instance in question, the teacher, Mr Ojo, departs from this strategy and asks the students to wind the length of string around a card (predistributed and of set length) and to determine the overall length by counting the number of windings around the card. Verran tells us that this lesson is overwhelmingly successful whereas those following the prescribed strategy fail dismally. A second example is the Yoruba numeral system itself. I won’t go into details here but will aim to give enough of an idea to motivate the ensuing view. Any numeral system has to contain a grammar for recursively generating numerals for the (potential) infinity of numbers. The Arabic system now prevalent in the West does this strictly, and uses base 10, as, I trust, we all know and are familiar with. The Yoruba system uses the numbers 1, 5, 10 and 20 as focal8. So a numeral for a number is generating by thinking of it in terms of its nearest multiple of 20 and then either adding or subtracting multiples of 5 or 10. So 54 would be ((3× 20)−5−1). That’s all very spare, but I truly believe that it is enough to be getting on with. The book includes as a chapter a previous paper which presents the numeral system, and in the next chapter, Verran immediately takes herself to task for the way in which she did so. Verran wants to align herself with a rejection of what she calls foundationism, but comes to see her relativist presentation of the numeral system as itself foundationist. She says the following in explication of foundationism: Foundationism of any sort is committed to ideals that are necessarily uniform. (2001: 32) Foundationism is a metaphysics that denies it is a metaphysics. (2001: 32) Foundationisms prescribe ultimate meanings—metaphysics—but fail to recognize this. (2001: 33) I must confess to finding this less than wholly clear and, to some extent, rather surprising, because it seems that any position which is fully aware of its prescription of ultimate meanings—let’s say that of Wittgenstein of the Tractatus or Russell in his logical atomist phase—thereby evades the charge of being foundationist. I’m not going to tarry over the nature of foundationism; something of its character will emerge in Verran’s self-criticism of her relativist presentation of the Yoruba numeral system. What she criticises herself for in ‘literalizing’ the system (by which I understand her to mean giving it formal expression) is that she treats it as an object there to be discovered and capable of being presented as an object of theorising shorn of its mode of discovery and embedding in a motley

Is philosophy bound by language?  241 of mundane practices: construction, farming and market-place commerce. So, in claiming an equivalence or parity or incommensurability between systems, relativism becomes a form of foundationism because it thereby treats the systems as abstract ideals, ultimate meanings. I want to concentrate on Verran’s more positive position but we shouldn’t let this pass without comment. Treating the product of a practice as an object is often an essential step of theorising. Philosophers and linguists treat languages as objects; philosophers and scientists very often treat theories as objects; philosophers and (academic) lawyers treat legal systems as objects; philosophers, historians and sociologists treat societies as objects. Verran seems to think that there is something deeply suspect in this theoretical manoeuvre but I’m not sure what it is. At times I am reminded of Wittgenstein’s warning about theorising, ‘Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday’ (1953: § 38), though here the message seems to be that ‘Theoretical problems arise when language goes to university’. Of course, there might be something wrong if, in reifying something as an object of study, we treat it as pristine and forget that it is a product of the messy, everyday social world. But there ought to be no inevitability about doing so. And, if we deny ourselves this tool, we deny ourselves a powerful way of trying to understand ourselves. To be sure, in focusing on the abstract object, we abstract away from details of its production and the development of its mode of presentation and we might treat it as platonic, as eternal and unalterable, but none of this is to deny the relation of the object to practice and to the historical contingency of the practice. We can have different interests at different times. Let’s go back to our examples. Verran wants to say that the measuring example and the system of numerals illustrate allied aspects of the Yoruba concept of number. This is what she says about the happening she observed in Mr Ojo’s classroom: The mutually supporting rituals we can recognize in English numbering differ from those in the composite ritual of Yoruba numbering. This difference leads me to propose that the numbers generated in Mr. Ojo’s classroom were different objects than the numbers generated in my laboratory session. The performance of the laboratory rituals of enumeration achieved my students as a relation: unity/plurality. Similarly, Mr. Ojo’s pupils were accomplished as the relation unity/plurality. Yet they were different relations. The latter ritual seems to work from a plurality to achieve a unity, which I gloss as generating a whole from parts. The other works from units to accomplish a plurality. I name this as working from a one to effect a many. The students in my laboratory session and the pupils in Mr. Ojo’s classroom emerge as different forms of the relation unity/plurality. (2001: 112) We’ll return in a moment to the importance of this talk of rituals. I take it that Verran is saying that what unifies the two ways of measuring is that they each involve unity/plurality. What distinguishes them is that they do so in opposite ways. In Mr Ojo’s classroom, the students work from plurality—counting the

242  Bernhard Weiss windings of string—to achieve unity—the overall length of string. But in the prescribed lesson, students are to move from unity—the distance between chalk marks—to achieve plurality—the many placings of the ruler. Likewise, the system of numerals in English proceeds in linear fashion and a number (not a numeral), a unity, is achieved by successively projecting towards it. In Yoruba we might arrive at it by subtracting, by taking apart a larger number. So again the systems offer different conceptions of number, which for Verran are different unity/pluralities and therefore different numbers. This is a version of ontological relativism. The latter seems like a plain confusion between our mental representation of numbers and numbers themselves. I think it is a confusion of this sort but it is not simple. Only a foundationist would appeal with such cavalier ease to a mental representation and its object. For Verran, we need to go back to the practices, what she calls rituals, which give rise to our understanding of number and to numbers themselves. She deliberately conflates numeral systems with numbers—‘It is common sense that numerals are numbers and numbers are numerals’ (2001: 102)—and the reason for this is that she thinks of numbers as coming about in a transformative process which establishes a relation between the enumerated and the number and thereby transforms each. Enumeration “transforms” all numerals to numbered bodies by the very ­precise operation of interpellating, and likewise transforms nonenumerated bodies to enumerated, I might say. (2001: 112) So when you count the cutlery on the table, the transformation operates in both directions: the set of cutlery and the numerals are altered. We can talk of numbers as objects, but these reside in the rituals which bring about the relevant transformations and thus they cannot sensibly be distinguished from the numeral systems which are utilised in the process. The effect of the ritual of enumeration is to alter the thing enumerated—it is ‘figured’—and the number. The number itself is thus a distributed object located in ‘its performance’ and inalienable from the material of those performances, the numerals deployed and the objects enumerated. So, given this close identification of number with the particular character of the practices in which it is implicated, we realise that Yoruba and English numbers are quite different. Let me stress: this is a sketch of an aspect of Verran’s view. I hope it’s tolerably clear and, of course, reasonably accurate. I’m now going to make a series of (universalist) counter-assertions before attempting some engagement. First, enumeration, ‘counting’ to the rest of us, does not transform numerals or the counted body, in any but the most trivial sense. When one counts, one puts a set of objects in one-to-one correspondence with the numerals. In so doing, one discovers the number of those objects. The number pre-dates the act of counting and survives it unaltered. The objects themselves are not altered9. Neither are the numerals. The only alteration here is in one’s state of information: there is an

Is philosophy bound by language?  243 epistemic alteration. Indeed, the fact that this is an epistemic procedure requires that these other things are unaltered by it. If not, the attempt to find something out would alter what one was interested in. (If you want to know the texture of a delicate object, you’d better take care to feel it gently.) Returning now to Verran’s examples, which are supposed to illustrate alternative concepts of number and, indeed, alternative numbers. I see no temptation to follow her here. The essential (I use the term advisedly) thing about length and its measurement is that a unit is chosen and the length of the object is determined as the number of times that unit goes into the length of the object. That multiple can be determined in a number of ways, e.g., by repeatedly laying the unit against the object to be measured; by passing the object over the unit, which is held fixed (as drapers are likely to do, using a bolt of cloth and a measure screwed onto the work surface); if the object is flexible, by winding it round the unit. All of this is incidental to the concepts of length and its measurement. Which method is chosen will be a matter of convenience, given the nature of the objects to be measured, and familiarity. But to grasp the concept of length one ought to be able to see that, whoever you are, there is a choice to be made here and it’s a choice which is made on non-mathematical grounds. So I’m happy to grant that there may be an interesting story to tell about why, in similar circumstances, that choice is apt to go differently in Western and in Yoruba classrooms. And it may be a story of some pedagogical significance, and perhaps also some significance to appreciating the effects of colonialism. (In fact, I think Verran makes these cases powerfully.) But it is not one of any conceptual consequence. Precisely the same points can be made about the different numeral systems. These are clearly equivalent ways of representing number. The very fact that number can be represented by many numeral systems is just one reason—but a sufficient one—for distinguishing numeral from number. Verran conflates the two, does so unconvincingly and on scant motivation. To be fair these are, as I said, simply counter-assertions. So let me make one point about them before tackling what I see as a primary inadequacy of her account. Though simply counter-assertions, they do, I think, show that one can make sense of the divergences within a universalist framework. Accepting the reality and uniqueness of the natural numbers (or rational numbers) does not entail that different cultures might not adopt different modes of representing them. Indeed, this is a basic observation about language: objects do not choose the terms we use to represent them; that choice is ad hoc or, some might say, conventional. Moreover, these differences very often have a cognitive significance10 and thus might be of psychological and pedagogical importance. Since the choice might well have a political dimension as well, there may be political consequences implicated in how we see the choice. So the deep question here is about how use of a symbolic system relates to differences of concept and differences in the world we thereby portray. Verran gives us no overview of where conceptual variation ends and mere notational change enters. In fact, she encourages the view that any change in our practices, any change in our rituals, will accomplish conceptual change. For her, it seems, a difference in language or in

244  Bernhard Weiss practice just is a difference in concepts: conceptual relativism emerges just from linguistic difference. And, since ontology is a reflection of conceptual apparatus, ontological relativism follows as well. Why do I think Verran’s position is inadequate? Why do I think we need to distinguish the practice from the reality it aims to portray? Verran locates number wholly in our practices and, though I’m sympathetic to the idea that practice is the source of meaning for language, I don’t think we can adequately make sense of ourselves by thinking of numbers in Verran’s way. Interestingly, in a book on number, Verran makes scant mention of arithmetic. Arithmetic is the science of number and arithmetic involves such things as counting numbers themselves, generalising over numbers, asserting identities between two presentations of the same number. I think these features of our use of number terms lie at the root of our need to think of numbers as objects, and this involves thinking of numbers not as time bound inhabitants of our practices but merely as represented in those practices. There are numbers which will never enter into our practices because they are too large; the number of prime numbers is not contained within our practices because it is infinite. To put it briefly, Verran’s conception makes it utterly mysterious what we are doing in arithmetic. We simply cannot make any sense of arithmetical practice unless we think of numbers as separable from actual practice, even if not separable from our practice in the ideal or in principle—but this, I take it, is to wed oneself to a form of foundationism. I want now to end by remarking on the deep question about difference in symbolic system and difference in world represented. What I think the comment of the previous paragraph establishes is that any sensible theory of our use of language in arithmetic must think of that language as having a genuine semantics, a theory about how that language relates to the world. There are things that a semantics will need to achieve; these things are debated by philosophers, but a plausible list might include: classifying as true (false) sentences paradigmatically taken as true (false); justifying inferential patterns that are paradigmatically taken to be valid; depicting the objects spoken about as things we could know about on plausible epistemic assumptions … . So there are better and worse semantic theories one might construct. My claim is simply that the respective semantic theories for Yoruba and for English will coincide in what they see as the semantic values of numerical terms. So these do not portray different realities. (Of course, the very business of constructing a semantic theory will involve treating the symbolic system as an object, which will lead to another accusation of illicitly embracing foundationism. I’ve already had a small say about why I think this accusation is misplaced.) I’m not going to tackle the issue about when a notational difference correlates with a conceptual difference. I think this might well be tackled in terms of the business of translation, but criteria for accurate translation are vexed, as we learned in previous sections of this chapter. In the particular case of the concept of length, I’ve said why I think the same concept is operative in both cultures.

Is philosophy bound by language?  245

Conclusion This has been a fragmented chapter, so in conclusion, let me try to draw the pieces together. How might one argue for the claim that philosophy in its method and/ or problems is bound by language? Well, one might appeal to differences in language which render translation impossible between one language and another. Were this the case then, quite obviously, there would be no comparing philosophy pursued in one language with its cousin pursued in a different language; it would be hard too to know how we could identify the two language-bound practices as both being practice of philosophy. Taking a less extreme view of the incommensurabilities of one language with another, one might argue that, though translation is possible, translation involves a leaching or enriching of cognitive content. Were this the case then it might come about that what appears philosophically pregnant in one language might appear merely vacuous in another. So, once again, what is possible philosophically in one language is impossible in another. Finally, though one might allow meaningful comparisons between linguistic practices and different languages—so that, for instance, we could see each as a practice involving number—one might be forced to elide the division between language and what it represents. Were this the case, then what is represented in one language would be different to what is represented in another, merely because the practices are different. So philosophy, insofar as it aims to speak about realities represented, would need to address itself to each practice independently of the other. Other than these three kinds of case, I find it hard to think of another way in which philosophy might find itself bound by language. For the restriction of philosophy to language will be a product of difference in language, differences which frustrate translation, or which involve loss through translation or which reveal differences in the realities portrayed. If none of these occur, then no restriction arises. Hallen and Sodipo provided an example of the first strategy. I think the discussion of their work illustrates a general dilemma for such approaches. Either they follow the methodology and conclusions of the indeterminacy results, in which case, they will struggle to illustrate their position, or they do not, in which case the differences between languages illustrate potential differences of concept between linguistic communities, which can be incorporated in philosophical methodology. Let me add one remark here. I’m unpersuaded by those (e.g., Davidson) who argue that anything recognisable by us as a language will be translatable into our language. I see no reason that beings with very different sensory and cognitive apparatus might not operate a language which we cannot understand. But then, because the concepts expressible in such a language are inaccessible to us, they can form no part of our philosophical theorising. Moreover, the possibility of such concepts is no reflection on the restricted scope of philosophical investigation of our concepts. Wiredu provides an example of the second strategy. In my view the only examples of such cases are those in which, pace Wiredu, there is a difference in conceptual resources available in each language. Given a conception of philosophy as involving conceptual analysis, it would be hard to deny that there

246  Bernhard Weiss are tongue-dependent philosophical questions. But whether there are tonguedependent questions where the tongues concerned are ordinary languages— as opposed to philosophical dissections of regions of ordinary languages—is a further and contentious point. To suppose there are is to suppose that ordinary languages might differ in their repertoire of fundamental concepts; can we, for instance, imagine an ordinary language that enables talk about behaviour but not about mental states? Till we have such examples, we have only its abstract possibility. Finally, Verran provides an example of the third strategy. Here I used an argument from the nature of arithmetic theory to argue that we ought to distinguish clearly between the linguistic practice and what it represents. The argument admits of generalisation: any practice of speaking about objects which can be seen to form an unsurveyable domain or a domain whose constitution does not vary precisely with the vagaries of actual practice (and this is almost every conceivable topic) will require such a distinction. So the conclusion I am tempted to draw is that, apart from the mere possibility of concepts embedded in practices we could not access, there is no interesting sense in which philosophy is language bound.

Notes 1 See Hallen and Sodipo (1997). 2 See Quine (1960, chapter 2). Quine argues that the behavioural data about use of language in context, which, he claims, is the only objective evidence on which to base translation, fails to determine a unique translation scheme. 3 See Craig (1999). 4 One might well value second- over first-hand knowledge for non-epistemic reasons when, for instance, the latter requires an arduous trip in dangerous territory: I’m quite happy for you to tell me what lies at the bottom of the mine shaft rather than find out myself. 5 See Wiredu (2004). 6 Compare with Hume’s principle: The number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs if the Fs can be placed in one-one correspondence with the Gs. Here, the LHS and the RHS are often held to be synonymous. 7 My thanks to Richmond Kwesi. 8 Verran calls them bases and thus claims that this is a multi-base system. But, as I understand it, a base system would generate a numeral for a number in terms of units and powers of the number taken as base. I see no use of powers of the above numbers in the Yoruba system. So I don’t think that the focus on these numbers should be confused with numerical systems using a base. 9 Unless one clumsily breaks one, en passant. 10 The choice of a notational system for a mathematical theory can have profound implications for one’s ability to function in it.

References Craig, E. 1999 Knowledge and the State of Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hallen, B. and Sodipo, J. O. 1997 Knowledge, Belief and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Is philosophy bound by language?  247 Quine, W. V. O. 1960 Word and Object, Boston, MA: MIT Press. Verran, H. 2001 Science and an African Logic, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wiredu, K. 2004 ‘Truth and an African Language’, in Brown, L. M. (ed.), African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 35–50. Wittgenstein, L. 1953 Philosophical Investigations, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

14 African philosophy in the context of a university Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe

1 Identity, uniqueness and difference Consider two illustrations that powerfully indicate the enormous difference the term ‘African’ might ostensibly make when it is used to qualify some concept. In the first case, it seems to alter the meaning of the concept. So, a range of myths, legends, folklores, traditional beliefs, proverbs and similar such things that fall under the notion of mythology would together constitute something they previously weren’t simply in virtue of the qualifier, African, being applied to them. I am thinking of Odera Oruka’s humorous remark that ‘what in all cases is a mythology is paraded as “African philosophy”, and …  [we are] expected to endorse that it is indeed a philosophy but an African philosophy’ (Oruka 1972, p. 23; see also Bodunrin, 1981). The other one is an extended quote from Chimamanda Adichie’s Americannah: Ifemelu shook her head and turned to the window. Depression was what happened to Americans, with their self-absolving need to turn everything into an illness. She was not suffering from depression; she was merely a little tired and a little slow. ‘I don’t have depression,’ she said. Years later, she would blog about this: ‘On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know.’ A Congolese woman wrote a long comment in response: She had moved to Virginia from Kinshasa and, months into her first semester of college, begun to feel dizzy in the morning, her heart pounding as though in flight from her, her stomach fraught with nausea, her fingers tingling. She went to see a doctor. And even though she checked ‘yes’ to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named? (Adichie 2013, pp. 157–158) In this second case, the function of the qualifier ‘African’ is not as obvious. What we notice, however, is that it makes some non-trivial difference how some condition is described. So, she is not suffering panic attacks because ‘nobody

African philosophy in the context of a university  249 in Kinshasa had panic attacks’ [in place of Congolese, and or Kinshasa, read African]. Similarly, Ifemelu could not be depressed because depression is not properly African—it is what happens to Americans. These illustrations are not merely frivolous. Together they point to the ways in which the term ‘African’ is intended to make a substantial difference to some concept, activity, condition, etc. What they essentially reveal is that the term ‘African,’ to a significant extent, is not merely a geographical concept. More than that, it carries with it a set of presuppositions that ultimately superimpose the categories of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘difference’ on what should pass as African. In other words, uniqueness and difference are conceptually constitutive of something that can plausibly count as African either by altering its original meaning when employed or by making some otherwise applicable condition exclusively inapplicable when withheld. To be unique, under the circumstances, is to have a set of features not shared with something else comparable in at least some respects. By application, African philosophy would connote properties, say a, b, c, and so on, beyond merely geography, which something like Western philosophy lacks, although both may be similar in other respects. The ‘African’ in African philosophy is supposed to capture that uniqueness. To be different is to possess enough of these unique features to differentiate it sufficiently from other comparable philosophies. That is, African philosophy has enough of properties like a, b, c, and so on, which renders it vastly unlike something like Chinese philosophy, say. Moreover, those who are convinced that African philosophy is essentially unique and different insist that to omit the qualifier, African, when describing some philosophy, and preferring instead to say, philosophy in Africa, is to fail in some non-trivial way to refer to African philosophy. It is to gravely misconstrue its identity, or worse, deny its existence. This makes Adichie’s rhetorical question apt: did things begin to exist only when they are named? Some philosophers have found this problematic. They argue that that image of African philosophy is too narrow. Carol Pearce (1992) has been especially strident in this regard. She argues that because it consciously seeks to be unique and different, African philosophy, construed as a unique and essentially different enterprise, is rather provincial in its aims, seeking always to establish an ‘intellectual apartheid’ (1992, p. 440). Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong in being unique and different. These qualities are often praised in persons. ‘Be yourself,’ ‘celebrate who you are,’ etc. typically constitute the core of various brands of self-help philosophy. The point instead is that there is a peculiar badness about construing African philosophy as unique and different. According to Pearce, it forecloses the possibility of a discourse and so corrupts the notion of philosophy, which hinges heavily on that possibility. Just as the Congolese woman construed her condition as unique and different, in spite of her symptoms, and so makes any meaningful exchange between her and the doctor extremely difficult, so, perhaps, the possibility of meaningful philosophical exchange is made impossible if philosophy is construed as unique and different.

250  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe In addition, Pearce thinks that this way of defining African philosophy turns out to be especially misleading since it renders what is essentially abstract, and universal, as something concrete, and particular (1992, pp. 450–455). However, critics of Pearce’s position, or similar ones, have pointed to the lack of adequate appreciation of African philosophy as essentially diverse in form and method. Others have queried the rather deliberate importation, on the part of opponents of African philosophy, or more correctly the unique and different version of it, like Pearce, of a notion of philosophy that is universal and abstracted from context, which, in the end, is Western philosophy in disguise (see, for example, Bewaji, 1995). Ultimately, the result has been an argumentative ping-pong. My interest is not to engage directly with the claims and counter-claims that have characterized attempts at making sense of African philosophy. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the fact that underlying them is a dangerously misleading assumption, viz. that the meaning of African philosophy is contingent upon negotiating whether and to what extent something that counts as philosophy could also be African. The danger here is similar to what Oruka suspects is characteristic of attempts to define African philosophy, namely, that we end up simply and uncritically labelling as philosophy what may not be philosophy at all. Moreover, the requirement to first negotiate, when conceptualizing African philosophy, whether and to what extent philosophy could be African would be too strong, potentially unfairly ruling out in advance a variety of plausible conceptual and methodological options for African philosophy, or so I shall argue in section two. In section three, I am going to suggest that the debate over the nature and meaning of African philosophy was, in retrospect, contestations over more basic issues. One of them relates to the place in which the activity we want to refer to as African philosophy, however we ultimately characterize it, is supposed to take place. I am thinking specifically of a university, and how the idea of it might constrain the notion of African philosophy we should prefer to teach, research, and, in the process, develop as a tradition. This approach allows us to assume the legitimacy and perhaps plausibility of a range of competing ways of speaking about African philosophy and then to identify those conceptions that will most likely conduce to such a place. Finally, in section four, I shall engage with the question of whether and to what extent philosophy is related to ideology. Here I aim to distinguish three ways this relationship may be characterized and then suggest how appealing to the idea of a university might enable us to engage the question of the relationship between African philosophy and ideology.

2 Universality and particularity The standard approach to making African philosophy intelligible often involves charting a middle ground between two extremes: one modelled on ‘uniqueness and difference’ and the other on the image of philosophy as entirely divorced from context in the sense of being both abstract and concerned with the universal (see Matolino, 2015 and Janz, 2004). This latter conception of philosophy is one that is in some sense unaffected by, and perhaps indifferent to, the specifics

African philosophy in the context of a university  251 of culture, history, etc. and concerned with general rather than particular claims (Eze, 2001). I think that standard approach is misguided. One reason is that what it requires imposes at once a rather stringent test for identifying something as African philosophy and an unfair burden on its practitioners. To see this, consider that the history of philosophy evinces a wide range of ways in which philosophical activity could be both universal and particular. More clearly, we can imagine a spectrum of cases in which some such activities occurring at one end are more particular and less universal, and at the other end, some are less particular and more universal. For example, what goes by the name Islamic, Christian and perhaps Chinese philosophy would fit the former description to the extent that they relate strongly to particular cultural and/or religious contexts (worldviews, assumptions, etc.) while something like the AngloAmerican tradition of philosophy, with its analytic and/or pragmatic bent, would fit the latter description. At various points near both ends and around the middle, one might locate something like the oral philosophy of characters like Socrates, sometimes simply manifested in proverbs, maxims, sayings, etc., as in Thales, Heraclitus, and the other early Greek philosophers, or in its written forms as in Aristotle and up to the present day. The point is that the history of philosophy is amenable to the idea of disparities in the meaning of philosophy, some tending to be more universal than particular (and vice versa). My next claim is that all of the ways philosophy could be African, i.e., the ways we could negotiate the universal and the particular in the idea of African philosophy, reflect the ways in which philosophy has been understood and employed throughout its own recorded history. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the diversity evinced in Oruka’s taxonomy of the trends in African philosophy, all of which together mirror the diversity of perspectives in the history of philosophy quite generally. Even the somewhat notorious ethnophilosophy, one manifestation of African philosophy, which ostensibly accounts for that relationship in ways that lean more toward the particular than the universal, seems to me to share important features with something like Christian or Islamic philosophy—typically a unique body of ideas, a worldview often mostly systematically recounted and reconstructed as opposed to say, strictly speaking, revised. The parallel between ethnophilosophy and Christian and/or Islamic philosophy is even more telling given the proselytizing intent behind them—in the case of ethnophilosophy, Tempels’ motivations in this regard have been critically reviewed (Matolino, 2011). The key point is that the variety of options associated with what goes by the name African philosophy coincides with what one typically observes in the history of philosophy quite generally. We can now add the point that, given this wide-ranging menu of options, dismissing some activity as unphilosophical will require more than merely the suggestion that it is too particular. Specifically, dispensing with some notion of African philosophy would require stronger arguments than that it is too African. If the suggestion is that the ‘African’ in African philosophy is too particular because it often picks out particular proverbs, maxims, etc. in some oral culture, we should raise similar objections to a large swathe of activities that is still today

252  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe subsumed under the name of ancient Greek philosophy. Yet, there is nothing in proverbs, maxims, and similar such aspects of culture, including orality as a form of transmission, that make them straightforwardly unphilosophical. As Bodunrin has noted, it is hard to see how one might argue out this point without presuming some meaning of philosophy (Bodunrin 1981, p. 171). Making what strikes me as a similar point, Bruce Janz has also observed that the question, ‘[w]hat is (or should count as) philosophy?’ is an essentialist question that assumes a certain kind of answer … . But there is a circularity—how can we ask ‘what is philosophy?’ apart from that which has been regarded as philosophy to this point? (Janz 2004, p. 106). It seems to me, then, that weaving into the concept of African philosophy the expectation that it successfully charts a middle ground between, on the one hand, the abstract and universal and, on the other, the concrete and particular in the idea of philosophy, is to ignore the history of philosophy itself and ultimately to posit a rather stringent conceptual requirement, one that potentially eliminates what would otherwise count as philosophy. Moreover, given that history, this burden would be unfair on practitioners of African philosophy. But it would also be unnecessary. If we knew all of the plausible ways philosophy could be African, i.e., the ways in which it is both universal and particular, we might still not know what African philosophy means. This is because often what we take to be philosophical activity tends to reinvent itself time and again, and so conceptions of it are likely to vary over time. Now, some of these ways might reasonably contradict others. We may need to rely on something else to decide. And we couldn’t possibly arrive at some consensus as to the meaning of African philosophy, if we did not know that something else. That something else is a set of more basic concerns that can justify the preference for one of the many potentially plausible senses of African philosophy. I shall return to one such basic concern shortly. In the meantime, we should add that at any rate, if there was any urgency to clarify the ways in which the universal in the notion of philosophy could be particular, that burden would be one that philosophy itself, and not merely African philosophy, was supposed to bear. It would be part of the constant and ongoing reflexive nature of philosophy to articulate more clearly the nature of this relationship. I quite like the way Abiola Irele (1983) speaks to the issue. In his view, the critical discussion that animated the debate on the existence and meaning of African philosophy should have been a reminder to philosophy in general to continuously reflect on the ways in which it relates to context, the ways in which it sometimes relies, albeit unconsciously, on the assumptions and biases of particular cultures etc. A reminder, in his view, that has not been heeded. We should arrest the impression that may have been created, viz. that since the history of philosophy itself exhibits an enormous variation in meaning and that since African philosophy mirrors this complexity, there is no reason to prefer one conception of philosophy over another. This statement by Bernard Matolino seems to suggest that much: ‘what is clear …  is that the history of philosophy has been very varied. Not only has it been varied but there is no way of adjudging the

African philosophy in the context of a university  253 natural viability and legitimacy of one approach over other approaches’ (Matolino 2015, p. 439). We have already motivated the claim that there’s no one meaning of (African) philosophy. The scope of the philosophical is extensive enough to accommodate a wide range of approaches. As such, there should have been no doubt that philosophy could be African, in a number of intelligible and plausible senses. Even so, the point is not that any meaning of African philosophy goes. Rather than dismissing some conception of it as too particular (or too universal), I intend to explore whether and to what extent some institution like a university, or rather some concept of it, might illuminate our thinking regarding which conceptions of African philosophy we should teach, research, and develop.

3 African philosophy and the idea of a university I want to suggest that one way a university might be imagined can significantly illuminate our decision about which conceptions of African philosophy we should teach, research and develop. To put the point this way is to assume that there is more than one plausible way of thinking about African philosophy and that some of them may not align neatly to a range of constraints engendered by the idea of university, although they may align to something else and so properly constitute philosophy in a different context of application. The assumption is that some context of application significantly shapes the notion of philosophy we come to adopt relative to that context. This point may be illustrated by reference to Placide Tempels’ own preference for what he referred to as Bantu philosophy. In retrospect, that conception of African philosophy was meaningful within the context of a missionary, proselytizing and allegedly racist agenda of a colonial establishment. Given the set of assumptions, expectations, biases, etc. of the colonial project more broadly, and of its missionary wing specifically, it was necessary to envision, then, what goes by the name of African philosophy today as a set of timeless principles and a rigid body of ideas that are essentially constitutive of the psychology of the Bantu. The colonial context of application naturally modified the presumed meaning of African philosophy to the extent that in conceptualizing it, Tempels could not escape from colonial assumptions, biases, etc., some of which included a need to assert metaphysical difference in line with the racist assumptions of colonialism and in preparation for final, albeit spiritual, subjugation of the Bantu people. This observation regarding Placide Tempels is situated within the wider context of the role of missionaries and missionary institutions in advancing the colonial agenda. In general, missionaries and missionary institutions occupied the role of intermediaries between the local chiefs and people and the administrators of colonies. This role was made possible in part because their encounters with the local chief and people were typically nonviolent and peaceful, and upon winning their trust, missionaries often became their spokesperson. Moreover, they claimed to possess intimate knowledge of the local chiefs and people and sometimes served as interpreters, both of which were useful for the administrators of the colony (Majeke, 1952). Missionaries in the colony did not always exercise

254  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe the role of intermediaries innocently. Specifically, it has been shown that they were Janus-faced. On the one hand, they portrayed themselves to the local people in the colonies as ‘friends’ and ‘allies’ and, on the other, participated actively in enabling colonial regimes in the annexation and eventual conquest of the local population. Essentially, then, they operated as double agents in the service of colonial administrators. As such, they became a vital cog in the various strategies of conquest adopted by administrators of the colonies. So, for example, colonial strategies of indirect rule, in which traditional leadership and governing structures were retained, would involve assigning some ‘resident agent,’ whose role typically was to function as adviser to the local chief and thereby influence the people in favour of the colonial government. Given his professed intimate knowledge of the people, and his position as an ‘intermediary,’ the missionary was crucial in the implementation of such strategies. Tempels’ Bantu philosophy in some way embodies the role of the missionary within the colonial context in that it both explicitly purports to demonstrate intimate knowledge of the philosophy of the Bantu—in a way the Bantu himself is unable to fully comprehend—and does so in the hope of contributing to the effectiveness of the civilization of the ‘natives.’ Besides the political motive, there is underlying the claim to the possession of intimate knowledge of the philosophy of the Bantu, and of the ability to systematize that philosophy in a way the Bantu could not, a tinge of the same arrogance and contempt characteristic of the colonial gaze on the African subject. As Hountondji has suggested, it betrays a conception of African philosophy in which the African himself is essentially passive and lacking in agency: an ‘unwitting philosopher … . Ignorant of his own thoughts’ and needing ‘an interpreter to translate them for him… ’ (Hountondji 1983, p. 57). However, in suggesting that Tempels’ Bantu philosophy was intelligible within a colonial context of application, we need not be committed to the view that it could not be one of several ways of conceiving African philosophy, even if an impoverished one. Instead, the claim is that although well attuned to colonial assumptions, biases, and so forth, it is not also appropriate to the context of a university, or at least a university outside a colonial context. Nor do we need to deny that it could be taught, researched, and developed further in a university; the fact that Tempels’ original model of African philosophy has over time tended to reinvent itself following the barrage of theoretical and political protestations against it means that it is becoming more and more adaptable to other contexts of application, including a university, and other than the one its early proponents perhaps intended for it (Hallen, 2010). But to do so involved explicitly rejecting the assumptions, expectations, and biases that initially informed it, including, as intimated above, its portrayal of the African subject, and setting new terms of engagement with it, specifically those engendered by the idea of a university (outside the colonial context). My view is that the idea of a university in part defines a context of application in the same way as something like the notion of colonialism can. By context of application, I do not mean some physical place, particular institutions,

African philosophy in the context of a university  255 or practices, although it is roughly associated with them. Instead I am thinking about assumptions, expectations, aims, biases, etc. often associated with institutions and practices, although they need not be, and that implicitly set the terms of engagement for the sort of activities that they engender. The idea of a university constitutes a context of application to the extent that it evokes a range of principles, norms, and assumptions that not only actuate it but also set the terms for undertaking what we may roughly regard as university-type activity. Another way to express the point being made here is to reference Abiola Irele’s suggestion that the dispute over the meaning of African philosophy was in retrospect reducible to debates about whether and to what extent African philosophy was supposed to reflect the marks of academic scholarship, as opposed to the ‘cultural nationalism’ with which it was frequently associated (Irele 1983, p. 21). In making this point, Irele gestures towards the idea that when applied in the context of a university, African philosophy might exhibit certain characteristics that would otherwise be irrelevant if were to be employed elsewhere—or at least, this is what ‘a new generation of academic philosophers anxious to remove their discipline from the shadow of the ideological preoccupations of African nationalism in order to affirm its independent, scientific character’ thought (Irele 1983, p. 21). Taking these basic ideas, from Tempels’ approach and Irele’s explanation as a starting point, I want to explore the ways in which the idea of a university, as a context of application, might impact the meaning of African philosophy. As should be clear subsequently, the goal is not to attempt, like the ‘new generation of academic philosophers,’ to neatly distinguish between a culturally nationalistic conception of African philosophy and a conception of African philosophy altogether free of nationalism. Instead, it is to found a principle that defines what might be regarded as a university-type activity in relation to a university’s objective of knowledge production and to determine how that principle might illuminate our thinking about African philosophy. My suspicion is that rather than recommend an easy distinction as envisaged by the ‘new generation,’ it is likely going to permit a plurality of perspectives regarding African philosophy. I have been referring to the idea of a university, in part because the task at hand does not involve assembling some data relevant to the practice of (African) philosophy one typically finds in some existing university department and drawing from these certain norms, conditions and principles that might help us decide which conception of African philosophy would be most at home at a university. To do so would involve failing, in no small way, to take into consideration the specific histories of existing universities and departments of philosophy and the extent to which they may still retain and sustain certain kinds of biases with regard to what philosophy should be. Where such biases have become the received ideology, what goes by the name African philosophy may simply be a reflection of them. Making sense of African philosophy in this way would be entirely unhelpful. And even if all existing universities, and their philosophy departments, were tainted with ideological bias, our task would not be delayed at all. This is because the focus is not on what currently obtains at a university. Instead, the focus will be on some motivated conception of a university, or what we would like a university to be.

256  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe There are two potential problems confronting the roundabout strategy of shedding light on African philosophy by way of examining how the notion of a university might impose certain constraints on the forms of it that may be researched, taught, published, and, in general, developed at a university. The first is that it seems to take for granted that there is some general consensus on the meaning of university. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. So, the quest to understand African philosophy becomes ‘all the more complex because there is hardly any agreement as to the meaning, and even less so, the future, of what goes by the name “the University” in our world today’ (Mbembe 2016, p. 32). If this is true, then the strategy may not be as promising as it initially seemed. Second, and relatedly, the dominant idea of a university might exhibit what some have called ‘epistemic violence’ to the extent that it is deeply and dangerously oriented to the West. That is, ‘in the sense that they [it is a] are local instantiations of a dominant academic model based on a Eurocentric epistemic canon …  a canon that attributes truth only to the Western way of knowledge production’ (Mbembe 2016, p. 32). Again, if this is true, a conception of African philosophy aligned to that idea of a university is one we should not adopt. In responding to these worries, we need to directly pose the question: what is a university, or rather how might we envision a university in Africa? The issue is difficult enough to delay us. However, as a way of proceeding, I will distinguish between questions of form and questions of content with respect to a university. Questions of the latter sort would require one to specify and perhaps prescribe in more detail what may be described as a university’s institutional culture. In an interesting paper on how to Africanize universities, Thad Metz addresses the idea of a university in terms of such a culture, which he characterizes in terms of five features: curriculum, research, language, aesthetics, and governance (Metz 2015, p. 246). These answer to the question of content—i.e., of the essence of a university or the constitutive features of it. We need not provide such a substantive view of the university, however, in order to enumerate certain constraints the idea of it might impose on the notion of African philosophy we come to adopt at a university. Instead, we may address ourselves to questions of form, i.e., the matter of what principles should guide us in setting up and organizing an institution which will be concerned with teaching and developing a curriculum, research, etc. Rather crudely, questions of form require us to say only so much about a university. The distinction is useful in addressing the worries above. For one, I suspect that deep disagreements over the idea of a university typically emerge where there are competing fully-fledged accounts. However, it is not clear to me that we need consensus on a robust meaning of a university in order to articulate certain justifiable constraints on the decision of what might pass as a conception of African philosophy that is useful to that context of application. It would suffice if we agreed on a very few things about what we might want from a university. So, I shall concern myself with a very thin vision of a university—ideas I deem uncontroversial and that I suspect would survive any responsible kind of ‘decolonization’ and ‘Africanization’ of the university. Moreover, where epistemic violence is a function of privileging some canon over others, specifically ones that

African philosophy in the context of a university  257 a university should centre precisely because of its location and obligations to its locality, it seems that much of the controversy would revolve around the nature of curriculum, and other aspects of a content-full notion of the university. We might disagree about whether the curriculum should be Afrocentric rather than Eurocentric, but still agree about certain ways of going on. This would not be odd at all. Perhaps, it is possible to agree about a few things about how to proceed, even in the face of deep disagreements about details. Perhaps this is what those who have advocated the importance of not discarding the ‘uni’ in the idea of a university, while pursuing the project of decolonization and Africanization, have in mind. The idea of a university seems to me to bear certain characteristics that are not easily done away with even if we successfully decolonized and/or Africanized the modern university (Metz 2015, pp. 252–253). At any rate, I would have nothing more to say to someone who denies a reasonable distinction can be made along the lines I have recently suggested. Those who already accept the distinction and the assumption underlying it may find the remainder of my claims more interesting than those who do not. What, then, does the idea of a university in terms merely of its form suggest about a university-type activity related to the production of knowledge? To my mind, the question reduces to the question of what principles should regulate an activity in a university whose primary aim is to produce knowledge. A number of them immediately suggest themselves, about which we can reasonably expect to reach some kind of consensus. One such principle should capture the idea of autonomy. If so, it would entail for such an activity that it is free of external influences, specifically those that would in principle impact the outcome—i.e., the knowledge produced, whatever this may be. Part of the reason why we intuitively value the sort of knowledge produced at a university is due to our sense that its knowledge-seeking aims are not unduly externally influenced. Note, however, that we can distinguish between types of external influence. If the international scholarly community were to influence the knowledge-production aims of university by inspiring new pedagogical approaches and methods of inquiry, this would be a positive kind of influence from outside (if one sees the international scholarly community as, strictly speaking, external to the idea of a university). However, if the government were to intervene in such a way as to require that some topics and research programmes are off limits, this sort of influence would undermine the autonomy of the university. More clearly, then, it is the latter sort of external influence that would be hostile to the knowledge-producing aims of a university. Moreover, one might think that it would be important for our conception of a university to exhibit a significant degree of respect for each person’s contribution to the knowledge-production business and that such respect entails not just equal opportunity for all of the possible perspectives but also equal access to all prospective participants in that activity. Perhaps, it may be said to exhibit a democracy principle. Reasonable constraints, of course, must be allowed, but these are likely to be based on other key principles upon which a university would be founded. For example, a university’s autonomy might permit it to set a rule that prevents it from admitting as a participant into its knowledge-producing activity

258  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe just anyone who aspires to. As with typical cases, it might require some kind of professional and academic qualification as the criterion for entry and participation. Such an expectation would be consistent with the democracy principle. Further, the democracy principle would entail such presumably desirable things as free associations, interactions, and intellectual exchanges among those who are participants in the knowledge-producing business. If we were to adopt a democracy principle as one of the principles constitutive of the idea of a university, we are likely going to arrive at the following conclusion regarding university-type activities that have as their direct aim knowledge production: that such an activity should not unfairly privilege some perspective over others; unfairly restrict associations, interactions, and contributions towards the end of producing knowledge; or unfairly refuse entry to aspiring participants in this activity. African philosophy construed as a university-type activity should exhibit a similar set of characteristics. Specifically, in principle, it should not include features that definitionally imply the impossibility of participation by certain people, who are otherwise qualified to do so. For example, conceptions of African philosophy that stipulate a particular mode of rationality that people of non-African cultures could not possibly attain would fail to satisfy the principle. Also, the principle would entail that the ethnic, racial, gendered, etc. identities of people who, on the basis of some professional and/or academic criteria, are regarded as qualified should not constitute a basis for exclusion. As such, conceptions of African philosophy that stipulate ethnic and racial identity as a constitutive feature of them would fail to satisfy the principle. The issue of equal opportunity can be complex. If a university’s knowledgeproducing activity were to feature fewer people from disadvantaged groups, Blacks, Africans, or women, there might be good reason to reconsider what equal opportunity really means. To prevent or perhaps address such anomalous situations, we could perhaps read into the idea of a university something like a social vision principle. Such a principle would set the terms of a university’s relationship with the broader social vision. Essentially, it should capture the intuition that something like a university (and I suspect this applies primarily to a public university) should not advance the interests and preferences of a few, but of society as a whole. Here, I’m relying on David Bilchitz’s idea that entities that are regarded as possessing legal personality, like corporations, exist not simply as machines for the furthering of the private interests of a section of society, but of society quite generally. In his view, this is entailed by the fact that the law is intended to be impartial towards the interest of society (Bilchitz, 2010). Something like a social vision principle should capture this idea in relation to a university, suggesting avenues for thinking about a university’s responsibility to the particular society for which it exists. University-type activities, like the teaching of subjects, e.g., African philosophy, should exhibit that sort of responsibility. This strikes me as a principle that would be reasonable to have since it would provide some basis for responding to problems of representation, or perhaps the wish that a university should benefit the society in which it is situated.

African philosophy in the context of a university  259 In relation to the social vision principle, I follow Metz in thinking that two reasons why we set up a university are (i) to advance the goals of development of its locality and (ii) to support the culture of its locality (Metz, 2009). He includes these among the proper final ends of a university. He goes on to suggest that supporting culture may happen in two distinct ways. It may involve simple acceptance of it or it may require distinguishing between aspects of it that are likely to contribute to the development of that culture and those that are not likely to do so. If some cultural practice turns out to be destructive to a certain group of our population, say women, and/or also inhibits development, supporting culture would mean discouraging such a practice (Metz 2009, p. 188). There are likely to be major disagreements regarding what count as good or bad aspects of culture. But we need not be delayed by these disagreements. The idea instead is that, as a matter of principle, a university should rather not encourage aspects of culture that may be harmful—and there are clear cases where this principle may be applied. For example, where a conception and the practice of African philosophy fail to provide the platform for members of the local community to be part of the discursive tradition, they would fail to qualify as a university-type activity aimed at knowledge production proper. What the foregoing suggests is a further principle that, to my mind, is constitutive of the idea of a university. It is the scholarship principle. Essentially, it captures the idea that in pursuing the goal of producing knowledge for the purpose, in part, of advancing development and supporting culture, a university’s epistemic relation to any presumed knowledge claim (and I use knowledge broadly to include more than propositional knowledge) should be critical. One way we can make sense of the idea that a university should exhibit a critical attitude in its pursuit of its knowledge-production objective is in relation to the quality of its discourses. First, the discourses it produces should be such that they are open to scrutiny, investigation, validation, invalidation, etc. rather than merely assumed. This perhaps is one way a university as a knowledge-producing entity might be distinguished from other possible ones and also why we tend to value it: the importance it places on critical scholarship. To suggest that something passes the test of critical scholarship is not to suggest that it conforms to some methodological approach. Instead, the term ‘critical’ is used broadly. African philosophy as a university-type activity will satisfy the scholarship principle if its discourses are such that they are held up to scrutiny and investigated, and that their authority is dependent upon the validation of other qualified participants in the production of knowledge. This does not imply that something is not African philosophy because it fails to satisfy that principle; instead, it merely implies that it is not a conception of philosophy aligned to the proposed idea of a university—as such, should not be taught, researched, and developed at a university. The idea is not to specify an exhaustive list of principles that should go into the idea of a university and that might illuminate how we think about African philosophy in the context of a university. Instead, the goal has been to indicate some of these and to suggest some of the features that a conception of African philosophy appropriate to the context of a university should exhibit. What we have seen is

260  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe that it should not be unduly restrictive and should not unfairly preclude participation. Moreover, while honouring the responsibility to context, it should do so in ways that respect critical scholarship as far as possible.

4 African philosophy and ideology One loose end should be tied. Perhaps, the attempt to think through the meaning of African philosophy by way of articulating some of the constraints the idea of a university might impose on it will be seen as an attempt to exorcise the spirit of revolutionary politics from African philosophy. More clearly, it may be seen as a way of concealing the relationship between (African) philosophy and ideology. To the extent that it suggests that a university-type activity is one that exhibits what we have described as the scholarship principle vis-à -vis its knowledgeproduction objectives, it tends to focus solely on academic philosophy and, in the process, fails to capture the sense in which African philosophy is born of struggle and is fundamentally a response to that struggle. To turn to the idea of a university in order to make sense of African philosophy, to appropriate it to the context of a university, is perhaps to turn it into merely a discursive analysis of concepts and, as such, leave it ‘effectively emasculated’ (Nkrumah 1970, p. 29, 54). Indeed, Kwame Nkrumah identified this as a feature of philosophy closely aligned with some concept of a university, essentially a Western notion of the university. Although we have already intimated that the project undertaken here is not a reflection on the nature of this or that university, but an idea of what a university might be, this concern still raises the need to consider whether and to what extent African philosophy as a university-type activity is related to ideology, particularly in its manifestations in revolutionary politics. Moreover, this suspicion regarding a university-type conception of African philosophy is interesting in part not only because it suggests a deliberate seeking to rid African philosophy of traces of revolutionary ideology, but also because it suggests that in doing so, it may be caught up implicitly in the maintenance of another kind of ideology—one that, although it is not explicitly revolutionary, is nevertheless deeply political. The result is a view according to which African philosophy purports to be non-ideological even though it is in fact in service of a different kind of ideology. In order to fully appreciate the foregoing suspicion, it is worth noting that African philosophy has and could play a key role in African liberation politics. For example, some of the revolutionaries and post-independence leaders of African states were also influential African political philosophers who consciously sought to relate their philosophical ideas and ideological commitments to the concrete challenge of resisting the forces of colonialism and to rework and appropriate traditional values to these modern circumstances. They include Senegal’s Leopold Senghor, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. So, to the extent that the question of the proper relationship of African philosophy to ideology remains unanswered, there remains as well the suspicion that construing African philosophy as a university-type activity not only strips it

African philosophy in the context of a university  261 of the capability to play a vital role in African liberation politics but also undermines any such vision insofar as it is (implicitly) ideological while professing to be non-ideological. Roughly, there are three perspectives on the relationship between African philosophy and ideology. Nkrumah represents one of these—the view that ideological commitments and philosophical reasoning are essentially inseparable. In other words, (African) philosophical endeavour is always ideological. In general, it involves taking seriously the ways in which the conditions of the social and political world in which philosophy is undertaken informs the practice. It is the recognition that insofar as a philosopher is situated, her philosophical activity must begin somewhere, as a practice already caught up in actual social and political realities. Nkrumah writes, ‘When the revolution has been successful, the ideology comes to characterize the society. It is the ideology which gives a countenance to the ensuing social milieu … . The statement, elucidation and theoretical defense of such a principle will collectively form a philosophy. Hence philosophy admits of being an instrument of ideology’ (Nkrumah 1970, p. 56). It would be uncharitable to read ideological commitment in this sense as straightforwardly entailing some form of irrationality—the refusal to submit some belief to rational scrutiny or to modify or perhaps reject it in light of relevant counter-evidence. If this were the case, the idea that philosophy is necessarily ideological would disqualify it as a university-type activity. However, it is fair to say Nkrumah’s willingness to submit an ideological principle to ‘theoretical defense’ suggests something more than a blind acceptance of it. Accordingly, I have preferred instead to characterize the position in terms of inseparability; the idea that philosophical endeavour and ideological commitments cannot be simply divorced. The second perspective is embodied in the critical work of Paulin Hountondji who in part was interested in articulating the proper meaning of African philosophy. His view was that philosophy properly understood is independent of politics to the extent that they belong to two different levels of discourses. This is clearly seen in Hountondji’s critical remarks on Nkrumah’s Consciencism, on the basis of which he expressed the hope that philosophy can be liberated from the grips of political ideology. Here is Hountondji: ‘If we can overthrow this thesis, [the ideological thesis that politics has a metaphysical level] we will be able to achieve …  the liberation of philosophical debate, as it recovers both its indispensable pluralism and its specific object as freely developing discussion around a specific problem’ (Hountondji 2017, p. 57). The key point, it seems, is that philosophy should be seen as a separate science, one marked by rigour in confronting ideas and pluralism with respect to them. It is worth pointing out that suspicions abound regarding the supposed neutrality of philosophical activity in relation to ideology. Analytic philosophy is a frequent culprit. The central criticism is that its pretensions to being a ‘truthseeking’ enterprise and its deference to ideal, as opposed to non-ideal, concerns often mask its tendency to maintain the social and political status quo. And to that extent, critics say that this account of philosophy does not fully escape the

262  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe grip of ideology as it purports to do. It remains deeply ideological, even if not always overtly (Srinivasan 2016, p. 372; see also Flikschuh 2017, p. 104). More concretely, the criticism is that Hountondji’s insistence on the separation between philosophy and ideology might just reflect some implicit and perhaps dangerous ideological commitment. As I go on to indicate briefly below, this view of analytic philosophy is sometimes overstated; at any rate, the view of philosophy as a university-type activity is amenable to the idea that philosophical activity should also contemplate and engage critically with the social and political conditions that characterize the immediate context in which that activity takes place. In the meantime, it is worth noting that, more recently, Katrin Flikschuh has suggested the idea of philosophy in action—a practically engaged philosophy—as a possibility somewhere in between the previous two options. She writes, ‘positively formulated, practical relevance is the endeavour intellectually to engage the moral, political, or even more general (scientific, theological) issues and beliefs that characterize one’s given social context and that bear reflecting on, at least in part, for just that reason’ (Flikschuh 2017, p. 102). As I understand it, the idea is that rather than dwelling on whether philosophy is ideological in the senses expressed above, we should rather focus on the ways philosophy can become more and more relevant to the practical issues that arise in the context in which philosophical activity occurs. Flikschuh believes that African philosophers like Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye exhibit in their philosophical reflections the idea of philosophy as a practically engaged activity. They are neither restricted by particular ideological commitments that constrain the free confrontation of ideas (as Hountondji fears), nor are they undertaking philosophy in ways that effectively emasculate it, by reducing it to merely a reflection on concepts (as Nkrumah fears). Moreover, although Flikschuh recognizes the possibility of slippage from philosophy that is practically engaged to ideology—in the sense of committing to dogmas not held up to scrutiny—she thinks that some possibility nevertheless remains for distinguishing between them. In general, then, the presumably nonideological philosopher needs to turn attention increasingly to practical concerns suggested by the context in which she undertakes her philosophical activity, while the explicitly ideological philosopher should be wary of and remain alert to the danger of slipping into dogmatism. Flikschuh’s approach is quite attractive. It rejects the extreme possibilities regarding the relationship between African philosophy and ideology and seems to define a middle point that is intuitively appealing. However, by focusing on the idea of university-type activities we are likely to arrive at a somewhat different approach, one that does not necessarily deny the extremes but sets out the conditions under which they may be regarded as approaches to African philosophy in the context of a university. On this view, a university-type activity associated with the objective of knowledge production is such that it does not preclude any knowledge-claim or methods of arriving at truth from scrutiny. So, whereas Flikschuh’s proposal appears to remain silent on the proper role of ideology in the conception of philosophy, preferring instead that philosophy engage practically with the world around it, the idea of philosophy as a university-type activity allows us

African philosophy in the context of a university  263 to think more clearly about the nature of the relationship between philosophy and ideology. And what it claims is that philosophy is neither entirely divorced from ideology nor entirely reducible to ideology; in other words, the relationship between philosophy and ideology is not an all-or-nothing kind of relationship. It is more productive instead to think of it as occurring in degrees and on a spectrum. At one end, ideology is a prominent feature of philosophical practice, and as one moves towards the other end of the spectrum, one notices the diminishing influence of ideology to the point that it becomes less prominent. In the middle cases, one might find something like Flikschuh’s conception of (African) philosophy as a practically engaging activity. The view of philosophy as a university-type activity construes philosophy not in terms of its manifestations in the middle cases (as I read Flikschuh’s account) but as the complex of the entire spectrum and insofar as they exhibit the principles we highlighted above as key to the idea of a university. So, while Flikschuh is right about the need for (African) philosophy to be practically engaging, (African) philosophy construed as a university-type activity need not always be so; it would suffice if it were just critically engaging at a purely theoretical level. Flikschuh seems to envisage something like Wiredu’s philosophical account of consensual democracy as practically engaging insofar as it is both provoked by the challenge of persistent failures in governance in many parts of Africa and seeks to respond to that challenge. The view that philosophy is a university-type activity suggests that that way of construing philosophy does not quite reflect the entire range of practices that we regard as philosophical. For example, Leke Adeofe’s attempt to draw the implications of Locke’s hypothetical case of the Prince and the Cobbler for personal identity in Yoruba thought evinces the sort of rigour that university-type activities aimed at knowledge should evince, even though it is not practically engaging—at least not in the same way as Wiredu’s. On my view, both sorts of activities can count as (African) philosophy, and what holds them together, besides that they seek to respond to fundamental problems typically associated with philosophical inquiry, is that they satisfy the conditions of a university-type activity, in particular the scholarship principle. I want to suggest that if we take seriously the view that some method or assumption associated with a university-type activity is potentially revisable when held up to scrutiny, whether or not philosophy is ideological, implicitly or explicitly, is not the primary concern. Instead, the real question is the epistemic status of the ideologies—explicit or implicit—that are associated with African philosophy. To the extent that the ideological basis of African philosophy is shielded from philosophical criticism, and is taken to be immune from revision, that corresponding conception of African philosophy fails to count as a university-type activity as I have described it. This is why I indicated above that the criticism directed at analytic philosophy is sometimes overstated. It is not its alleged denial of ideological commitment or its supposed aims of preserving the status quo that essentially matters for its status as a legitimate way of going about philosophical activity; instead, it is whether and to what extent its pretensions to truth-seeking and its implicit or explicit commitment to ideology are open to rigorous scrutiny and contestation.

264  Oritsegbubemi A. Oyowe

5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to shift attention away from what I described as a standard approach to thinking about African philosophy, one that requires its practitioners to justify how and to what extent it is at once universal, that is, philosophical, and particular, that is, African. One of the major contentions was that the history of philosophy itself evinces sufficient complexity for an easy solution to the dilemma to be extremely difficult. Moreover, the need to demonstrate how and to what extent philosophical activity can be both universal and particular should not be the burden of African philosophy, but of philosophy in general. Rather than adopt the standard approach, this chapter has sought to provide the basic contours of the sort of activities that might count as university-type activities and to determine which of the ways of conceiving (African) philosophy qualifies it as a university-type activity aimed at knowledge production. One key characteristic of a university-type activity aimed at knowledge production, as we saw, is that it can be held up to scrutiny and open to rigorous criticism. As we saw, making sense of African philosophy this way leaves open the possibility that some ways of conceiving it may not be suited to the context of a university, even if plausible for other reasons and in other contexts of application. In addition, the chapter has considered the probable objection that making sense of African philosophy by way of thinking through the idea of a university runs the risk of endorsing a notion of philosophy that purports to be non-­ideological. In this connection, it examined the supposed relationship between (African) philosophy and ideology, specifically noting three different ways that relationship has been construed. On the view of African philosophy as a university-type activity, however, what ultimately matters is not whether African philosophy is related to ideology implicitly or explicitly, but instead is the epistemic status of the associated ideology. In particular, it is whether the implicit or explicit influences of ideology in the philosophy are open to criticism and potentially revisable as a consequence of philosophical reflection.

References Adichie, C. (2013). Americanah. London: Fourth Estate. Bewaji, J. (1995). Critical Comments on Pearce, African Philosophy, and the Sociological Thesis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 25, pp. 99–119. Bilchitz, D. (2010). Do Corporations Have Positive Fundamental Rights Obligations? Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Philosophy, 57, pp. 1–35. Bodunrin, P. (1981). The Question of African Philosophy. Philosophy, 56, pp. 161–179. Eze, C. (2001). African Philosophy and the Analytic Tradition. Philosophical Papers, 30, pp. 205–213. Flikschuh, K. (2017). Nkrumah’s Philosophy in Action: Between Ideology and Ethno­ philosophy. In: M. Ajei, ed., Disentangling Consciencism: Essays on Kwame Nkrumah’s Philosophy, Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. 93–111. Hallen, B. (2010). “Ethnophilosophy” Redefined? Thought and Practice, 2, pp. 74–85.

African philosophy in the context of a university  265 Hountondji, P. (2017). The Idea of Philosophy in Nkrumah’s Consciencism. In: M. Ajei, ed., Disentangling Consciencism: Essays on Kwame Nkrumah’s Philosophy, Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. 45–62. Hountondji, P. (1983). African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. London: Hutchinson & Co. Irele, A. (1983). Introduction. In: P. Hountondji, ed., African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, London: Hutchinson & Co., pp. 7–30. Janz, B. (2004). Philosophy as if Place Mattered. In: C. Havi and D. Gamez, eds., What Philosophy Is: Contemporary Philosophy in Action, London: Continuum, pp. 103–115. Majeke, N. (1952). The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest. Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa. Matolino, B. (2015). Universalism and African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 34, pp. 433–440. Matolino, B. (2011). Tempels’ Philosophical Racialism. South African Journal of Philosophy, 30, pp. 330–342. Mbembe, A. (2016). Decolonizing the University: New Directions. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15, pp. 29–45. Metz, T. (2015). Africanizing Institutional Culture: What is Plausible and Possible. In: P. Tabensky and S. Matthews, eds., Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions, Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, pp. 242–271. Metz, T. (2009). The Final Ends of Higher Education in Light of an African Moral Theory. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43, pp. 179–201. Nkrumah, K. (1970). Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization. First Modern Reader Edition. New York: Monthly Review Press. Oruka, O. (1972). Mythologies as African Philosophy. East African Journal, 9, pp. 5–11. Pearce, C. (1992). African Philosophy and the Sociological Thesis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 22, pp. 440–460. Srinivasan, A. (2016). Philosophy and Ideology. Theoria, 31, pp. 371–380.

Part V

Comparative perspectives

15 Relational normative thought in Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism Dorothea Gädeke

1 Introduction Anglo-American and European normative philosophy is essentially individualist in character, while African philosophy is of a collectivist kind. Such general statements are common within the comparative literature on these philosophical traditions. Individualism considers the individual, taken separately, to be of sole and ultimate concern. The most prominent example of individualist normative thought are the various types of liberalism currently predominant in Anglo-American and European philosophy and politics. Collectivism, by contrast, holds that it is the community itself that is of normative concern. With its decidedly communalist orientation, African philosophy seems to be based precisely on such a collectivist approach to normative thought. Such homogenizing ascriptions, however, are misleading for at least two reasons. First, they risk falsely suggesting a homogeneity among African or AngloAmerican and European normative philosophy that ignores the diversity of philosophical traditions that have been and continue to be shaped by controversies over fundamental concepts of normative thought rather than by widespread agreement. Second, the representation of the domain of normative thought as being either individualist or collectivist is too narrow. It conceals a third perspective: Thaddeus Metz claims that African philosophy is best interpreted as neither individualist nor collectivist,1 as it puts relationships between people at the centre of normative concern, not individuals or communities. In fact, relational forms of normative thought have attracted increasing attention in the comparative literature. As Sandra Harding has pointed out, African ethics and the Western feminist ethic of care share an emphasis on praiseworthy relations (Harding 1987).2 Similarly, Daniel Bell and Metz have highlighted affinities with regard to the crucial importance accorded to harmonious relationships between African and Chinese philosophy (Bell/Metz 2011).3 Some even suggest that Marxist and Christian thought need to be reinterpreted in relational terms (see Metz/Miller 2016: 2). These references certainly testify to the perceived attractiveness of the relational paradigm. If, however, relational normative thought covers approaches as diverse as African, Feminist, Chinese and possibly Marxist and Christian ones, one may wonder: What exactly does relationality mean? What is it that these approaches share? And what, if anything, is particular about relationality as compared with other, non-relational approaches?

270  Dorothea Gädeke This chapter aims to clarify the notion of relationality in normative thought by bringing African relational thought into conversation with a fourth body of literature, over and beyond Anglo-American or European Feminism and Chinese approaches, namely republicanism. More specifically, I will concentrate on the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu and on Neo-republicanism as developed by Philip Pettit (Pettit 1997; Pettit 2012). By picking out two particular contemporary approaches within the African and the Anglo-American or European philosophical tradition, I aim to move beyond simplifying contrasting schemes such as Western/African or Male/Female ethics. What I am interested in is the relational form of normative thought. I will defend neither a particular version of relational normative thought nor the relational approach in general. Rather, I will show how different dimensions of relational thought operate in different ways within the two approaches I compare. Hence, instead of comparing principles or values, I am interested in different forms of relational arguments that help clarify what it means to pursue a relational approach to normative thought. I will first summarize some relational features of normative thought in Ubuntu (2.) and in Neo-republicanism (3.). Against this background, I propose a way of systematizing relational thought by distinguishing four dimensions of relationality: the object of normative concern, the grounds of normative concern, the content of normative concern and normative epistemology. While Ubuntu and Neorepublicanism broadly share a relational perspective on the question of what matters normatively and why it does, as well as on how to reach normative judgments, they differ with regard to relational content: Neo-republicanism not only formulates a weaker, negative account of relationality than the positive one advocated by proponents of Ubuntu, it also concentrates on a perspective on relationality that has been lacking in the comparative literature so far, the structural one as opposed to the interactional and virtue-based one.4 These different perspectives arguably reflect different domains of normativity: the ethical, the moral and the political (4.). To conclude, I sketch some preliminary thoughts on how they relate to one another (5.).

2 Relational thought based on Ubuntu The notion of Ubuntu, translated broadly speaking as humanness, is often taken to represent the core of African ethics and worldviews (see Mnyaka/Mothlabi 2005: 215). Yet, what exactly Ubuntu stands for is a contentious issue. It is both a highly influential and a notoriously elusive notion. Bernard Matolino and Wenceslaus Kwindingwi polemically state that “the notion of ubuntu has enjoyed such popular appeal that it can be said that it has become anything to anyone who so wishes to deploy it” (Matolino/Kwindingwi 2013: 201). It therefore seems helpful to distinguish three contexts in which the notion of Ubuntu is mobilized: First, Ubuntu as an actual and/or reconstructed worldview and practice ascribed to (precolonial) African societies (see Mnyaka/Mothlabi 2005); second, Ubuntu as a political discourse, which originated in the fight for liberation in Zimbabwe and South Africa around the idea of mobilizing Ubuntu as a resource to forge a new national

Relational normative thought  271 identity5; and third, Ubuntu as a philosophical concept that provides a contribution to philosophical debates, particularly (though not exclusively) with regard to normative issues (Shutte 2001; Ramose 2005; Metz 2007; Murove 2014). In what follows, I focus on the normative side of two philosophical accounts of Ubuntu. Both are decidedly relational in being primarily concerned with a particular kind of relationships, namely harmonious ones. Yet, while the first conceives of Ubuntu as a perfectionist ideal aiming to develop good character, the second focuses on an account of morally right action. 2.1 Ramose’s perfectionist account of Ubuntu One prominent and highly influential philosophical account of Ubuntu is Mogobe Ramose’s African Philosophy through Ubuntu. It starts from the notion of ­Ubu-ntu, understood as be-ing human, that is, as human-ness (Ramose 2005: 37). Ramose emphasizes that this notion of be-ing is a dynamic one; it represents both being and becoming human. In fact, being and becoming human are not distinct and in opposition to each other but rather two inseparable aspects of a holistic view of reality (39). The insoluble link between the “be-ing becoming” and the “temporarily having become” (36) is expressed through the hyphenated writing of be-ing and ubu-ntu. The prefix Ubu-, evoking the general idea of enfolded be-ing, is oriented towards –ntu, that is, towards unfoldment in the concrete manifestation of being (36). Hence, Ubuntu does not merely refer to being human in a static sense; rather, it implies the imperative to actually become human: “What is decisive then is to prove oneself to be the embodiment of ubu-ntu (botho) because the fundamental ethical, social and legal judgment of human worth and human conduct is based upon ubu-ntu” (37). The basic normative requirement of Ubuntu is that one affirm “one’s humanness by recognizing the same in others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them” (Ramose 2005: 97). The notion of human-ness – as opposed to humanism – reflects the dynamic understanding of be-ing. It emphasizes that “motion is the principle of be-ing” and that “the forces of life manifest themselves in an infinite variety of content and form” (149) that cannot be fixed by describing them as humanism. The notion of Ubuntu responds to this instability of be-ing by calling on individuals to develop and display human-ness through humane relations with others to preserve and maintain cosmic harmony in all spheres of life (46).6 Humane relations are characterized by human equality, reciprocity and solidarity, reflecting the idea that “one human being is deemed to be the same thing, namely, a human being in relation to another human being” (99) and by the principle of sharing the joys and sorrows of life, the goods of the earth and personal property (100). Thus, as Ramose summarizes his view, “[s]haring and caring for one another are basic tenets of African morality” (102). Ramose’s account of Ubuntu is by no means collectivist. Ubuntu does not refer to the community, taken as a normative entity in its own right. In fact, he emphasizes “the individual human being is an object of intrinsic value in its own right” (Ramose 2005: 97). Affirming one’s own humanness through the recognition of

272  Dorothea Gädeke humanness in others means considering the individual other as well as oneself as worthy of dignity and respect. This entails thinking of the individual not merely as an object but rather as a subject of intrinsic value in its own right (149), that is, as a “wholeness acquiring rights as such” (151). At the same time, Ramose’s account is not individualistic either. It focuses on how humanness manifests itself within communal relations between individuals. Ramose maintains that an individual only counts as truly human when relating to others, and that means in the context of actual humane relations (99). Treating the individual other with dignity and respect and recognising one’s own humanness in others expresses the idea of individuals as being part of a “oneness” (99). The unceasing movement of be-ing “makes sense only if we recognise that the forces of life do not belong to anyone” (149). Human-ness itself is essentially a shared property. Others do not merely present a context for displaying one’s own humanity. They are part of what it means to be human and to maintain harmony. Hence, what matters is not the individual, taken in the abstract, but rather harmonious relations individuals establish among each other. Reading Ramose’s account of Ubuntu through the categories of Anglo-American or European normative thought, one might be inclined to insist that there is, after all, an individualist thrust to Ubuntu given that it is a perfectionist notion, calling on us to realize our distinctively human nature. It might evoke a narrow, self-regarding individualism as the focus on personal growth seems to condone a somewhat selfcentred ethic concerned primarily with turning oneself into a better person. Hence, as Metz argues, on such a perfectionist view, ultimately “it is one’s own good that has fundamental moral worth” (Metz 2007: 332). The good of others only seems to matter indirectly, as part of what it means to realize one’s own self. This criticism, however, is itself based on an individualist understanding of ethics: Whether it is my own good or the good of others that is taken to be of ultimate value, both views remain individualist in the sense of concentrating on the good of individuals. A decidedly relational reading of Ramose’s account of Ubuntu, by contrast, emphasizes that communing with others is neither solely for my own sake nor for that of others. The focus is on our shared humanity that we develop through communing with each other and that allows us to preserve cosmic harmony. On this reading, Ramose’s perfectionism is not individualistic in the sense of focusing on self-centred self-realization precisely because developing and affirming one’s humanness is essentially constituted by recognizing our common humanity in others, that is, seeing our own humanity as being bound up in that of others and embodying ubu-ntu through communing with them. It is itself a relational form of perfectionism. Realizing one’s relational self does not mean giving priority to one’s own good. Neither does it entail prioritizing the good of others. It consists of how one relates to others. Other authors support such a relational reading of the perfectionist understanding of Ubuntu. Murove argues that the notion of Ubuntu needs to be understood against the background of the “worldview of relationality” that underpins it, that is, by the “original understanding of a human being as a relational being” (Murove 2014: 37). That in turn means “the definition of Ubuntu as humanness

Relational normative thought  273 is dovetailed by this presumption – namely, that humanness is our existential precondition of our bondedness with others” (Murove 2014: 37). Developing one’s humanness therefore is not a self-centred endeavour whereby one reaches out to others merely in order to improve one’s own character. Rather, the human aspects of our nature already relate us to others. Hence, humanness can only be understood, developed and displayed through developing this relational aspect of our selves. Similarly, Augustine Shutte emphasizes, “although the goal is personal fulfilment, selfishness is excluded” (Shutte 2001: 30).7 Selfishness certainly is not the same as individualist normative thought. One might defend individualism without condoning selfishness, such as when the good of other individuals is deemed more important than one’s own. Yet, the point Shutte highlights is that, from the point of view of Ubuntu, the very idea of personal fulfilment can only be understood in terms of social relations with others. Any normative reasoning based on striving to develop one’s own humanness already makes reference to others and their humanness. Relational perfectionism is geared towards expressing and developing the oneness of being human, not the alleged humanness of merely being one. 2.2 Metz’s interactional account of Ubuntu Perfectionist accounts of Ubuntu seem to be dominant in the literature (see Metz 2007: 331). Yet, Metz develops an alternative account based on the fundamental value of harmonious relationships without invoking any perfectionist underpinning. In fact, Metz’s approach does not pertain to character. Rather, he defends “a comprehensive, basic norm that is intended to account for what all permissible acts have in common as distinct from impermissible ones” (321). His aim in spelling out such an Ubuntu-based principle for evaluating right actions lies, ultimately, in comparing and contrasting it with principles advocated in the AngloAmerican or European traditions, such as utility or respect (321). The principle he generates from extant literature postulates that an “action is right insofar as it promotes shared identity among people grounded on good-will; an act is wrong to the extent that it fails to do so and tends to encourage the opposites of division and ill-will” (338).8 It requires us to commune through identifying with others by sharing a form of life and considering oneself a part of it and through exhibiting solidarity with others by caring for their quality of life. While Metz draws on the same normative content as Ramose, emphasizing the value of caring and sharing with others, he approaches this content from a different normative perspective: Caring and sharing, that is, solidarity and identity are (primarily) a matter of performing right actions, not of living a genuinely human way of life. One might argue that Metz’s account nevertheless retains a reference to character traits. The notions of shared identity and love (as the combination of shared identity and good will [Metz 2007: 337]) seem to refer to an attitudinal dimension that extends beyond particular acts. After all, while particular acts might well be expressions of shared identity or love, the latter transcend the individual act. We would not speak of an act as a manifestation of love or shared identity if that

274  Dorothea Gädeke affection or sense of belonging was not rooted in a corresponding disposition that outlasts this act. Shared identity and love seem to consist in a disposition to identify with others or to display affection rather than simply to do so on a case-bycase basis. Still, Metz focuses on what they entail for the evaluation of particular acts, setting aside how to evaluate a good character. This change of focus is in part motivated by his rejection of perfectionist accounts. In fact, initially Metz pitched his own preferred view as a “communitarian” rendition of Ubuntu that better captures the communalist nature often ascribed to African thought than the perfectionist accounts of Ubuntu, which he takes to have an individualist, egocentric leaning (333, 337). In recent work, however, Metz has emphasized and developed the relational nature of his account (Metz 2010; Metz 2012; Metz 2013b; Metz 2016; Metz/ Miller 2016). The basic idea is that what is special about human beings is their capacity to be in communal relationships with others. It is this relational capacity that grounds our moral status and thus warrants respect from others, not relationships as such, as he suggested earlier (Metz 2012: 393; Metz 2016: 180).9 Right actions are construed as respecting and valuing this status by relating to them in a certain way. In cashing out what this means, Metz now puts less emphasis on actually seeking to commune with others; respecting our capacity to commune can take various forms including not degrading this capacity, honouring existing relationships and possibly helping others to commune (see Metz 2016: 186). Yet, his account still differs substantially from individualist accounts in being based on a relational capacity and in being concerned not primarily with how individuals fare, but rather with how they relate to one another. And it is not collectivist as it accords moral status to individuals, not communities. In fact, it was Metz who highlighted that Ubuntu suggests a third way of approaching normative thought. Instead of focusing on facts about individuals, such as their needs, or facts about a community, such as a certain collective identity, it draws attention to the way we relate to one another and thus to the fundamental moral value of a particular kind of social relationship. Metz maintains that it is precisely this relational form of argument that best articulates “the most central strand of sub-Saharan ethical thought” (Metz 2012: 388). In this sense, the relational reading of Ramose’s perfectionist account of Ubuntu suggested above is certainly in the spirit of Metz’ own understanding of African normative thought. That, however, means that the crucial difference between their accounts lies not in relationality as such. Rather, the accounts differ with regard to the object of normative enquiry: While Ramose conceives of Ubuntu in terms of a relational account of the good person who realizes the valuable aspects of human nature, Metz focuses on a relational answer to the question of what makes an action a right action.

3 Relational thought in Neo-republicanism Republicanism arguably formulates the most powerful challenge to liberalism within contemporary Anglo-American and European philosophy. The republican

Relational normative thought  275 tradition is older than the liberal one, going back to Athens and Rome and the adaptation of ancient political thought in the early modern period. However, it gradually fell into oblivion with the rise of liberalism that went hand in hand with the rise of a commercial class and its interest in not hampering economic activity. Under these new circumstances, the republican emphasis on the common good, collective decision-making and civic virtue did not seem relevant any more. It was only in the second half of the 20th century that philosophers in the European and Anglo-American context started to rediscover the republican tradition in order to develop a systematic alternative to liberal political philosophy (see Arendt 1960; Taylor 1989; Habermas 1996). Currently, the most influential approach within this republican revival is Neo-republicanism, as developed by Pettit. The core of Neo-republicanism is the ideal of non-domination. Pettit casts it as a conception of freedom and develops it in critical engagement with classic liberal theories of freedom (Pettit 1997: chapters 1 and 2). Classic liberals and libertarians conceive of political freedom in terms of non-interference. The basic idea is that the individual needs to be able to make choices without suffering interference from others. Pettit, by contrast, draws attention away from the number and importance of unobstructed choices and towards how persons relate to one another. He takes freedom to be constituted by a status that protects against the arbitrary power of others. Freedom in the sense of non-domination thus is an account of the free person, not merely of free choice (Pettit 2007). The notion of domination refers to power asymmetries that deny others equal status and thus prevent them from relating to their fellows on equal terms, being able to look them in the eye without the need to bow or scrape (Pettit 2012: 82). Pettit cashes it out as the “capacity to interfere [… ] on an arbitrary basis [… ] in certain choices that the other is in a position to make” (Pettit 1997: 52). This conception nicely brings out the two main differences from the liberal ideal of noninterference. On the one hand, non-domination runs deeper than non-interference as it deems the mere capacity to interfere as a constraint on freedom, over and beyond instances of actual interference. This wide account of power is meant to capture the intuition that even the slave of a benevolent master who refrains from interfering with her slave remains a slave. As long as she retains the capacity to interfere at will, she dominates the slave (Pettit 1997: 31). The notion of domination is concerned less with what people actually do and more with how their relationship is structured. On the other hand, the ideal of non-domination is narrower than non-­ interference: Neo-republicans emphasize that only arbitrary interference is problematic. Non-arbitrary interference that is forced to track my interests (Pettit 1997: 52), or as Pettit has put it more recently, that is under my control (Pettit 2012: 245), does not compromise my freedom, as it does not entail being subjected to the will of others. This point reflects the idea that some interference through social and legal institutions may be required in order to ensure that everyone enjoys the status of non-domination (Pettit 1997: 122). Like the different renderings of Ubuntu sketched above, Neo-republicanism is critical of both collectivist and individualist ethics. In contrast to communitarian

276  Dorothea Gädeke positions that are sometimes also referred to as ‘republican’ (see Sandel 1996; Taylor 1989), Neo-republicans do not consider community the core focus of normative thought. In fact, Pettit is very critical of any account that might jeopardize the rights of individuals for the sake of a greater collectivity. He puts a lot of emphasis on devising institutional mechanisms for preventing a tyranny of the majority (see Pettit 2004). Furthermore, he is wary about positive conceptions of freedom that might legitimize coercion in the name of greater, true freedom. Just like the liberal conception of non-interference, he casts the ideal of nondomination as a decidedly negative account of freedom, focusing on the absence of external obstacles to individual freedom (Pettit 1997: 27–31). However, Neo-republicanism also does not take individuals considered separately as its subject matter. This is what sets it apart from liberalism: On liberal accounts, the free individual is able to make choices without interference from others. Behind this idea, largely dominant in European and Anglo-American political philosophy, lies a conception of the individual considered separately, in isolation from her social relations. In fact, others are conceived of as a potential threat that she needs to be protected against by securing a sphere of uninterfered, unobstructed choice. Neo-republicans, by contrast, hold that the problem is not interference as such, but rather being subjected to the will of others. From this perspective, it is misleading to look merely at how much interference a person suffers in making choices. Instead, we should direct our attention to the kind of social relations in which we find ourselves. Thinking about freedom means specifying how we can enjoy freedom in the presence of – and to some extent through – others instead of in their absence. This is what the ideal of non-domination expresses. It is a relational ideal in that it is concerned with how people relate to one another. Thus, it contrasts with individualist values such as material welfare or non-interference, which focus on the state of the individual alone. Others might, for contingent reasons, be necessary to help realize material welfare, such as through mechanisms of redistribution. Yet, the good of material welfare does not make essential reference to others in itself. Nondomination, by contrast, cannot be enjoyed in isolation from others. And yet it is not a collectivist ideal that risks overriding the individual. Rather, it is decidedly relational in that it can only be realized within relations of individuals to one another.

4 Four dimensions of relational thought Having sketched the basic relational features of Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism, I will now take a closer look at what it means to think about normativity in relational terms by comparing the two accounts. Note that I am less interested in the substantive differences between the views than in the forms of argument and thus in the way they understand relationality. I distinguish four dimensions of relational normative thought: the subject matter, the grounds, the content and normative epistemology. In all four dimensions, both Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism formulate relational accounts, though they differ most significantly with regard to content.

Relational normative thought  277 4.1 Social relations as the subject matter of normative thought Both Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism are relational in the general sense that they take relationships to be the relevant subject matter of normative thought, not the individual or the community as such. This is not a trivial point. One might argue that morality and other forms of normativity are social practices and as such always imply relating to others in one way or another. Material well-being or happiness, for instance, taken as moral concepts, require us to make sure that others enjoy the greatest amount of it – and thus not to steal from or harm others. In that sense, all accounts of morality seem to be relational. Yet, Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism share a deeper sense of relationality. Taking relationships to be the subject matter of normative thought means that the mere situation of individuals (or of groups), for instance, how much happiness (or communal cohesion) they enjoy, as such is neither moral nor immoral. From a relational perspective, focusing on how an individual (or a group) fares, in abstraction from their social relations, misses the point of what is of ultimate normative relevance, namely the kind of relations that pertain between individuals (or groups). Note that this general sense of relationality does not imply ascribing moral status to relationships themselves. Although this would be one particularly strong way of cashing out the view that relationships are the subject matter of normative thought, it is not the only one – and in fact, it is not the view put forward by the proponents of Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism presented above.10 Metz initially played with “the idea that relationships of some kinds have basic moral status” (Metz 2007: 333). However, in recent writings he dropped this idea out of a concern with the partiality involved in according extant relationships a special standing. He now maintains that it is the individual who enjoys basic moral status, albeit in virtue of her ability to relate to others in a certain way (Metz 2012: 392–396).11 On Ramose’s account, relationships are valuable; yet they do not enjoy a status over and above the individual as individuals have intrinsic value in their own right (Ramose 2005: 97). Pettit holds that non-dominating relationships are of value because they constitute the status of non-domination (Pettit 1997: 106–109). Yet, the bearers of moral status are individuals. Thus, relationality in this first, general sense is not about the bearer of status but about the subject matter of normative thought.

4.2 Why to think relationally: relational grounds for relational normative thought One may ask, however, why we should think of the subject matter of morality in terms of relationships. This question highlights a second dimension of relational normative thought that refers to the grounds for taking a relational view. A first answer grounds relational normative thought in a relational social ontology. This is Ramose’s view. In fact, on his account, the ontological, the epistemological and the normative are not separated in the way they usually are in the Anglo-American or European philosophical traditions. Ubu-ntu is both the fundamental ontological

278  Dorothea Gädeke as well as the fundamental epistemological category – and, one may add, the normative one (Ramose 2005: 36). The inseparable dual aspects of Ubuntu, the being and becoming, are an expression of what he calls a “rheomodic” ontology that resists thinking in fragmented categories of being and emphasizes the whole-ness of existence (40–45). It conceives of be-ing as an incessant motion of shaping and reshaping, of being and becoming, of one-ness and whole-ness – and thus of being as interconnected be-ing. This ontological dimension of Ubuntu is expressed in Ubuntu as a gerund, as a verbal noun that emphasizes the do-ing over the do-er and refers to motion as the principle of be-ing (41). Ubuntu also constitutes the way we see and know the world. This epistemological aspect is captured by Ubuntu as a gerundive, that is, a verbal adjective (Ramose 2005: 36). While Ubu- represents the general be-ing of the world in its whole-ness, -ntu denotes the specific differentiation, the temporarily having become, and thus that which is known. The epistemological aspect refers to this “nodal point at which be-ing assumes concrete form or a mode of being in the process of continuous unfoldment” (36). However, this specific manifestation is itself part of incessant motion. This is why Ubuntu is a verbal adjective, not merely an adjective: “[e]pistemologically, be-ing is conceived as a perpetual and universal movement of sharing and exchange of the forces of life” (41). At the same time, the gerundive aspect of Ubuntu also expresses its normative dimension: The imperative to become human through affirming, developing and displaying one’s humanness is itself an expression of the continuous flow of be-ing becoming. Read from the perspective of Anglo-American or European traditions, one might wonder how a relational ontology may ground relational normative content. After all, this seems to be a classic example of the is-ought fallacy: The mere fact that the world is an interconnected one-ness does not seem to imply that we should preserve it as such, or develop our own human nature as relational beings within this world (see Metz 2013a). This criticism, however, needs to be reassessed in light of the complex and dynamic philosophical account Ramose articulates: The idea is not that the relational normative content derives from relational ontology. In fact, these dimensions are not distinct in the way the is-ought fallacy suggests. The ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ are both part of a world of motion and interconnectedness. In other words, the relational ontology, which conceives of being as an intertwined whole-ness and thus of the human being as a relational being, is inseparable from relational normative thought as the world the human being is part of is itself conceived of as a normative world. Challenging the link between ontology and normative content in Ramose’s account of Ubuntu therefore requires engaging with his relational ontology and the way he posits it as the philosophical foundation of Ubuntu as a comprehensive concept. Metz avoids giving his account of Ubuntu a controversial ontological underpinning. Instead, he refers to a relational capacity as grounds for his relational approach to normativity, focusing on the narrower issue of why a certain entity has moral status and thus is the object of a direct duty. Individualist accounts of moral status, he argues, are grounded in properties entirely intrinsic to that entity such as the capacity to experience pleasure and pain – or, if a group is deemed

Relational normative thought  279 the bearer of moral status, communal cohesion (Metz 2012: 389).12 Relational accounts of moral status, by contrast, hold that moral status is “constituted by some kind of interactive property between one entity and another” (390). The relational property Metz proposes as the ground of moral status is the capacity “of being part of a communal relationship of a certain kind” (393), where such relationships, in turn, are characterized by caring and sharing as explained above. It is precisely our capacity for communing with others that calls for being respected and thus grounds moral status. In fact, in his recent work, Metz characterizes relational approaches to normative thought as generally based on such relational properties (Metz/Miller 2016: 2). Pettit’s Neo-republicanism combines these features, drawing on a relational ontology that he calls holistic individualism as the basis for a pragmatist reconstruction of our relational capacity to reason (Pettit 1993: chapters 3 and 4). Ontologically speaking, Pettit defends individualism, as opposed to collectivism, in holding that the presence of social-structural regularities does not override or outflank our capacity as intentional agents. In spite of being exposed to a number of social regularities, we retain autonomy in the minimal sense of having the capacity to respond to reasons and adjust accordingly (Pettit 1993: 120). Hence, we are able to engage critically with social structures we find ourselves in and retain our individual agency as discursive agents. This defence of a minimal sense of individual autonomy, however, does not imply thinking of the individual as an atomistic, rational entity detached from its social environment. Quite to the contrary: Pettit’s social ontology is decidedly holist as opposed to atomist in that it maintains that we depend non-causally on social relations for the development of distinctive human capacities. The distinctive human capacity Pettit has in mind is precisely the capacity for reasoning. It might seem trivial to emphasize that we are subject to various causal influences from our parents, teachers, friends etc. in developing our capacity for reasoned thought. Yet, Pettit’s point runs deeper: The idea is not merely that there is a causal link between enjoying social relations and developing the capacity to think; rather, the link is constitutive (Pettit 1993: 170). It is based on the idea that reasoning involves following certain kinds of rules that are intelligible to others. The commonability of such rules, in turn, is a property that makes essential reference to others. An individual “can think commonable thoughts – thoughts that are suitably accessible or scrutable – only in a world where there are others and only in a world where she enjoys social relations with others” (181). Hence, Pettit argues the capacity for reasoning itself is a “social ability”; even if we were to withdraw from social relations, we would still “carry the voice of society” within ourselves; “[i]f that voice were absent, if there were no others to whom the individual thinker was answerable, then scrutable human thought would be impossible” (191). In other words: As thinking beings we are essentially relational beings.13 Even if this account of a relational ontology is deemed plausible, one might still wonder how it is linked to the ideal of non-domination. The mere fact of being dependent in a constitutive sense on others does not seem to entail any specific normative content. However, the link between the ontological account of our

280  Dorothea Gädeke relational nature and the relational ideal of non-domination can be reconstructed in two steps. First, a relational ontology entails that ideals for the assessment of social and political institutions are not merely individual values like material welfare that could in principle be enjoyed in total isolation. While a relational ontology might not entail any specific normative ideal, it requires that at least some of our normative ideals be relational in character (Pettit 1993: 302–322)14 – and this requirement reflects precisely the first dimension of relational normative thought that was to be grounded: the idea of taking relationships as the primary subject matter of normative thought. Second, the link between Pettit’s relational ontology and the particular relational ideal of non-domination is provided by a pragmatist reconstruction of discursive practices.15 As conversable beings, i.e. beings who are able to reason, we are liable to have our judgments and actions held to relevant standards and are able to adjust accordingly. We are able to reconsider our reasons and correct them in light of criticism from others. We understand ourselves as having this capacity to be moved by reasons, even when we fail to exercise it. Hence, we also need to ascribe it to others with whom we engage discursively. This ascription, however, implies certain practical norms, as it presupposes that our capacity to be moved by reasons is not undermined in the first place. The notion of nondomination is meant to protect precisely these interpersonal conditions of our discursive capacity. This discursive capacity in turn is a decidedly relational capacity. It comprises not merely the socially constituted yet intrapersonal capacity to reason, but also our capacity to relate to others in a way suitable for everyone to be taken seriously as a credible speaker (Pettit 2001: 70). This relationality, in fact, goes deeper than Metz’s account. It does not just refer to others as possible agents to relate to; rather, it presupposes some kind of actual relationship. Pettit maintains “a relational capacity cannot exist without the occurrence of some interaction with others. The discursive power or status that someone has so far as their relationships with others are entirely discourse-friendly presupposes that these relationships are actually in place” (Pettit 2001: 71). In contrast to Metz, Pettit conceives of the relational capacity as a certain kind of power we enjoy in relation to others, not just as a capacity making reference to others that we retain in ourselves even without ever having to relate at all. In abstraction from any relationships, this power vis-à -vis others simply would not make sense – even though we would still be able, in principle, to relate to others in discursive ways.16 Comparing the Ubuntu-based and Neo-republican answers to the question of why we should take a relational approach to normative thought, it is striking that both refer to similar kinds of relational concepts, even though they are cashed out differently. While Ramose’s relational ontology is a comprehensive account of how individuals are relational beings, embedded in a web of relations that are themselves normative, Metz argues that it is our relational capacity to commune with others that grounds our claim to be respected as a being able to relate to others. Pettit in turn draws on both kinds of ideas: a relational ontology characterized as holistic individualism as well as a slightly different notion of a relational

Relational normative thought  281 capacity that he weaves together in a pragmatist reconstruction of our discursive practices. All three accounts of the sources of relational normative thought are relational, however, in focusing on relational features of human beings, whether these are relational capacities or an ontological account of the human being as a relational being – or both. 4.3 How to relate: relational normative content A third dimension of relational normative thought refers to normative content. Against the background of taking relationships as the subject matter of relational normative thought, this third dimension provides an answer to the questions: How do relationships matter? What kind of relationships matter? In this regard, the Ubuntu tradition differs fundamentally from the Neo-republican approach. Proponents of the philosophy of Ubuntu consider humane relationships as the core concern of normative thought. Such relationships are characterized positively in terms of some other-regarding values that should be realized through communing with others and that, ultimately, are an expression of human-ness and thus, Ubuntu. That means the core normative content is relational in the sense that it values and calls for actively seeking to commune with others. This is clearly the case in Ramose’s account, which calls for developing one’s humanity by relating to others in humane ways. Metz’s view has shifted from straightforwardly calling for communing with others through caring for and sharing with them to merely respecting our moral status in virtue of our capacity to commune. This respect, however, involves honouring extant relationships as well as helping others to commune. Respecting others thus is a way of securing the preconditions for communal relationships to flourish. Republicanism, by contrast, starts from a negative account of what kind of relationships should be avoided, namely relationships of domination. The ideal of non-domination does imply certain characteristics of non-dominating relationships, most notably the enjoyment of equal status that is protected by law and supported by corresponding civic virtue. Yet, non-domination does not call for relating to others for the sake of enjoying relationships. It merely requires us to make sure that whenever we do relate to others, everyone can walk tall and look each other in the eye (Pettit 2012: 82). This requires setting up non-­dominating institutions that allow us to relate to one another as equals. In that sense, domination rules out total disengagement in the face of existing domination. Yet, whether we should seek to realize any other positively defined values or even seek to establish new relationships beyond transforming those we find ourselves in remains open. In that sense, republicanism advocates a weak, negative form of relationality. Non-domination is certainly a relational good in the sense that while it is enjoyed by individuals, it constitutively requires to be realized with and through others. Yet, it does not place substantive value on seeking social relations for their own sake. Rather, it gives an account of what kind of relationships to avoid, namely dominating ones. Proponents of Ubuntu, by contrast, start from a positive

282  Dorothea Gädeke characterization of valuable relationships and prescribe seeking to commune in such a way with others. In fact, it is precisely actively relating to others through sharing and caring that constitutes the core content of Ubuntu. In that sense, Ubuntu provides a strong, positive account of relational normative content, turning communing with others into the basic requirement itself. This contrast between the philosophy of Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism does not just point to a difference in degree but to different kinds of relationality. While proponents of Ubuntu focus on how to realize human-ness through particular actions or dispositions of character, Neo-republicanism is concerned with how relationships are structured, that is, on whether they are symmetrical and reciprocal or hierarchical and unilateral. Behind this difference lie contrasting ideas about the object of normative thought. Ramose’s perfectionist account concentrates on the virtuous character and corresponding relational dispositions of individuals. Metz’s interactional account calls for respecting our capacity to commune, drawing attention to the actions of individuals. Neo-republicanism takes a structural approach to relational thought, focusing on structural properties of relationships. It demands suitable institutions that restructure social relations in a way that avoids subjecting some to domination. These three different objects of relational normative content arguably reflect the difference between ethics, moral philosophy and political philosophy: While ethics is primarily concerned with the good life and the good person, moral philosophy is about the right and right actions, whereas political philosophy is primarily about social structures and just institutions. Through this lens of analysis, Ramose’s normative account of Ubuntu primarily articulates an account of ­ethics, asking what it means to be a good person and to live a good life in light of our shared humanity. Metz, by contrast, takes a decidedly moral perspective on Ubuntu, putting the issue of right action at its centre. Pettit, finally, advocates a political approach to relationality that is primarily concerned with social background conditions, that is, social structures and just institutions. 4.4 How to think relationally: relational normative epistemology The fourth feature of relational normative thought pertains to normative epistemology, that is, to the question of how we are to reach normative judgments. A relational perspective on normative epistemology highlights the role social relations play in normative decision-making and thus endorses some form of contextualism. This holds for Ubuntu as well as for Neo-republicanism. Both draw inspiration from an idealized, small-scale historical practice, that of pre-colonial African societies in the case of Ubuntu and that of Ancient Rome and early modern city states in the case of Neo-republicanism. And both highlight that normative decision-making is informed by context and actual social relations. Given that Ubuntu calls for communing with particular others, it first requires paying attention to the other’s particular history, needs and character, not just to abstract features that characterize him or her as a human being. A normative judgment based on Ubuntu does not merely require following abstract principles but rather taking into account what it means to relate to this particular individual.17

Relational normative thought  283 Second, normative demands of Ubuntu are themselves in parts a lived experience. On Ramose’s account, normativity is inscribed in the unfragmented continuity of the world as a whole-ness and motion as the principle of be-ing. This is why normative judgments cannot be made in the abstract. The oneness of be-ing “should also be understood ontologically to mean that human relations are not and cannot be defined and determined once and for all time” (Ramose 2005: 98). Accordingly, Ramose emphasizes that law is not an abstract demand; it is “always a desideratum arising from concrete experience at a particular place and time” (87). Its goal is to enhance harmony in human relations, but it is itself not fixed; “[l]aw as a lived experience cannot reach a point of finality” (86). In fact, a rule of behaviour can “never become a permanent substitute of the continual unfolding of experience” (88). Normative judgments are themselves part of the lived experience of particular human beings at a particular point in time. This contextuality of normativity, however, does not mean that it is relativist in the sense that there are no context-transcending principles. The idea of humane relations and thus the principles of caring and sharing as “basic tenets of African morality” (102) articulate precisely the overarching value of Ubuntu, which is inscribed into the unfragmented continuity of being. Third, Ramose’s undogmatic stance on normativity implies an emphasis on consensual decision-making rather than adversarial conceptions such as those exemplified by multi-party democratic systems or even solitary abstract reasoning. Adversarial modes of decision-making are instances of dogmatism, as they require the participants to take up one position on a matter and defend it, as if there could not be an alternative, possibly even superior one (Ramose 2005: 103). Consensual decisions as called for by Ubuntu, by contrast, are based on the attempt to reconcile contending judgments on the matter at issue. This means that the very form of decision-making itself instantiates the requirement of relating to others in a harmonious way. Finally, the emphasis on the one-ness of be-ing implies that there is no opposition between rational and emotional reasoning, since reason and emotions are mutually dependent (Ramose 2005: 42). The concrete emotions within particular situations play an important role in normative decision-making. In fact, the requirement to commune with others also implies developing corresponding emotions such as empathy. Emotions, therefore, are part of normative content. Moreover, emotions such as irritation, anger, gratitude or sadness generated within a particular relationship are indicators of what is good or bad about this relationship – and thus also what needs to be changed to make it more humane (see Metz 2013b: 84). Neo-republicanism is also decidedly contextualist with regard to its normative epistemology, albeit in slightly different ways. Given that it does not call for seeking to commune with others but rather for avoiding relations of domination, actually existing relations of domination provide the starting point for normative reasoning. Relations of domination can take a variety of different forms. What exactly the ideal of non-domination requires in a given situation can only be established with regard to the kind of domination that is to be addressed. Thus, on the neo-republican view, paying attention to context does not mean paying

284  Dorothea Gädeke attention to particular others so much as taking into account and starting from the particular relations of domination to be addressed. Second, Neo-republicanism also holds that normative judgments form part of a lived experience. While the ideal of non-domination states what needs to be avoided, it remains underdetermined with regard to how this is to be achieved. Solutions to a similar kind of domination may differ from one context to the other. They are the answer that a particular political community establishes in order to address a particular form of domination. In that sense, realizing non-domination is a collective achievement in a particular social and historical context. It is itself a lived experience. Third, this is why Neorepublicans also rely on actual political processes and deliberation in order to establish what needs to be done about particular instances of domination. Abstract reasoning only provides a general account of domination and principles for an institutional framework that realizes basic non-domination and thus provides the means to address other forms of domination. What exactly this requires needs to be sorted out through non-dominating procedures, that is, essentially through deliberation. The role of emotions, finally, is less pronounced in Neo-republicanism than in Ubuntu. While within the republican tradition itself, at least particular kinds of emotions, especially love for one’s own republic, have been emphasized (Mazzini 1907)18, Pettit himself does not follow this line of argument. Note that the kind of contextualism found in both Ubuntu and Neorepublicanism does not necessarily imply a particularist approach to normative thought. It highlights the need to pay attention to the context normative judgments are to bear upon. In fact, normative thinking starts from actual human beings or existing relations of domination and asks how to transform them. In that sense, particular contexts one is involved in already provide the starting point for normative thought. However, the ideal of non-domination itself is an impartial, contexttranscending one, just as the ideal of Ubuntu with its appeal to human-ness is.

5 Conclusion I started with a brief overview of Ramose’s and Metz’s accounts of Ubuntu on the one hand and Pettit’s Neo-republicanism on the other, highlighting the relational features of their accounts in order to provide a systematic exposition of what it means to take a relational approach to normative thought. In a very general sense, all three of them are relational in that they take relationships to be the primary matter of normative thought, not individuals or communities as such. Beyond this general sense of relationality, however, there are three more specific dimensions of relational normative thought: relational normative grounds, relational normative content and relational normative epistemology. Proponents of Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism refer to similar relational grounds, that is, to some forms of relational capacities or a deeper ontology of humans as relational beings. They also share a commitment to contextuality and particularity with regard to normative epistemology, even though Neo-republicans do not necessarily emphasize

Relational normative thought  285 the role of emotions and focus more on the particularities of a given context of domination than on concrete individuals themselves. In fact, this latter difference in emphasis reflects deeper differences between Ubuntu and Neo-republicanism with regard to normative content: On the one hand, Ubuntu positively characterizes valuable relationships and calls for seeking communion with others, whereas Neo-republicanism merely cashes out negatively what kind of relations need to be avoided. On the other hand, Neo-republicanism takes a structural perspective on relationality whereas Ubuntu focuses on individuals, whether through a relational virtue-based or a relational interactional approach. These three perspectives correspond to three domains of normative thought: ethics or the issue of good character, morality or the issue of right actions, and politics or the issue of just institutions. A first set of further research questions pertains to the way the four dimensions of relational normative thought relate to one another. Does taking a relational perspective in one dimension necessarily entail a relational view with regard to the others? How are the different kinds of relational arguments interrelated? It seems for instance that defending a stronger, i.e. ontological claim with regard to the grounds of relationality does not entail taking the stronger position with regard to normative content. In fact, we find various combinations of different relational grounds and stronger and weaker versions of relational content in the literature I cited. A second set of questions refers to the distinctions I made with regard to the normative content of relational accounts. One may ask, for instance, whether a strong account of relationality with regard to ethics entails a commitment to a strong account in the domain of political philosophy. Or is the weak account precisely the one pertaining to the political sphere while the strong one holds for interpersonal morality and ethics? Another issue is how dispositional, interactional and structural relational thought – or, more generally put, relational ethics, relational morality and relational political philosophy – relate to one another. Does a full account of relational normative thought comprise relational accounts of virtue, right action and just structures? Given that relational normative thought aims to transform social relations, the three domains of normative thought seem closely interlinked. On the one hand, relational ethics and morality need the structural, political perspective. Focusing on how to relate to particular individuals or on trying to develop one’s own humanity will not change the way social relations are structured through power. This holds especially under conditions of deeply entrenched structural injustices such as Apartheid. Without understanding and fighting those fundamental social structures, any efforts to be a good person or to act in the right way will tend to reaffirm those very unjust structures.19 On the other hand, a structural perspective does not necessarily provide any clue on how to relate to others under conditions of structural injustice, especially when fighting unjust social structures. Hence, it seems that it needs the moral and ethical perspectives in order to assess actions taken under such conditions. Yet, does that mean one relational ideal may provide an account across all three domains?

286  Dorothea Gädeke Working on these questions will not only help flesh out a relational approach to normative thought instead of conflating it with collectivist approaches. With its emphasis on the fundamental importance of social relationships, relational thought might, ultimately, provide a compelling alternative to the individualist liberal paradigm currently predominant in Anglo-American and European philosophy and politics that resonates with normative thought across various different traditions.20

Notes 1 Metz uses the term ‘holism’, which he borrows from environmental ethics (Metz 2007: 333). I speak of ‘collectivism’ to distinguish this position from ontological holism (see section 4.2). 2 See also Mangena (2009: 20), Sander-Staudt (2011: 51f) and Metz (2013b). 3 See also Unah (2014) and Metz (2015). 4 The structural perspective on relationality could possibly also be developed drawing on Marxism and those parts of Feminism that focus on structural injustices instead of an ethic of care. In this chapter, however, I will focus on Neo-republicanism. 5 See Van Binsbergen (2001), Marx (2002) and Nkondo (2007). For a comprehensive analysis of its role in contemporary South African discourse, see Eze (2010). 6 On Ramose’s onto-triadic account of being, this includes relations to the living-dead and the yet-to-be-born as well as to nature (Ramose 2005: 45f). I will focus on cashing out the normative content in purely anthropocentric terms, though it will, obviously, be limited to relations between living human beings. 7 See also Behrens (2014: 66). 8 For a more recent formulation see Metz (2012; 2016: 178). 9 This shift is motivated by developing a deontological account of Ubuntu as opposed to the consequentialist one he reconstructed from extant literature in Metz (2007). 10 See, however, Behrens (2014) for this view. 11 See also Metz (2010: 59f). 12 Note that, on my reading, intrinsic accounts can be either individualist or collectivist (what Metz calls holist) with regard to the bearer of moral status. Metz, however, does not distinguish the issue of the bearer of status from that of the grounds of status, characterizing individualism as the “view that properties intrinsic to an entity ground the capacity to be wronged” (Metz 2012: 389) and holism as the “view that the bearers of moral status are groups” (390). 13 The holist view does not imply that social relations are sufficient for realizing our capacity for thought; other factors might be involved in developing it. Nor does it entail that social relations are necessary in a transcendental sense. In principle, something else might play the same role. All that the holist maintains is that our capacity for thought superveniently depends on social relations. Yet, Pettit maintains that, given that social interaction is always involved in practice, the abstract possibility of solitary thought is not relevant (Pettit 1993: 179). 14 See Gä deke (2017) for elaboration of this point. 15 See for the following Pettit (2001). 16 Note that the emphasis on actual relationships does not imply according them some kind of normative priority (see Metz 2010: 59f for this concern). They do not ground our moral status; rather, they are the context that allows for having discursive powers and enjoying the status of non-domination. 17 See also Metz (2013b: 84). 18 For a contemporary account, see Viroli (1995).

Relational normative thought  287 19 See Biko’s critique of liberals under Apartheid for a case in point (Biko 2004: ­chapter  5). 20 I am grateful to Thaddeus Metz and George Hull and to seminar audiences at Wits University and at the University of Cape Town for helpful comments.

References Arendt, Hannah 1960: Freedom and Politics: A Lecture. In: Chicago Review 14/1, 28–46. Behrens, Kevin Gary 2014: An African Relational Environmentalism and Moral Considerability. In: Environmental Ethics 1, 63–82. Bell, Daniel A./Metz, Thaddeus 2011: Confucianism and Ubuntu. In: Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (Suppl.), 78–95. Biko, Steve 2004: I Write What I Like. Johannesburg (Picador). Eze, Michael Onyebuchi 2010: Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa. New York (Palgrave Macmillan). Gä deke, Dorothea 2017: Relational Well-Being: How the Ontological Circumscribes the Normative in Gyekye’s Political Philosophy. Unpublished Manuscript. Habermas, Jü rgen 1996: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge, MA (MIT Press). Harding, Sandra 1987: The Curious Coincidence of Feminine and African Moralities. In: Kittay, Eva Feder/Meyers, Diana T. (eds): Women and Moral Theory. Lanham, MD (Rowman & Littlefield), 296–315. Mangena, Fainos 2009: The Search for an African Feminist Ethic. In: Journal of International Women’s Studies 11/2, 18–30. Marx, Christoph 2002: ‘Ubu and Ubuntu: on the Dialectics of Apartheid and Nation Building. In: Politikon 29/1, 49–69. Matolino, Bernard/Kwindingwi, Wenceslaus 2013: The End of Ubuntu. In: South African Journal of Philosophy 32, 197–205. Mazzini, Giuseppe 1907 [1860]: The Duties of Men and Other Essays. London (J.M. Dent & Sons). Metz, Thaddeus 2016: An African Theory of Social Justice: Relationship as the Ground of Rights, Resources and Recognition. In: Boisen, Camilla/Murray, Matt (eds.): Distributive Justice Debates in Political and Social Thought. London (Routledge), 171–190. Metz, Thaddeus/Miller, Sarah Clark 2016: Relational Ethics. In: Hugh LaFollette (ed.): The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Malden, MA (Wiley-Blackwell), 1–10. Metz, Thaddeus 2015: How the West Was One: The Western as Individualist, the African as Communitarian. In: Educational Philosophy and Theory 47/11, 1175–1184. Metz, Thaddeus 2013a: Questioning African Attempts to Ground Ethics on Metaphysics. In: John Bewaji/Elvis Imafidon (eds.): Ontologized Ethics: New Essays in African Meta-Ethics. Lanham, MD (Rowman & Littlefield), 189–204. Metz, Thaddeus 2013b: The Western Ethic of Care or an Afro-Communitarian Ethic? Specifying the Right Relational Morality. In: Journal of Global Ethics 9/1, 77–92. Metz, Thaddeus 2012: An African Theory of Moral Status. A Relational Alternative to Individualism and Holism. In: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15, 387–402. Metz, Thaddeus 2010: For the Sake of the Friendship: Relationality and Relationship as Grounds of Beneficence. In: Theoria 57/4, 54–76. Metz, Thaddeus 2007: Toward an African Moral Theory. In: The Journal of Political Philosophy 15/3, 321–341.

288  Dorothea Gädeke Mnyaka, Mluleki/Motlhabi, Mokgethi 2005: The African Concept of Ubuntu/Botho and its Socio-moral Significance. In: Black Theology 3, 215–237. Murove, Felix Munyaradzi 2014: Ubuntu. In: Diogenes 3–4, 36–47. Nkondo, Gessler Muxe 2007: Ubuntu as Public Policy in South Africa: A Conceptual Framework. In: International Journal of African Renaissance Studies – Multi- Interand Transdisciplinarity 2/1, 88–100. Pettit, Philip 2012: On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press). Pettit, Philip 2007: Free Persons and Free Choices. In: History of Political Thought 28/4, 709–718. Pettit, Philip 2004: Depoliticizing Democracy. In: Ratio Juris 17/1, 52–65. Pettit, Philip 2001: A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency. Oxford (Oxford University Press). Pettit, Philip 1997: Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford (Oxford University Press). Pettit, Philip 1993: The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics. Oxford (Oxford University Press). Ramose, Mogobe 2005: African Philosophy through Ubuntu. Revised Edition, Harare (Mond Books Publishers). Sandel, Michael J. 1996: Democracy’s Discontent: America’s Search for a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press). Sander-Staudt, Maureen 2011: Care Ethics. In: James Feiser (Ed.): The Internet Encyclo­ pedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/care-eth/#H12 Shutte, Augustine 2001: Ubuntu: An Ethic for the New South Africa. Cape Town (Cluster Publications). Taylor, Charles 1989: Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate. In: Rosenblum, Nancy (ed.): Liberalism and the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press), 159–182. Unah, Jim 2014: Finding Common Grounds for a Dialogue between African and Chinese Ethics. In: Imafidon, Elvis/Bewaji, John (eds.): Ontologized Ethics. Lanham, MD (Lexington Books), 107–120. Van Binsbergen, Wim 2001: Ubuntu and the Globalisation of Southern African Thought and Society. In: Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy 15/1–2, 53–89. Viroli, Maurizio 1995: For Love of Country: An Essay on Nationalism and Patriotism. Oxford (Oxford University Press).

16 African philosophy, disability, and the social conception of the self Julie E. Maybee

African philosophers have long pointed to communalism or ­communitarianism as a unique feature of African philosophy and of many traditional African cultures—a feature that, it is said, distinguishes African philosophy and cultures from Western philosophy and cultures dominated by forms of individualism. The claim that Africans are communalistic or communitarian has sometimes conflated a number of different views that, while interlocking, are perhaps better kept separate. First, communalism is sometimes understood as the claim that the self or person cannot be defined or have an identity outside of the social community. Communalism is also sometimes associated with a normative conception of the person, according to which someone can be more or less of a person, depending on his or her moral status in the community. On this view, achieving personhood is a process, and has to be earned over time in a community. Someone is ultimately a person only if he or she is a well-developed, socially successful (i.e. good) person in the community. African communalism has also been understood as the moral or ethical principle that the community is more important than the individual, so that individuals are expected to set aside their interests in favor of the interests of the community. On this view, by extension, individual rights are not absolute, and can be outweighed by the demands (rights?) of the community. African communalism is sometimes also interpreted as an economic principle and practice, according to which land, for instance, is communally (rather than individually) owned, or individuals are expected to contribute to a community-based system of cooperative labor, such as the Akan system of owé . In this chapter, I will be focusing on the first of these ways of thinking about communalism in African philosophy—the social conception of identity, according to which a person cannot be defined or have an identity outside of a social community. This sense of communalism is perhaps more basic than—and helps to justify—the others. Indeed, in the “Introduction” to their anthology, I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy, Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan Scott Lee argue that this theme is one of two themes that constitutes the “black philosophical tradition.” As they put it, “[t]he first generative theme constitutive of the black philosophical tradition highlighted therein [in the anthology] is the idea that the identity of the individual is never separable from the sociocultural environment” (Hord and Lee 1995, 7). According to this view,

290  Julie E. Maybee Hord (Okpara) and Lee explain, “a person’s identity is constructed in and at least partially by a set of shared beliefs, patterns of behavior and expectations” (Hord and Lee 1995, 7–8). In my own work, I have found this social conception of identity fruitful for thinking about disability. In particular, it helps to show that disability identity— understood both in terms of how people experience and define themselves, from the inside, so to speak, as well as how they are identified (by themselves or others) in the world, from the outside, so to speak—is irreducibly social. Embodied disabled identity, I have suggested (Maybee 2017)—what it feels like (in experience) and what it is like (as an object out there) to negotiate the world as a disabled person—can never be defined or identified outside of socially constructed beliefs, concepts, and environments. There are no pre-social, purely physical, or biological bodies, either in experience or out there in the world. There is a materiality to identity—there is something it feels like and is like to move about in the world— but what that something is can never be determined (defined or identified) outside of the social. Hence there is no identity, no determinate self, outside of the social. In this chapter, I use a variety of resources from African philosophy as well as disability studies to argue that African philosophers are right when they say that people cannot be identified or defined—either in terms of what it feels like (in experience) or in terms of what one is (out there)—outside of a social community. One obvious way in which a community constitutes a person’s identity is through social relationships. We identify ourselves and others through social roles that require social cooperation. I am a mother and teacher, for instance, but neither of those identities is possible outside of a community. This point has been made, for instance, by Okot p’Bitek, in an argument that pokes fun at what he takes to be an overly individualistic, Western conception of freedom—according to which freedom is defined merely as individual freedom from constraint, including the constraint of social roles. “‘Son,’ ‘Mother,’ ‘Daughter,’ ‘Father,’ ‘Uncle,’ ‘Husband,’ ‘Grandfather,’ ‘Wife,’ ‘Clansman,’ ‘Mother-in-law,’ …  ‘Chief,’ ‘Medicineman,’ and many other such terms are the stamps of man’s unfreedom,” p’Bitek writes sarcastically. In fact, however, he continues, “[i]t is by such complex titles that a person is defined and identified …  The central question ‘Who am I?’ cannot be answered in any meaningful way unless the relationship in question is known. Because ‘I’ is not only one relationship, but numerous relationships” (p’Bitek 1998, 74). In general, our social communities provide us with a menu of roles out of which to build our social identities. Before computers were invented, for instance, no one identified him- or herself as a computer programmer, because that social role—that identity—simply was not available to anyone. Our social communities also define us insofar as they determine, to some degree, how we should live out those social identities. As p’Bitek notes, the social titles he lists “order and determine human behavior in society” (p’Bitek 1998, 74). G.W.F. Hegel argued that concepts are not only descriptive, but also prescriptive. The concept of hammer, for instance, describes a hammer and also tells us something about what a good hammer is like. A hammer is only truly a hammer if it is a good hammer; a hammer that is broken into two pieces is not only no longer a

African philosophy, disability, and the self  291 good hammer, it is also not really a hammer at all. Similarly, concepts of social roles are also prescriptive.1 To truly be a teacher, I have to live up to that role, at least to a minimal degree, in a way that could be recognized by others in the community as living up to that role. I cannot claim to be a teacher and then behave in ways that no one would recognize as “being a teacher.”2 Disability, however, you might argue, is not a social role—or, at least it is not merely a social role. As Kwame Gyekye says in his argument against what he regards as an extreme form of communalism, “a person is by nature a social (communal) being, yes; but he/she is by nature other things as well (i.e. a person possesses other essential attributes). Failure to recognize this may result in pushing the significance and implications of a person’s communal nature beyond their limits” (Gyekye 2003, 301). Gyekye argues that the essential attributes that persons have include rationality, the capacity to be morally virtuous, and the capacity to make moral judgments (Gyekye 2003, 305). These attributes belong to individuals, he suggests, not social communities. “It is not the community that creates these attributes; it discovers and nurtures them” (Gyekye 2003, 305). I am not committed to Gyekye’s list of essential attributes, but one could argue, in a similar vein, that, although persons are defined by their social roles, they are also defined—as individuals—by other attributes or capacities, including attributes that define them as disabled. In the West today, these attributes would typically be specified in terms of physical or biological (bodily or mental) functioning—as impairment, or as a lack of capacities. However, I would like to argue, a person’s set of individual attributes or capacities—that identity—is also irreducibly social, or, as Hord (Okpara) and Lee put it, is “never separable from the sociocultural environment.” Both what it is like (as an object out there) as well as what it feels like (in experience, or from the inside) to have attributes or to have or lack capacities that define or identify one as disabled are irreducibly social.

Identity ‘out there’ Let me begin by talking about how people are defined as disabled (by themselves or others) from the outside, so to speak, or out there. We can begin to see how identities that refer to supposedly individual, publicly accessible attributes or capacities (or lack of capacities) are irreducibly social by thinking about the concepts of “impairment” or “disability.”3 Friedrich Nietzsche argued that all concepts are metaphors. “Every concept is produced through the equation of the not-equal,” Nietzsche wrote. “As, certainly, no leaf is entirely equal to another, so, certainly, is the concept of leaf formed by dropping any of these individual differences, by a forgetting of the discriminating” (Nietzsche 1976, 46 [§ 1]; alternate translation). The concepts of disability and impairment are extremely abstract: they equate quite a lot of things that are not-equal. As Whyte and Ingstad point out, concepts such as disability (where by “disability,” they seem to have impairment in mind) and handicap were invented under particular historical circumstances in Europe. “In many cultures one cannot be ‘disabled’ for the simple reason that ‘disability’

292  Julie E. Maybee as a recognized category does not exist,” they write. “There are blind people and lame people and ‘slow’ people, but ‘the disabled’ as a general term does not translate into many languages” (Whyte and Ingstad 1995, 7). As Whyte and Ingstad note (Whyte and Ingstad 1995, 7), Aud Talle has argued that the Maasai term that is translated into English as “disabled,” for instance, refers to a lizard that, as Talle describes it, “walks awkwardly, slowly, and with difficulty” (Talle 1995, 59), and so is a description only of physical movement. It therefore does not include what we would think of as intellectual or psychological impairments. Further, it is not clear how much weight some smaller-scale societies would give to blindness or walking in an awkward way, for instance, in defining a person’s identity. Jessica Scheer and Nora Groce have argued that, in small-scale societies where people have regular face-to-face contact and a number of different social relationships with one another, characteristics such as blindness would tend to be considered single, personal characteristics and would be unlikely to be used to define someone’s identity (Scheer and Groce 1988, 30). Talle suggests, for instance, that, although the Maasai take note of differences, “disability is not a basis for defining persons.” What we would consider a person’s impairment, is, for the Maasai, “just an aspect of his/her person, but does not make any difference in social and cultural terms” (Talle 1995, 71). People in Maasai society become full persons by marrying, having children, and taking part in the community’s social relationships (Talle 1995, 56–57, 69–71). As a result, Talle suggests, “differences in people’s physical or mental capabilities are not culturally constructed as differences having implications for a person’s fulfillment in life” (Talle 1995, 70). Moreover, since only a few people in such societies would be what we would consider “disabled” (Scheer and Groce 1988, 26), such societies would also be unlikely to develop concepts of “impairment” or “disability” that abstract across the wide range of differences that the Western concepts do. As Talle says of the Maasai, for instance: “[t]he Maasai do not regard people with a disabling condition as a single, unified category toward whom they relate by a standardized set of behaviors” (Talle 1995, 56). “Impairment” and “disability” are thus socioculturally and historically specific concepts. The Western concept of impairment—which is supposed to refer to a person’s physical or biological conditions—has also been suspicious for political reasons. What counts as an “impairment” has changed over time—often for what are really socio-political reasons. As David Wasserman has observed, “there is reason to be skeptical about the impairment classification,” because “the impact of conditions classified as impairments varies widely across environments and goals, the scientific basis of that classification is obscure, its elasticity makes it highly susceptible to abuse, and its application to particular conditions, from homosexuality to congenital deafness, has been plausibly challenged” (Wasserman 1994, 182–83). Still, Wasserman argues, there are smaller categories of impairment—categories of blind or lame or “slow” people, we could say, or people who are like lizards that walk in an awkward way—that are objective. As Wasserman puts it, “there is an objective category of impairments, even if it is narrower and less significant than commonly supposed” (Wasserman 1994, 183). Or as he puts it elsewhere,

African philosophy, disability, and the self  293 there is a “fact of biological impairment” (Wasserman 1993, 10),4 even if the facts must be captured by categories more narrow than the category of “impairment.” However, as Ifeanyi A. Menkiti has argued, facts themselves are socially constructed because they are always shaped by the languages in which they are expressed and by learning associated with the cultures to which those languages belong. In his classic defense of African communalism, Menkiti emphasizes the role that languages—which, as he notes, “belong to this or that social group” (Menkiti 1984, 172)—play in constructing a person’s identity. The individual comes to identify himself “as a durable, more or less permanent fact of this world” (Menkiti 1984, 172), Menkiti says, by reference “to the language which he speaks[,] …  which is no small factor in the constitution of his mental dispositions and attitudes.” As a result, Menkiti says, “the sense of self-identity which the individual comes to possess cannot be made sense of except by reference to these collective facts” (Menkiti 1984, 172).5 Although Menkiti talks about a person’s selfidentity, because the identities he has in mind are “facts,” as he puts it, they are the kinds of identities that define someone out there, so to speak, and so could be used by an individual him- or herself or by others to define the individual. Thus, Menkiti is arguing, people’s identities are determined as facts in the world, but since languages—which are social—shape the facts that we perceive, identities themselves are shaped by the social. Menkiti does not really explain how language shapes the facts that we perceive—either about our own identities, as he suggests, or others’ identities, as I would add. He goes on instead to defend the “processual,” as he puts it (Menkiti 1984, 172), or normative conception of the self, according to which personhood has to be earned over time in a community—a claim that has been criticized in African philosophy (see, e.g., Gyekye 2003, 298–306; Matolino 2011). However, the work of philosopher of science Norwood Russell Hanson can be used to support Menkiti’s claim that language determines the facts—and hence the identities—that we perceive. As I have suggested elsewhere (Maybee 2017), Hanson argues that facts are always shaped by the languages in which they are expressed, and so are socially constructed. As Hanson says, “the character of what we call ‘the facts’ is affected fundamentally by the logical-grammatical peculiarities of the language in which those facts are expressed. Those peculiarities provide a ‘set,’ as it were, a context in which the world looks one way as opposed to another way, or in terms of which the facts are construed in one way rather than in another” (Hanson 1969, 183). Language does not produce what we see or think about, but forms or organizes what we perceive as the facts. As he puts it, “the (logico-grammatical) form of language exercises some formative control over our thinking and over our perceiving, and over what we are inclined to state as the facts (and indeed how we state those facts)” (Hanson 1969, 184). Facts, he suggested, are theory-laden: they presuppose claims about what the world is like— claims that can be captured in sets of “that”-clauses (Hanson 1969, 193)—that shape the facts that we perceive. We can see Hanson’s point by examining Anne Wilson and Peter Beresford’s criticism of the Western concept of “mental illness.” Wilson and Beresford have

294  Julie E. Maybee argued that the medicalized and supposedly “scientific” concept of “mental illness” is flawed (Wilson and Beresford 2002, 144–7). It treats mental distress as a kind of physical disorder, but, they argue, “mental illness” is a socially constructed concept. Supposed mental “illness” is diagnosed using lists of symptoms created by committees of psychiatrists who do not always agree. Individual psychiatrists then go on to apply those lists to individual “patients” in different ways, so that specific diagnoses are largely subjective judgments made by individual psychiatrists. And, Wilson and Beresford argue, in spite of the search for underlying biological or genetic causes, there is “still no definitive ‘laboratory test’ for any specific mental illness” (Wilson and Beresford 2002, 147).6 Wilson and Beresford do not deny that people experience “very real mental and emotional distress” (Wilson and Beresford 2002, 144). What they deny is that this distress is best captured by the concept of “mental illness,” or that there is a “fact” of mental illness, given the theoretical commitments associated with that “fact.” The concept of “mental illness” implies that it is an individual defect within a specific person, that it is permanent, and that people can therefore be divided neatly into categories of “normal” and “mentally ill” (Wilson and Beresford 2002, 144). But, they argue, mental distress is experienced by all people and can vary as well as ebb and flow over the course of a lifetime in response to different situations. We can capture the theoretical commitments of the concept or “fact” of “mental illness” in a series of “that”-clauses of the sort that Hanson describes: that the distress is mental or emotional, that it is a defect within the individual, that it is like a physical disorder, that it is permanent and fixed, that it is one side of a dichotomous pair according to which someone is either “normal” or (permanently) “mentally ill,” and so on. These are the sorts of theoretical commitments that, as Hanson would say, “provide the logical matrices through which we see the world” (Hanson 1969, 196). The distress—as an account of what it is like for someone to move about in the world—is real, but what the distress is like—where it is located, what its sources or causes are, what kind of thing it is, its relationship to other ways in which people move about in the world, what one should do in response to it—is determined by the associated “that”-clauses we use to perceive the world. As author and journalist Andrew Solomon—who has researched what we would call depression around the world—noted in an article in The Guardian, “depression exists universally, but the ways that it’s understood, conceptualized or even experienced can vary a great deal from culture to culture” (Leach 2015). The article goes on to describe cases in which Western-trained mental health workers who traveled around the world to provide psychological assistance after crises were sometimes sent away by local people who thought the Westerners did more harm than good (Leach 2015). Appeals to “facts” of biological impairment to get around the politically suspicious nature of the concept of “impairment” fail, then, because, as Menkiti suggested, assertions of facts are already shaped by what we learn as members of our societies, particularly when we learn our languages. As Hanson remarks, “[g]iven the thesis that changes in our language (and, ipso facto, changes in our conceptual framework) can change our appreciation of the nature of the world, the notion of

African philosophy, disability, and the self  295 fact is no antithesis, antidote, or corrective to this thesis” (Hanson 1969, 198). As Oyè rónké.  Oyě wù mí  has put the point, “language carries with it the world-sense of a people” (Oyě wù mí  1997, 28). Wasserman’s appeal to smaller categories or facts of biological impairment also fails to overcome the suspicious nature of the concept of “impairment” because the notion of biology itself is just one of the theories that shapes the facts that those of us who have learned to think in terms of biology perceive. In his argument against the view that human beings have an innate conception of biology, Jesse Prinz suggests that infants come to draw a distinction between living beings and inanimate objects by observing people and animals moving around on their own. However, children take more time to learn other facts of biology (Prinz 2014, 95–96). They take longer to learn that plants are alive, Prinz says, and they sometimes continue to believe that inanimate objects such as cars or buttons are alive. Children also sometimes have mistaken beliefs about illness, he suggests: “[f]our-year-olds think that bad moral behavior is as likely to make you vulnerable to getting sick as poor diet” (Prinz 2014, 96). Some biological facts are difficult to learn by observation, and “do not come naturally” (Prinz 2014, 96), Prinz says. “Facts that are difficult to observe require instruction” (Prinz 2014, 96). However, as I have also argued elsewhere (Maybee 2017), facts that are difficult to observe and require instruction are also, as Hanson would say, theoryladen, and hence shaped by our cultures and languages. In cultures that do not make sharp distinctions between the natural and supernatural/spiritual, the body and mind, or the self and others, people often believe that bad moral behavior can make you sick. Godwin S. Sogolo has argued, for instance, that traditional African approaches to illness often employ two types of causal explanations. What Sogolo calls “primary causes” are not strictly physical (though, he says, we must be careful to keep in mind that many traditional African cultures do not make a sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural [Sogolo 2003, 198]), but refer to violations of the community’s morality, to strained social relations with others, or to supernatural entities such as spirits, gods, or witches (Sogolo 2003, 196–97). These causes are believed to weaken the body’s natural ability to heal itself (Sogolo 2003, 197–98). “Secondary causes” are similar to the ones offered by modern medicine. If someone has a stomach ache, he or she may have eaten “‘poisoned’ food,” for instance (Sogolo 2003, 197). In the case of malaria, healers are often vaguely aware that the illness is caused by a parasite (Sogolo 2003, 198). For such secondary causes, healers will prescribe herbal remedies, but since primary causes weaken someone’s ability to heal, the remedies will be effective only if the healer also addresses the primary causes. The appeals to primary and secondary causes are therefore compatible with one another, Sogolo suggests (Sogolo 2003, 197). Because traditional African medicine invokes primary causes as explanations—which include appeals to violations of community morality—it claims, in contrast to Western biology, that bad moral behavior makes us sick. Sogolo argues that these sorts of explanations are not that different from medicine’s more recent admission that stress can reduce someone’s resistance to disease—although he says that Western medicine tends to recognize

296  Julie E. Maybee different sources of stress. While Western medicine will tend to emphasize overwork as a source of stress, for instance, traditional African cultures tend to emphasize strained relationships either with spiritual entities or with members of one’s community (Sogolo 2003, 197). Western talk of biology is also embedded in a sorry history of, to use a phrase introduced by Michel Foucault, “racism against the abnormal” (Foucault 2003, 316). Ladelle McWhorter has argued that biology—a term first used in 1802— changed how human beings were characterized in the West. The discipline of natural history, which preceded biology, defined living beings in terms of morphology or visible structures. But biology defines them in terms of functions and development. The discipline of biology—and particularly the work of Georges Cuvier—went on to invent the science of functional and developmental norms (McWhorter 2009, 99–100). The norms were then used to characterize supposedly inferior races as developmentally stunted: “as retarded, as primitives or lifelong children constitutionally incapable of adult self-discipline or full participation as citizens in a democratic society, a developmental incapacity that was held to be physiologically and inevitably heritable” (McWhorter 2009, 101). McWhorter uses her analysis to argue that the development of biology redefined racism as a form of prejudice and discrimination against the abnormal (McWhorter 2009, 32). The invention of biology gives rise to worries about (supposedly) developmentally stunted populations generally, as well as to attempts to control the bodies and particularly the sexuality of such (supposedly) developmentally stunted populations—immigrants, women, blacks, “feebleminded” people, and sexually abnormal people (McWhorter 2009, 150–95). By the beginning of the twentieth century, sexuality became the primary method for managing bodies and protecting the “glorious Anglo-Saxon future” (McWhorter 2009, 199). As McWhorter writes, “[s]exuality was the invention, the technological apparatus, that would enable scientific racism to operationalize itself as the eugenics movement” (McWhorter 2009, 199). That technological apparatus, McWhorter argues, was thus made possible by the invention of biology and its emphasis on function and development: “[d]evelopment was the fundamental concept in virtually every human science of the day,” McWhorter writes. “Reality was development—patterns of change that could be measured, projected, and normed” (McWhorter 2009, 199). McWhorter’s argument suggests that we have reason to doubt the claim that we can overcome the suspicious nature of the concept of impairment by appealing to more specific “biological” conditions—such as blindness or walking in an awkward way—since claims about “biology” are themselves embedded in questionable social practices. Spelling out the role of biology in racism against the abnormal does not by itself refute the claim that there is a given, biological body, but, as McWhorter said in an unpublished lecture, it does “undermine claims to definitive knowledge of the body by creating awareness—some might say a suspicion—that current claims are no more ‘untainted’ by power relations than the claims of previous generations and that they, too, may pass away” (McWhorter 2006, 4).

African philosophy, disability, and the self  297 Indeed, Oyě wù mí  has criticized Western biological reasoning or “bio-logic” (Oyě wù mí 1997, 11), or what she describes as “the ubiquity of biologically rooted explanations for difference in Western social thought and practices,” as well as “the extent to which biological explanations are found compelling” (Oyě wù mí  1997, 8). Oyě wù mí ’s criticisms are directed primarily against Western feminists, who, she argues, have tended to assume that sex and gender are culturally universal categories (Oyě wù mí  1997, 31). Unlike many Western cultures, however, she suggests, traditional Yoruba society did not identify people in terms of biology, but in terms of social relations, particularly relations of seniority (Oyě wù mí  1997, 36). Oyě wù mí argues that the Yoruba did not employ a biological conception of sex, for instance. Unlike many Western languages, the traditional Yoruba language is gender-free (Oyě wù mí 1997, 29). And although the Yoruba language has words that capture what we would think of as anatomical sex differences—obinrin and okù nrin—these words cannot be understood as equivalent to the English words “female” and “male,” respectively, she argues. Oyě wù mí does not express her points this way, but we can capture the distinction she wants to draw between the Yoruba terms and the English terms by reformulating her observations as a series of “that”-clauses of the sort that Hanson describes. Obinrin implies the following surrounding, theoretical commitments: that it is a human being, that it is an adult, that it bears babies; okù nrin has the following surrounding, theoretical commitments: that it is a human being, that it is an adult, that it does not bear babies (Oyě wù mí  1997, 33–35). The English terms “female” and “male,” in contrast, are associated with different sets of theoretical commitments. The term “female,” for instance, includes the following theoretical commitments: that it is an essence of the individual (and so applies to children as well as adults), that it is a sex (which involves more than just a role in reproduction), and that is it one of two, dimorphic categories (Oyě wù mí 1997, 35–36). Historically in the West, Oyě wù mí  suggests, the term “female” has also implied a number of additional theoretical commitments about how being “female” determines one’s social role: that it lacks a penis or is not-male in some sense (so that being “male” is the standard), that it does not have power (or is lower in the hierarchy), and that it cannot participate in the public arena (Oyě wù mí 1997, 34). The differences in the associated “that”-clauses mean that the Yoruba terms and the English terms are not equivalent. The Yoruba terms are references only to having certain roles in (adult) reproduction, while the English terms imply the presence of a sexual and dimorphic essence. Thus, Oyě wù mí  argues, although traditional Yoruba obviously recognized different roles in reproduction and what we would think of as the anatomical differences associated with those roles, they did not conceive of those differences as biological differences between “females” and “males.” As she suggests, “[t]he frame of reference of any society is a function of the logic of its culture as a whole” (Oyě wù mí  1997, 39). We can also see that the terms obinrin and okù nrin do not map on to the English terms “female” and “male,” Oyě wù mí  argues, by examining the traditional Yoruba social roles of oko and aya, which have been incorrectly translated as “husband” and “wife,” respectively. Oyě wù mí  suggests that oko and aya are

298  Julie E. Maybee best understood as “owner/insider” and “nonowner/outsider” in relation to a traditional living compound and lineage (Oyě wù mí  1997, 44). The oko (insiders) were those who were born into the living compound and lineage, while the aya (outsiders) were those who were born outside of the living compound and lineage. Because traditional Yoruba society tended to be patrilocal in terms of marriage patterns (Oyě wù mí  1997, 44)—though it was not always or everywhere so (Oyě wù mí  1997, 48)—the aya (outsiders) in a community were typically obinrin (the ones who have babies). But, Oyě wù mí  argues, the oko (insiders) were both obinrin (the ones who have babies) and okù nrin (the ones who do not have babies). Moreover, oko (insiders) who were obinrin (the ones who have babies) had all the same rights as oko with the same seniority who were okù nrin (the ones who do not have babies) (Oyě wù mí  1997, 45–46). In addition, although aya in communities were typically obinrin, the term aya was also used to describe worshippers in the house of a god/goddess—who were all outsiders in relation to the god’s/goddess’s house—and in this context referred both to obinrin (the ones who have babies) and okù nrin (the ones who do not have babies) (Oyě wù mí  1997, 47). Because the terms obinrin (the ones who have babies) or okù nrin (the ones who do not have babies) applied only to adults, and because aya (outsiders) and oyo (insiders) could be both obinrin (the ones who have babies) or okù nrin (the ones who do not have babies), being an obinrin or okù nrin was not conceived of as a biological or sexual essence that determined someone’s identity. Rather, Oyě wù mí  argues, again, the most important determinant of someone’s identity in traditional Yoruba society was seniority (Oyě wù mí  1997, 42), which was defined according to when someone joined (came inside) the compound or lineage, either through birth or marriage (Oyě wù mí  1997, 46). Perhaps someone will argue that, although the Yoruba may not regard babies or children as having a (biological) sex, for instance, as Oyě wù mí  suggests, it does not follow that babies and children have no biological sex. Some cultures may simply not recognize (the fact) that babies and children have biological sexes. However, I would argue, on what basis would we insist that children have sexes? Even in our own view, little girls and boys do not share all of the “sexual” characteristics of women and men—pubic hair, breasts (in the case of women), for instance, or the ability to play a role in reproduction. Why give more weight to the characteristics that girls share with women, and boys with men, and insist that little girls and boys have “sexes,” rather than to the characteristics that girls do not share with women, and boys do not share with men—such as having a role in reproduction—and say that girls and boys have no sex? Our view seems to presuppose that the world should be cut up or determined in terms of development—the presupposition of biology, as McWhorter might point out. Since most girls develop into women, and most boys into men, we say that girls are little women, and boys are little men. That presupposition leads us to see the world our way, rather than the way the Yoruba do, as Hanson might say. But since all babies and children can play no role in reproduction, would it not also be fair, on those grounds, to say that all babies and children belong to the same category as one another in relation to questions of reproduction, and are neither female nor

African philosophy, disability, and the self  299 male? Indeed, our society might well be better off if we did not regard children as having a sex at all. Thus, identities “out there,” as Menkiti argued—whether based in (supposed) fact or in (supposed) biology—are defined only in a sociocultural context. The Western concept of biology is theory-laden and determined by a series of “that”clauses that are learned by instruction and expressed in language, and hence socially constructed. Western biology says that animals are alive, that living beings and bodies are defined in terms of functions and development, that there is a sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural, between self and others, and between the natural and the social, that bad moral behavior cannot make you sick, that human beings have sexual essences so that little girls and little boys have a sex, and so on. Human beings may well agree on some “that”-clauses—e.g. that people need to eat. But to conceive of people or eating as “biological” bodies or functions is to use a conceptual apparatus that is specific to Western cultures. As Oyě wù mí  puts it, “biology itself is socially constructed, and therefore inseparable from the social” (Oyě wù mí  1997, 9).

Identity ‘from the inside’ So far I have been talking about what we can think of as third-person accounts of identity, that is, how a person is identified (whether by him- or herself or by others) from the outside, so to speak, as an object or “fact,” as Menkiti would put it, out there. Like some feminist and queer disability theorists (e.g. GarlandThomson 2011; Clare 2001), I have criticized conceptions of identity for being overly focused on such third-person accounts and hence for missing important aspects of identity that are rooted in first-person levels of embodiment—in what it feels like, from the inside, so to speak, to move about in the world (Maybee 2017, 299). I do not want to revisit those arguments here, but I do want to suggest that even such first-person identities cannot be defined outside of social contexts. For instance, although our desires for social roles—e.g. to be a mother or computer programmer—are certainly social, other, perhaps more basic desires that we use to define our identities—as someone who likes pizza, for instance7—I would argue, also presuppose a community. As the ancient Egyptian scribe, Any, argued in a dialogue with his son, Khonshotep, while the infant may desire only his mother’s milk, “when he finds his speech, [h]e says ‘[g]ive me bread’” (Maybee 1999, 163). As the child grows up, the child receives two gifts from his community: language or speech, and foods and other items, such as bread, which are sophisticated social products, handed down over generations through the use of language. These gifts structure and change the child’s desires into the sorts of desires that can only be had in the context of a socio-linguistic community. It’s not that the child desires some generic notion of “food,” and then fills the desire in with “bread” (though that can happen sometimes too). The child desires and asks for bread. What the child feels is a desire for bread. Since bread is a socio-linguistic product, the very feel of such desires—from the inside—is shaped by the social.

300  Julie E. Maybee Thinking about disability also helps to reveal that first-person, embodied identity is socially defined. We have already seen Andrew Solomon suggest above, for instance, that, although something like what we call depression is a universal phenomenon, how it is conceptualized and also experienced can vary from culture to culture. The experience of physical disability is also socially defined. In a speech before fellow medical sociologists in 1990 (published in 1991), sociologist, disability studies scholar, and polio survivor Irving Kenneth Zola criticized his colleagues’ tendency, he argued, to avoid talking about personal bodily experiences in their work. At the same time, he argued, talking about or reclaiming such experiences is not straight-forward. His speech was thus an attempt, he said, “to convey what is at stake in the denial of personal bodily experiences as well as in the difficulty of reclaiming them” (Zola 1991, 2). The reason why it is difficult to reclaim personal bodily experiences, Zola argued, is because there are what he called “structural limitations” on our abilities to be aware of—and then to write or speak about—our bodies (Zola 1991, 4). He said that for 20 years, for instance, he navigated the airport the same way that everyone else does. He parked his car and walked—with the aid of his leg brace—to the terminals and gates. But he arrived at his travel destinations more sore, tired, and cramped than others. Since he had never traveled any other way, however, he said, these experiences of his body were not really accessible to him. He saw his fatigue and pain simply as “part of the cost of traveling and of being Irving Kenneth Zola” (Zola 1991, 4). Only after his consciousness was changed by disabled people’s independent living movement and he was “‘able,’” as he puts it (Zola 1991, 4), to use a wheelchair while traveling, did he really feel that soreness, fatigue, and cramping, and realize how his travel experiences had been shaped by social practices and expectations. “Only then did I realize,” Zola said, “how much of my travel ‘experience’ inhered not in my disability, but rather in the society in which I lived—socially maintained and socially constructed” (Zola 1991, 4). In particular, Zola’s experiences of his own body—from the inside—were shaped by Western, cultural values, namely, by the values of individual, physical independence and “normalcy,” or by the assumption that it is important to accomplish physical tasks—such as navigating the airport—by oneself and in as “normal” a fashion as possible. These values led Zola to believe that it is better to walk with a brace than to use a wheelchair, and worse still to have someone else push the wheelchair—values that, in turn, led him to resist using a wheelchair, and hence to have certain experiences of his own body. There was thus something it feels like to be Irving Kenneth Zola, but that “something”—the being of Irving Kenneth Zola—was structured by the social. Moreover, Zola argued, if, for 20 years, the “structural limitations” of our society’s values and assumptions made it impossible for a sociologist trained to spot socially-constructed experiences8 to articulate his own bodily experiences as disabled, “it must be at least equally difficult for the proverbial man or woman in the street when they try to be aware of and thus to write or speak about their bodies” (Zola 1991, 4). Because social structures shape what it feels like to move about in the world, Zola’s work suggests, how we are identified and defined—from the inside, so to speak—also cannot be determined outside of the social.

African philosophy, disability, and the self  301 In a similar way, Deborah Marks has argued that the way in which cognitively disabled people experience their own intelligence is also socially defined. Cognitively disabled people are aware of their devalued status in our society. They hear the overall message that the world would be better if they did not exist, and they often misdirect or internalize appropriate anger about this message against themselves (Marks 1999, 618–19). In particular, the social message that it would be better if they were dead creates anxiety that reduces their capacity to think. Marks quotes clinician Valerie Sinason: “faced with an internal and external death-wish the handicapped child or adult can cut off his or her intelligence further so as not to see, hear or understand what is going on in a hostile world. Only when we take that on board can we understand the stupid smiling behavior” (Marks 1999, 619). In this case, the oppressive, social context of ableism affects how cognitively disabled people feel their own intelligence, from the inside, and hence how they experience and so will define their identities. I have argued, then, that African philosophers who have defended the social conception of identity are right. Our identities—both in terms of how we are identified (either by others or ourselves), from the outside, as something out there, as well as in terms of how we are defined or identified, from the inside, given what it feels like to move about in the world—are socially defined. This view is both reinforced by, but also helps to explain, the experiences of impairment and disability.

Notes 1 In the Encyclopaedia Logic, for instance, Hegel distinguishes between items that are real and items that are actual. An item is real if it is there or exists, but it is actual only if it lives up to the concept of the thing that it is supposed to be. That concept defines not only what the thing is, but also what it should be. Not everything is what it should be, however. As Hegel says, “[w]ho is not smart enough to be able to see around him quite a lot that is not in fact how it ought to be” (Hegel 1991, § 6, Remark). Hegel’s concept of actuality is also closely connected to his concept of truth. He defines truth as the agreement between the content of something that is there and its concept. He used the example of a friend. “We speak, for instance,” he said, “of a ‘true’ friend, and by that we understand one whose way of acting conforms with the concept of friendship” (Hegel 1991, § 24, Addition #2). A true friend is someone whose behavior lives up to the concept of friendship, which captures how a friend ought to behave. An untrue friend is thus a bad friend. “To say of something that it is ‘untrue’ is as much as to say that it is bad, that it involves an inner inadequacy” (Hegel 1991, § 24, Addition #2). 2 There is perhaps a connection, then, between the social conception of the person or of identity and the normative conception of the person. If concepts are both descriptive and prescriptive, then the notion of “person” would not only describe a person, but also tell us something about what a good person should be like. It is therefore a short step from “person” as a descriptive identity to “person” as a prescriptive identity, or to the idea that a person can be a person only if he or she also lives up to some standard that the community would recognize as constituting a good person. I am not saying that communities’ prescriptive accounts cannot be criticized, just that there is a close connection between a concept’s descriptive and prescriptive status. 3 While the dominant view in Western societies tends to equate “impairment” with “disability,” those familiar with disability studies will point out that Western disability studies scholars have often embraced “social models” of disability that distinguish

302  Julie E. Maybee “impairment”—which is supposed to refer to biological or physical conditions—from “disability”—which is reserved to refer to the social consequences (namely, in Western societies, they argue, oppression and discrimination) that are imposed on people with impairments. When disability is defined as social oppression or discrimination, it is obviously socially defined. For the purposes of the argument in this paragraph, however, both “impairment” and “disability” are being used in the dominant sense in which they refer to (supposedly) physical conditions. 4 The view that our modern, scientific constructs of impairments have a legitimate factual basis has been defended more recently by Dimitris Anastasiou and James M. Kauffman. For them, impairments are subject-independent facts, though the experiences of these conditions are socially shaped (Anastasiou and Kauffman 2013, 443–44). See also their 2011 article in which they defend a “critical scientific realist approach” to disability (Anastasiou and Kauffman 2011, 373), according to which disabilities are best conceived of as “real ‘socialized biological’ conditions” (Anastasiou and Kauffman 2011, 373). 5 Someone might object to Menkiti’s reliance on the concept of “fact.” Kwasi Wiredu has argued that the concept of “fact” is not universal to all cultures, though all cultures will have some concept of what it is for something to “be so” (Wiredu 2003, 240–41). But that’s all Menkiti needs for his argument. He is claiming that the question of a person’s identity depends on what people in a society will regard “as so.” His argument does not rest on any technical or specialized notion of a “fact.” 6 For an excellent discussion of the current debate about the genetic underpinnings of schizophrenia, for instance, see Prinz (2014, 26–27). 7 Robert Bogdan and Steven J. Taylor stress the importance that likes and dislikes—such as for types of food—play in caregivers’ constructions of the individuality and humanness of severely disabled people that they care for (Bogdan and Taylor 1989, 142). 8 Zola’s area of study was the doctor–patient relationship.

References Anastasiou, Dimitris, and James M. Kauffman. 2011. “A Social Constructionist Approach to Disability: Implications for Special Education.” Exceptional Children 77 (3): 367–84. Anastasiou, Dimitris. 2013. “The Social Model of Disability: Dichotomy between Impair­ ment and Disability.” Journal of Medicine & Philosophy 38 (4): 441–59. Bitek, Okot p’. 1998. “The Sociality of Self.” In African Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, 73–74. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Bogdan, Robert, and Steven J. Taylor. 1989. “Relationships with Severely Disabled People: The Social Construction of Humanness.” Social Problems 36 (2): 135–48. Clare, Eli. 2001. “Stolen Bodies, Reclaimed Bodies: Disability and Queerness.” Public Culture 13 (3): 359. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collè ge de France, 1974–1975. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2011. “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept.” Hypatia 26 (3): 591–609. Gyekye, Kwame. 2003. “Person and Community in African Thought.” In The African Philosophy Reader: A Text with Readings, edited by Pieter H. Coetzee and Abraham P. J. Roux, 2nd edition, 297–312. New York: Routledge. Hanson, Norwood Russell. 1969. Perception and Discovery: An Introduction to Scientific Inquiry. Edited by Willard C Humphreys. San Francisco, CA: Freeman, Cooper & Company.

African philosophy, disability, and the self  303 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1991. The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences with the Zustze. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Hord, Fred L., and Jonathan Scott Lee. 1995. I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Leach, Anna. 2015. “Exporting Trauma: Can the Talking Cure Do More Harm than Good?” The Guardian, February 5, sec. Global Development Professionals Network. https​:// ww ​ w .the ​ g uard ​ i an.c ​ o m/gl ​ o bal- ​ d evel ​ o pmen ​ t -pro ​ f essi ​ o nals ​ - netw ​ o rk/2 ​ 0 15/f ​ e b/05 ​ / ment​al-he​alth-​aid-w​ester​n-tal​king-​cure-​harm-​good-​human​itari​an-an​throp​ologi​st. Marks, Deborah. 1999. “Dimensions of Oppression: Theorising the Embodied Subject.” Disability & Society 14 (5): 611–26. Matolino, Bernard. 2011. “The (Mal) Function of ‘It’ in Ifeanyi Menkiti’s Normative Account of Person.” African Studies Quarterly 12 (4): 23–37. Maybee, Julie E. 1999. “‘The Instruction of Any:’ An Ancient Egyptian Philosophical Theory of Ethics.” African Philosophy 12 (2): 149–74. Maybee, Julie E. 2017. “Em‘body’ment and Disability: On Taking the (Biological) ‘Body’ out of Em‘body’ment.” Journal of Social Philosophy 48 (3): 297–320. McWhorter, Ladelle. 2006. “In Perpetual Disintegration.” Keynote address delivered to the Foucault Society Conference on the Body: Ethos and Ethics. New School for Social Research, New York, NY. McWhorter, Ladelle. 2009. Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Menkiti, Ifeanyi A. 1984. “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought.” In African Philosophy: An Introduction, edited by Richard A Wright, 171–81. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1976. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Oyě wù mí , Oyè rónké. . 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Prinz, Jesse J. 2014. Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind. 1st edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Scheer, Jessica, and Nora Groce. 1988. “Impairment as a Human Constant: Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Variation.” Journal of Social Issues 44 (1): 23–37. Sogolo, Godwin S. 2003. “The Concept of Cause in African Thought.” In The African Philosophy Reader, edited by Pieter H. Coetzee and Abraham P. J. Roux, 2nd edition, 192–99. New York: Routledge. Talle, Aud. 1995. “A Child Is a Child: Disability and Equality among the Kenya Maasai.” In Disability and Culture, edited by Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, 56–72. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Wasserman, David. 1993. “Disabilty, Discrimination, and Fairness.” Report from the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy 13 (1/2): 7–12. Wasserman, David. 1994. “Impairment, Disadvantage, and Equality: A Reply to Anita Silvers.” Journal of Social Philosophy 25 (3): 181–88. Whyte, Susan Reynolds, and Benedicte Ingstad. 1995. “Disability and Culture: An Overview.” In Disability and Culture, edited by Benedicte Ingstad and Susan Reynolds Whyte, 3–32. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

304  Julie E. Maybee Wilson, Anne, and Peter Beresford. 2002. “Madness, Distress and Postmodernity: Putting the Record Straight.” In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, edited by Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare, 143–58. London: Continuum. Wiredu, Kwasi. 2003. “The Concept of Truth in the Akan Language.” In The African Philosophy Reader, edited by Pieter H. Coetzee and Abraham P. J. Roux, 2nd edition, 239–43. New York: Routledge. Zola, Irving Kenneth. 1991. “Bringing Our Bodies and Ourselves Back In: Reflections on a Past, Present, and Future ‘Medical Sociology.’” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 32 (1): 1–16.

Index

Abdurahman, Abdullah 78 Abiodun, Roland 207n9 ableism 301 abortion 206 Abraham, W. E. 196 Abuja 232 accountancy/accounting xii Accra 232 Acheulean 62 Adams, Robert M. 153 Addis Ababa 62 addressee/addressor 122, 123, 124, 126, 127n2 Adeofe, Leke 263 Adhikari, Mohamed 93n20 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 248–49 aesthetics 69, 123, 125, 202–203, 207, 256 Africa: African concepts 48; African diaspora xi, 64, 99, 219; East Africa 47, 49–50; indigenous African cultures/ worldviews 4, 8, 48, 52, 54, 57n6, 154–55, 161n7, 196–97, 199–200; African languages 1, 8, 203, 239; African liberation movements 11–14, 75–91, 92n4, 97–114, 115n7, 118–27, 260–64; monolithic conception of 196; as mother of humanity 62; pre-colonial 11, 64, 196, 270, 282; southern 138, 150, 154–55, 270; sub-Saharan 4, 52, 64, 71, 154, 160, 161n2, 174, 178n4, 197, 200, 274; see also African-ness; African philosophy; black people; slavery; spirituality African nationalism 11, 18n24, 78, 82, 93n23, 106, 255 African National Congress (ANC) xii, 13, 68, 75–76, 78–81, 89–91, 92n4, 92n5, 92n11, 93n17, 107, 144n17 African-ness 54, 111; romanticizing of 54; as constituting uniqueness/difference 248–53; see also universities

African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA) 81 African philosophy xiv, 1–6, 11–16, 17n8, 17n9, 17n11, 18n36, 43, 51, 64, 154–57, 164–78, 178n1, 178n10, 179n16, 182–83, 193, 213–21, 225, 230, 234, 239, 248–64, 269–70, 289–90, 293; Afro-communitarianism 198, 200; as counter-colonial 51; cultural nationalist conception of 255; African ethics 51–52, 54, 159, 195–207, 269–70; as ideological 250, 260–64; International Society for African Philosophy 57n8; philosophical sagacity 17n16, 174; contrasted with ‘philosophy in Africa’ 18n37, 249; pseudo-, autarkic schools of 193; see also ethnophilosophy; hierarchy; marginalization; “Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy” research seminar series; University of Cape Town (UCT); virtue African Philosophy through Ubuntu (Ramose) 222–25, 271–74, 277–78, 280–84, 286n6 African Political Organisation (APO) 78 African studies xi–xiv, 14–15; as a degree subject xi–xii, xiv Afrikaans xvn1, 82, 86, 115n17, 124 Afrikaners 66, 68–69, 86; see also spirituality Afrocentrism x, 257 Afropolitanism 218 agency 279; denial of 54; lack of 107, 254; sense of 112; withholding/deprivation of 13, 104–106, 108, 110–11 Ahmed, Hawa 76 Akan, 8, 193, 198, 202, 205, 207n4, 235–37, 289 akrasia 16

306 Index Alexander, Neville 13–14, 75–76, 80–81, 84–91, 92n7, 92n13, 93n24; see also One Azania, One Nation; Thoughts on the New South Africa Algeria 101 alienation 106, 110, 112 All-African Convention (AAC) 76, 80, 81, 92n11, 92n14 Alloggio, Sergio 13, 128 allowance 119–20, 122, 124, 126 Americans 149 Anastasiou, Dimitris 302n4 ancestors 68, 77, 165–66, 168, 170, 205 Angier, Tom P. S. 5 animals (non-human) 65, 133, 154–55, 164–77, 178n1, 178n2, 189, 202, 232, 295, 299; fish 65, 205; animal sacrifice 166, 175–77 anthropocentrism 4, 164–178, 178n1, 179n16, 286n6; see also ethics anthropology 3, 17n14, 154, 195, 199–200; medical 46; physical 77, 85; social 14, 84; see also ethnography Anti-CAD 76, 77, 81, 92n12, 92n14 Anti-Segregation Council (South Africa) 76, 81 apartheid xi, xvn1, 12–13, 81, 89, 90, 92n3, 98–100, 104–108, 110–14, 118– 19, 121–26, 128, 135–36, 143n10, 285, 287n19; anti-apartheid activities 11–13, 81, 93n17, 104, 114; beneficiaries of 16, 135, 138, 143n10; “intellectual apartheid” 249; psychological effects of 106; reparations for 138; see also development Appiah, Kwame Anthony 3, 17n14, 18n26, 196, 218 Arabic 82, 240 Araeen, Rasheed 218 arbitrariness 119, 126, 133 Aristotle 28, 202, 204, 208n11, 223, 251 arithmetic 239, 244, 246 asceticism 139 Ashanti 197–98 Asian people 98; “Asiatic” people 99 Athapaskan (Canada) 176 Athens 31, 275 atomism 279; agonistic 119, 121, 125; logical 240 attitudes xiii, xv, 8–9, 13, 18n24, 43, 85, 89, 97, 99–100, 107, 110, 111–14, 133, 138–39, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156–57, 158, 170, 177, 199, 205–206, 207, 216, 259, 293; propositional 229, 232–33; see also universalism

attributes see property (metaphysics) Aufhebung (Hegel) 215 Australasia 5, 149 autonomy 52, 87, 198, 257, 279 aya 297–98 Azanian People’s Organisation (AZAPO) 81, 93n15 babies 297–98 bad faith 12, 103 Bam, Fikile 68 Bamenda 178n9 Bamford, Rebecca 9 “Bantu” 17n17, 98, 107, 165–66, 253–54 Bantu Education Act (South Africa) xvn1, 84, 104, 115n18 Bantu Philosophy (Tempels) 3, 4, 178n4, 254; see also force thesis Bantu-speaking peoples 66, 87 Bantustans 82, 87 Barbados 30 Barbeyrac, Jean 30 Baron, Marcia 142 Basotho 66, 86, 98 Batswana 98 Bavenda 66, 86 Baxter, Richard 27 Beattie, James 11, 31 beauty 61, 123, 169–70, 202–203 behaviour 16, 85, 104, 105, 138, 156, 175, 177, 185, 203, 214, 229, 234, 238, 239, 246, 246n2, 283, 290–91, 292, 295, 299, 301, 301n1 “be-ing” (Ramose) 198, 217, 222, 271–72, 278, 283 “being-ness” 169–70 Belgium 3, 71 Bell, Daniel 269 Bell, Richard 199, 204 Benin 232 Bentham, Jeremy 208n11 Beresford, Peter 293–94 Bergson, Henri 217 Bernasconi, Robert L. 2, 11, 16n5 Berreman, Gerald D. 84–85, 93n21 bêtise 220–21 Bewaji, John 202 Bhunga (South Africa) 78, 80 Biko, Bantu Steve 12–13, 15, 18n34, 18n35, 97–101, 103–114, 115n7, 115n19, 115n26, 116n33, 118–26, 128, 287n19 Bilchitz, David 258 biocentrism 4, 164, 172, 173, 177, 178n10, 179n16

Index  bioethics 43–48, 50–56, 56n5, 205–206; African 48, 52, 205–206; global 43–45, 48, 50–51; transcultural 51; Western 47, 55; see also abortion; cloning; consent; eugenics; euthanasia; neocolonialism; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) biology 16, 28, 77, 80, 83, 85, 99, 185–86, 188–89, 224, 290–99, 302n3, 302n4; bio-logic (Oyěwùmí) 297; as influencing racism 296; as socially constructed 299; Western 295–97, 299; see also development; race; sex Blackburn, Robin 25 Black Consciousness (BC) 13, 18n34, 81, 97–100, 106–107, 115n26, 118, 124–25, 128–29; Black Consciousness philosophy 97, 118–20, 125; Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) xii, 12, 75, 115n7 Black First Land First (BLF) 138, 144n17 black people 12–13, 26, 31, 34, 54, 64, 68, 78–79, 82, 87, 93n23, 97–114, 115n18, 118–26, 128–43, 143n10, 223, 248, 258, 296; black Africans 98, 218; “blackness” 13, 66, 102, 116n33, 140; category black 12–13, 97–101, 103, 107–108, 111–14, 115n7; “noir” 101; “real” black people 97; see also experience; South Africa Black People’s Convention (BPC) 115n7, 115n19 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 101 blindness 292, 296; see also disabled people Bloemfontein 76, 92n4 Blum, Lawrence 93n29 Bodin, Jean 27–28 Bodunrin, Peter O. 17n15, 18n26, 252 Bogdan, Robert 302n7 Bogues, Anthony 38n1 Bohm, David 224–25 Botha, President P. W. 69 Botha, Roelof Frederik “Pik” 93n23 botho see ubuntu Botswana 46 Bromberger, Sylvain 215 Brooks, David H. M. xiii Brown University 35 Bruin Belange-Inisiatief (South Africa) 91 Budapest 62 Bujo, Bénézet 64, 172 Burns, Sir Alan 54 Buys, Coenraad 66

307

Caesar, Julius 66–67 Cameroon 174, 178n9, 205 capacities: discursive 280; relational 274, 278–81, 284; see also community; thought Cape Action League (CAL) 81, 93n15 Cape Malays 77, 86 Cape Town 76–78, 80, 81; see also University of Cape Town capital 85; cultural 89; financial 89; “national capital” 86; social 89 capitalism x, 79–80, 82, 92n10, 144n17, 198; colonial x care-givers 49, 302n7 caring 5, 131–32, 133, 136 139–41, 154, 156, 160, 206, 269, 273, 279, 286n4; sharing and 198, 271, 273, 279, 281–82, 283 Carmichael, Gershom 30–31, 38n2 Carolina 29–30 Carretta, Vincent 38n1 castes 84–86, 88–91, 93n21; Brahmin 85; “colour-castes” (Alexander) 14, 75, 84–86, 88–91; endogamy within 85; Harijan 93n21; Hindu caste system 85, 93n21; Shudra 93n21 categories 7, 15, 62, 67, 84, 86, 87, 91, 97–114, 116n33, 184, 185, 249, 272, 278, 292–95, 297–98; amelioration of 12, 97, 100, 114; derivative 102, 108–112, 114; dimorphic 297; fundamentality of 107; negative 101, 108–110, 114; non-derivative 13, 108, 112; oppositional 107, 109; racialized 70, 98; social 12, 98–99, 101, 109, 114; social construction of 13, 99; see also black people causal explanation 115n30, 295; primary and secondary causes 295 Césaire, Aimé 101, 120 chain of being 170; see also hierarchy character 5, 138, 149, 152, 154, 157, 202, 207n9, 271, 273–74, 282, 285; see also relationships charity 153; “charity begins at home” 158; principle of 230 chastity 44 Chemhuru, Munamato 179n16 chiefs 253–54, 290 children 44, 62, 77, 101–102, 131, 132, 134, 138, 139, 151, 171, 204, 206, 208n10, 232, 292, 295, 296, 297–99, 301; “child of his time” 37, 38; see also babies Chirwa, Danwood 115n8, 116n35

308 Index Christianity 17n10, 28, 30, 31–32, 34, 37, 61, 67, 68, 71n1, 78, 82, 203, 207n2, 269; see also Judaeo-Christian tradition; philosophy; spirituality civic-mindedness 198 Clarkson, Thomas 33 class xii, 13, 77–80, 82, 84, 86–88, 89, 90–91, 92n6, 121, 140, 188; purist classism 76, 90; see also hierarchy; war; working class clinical trials 46, 49 cloning 206 coercion 44, 276 cognition 187, 189, 215, 222–25; enactivism about 225; cognitive science 224; cognitive strategies 6, 10, 223–24; cognitive systems 217; team cognition 224; see also scholarship Cold War 91 collectivism 15, 198, 269, 271, 274, 275, 276, 279, 286, 286n1, 286n12 Collingwood, R. G. 215 colonialism x, xi, xiii, 6–10, 11 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 53–54, 56n1, 63–64, 69, 79, 101–102, 107, 196, 219, 224–25, 239, 243, 253–54, 260; colonial gaze 254; colonial mentality 196; see also capitalism; missionaries; neo-colonialism; values; violence colonization 3, 7, 25, 45, 47, 62, 64, 98, 138, 101; see also France; imperialism Coloured Advisory Council (CAC) 76, 78, 80 Coloured Affairs Department (CAD) 76 “Coloured” people (South Africa) 13, 75–84, 87–89, 91, 92n13, 98–99 commercialization/commodification 206 communal cohesion see social cohesion communalism see communitarianism communism xii; Suppression of Communism Act (South Africa) 81 Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) xii communitarianism 15, 47, 55, 159, 164, 171–73, 177, 217, 225, 269, 274–75, 289, 291, 293; eco-biocommunitarianism 170–71; see also African philosophy; virtue community xv, 6, 44, 45, 52, 60, 64, 78, 92n6, 109, 154–55, 159, 164, 165, 171–73, 175–77, 178, 178n12, 188, 191, 197, 232, 233, 257, 259, 269, 271, 274, 276, 277, 284, 289–93, 295–96, 298–99, 301n2; capacity to commune

274, 280–82; communal feeling 197; as locus of intrinsic value 164, 173, 178; see also rights compensation 118, 138 complement (logic) 108, 110, 112, 155 Comte, Auguste 220 concepts 97, 114, 183, 184, 186–88, 190, 195, 202, 214, 216, 218–19, 221, 225, 228; activation of 214, 217, 219, 222; conceptual analysis xii–xiii, 219, 233, 238–39, 245; basic 233, 237; creation of 214, 216–17, 219, 223–24, 226; epistemic 232–33; as metaphors 291; as prescriptive 290–91, 301n2; see also Paradox of Analysis; relations; truth Consciencism (Nkrumah) 11, 261 Condorcet, Marquis de 26 Confucianism 154 Congo 172, 174, 248–49; see also Kinshasa Congress Movement (South Africa) 13, 81, 87, 88, 92n5 Congress Youth League (CYL) 78, 106 conquest 45, 61, 63, 65, 67, 77, 254; conquered vs. conqueror 61–62, 65–70, 77; right of conquest 65, 69 consensus 17n14, 17n16, 32, 197–98, 200, 252, 256, 257; “liberal egalitarian consensus” 204; overlapping 200–201 consent 32, 47, 206; ethics of 47; informed 47, 52 consequentialism 132, 286n9; indirect 132; see also ubuntu Constitutional Court (South Africa) 201 contempt 80, 85, 254 contextualism 282–84 contractualism 132 Cooper, David x corporations 138, 258 cosmogonies 3 Cottingham, John 131 courage 26, 61, 71, 153 Cradock 92n13 Craig, Edward 233 cruelty 32, 35, 136 Cugoano, Ottobah 11, 27, 33–37, 38, 38n1; see also Thoughts and Sentiments cuisine 6, 174 culture: cultural fundamentals (Oruka) 16, 182–84; cultural particulars (Wiredu) 16, 184, 186, 193; cultural universals (Wiredu) 16, 182–93; see also Africa; language; relativism Cuvier, Georges 296

Index  Dadoo, Yusuf 76, 92n5 Darwin, Charles 165 Davidson, Donald 230, 245 Davis, Miles 221 deafness 292 death penalty 201 decolonization: of curriculum x–xi, 25, 38, 138; epistemological 239; intellectual xiv, 1–2, 7–10, 16n3, 256–57; of philosophy 1–2, 6–11, 33, 38; political 1, 63–64, 87; politically correct discourse about 87; see also justice; “transformation” deference 85, 89, 137, 204 defiance 13, 97, 99, 112–13 De Gaynesford, R. Maximilian 131 dehumanization 18n36, 103, 105 deities 35, 36, 61, 65, 67, 69, 165–66, 168, 170, 171, 202–204, 206, 295, 298 Deleuze, Gilles 217, 221, 224 democracy xi, xvin2, 69, 89, 135, 200, 257–58, 296; consensual 263; consociational 93n24; see also rights deontology 52, 132, 286n9 depression 151, 248–49, 294, 300 Derrida, Jacques 220 desert 29, 102, 135, 141, 160–61, 204, 205 development 44–46, 185, 259, 279; biological 296, 298–99; moral 144n16, 204, 208n11; “separate development” (South Africa) 118; development studies 46 Dewey, John 235 dialectic 44, 101, 114, 121, 195, 197, 199, 215, 223 dialogue 13, 15, 44–45, 48–49, 51–52, 54, 56n5 118, 198, 221, 299; intercultural 53, 184; philosophical 128, 182, 184, 193 differend/différend 118–20, 123–26; “meta-differend” 126 The Differend (Lyotard) 118–22, 124, 126 disabled people 15, 290–92, 300, 302n7; cognitive disability 301; disability identity 290; see also ableism; deafness discrimination 10, 12, 78, 89, 97, 99–100, 111–12, 116n33, 119, 121, 126, 291, 296, 302n3 disease see illness District Six (Cape Town) 77 “divide and rule” 80, 86–87, 107 dogmatism 221, 262, 283 donors xv Doris, Glen 26 Down syndrome 206

309

Drew, Allison 93n30 Dudley, R. O. 81 Dutch (language) 86 Dutch people 64, 98 duties 33, 36, 82, 136, 151–52, 158, 206; direct 278; imperfect 132, 159, 161n4; partial 132; perfect 132; positive 132 Du Toit, André xii Dyantyi, Mbongisi 13, 128–29 Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen 92n13 ecocentrism 4, 164, 172–73, 177, 178n10, 179n16 Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) 138, 144n17 education 47–48, 70–71, 83, 88, 93n20, 110, 115n18, 137–40, 171, 239; higher x, xiv, 115n4, 115n17, 138; philosophical 7; political xii; see also Bantu Education Act; Extension of University Education Act egalitarianism 93n25, 167–69, 172, 201, 203–204; anthrospherical 164–65, 167–68; liberal 5, 199–201, 204, 207 egbin 202 Egypt 68, 299 Eisenhower, President Dwight D. 69 Ekpo, Denis 218 elders see old people emancipation xii, 12, 25, 32–34, 97 embarrassment 158 emotions 70, 131, 132, 133, 149–52, 156–59, 161, 161n3, 169, 205, 283–84, 285, 294 endangered species 177 English (language) 1, 8–9, 33, 34, 82, 104–105, 124, 128, 178n4, 203, 229–37, 239, 241–42, 244, 292, 297 English people 1, 27, 30, 68, 69, 98, 233 Enlightenment 32 envy 139, 152 “epistemicide” 9 epistemology 98, 119, 215, 221, 229, 234, 239, 277–78; feminist 62; normative 270, 276, 282–84; see also decolonization; meaning; values Epstein, Brian 12–13, 15 equality: distributive equalization 89; legal 89; of opportunity 257–58; political 89 Equiano, Olaudah 33 erotetic method 215 Esterhuyse, Willie 68–69 ethics: applied 195; environmental 15, 286n1; ethical systems 44–46, 48,

310 Index 50–52, 54; feminist 56, 225, 269; human-centred 165; meta-ethics 195; normative ethics 195; research ethics 46–47, 56; virtue ethics 44, 150, 153, 156, 159; Western ethics 44, 47, 51–52, 150, 225; see also African philosophy; bioethics; European philosophy; consent; judgement; relations; science; values Ethiopia 62, 92n13 ethnography 3, 218 ethnophilosophy 3–4, 15, 17n12, 173–74, 216, 251 Etieyibo, Edwin 4, 15, 17n9 eudaimonism 154 eugenics 206, 296 Eurocentrism x, 6, 256–57 European people 2–3, 6, 9, 10, 17n14, 25, 28, 29, 78, 79, 100, 107, 196, 205, 219; East Europeans 77 European philosophy 2, 6, 269–70, 272–74, 276–78, 286; European ethics 195–97; see also values European studies 14 euthanasia 206 Everatt, David 93n17 exclusion 2, 6, 10, 14, 121, 124, 258 exculpation 135 experience xi, xiii, 15, 44, 48–49, 53, 55, 61, 65, 80, 90, 101, 102, 104, 119, 122– 23, 135, 149, 155, 159–61, 171, 185, 189, 196, 204, 216–17, 219, 225, 231, 232, 278, 283, 290, 291, 294, 300–301, 302n4; black 121–23, 125; lived 63–64, 70, 105, 283–84; phenomenal 51 exploitation xii, 11, 48, 61, 68, 80, 86, 93n21, 170, 232; super-exploitation 79–80 Extension of University Education Act (South Africa) 115n4, 115n17 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 51 facts: fundamentality of 109; metaphysics of 235; as socially constructed 293, 299; as theory-laden 293 fairness 131–32, 140, 142–43, 149, 160, 204, 298 family 49, 76, 98, 105, 138, 151, 158–59, 198; “family first” 158 Fanon, Frantz 12–13, 37, 50–51, 54, 71, 97–98, 100–105, 107–111, 113–14 feminism 52, 269–70, 286n4, 299; ethics of care 269; Western feminists 269, 297; see also epistemology; ethics; ubuntu Ferguson, Adam 32

Flaubert, Gustave 220 Flikschuh, Katrin 262–63 flourishing life 131, 133, 135–37, 139–41, 157, 225 force thesis (Tempels) 165; see also hierarchy; vitality Forde, Daryll 196 Forum Club (Cape Town) 81–82, 84, 88, 90 Foucault, Michel 220, 296 foundationism (Verran) 240–42, 244 Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (FIOSA) 81 France 86, 101, 115n7, 206; French colonies xiii freedom: free intellectual exchange 258; as non-domination 275–76; as non-interference 275–76; see also Africa; emancipation Freedom Charter 81 Freedom Park (Tshwane) 69 French 1, 33, 34, 118, 178n4, 190 Freud, Sigmund 213, 220 Fricker, Miranda 48–49 friendliness 154, 156, 171, 197 friendship 56n2, 139, 301n1 Frye, Marilyn 144n14 funding 46–47, 50, 115n18; funding agencies 46–47, 49; see also donors Futter, Dylan 5, 17n19 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 215; see also Truth and Method Gädeke, Dorothea 15 Gamiet, Zayed 82 Garfield, Jay L. 2 Gbadegesin, Segun 51–52, 199, 202 gbagbo 8–9, 230–34 gender xii, 6, 55, 136, 140, 258, 297 genealogy 233 genocide 91 geography 43, 62, 77, 98, 110, 112, 114, 161n2, 175, 188, 196, 219, 249 German 1, 34 Germans 66, 86; German romanticism 203; see also philosophy Ghana 27, 171, 174, 260 Gisborne, Thomas 32–33 globalization 44, 62, 218 Global North 2, 6, 9, 15 Global South xi, 6 Goebbels, Joseph 79 goods: common good 275; purely individual 197; relational 281; social 197; see also virtue

Index  Gool, Goolam H. 76, 78 Gool, Janub 76, 78 Gordon, H. L. 54 Gordon, Lewis 97, 100, 103 Gould, Stephen Jay 92n7 Graaff, Johan xvin3 grammar 120, 123, 240 Greece 28–29, 154, 197, 202–203, 206, 207, 251–52 Greenspan, Patricia 159 Grégoire, Henri 27 Griqua 86 Groce, Nora 292 Grotius, Hugo 27–30; see also The Rights of War and Peace grounding 115n29, 118, 160, 197, 217 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 14 guilt 34–35, 63, 64, 139, 150–53, 158–61, 161n3; as tracking blame 152–53; objective vs. subjective senses of 150–51, 160; survivor’s guilt 5, 149–54, 157–61, 161n1, 161n4 Gyekye, Kwame 159, 196–97, 200, 205, 207n7, 217, 262, 291 habit 48, 85, 137–38, 196, 208n10, 222; habituation 208n11 Hall, Martin xvin3 Hallen, Barry 8–9, 15, 200, 202, 229–35, 245; see also Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft Hamlet (Shakespeare) 60 Hanson, Norwood Russell 293–95, 297, 298 happiness 61, 178, 202, 277 Harding, Sandra 269 harm: epistemic 9; transcendental 125 harmony 124, 171–72, 272; cosmic 271–72; social 51, 52, 154–57, 159, 172–73, 191–92, 197–98, 207n1, 224, 269, 271–73, 283 Harold Cressy High School (Cape Town) 75 Harvard University x Haslanger, Sally 12 Hauptmann, Gerhart 92n13 Head, Bessie 203 hearsay 234 Hegel, G. W. F. 101, 103, 109, 121, 215, 223, 290, 301n1; see also Aufhebung; truth Heidegger, Martin 215; see also Seinsfrage Heraclitus 251

311

hermeneutics of suspicion 114 “Herrenvolk” 79, 83, 84 Hertzog, J. B. M. 76 hierarchy 5, 84–85, 89, 282, 297; age 203–204, 207; of beings 4, 165–70; clan 204; class 203–204; racial 77; social 75, 85, 91, 198; see also castes Hindi 82 Hinduism 85, 86; see also castes Hirson, Baruch 82 history x, xii, 6, 10, 17n10, 18n29, 25–26, 30, 35, 37–38, 48, 50, 51, 53–56, 61–62, 63–65, 68, 70, 75, 77, 83–84, 86, 90–91, 93n30, 112–14, 121, 131, 135–36, 188, 193, 195–96, 198–99, 215, 220, 224, 229, 231, 241, 251, 255, 282, 284, 291, 292, 296, 297; as “his-story” 62–63; natural 296; of philosophy 33, 37, 215–18, 220–21, 223, 251–52, 264 Hobbes, Thomas 27 holism 170, 171, 271, 279, 286n1, 286n12, 286n13; see also individualism homosexuality 292 Hord, Fred Lee 289–91 Horne, Neil 161n10 Horsthemke, Kai 166 Hountondji, Paulin J. 3–4, 17n10, 216, 254, 261–62 Hull, George x, xii–xiv, 57n8, 98, 115n8, 116n35, 143n1, 144n16, 161n10, 178n7, 179n13, 179n17, 287n20; Philosophy of Race course (PHI2045S) xiii humaneness 190–92, 271–72, 281, 283 Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) 55 humanness see humanity humanity: base case of 103; “common human element” 169; withholding of 101–104, 113; see also Africa; dehumanization; non-humanity human sacrifice 176–77 Hume, David 26, 31, 189, 238, 246n6 Hungary 62 Hurka, Thomas 153 Hursthouse, Rosalind 153 Husserl, Edmund 213 Hutcheson, Francis 11, 30–31 hypocrisy 36, 60, 104 Hyppolite, Jean 115n11 identity 6–12, 14, 65–66, 75–77, 80, 83, 86, 88–90, 98, 132, 137–38, 141, 143n10, 155, 157, 171, 185–86, 188, 196, 222, 249, 258, 271, 289–93, 298–99, 302n5; ethnic 1, 6, 86, 258; first-personal

312 Index accounts of 299–301; identifying with others 5, 156, 158, 273–74; injusticebased identities 89; numerical 238, 244; search for lost xv; social conception of 289–93, 301, 301n2; third-personal accounts of 299; see also personhood ideology xv, 11, 13, 50, 51, 80, 88, 93n18, 106, 118, 188, 250, 255, 260–64; racial vs. religious 85–86; see also African philosophy Igbo 190, 204 Ijiomah, C. O. 171 ikuyajesin 51–52 illness 35, 46, 49, 55, 57n7, 65, 70, 206, 248, 295; as caused by morally bad behaviour 295; mental illness 132, 206, 293–94; see also depression; Human Immunodeficiency Virus; panic attacks impairment see disabled people impartiality 15–16, 131–37, 140–43, 182, 190–92, 258, 284; impartial reasons 131–33; sympathetic impartiality 16, 182–83, 187–92 Imperialism (Lenin) 79 imperialism x, xv, 1, 45, 53, 82, 144n17; cultural 43, 48, 234; moral 43, 51; see also indirect rule impersonal perspective 16, 130–36, 138–40, 142, 143n2, 144n16 inanimate objects 164–68, 170, 178n2, 295 incommensurability 13, 123–24, 186–87, 228, 232, 241, 245 India 85, 92n6, 98 Indians 13, 75–76, 77, 78–79, 81, 83–84, 87–89, 91, 98 indirect rule 254 individualism 15, 55, 198, 201, 207, 207n3, 269, 272–76, 278–79, 286, 286n12, 289–90; holistic individualism (Pettit) 279–80 Indonesia 77, 98 induction 188–89 inequality 16, 80, 93n25, 130, 135, 138, 141, 143; racial 37, 130, 137–38 informants 233 Ingstad, Benedicte 291–92 injustice 10, 12–13, 16, 29, 31–33, 35–36, 53, 60, 64–65, 67, 71, 75, 78, 102, 118, 130, 133, 135, 138, 141; beneficiaries of 9, 64–65, 68, 138–39, 141; distributive 88, 160; epistemic 10, 48–50, 53, 56, 61, 65, 67, 69, 71; hermeneutical 48, 98; structural 53, 138, 285, 286n4; systemic 37, 48, 50, 135, 138;

testimonial 48–49, 56; transcendental 125; see also identity In My Father’s House (Appiah) 218 Intelligence Quotient (IQ) 169 intuition 150, 152, 156, 160, 182, 188, 191, 204, 257, 258, 262, 275; linguistic intuitions 228 The Invention of Africa (Mudimbe) 219 Irele, Abiola 252, 255 irrationality 130, 197, 261 Islam 207n2, 251; see also philosophy Israel 197 Jaffe, Hosea 83, 88, 92n7 Jahn, Janheinz 222 James, C. L. R. 35 James, Wilmot 93n30 Janz, Bruce B. 5, 10, 18n36, 252 Japan, 151–52; tsunami in (2011) 151–52 Jauss, Hans Robert 215 Jeffers, Chike 38n1 Jews 28, 82 Jordaan, Kenneth A. 82, 93n19 Judaeo-Christian tradition 204, 206, 207 judgement xv, 29, 31, 34, 48, 123, 125–26, 134, 137, 139, 142, 150, 152, 154, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 186, 204, 206, 232, 234, 252, 280, 294; moral 44, 121, 134, 271, 291; normative 51–52, 120, 134, 193, 202, 270, 282–84; rule of (Lyotard) 118, 125 justice xii, 1, 9–10, 14, 18n27, 27, 29–31, 33, 50, 55, 60–62, 65, 75–76, 89, 121, 132, 134, 136, 140, 141, 143, 149, 153, 156, 160, 239, 282, 285; decolonial 10; epistemic 10, 69–71; forward-looking vs. backward-looking 9; intersectional 56; social 1, 64, 69–71, 91, 137; see also war Kagame, Alexis 217 kalon 202 Kant, Immanuel 2, 11, 14, 16n4, 25–26, 28, 37, 208n11, 213; Kantianism 5, 132, 149–50, 152–53; see also Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kathrada, Ahmed 81 Kauffman, James M. 302n4 Kaunda, Kenneth 119, 124, 198 Keita, Lansana 189 Khoi/Khoikhoi 64–67, 77, 98 Khoi-San 199; see also Khoi/ Khoikhoi; San khora (Plato) 213

Index  Kies, Ben 76–79, 82–84 King, Martin Luther 37 Kinshasa 248–49 Kiswahili 82, 190 knowledge 8, 9–10, 25, 28, 31, 34, 36, 37, 48–49, 50, 63, 65, 66, 70, 103, 122, 123, 132, 136, 138, 168, 169, 172, 175, 177, 182, 186, 187, 195, 217, 219, 220, 221, 222, 224, 229–34, 240, 243, 244, 248, 252, 253–54, 259, 262–63, 278, 290, 296; first-hand vs. second-hand 9, 231–34, 246n4; knowledge production 255–62, 264; restitutive 10 Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft (Hallen & Sodipo) 8 Kojève, Alexandre 115n11 Koralus, Philipp 215 Kramer, Matthew 207n8 Kruger National Park 71 Küng, Hans 60 Kwesi, Richmond 246n7 Kwindingwi, Wenceslaus 270 Laband, John 207n5 Lacan, Jacques 220 language xiii, xvn1, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7–8, 13, 32, 34, 49, 53–54, 62, 87, 93n20, 98, 115n17, 119–26, 128–29, 170, 184, 187, 190, 198, 213, 222, 225, 228–33, 235–39, 241, 243–46, 246n2, 256, 292–95, 297, 299; as binding on philosophy 8, 228, 235, 245–46; first 49; meta-language 122; as shaping perception 293; philosophy of 1, 14–15, 123, 127; as presupposition of culture 187, 190; private 123; second 49, 104; third 49; see also Africa; intuition law 12, 16, 27, 29–32, 34–37, 50, 65, 67, 69, 70, 82, 85, 88, 89, 92n11, 93n17, 97, 99–100, 105, 110, 111, 112, 116n33, 170, 188, 198, 206, 213, 224, 241, 258, 271, 275, 281, 283; of nature 28–29, 32, 36; of peoples 28; see also equality Lebanon 93n24 Leclerc Jean, 29 Lee, Jonathan Scott 289–91 legitimacy 14, 28–30, 31, 35–38, 44, 63, 85–86, 88, 89, 118–24, 126–27, 141, 195, 199, 217, 224, 250, 253, 263, 276, 302n4 Lembede, Anton Muziwakhe 78, 106–107 length 239–40, 242–44 Lenin, V. I. 79 Levinas, Emmanuel 37

313

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 3–4 Lewis, Martin W. 219 liberalism 50, 55, 102, 104, 107, 115n26, 200–201, 204, 207n7, 225 269, 274–76, 286; see also egalitarianism; liberals liberals 5, 13, 101–105, 120–22, 198, 201, 287n19; white liberals 101 103–104, 123, 126 lifeworld (Husserl) 213 Ligon, Richard 30 lineage 35, 37, 199, 201, 298 litigation (Lyotard) 118, 124 living-dead 286n6 Livingstone High School (Cape Town) 75 Locke, John 11, 25, 27, 29–30, 36, 38n1, 263 logic xii, 51, 110, 119, 121–24, 150, 155, 197, 215, 220, 222, 237–38, 239, 293, 294, 297, 301n1; formal 108; see also biology love 65, 92n11, 131, 134, 139, 141–43, 273–74, 284; epistemic 61; political 61; see also virtue Luckett, Kathy xii, 93n30 luxury 136, 137, 140, 141, 144n13, 193 Lyotard, Jean-François 118–26, 127n2 MacFarquhar, Larissa 144n20 McGinn, Colin 203 McWhorter, Ladelle 296, 298 Maasai 292 Madagascar 98 Madiba, Mbulungeni xiii, madness 65, 69, 220; see also illness Madlala-Routledge, Nozizwe xiii Mafeje, Archie x–xi, xv, xvin2, 17n12 Magaziner, Daniel R. 114 Makgabeng plateau 66 Malan, Daniel François 86 malaria 295 Malawi 171, 174 Malaysia 77, 98 Malema, Julius 66, 144n17 Mamdani, Mahmood xi Mandela, President Nelson Rolihlahla 79, 81, 93n24 Mangcu, Xolela 111 Mansfield, Lord 27 Mapungubwe 66 Marcel, Gabriel 215 marginalization 1, 48–49; of African thought 48 Marks, Deborah 301

314 Index Marx, Karl 114; Marxism xii, 13, 77, 79–80, 91, 269, 286n4 Masolo, D. A. 196 materialism 217; dialectical 121; historical 91 Mathari Mental Hospital (Kenya) 54 mathematics 204, 239, 243, 246n10; see also arithmetic Matolino, Bernard 18n36, 18n37, 252, 270 Mauritius 26 Mawere, Munyaradzi 17n11 Maxwele, Chumani x Maybee, Julie E. 15 Mbeki, Govan 81 Mbeki, President Thabo 68 Mbiti, John 203, 205, 216, 218 Mda, A. P. 79 Mda, Zakes 66; see also The Sculptors of Mapungubwe meaning, xi, xii, xiv, xv, 32, 52, 61–62, 64, 65, 70, 106, 122–24, 125, 128, 131, 134, 138, 140, 142, 155, 166, 169, 183, 184– 86, 192, 205, 229–31, 244, 245, 248–53, 255–56, 260–61, 290; epistemology of 229; meanings as entities 185, 231; stimulus meaning 229–30; ultimate meanings 240–41; see also semantics; synonymy measurement 239–40, 243, 296 media 198, 201; Western 201 medicine 46, 49, 54, 70, 132, 290, 294–96, 300; medical practitioners 48–49; medical researchers 48–49 memory 10, 61, 69, 71, 214, 224; philosophy of 62–64, 70; “re-membering”, 64, 68 Menkiti, Ifeanyi A. 15, 203–204, 208n11, 293–94, 299, 302n5 mental states 198, 238–39, 246 metaphysics 3, 5, 108–109, 115n30, 154, 161n7, 164–65, 170–71, 174–77, 179n16, 196, 197, 205, 217–19, 221–25, 232, 235, 240, 253, 261; social 98; see also facts; property; ubuntu Metz, Thaddeus 4–5, 52, 174, 195, 197– 205, 207, 207n1, 207n7, 256, 259, 269, 272–74, 277–82, 284, 286n1, 286n12, 287n20; “Metz method” 200–202, 207 Meyer, Michel 215 migration 66, 77, 296; forced 98, 105 Mills, Charles W. 2 missionaries 3, 17n14, 66, 115n18, 205; as Janus-faced 254; their role in colonialism 253–54

Mngxitama, Andile 144n17 Mnyaka, Fr. Mluleki 156, 158 mo 8–9, 230–34 Montagu, Elizabeth 31 Montesquieu, Baron de 26, 31; see also The Spirit of the Laws Moore, Jesse 144n19 morality see ethics moral luck 159 Moral Re-armament (MRA) 45, 56n2 More, Mabogo Percy 11–12, 18n33, 18n34, 97, 100, 115n7 Mori, Tatsuya 151 Morris, Herbert 149, 152, 157, 160, 161n3, 161n9 mothers 52, 62, 82, 92n13, 101, 151, 208n10, 290, 299; surrogate 206; see also Africa Motlhabi, Mokgethi 156, 158 Mubaya, Tapuwa R. 17n11 Mudimbe, Valentin-Yves 213, 219 multi-nationalism 87 multi-racialism 81, 93n17, 107 multi-racial organizations 81, 83, 104 Munnik, Judge George xii Murove, Munyaradzi Felix 171, 272 Muslims see Islam myth 3, 70, 77, 79, 83–84, 93n20, 219, 248 Nagel, Thomas 130–36, 140, 142–43, 143n2, 144n16; see also The View from Nowhere Naicker, Monty 76, 92n5 narcissism 198 Natal Indian Congress (South Africa) 76 National Forum (NF) 81, 93n15 National Institute of Health (U. S. A.) 46 National Liberation Front (NLF) 81 National Liberation League (South Africa) 76 national minorities 90 National Party (South Africa) 86–88, 92n10, 98; “purified” 86 national question (South Africa) 75, 81, 84 National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) 12, 104, 106, 122 nations 13, 29, 30–31, 35, 44–47, 52–55, 56n1, 56n2, 64, 75–76, 79, 82, 84, 87–90, 106, 114, 176, 206, 207n7 Native Americans 27, 29, 64, 176 “natives” 27, 54, 98–99, 106, 107, 230, 254 Natives’ Representative Council (South Africa) 78, 80 nativism 218

Index  nature (non-human) 133, 164–73, 177, 178n1, 178n2, 179n16, 286n6; value of 133, 164–68, 179n16; see also animals (non-human); biocentrism; communitarianism; ecocentrism; history; law; plants Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 9–10, 218 negation 101, 108–110, 112; see also categories negligence 151 Négritude 101, 114, 115n7, 171, 218 “nègre” 101–103, 107–111, 115n7 “Negro” 26–29, 31, 33, 35, 101 neo-colonialism 9, 45–46, 56n1; covert 45; direct 43, 45, 46–47, 50, 55–56; global bioethics as 48, 51, 55–56; indirect 43, 45, 47–50, 53; moral 9, 43–51, 53–56, 56n3; social 56n3 Nevis 34 New Era Fellowship 76 Nguni language group 5, 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich 114, 291 Nigeria 47, 171, 174, 232 Nkrumah, Kwame 45–46, 56n3, 260–62; see also Consciencism non-collaboration 77–78 non-contradiction (principle) 188–89 non-Europeans 77–79, 83–84, 100, 107; non-European unity 78, 107 Non-European United Front 76 Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) see Unity Movement non-humanity 103 non-persons 107, 111, 155 non-racialism 13, 77–83, 85–87, 107, 112, 114, 115n26 non-white people 50, 77, 79, 97–100, 104– 106, 108, 111, 130; category non-white 12–13, 15, 99–100, 103–104, 107–113 normal people 294, 300 North America xiii, 2, 10 Norway 80 No Sizwe see Alexander, Neville Nso 170, 178n9, 205–206 Ntsebeza, Lungisile 2, 17n6, 93n30 nuclear weapons 65, 69 numbers 238–45, 246n6, 246n8; natural 243; number systems 239; as objects 242, 244; rational 243; universalist conceptions of 239, 242–43 numerals 240, 242–43, 246n8; numeral systems 240–43 Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 10 Nyerere, Julius 198, 260; “Nyerere doctrine” 64; see also ujamaa

315

obinrin 297–98 objectivity 62, 90, 139, 186, 229–30, 246n2, 292; moral 132–33; objective value 51, 134; see also guilt Ogude, S. E. 38n1 Ojomo, Patricia 179n16 Okeja, Uchenna 15–16 oko 297–98 Okpara, Mzee Lasana see Hord, Fred Lee okùnrin 297–98 Oladipo, Olusegun 205 old people 52, 139, 160, 203–204 Omar, Dullah 92n2 omnicide 65 One Azania, One Nation (No Sizwe) 75, 81, 84, 89–90 onisegun 229 ontology 66, 108, 120, 164–65, 168, 172, 177, 198, 204, 277–79, 281, 283, 285, 286n1; social ontology 1, 15, 277, 279; see also relations; relativism Onyewuenyi, Innocent 171 Opoku, Kofi 171 oppression xii, xvn1, 11, 13, 34–35, 37, 51, 56, 75, 80, 82–83, 91, 98–99, 112– 14, 120–21, 125–26, 135, 144n16, 301, 302n3; oppressed 35–37, 48, 61, 64, 75, 77–79, 83, 85, 87–88, 106–107, 112–13, 118, 120–21, 123–26, 128, 138, 143n10; oppressor 35, 61, 80, 106, 113, 118, 120–21, 125; social 302n3; systemic 48, 53, 105; tyrannic 48 Orange, House of 67 orature 3 Oruka, Henry Odera 11, 16, 17n16, 182–84, 187–88, 190–92, 213, 216, 248, 250–51 owé 289 Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́ 15, 295, 297–99 Oyowe, Oritsegbubemi A. 5–6 pagans 30 Pahad, Aziz 69 Paley, William 25, 31–34, 37; see also The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) 74 panic attacks 248–49 Paradox of Analysis 236, 238 parataxis 119 Paris, Peter J. 156 Park, Peter K. J. 2 partiality 15–16, 131–34, 136–39, 141–43, 158, 277; strong vs. weak 131, 134

316 Index particularism, 153, 185, 284 patients, 9, 48–49, 52–53, 56, 294; see also relationships Paul III, Pope 27 p’Bitek, Okot 290 peace 28, 52, 56n2, 61, 62, 64, 105, 253 Peace Corps (U. S. A.) 45, 56n2 Pearce, Carol 249–50 pecunimania 65–69, 71 perception 2, 3, 49, 50, 51, 63, 64, 102, 198, 269, 293–95; reflective 186, 189, 190 personal perspective 16, 130–36, 138–39, 142–43, 144n12 personhood 3, 5, 154–56, 159, 161, 186, 197–98, 204, 263, 289–93, 299, 301n2; legal 32, 258; normative conception of 289, 301n2, 302n5; processual conception of 289; see also non-persons Pettit, Philip 15, 270, 275–77, 279–80, 282, 284, 286n13 phenomenology 12, 114, 218, 224; existential 12, 97 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 101 philosophy: academic 11, 37, 255, 260; Africana 12; African cultures as a resource for 3–5, 18n38, 50–53; analytic xiii, 15, 213, 215, 223, 261–63; Chinese 249, 251, 269; Christian 251; continental 213, 215, 223; diversity in 182; edges of 6, 213–16, 225; folk 3–4, 17n12; German 14; Islamic 251; legal 65; moral 14, 15, 30–33, 43, 50, 52, 65, 203, 282; ordinary language philosophy 233; philosophical canon 2, 11, 17n14, 25– 26, 38; philosophy in action (Flikschuh) 262; of place 5, 174, 225–26; political philosophy xii, 1, 11, 15, 25–27, 18n27, 31, 33, 38, 127, 168–69, 260, 275–76, 282, 285; South American 2; “spatial” 213, 221; Western 149–50, 153–54, 193, 213–14, 249–50, 289; World philosophy 214; see also African philosophy; decolonization; education; epistemology; ethics; European philosophy; genealogy; history; language; memory; race; relativism; science “Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy” research seminar series xiv, 2, 17n6, 17n19, 18n33, 179n17 phrases 10, 25, 45, 119–26, 150, 154, 231, 296; phrasal atoms 123–26; phrase regimens 13, 119, 123–26 physiology 187, 296

Piattoli, Scipioni 27 Picasso, Pablo 221 Pickrell, J. K. 66 Pitman, Michael 144n19 Pityana, Nyameko Barney 12, 13, 18n35 plants 65, 168, 170, 177, 295 Plato 109, 198, 202, 213, 220; see also The Republic; The Symposium pluralism 239, 261; cultural 51–52 Pogge, Thomas 203 police 97, 105, 188 Political Liberalism (Rawls) 200 politics: phrasal 120–26; political activism xii, 103; political judgement 125; racial 122; revolutionary 260; see also decolonization; equality Polokwane 66 Population Registration Act (South Africa) 90, 92n3, 98, 116n33; “population registration groups” 13, 75–76, 83–84, 87–91 Portuguese 1 positivism 220 post-racialism 99, 107 poverty 63, 66, 67, 70, 131, 135, 136, 144n13, 203, 206; “spiritual” (Biko) 12; value of 5, 203, 207; Western assumptions about 203 practices: discursive 280–81; of valuing 133, 137, 139 prayer 44 Press, Karen 93n30 pride xv, 128, 156–58 Princeton University x The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (Paley) 31, 33 Prinz, Jesse 295 Prior, Arthur 215 Prior, Mary 215 prison xii, 81, 188 privilege 16, 53, 55, 79, 82, 85, 87, 102, 121–23, 130, 133, 135–43, 144n16, 170; economic 140; epistemic 48–49; in higher education 258; as problematic habits of character 137; racial 137; unearned 138; white 130, 138, 141, 143; see also rights “problematology” (Meyer) 215 profane 170 property (metaphysics) 102, 108–109, 133, 136, 161n2, 170, 175, 224, 236–37, 249, 272, 278, 282, 286n12; essential attributes (Gyekye) 291; interactive 279; see also relations

Index  property (possessions) 32, 38, 68, 137–38, 140, 170, 271 proverbs x, 3, 198, 203–204, 208n10, 248, 251–52, 300 psychiatry 54, 294 public policy 50, 89 Pufendorf, Samuel von 27–30 punishment 29, 33, 152–53, 204; retributive conception of 201 Putnam, Hilary 221 Quine, W. V. O. 229–31, 246n2 Quisling, Vidkun 80; “quislings” 80 race xii, xiii, 13, 16n4, 28, 66–67, 70, 75–91, 92n6, 92n7, 92n11, 93n20, 93n24, 98–99, 102, 112, 136–37, 140, 196, 221, 225, 296; biological conception of 28; compared to ghosts 85; Race Classification Review Boards (South Africa) 99; racial categories 70, 98–99, 107, 114; racial classification 70; racial nihilism/error theory 78–79, 92n8; philosophy of xiii, 12, 92n8; as a psychological weapon of ruling class 79, 85; racialization 14, 30, 55, 83, 85, 91, 99, 111, 135, 136, 140; as a social construct 85; “sociological races” 85; race thinking as intellectual collaboration 80; see also ideology; inequality; politics racism 2, 14, 18n27, 50–51, 53–55, 67, 101, 103–105, 108, 110–11, 143, 157, 199, 216, 224, 253, 296; anti-black racism 12–13, 51, 103, 108, 110–11; scientific 296; structural 216; see also biology Ramose, Mogobe Bernard 5–6, 10, 198, 217, 222–25, 271–74, 277–78, 280–84, 286n6; see also African Philosophy through Ubuntu Ramphele, Mamphela xiii rationality xv, 3, 4, 35, 102–103, 110, 113, 119, 121, 130, 153, 167, 187–88, 190–92, 204, 208n11, 213, 258, 261, 279, 283, 291; see also numbers Rawls, John 187–88, 200, 207n7; see also Political Liberalism recognition 101–105, 136, 144n16; failure of 101; deprivation of 104, 107–108; mutual recognition 101–103, 109, 113, 118, 271–72; withholding of 102–103, 110, 114 reconciliation 120, 124, 197, 283; see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission

317

Reddy, Thiven 93n30 redress 9–10, 90; epistemic 10 Reid, Thomas 38n2 relations 29, 61, 65, 85, 88, 101, 115n29, 123, 131, 134, 155, 176, 197–98, 213, 231, 235, 237–39, 241–42, 272–73, 276, 279, 282–85, 286n6, 286n13, 295–98; conceptual relations 233, 235–37; reciprocal 224, 271; relational normative thought 10, 15, 149, 154, 200, 269–70, 277–82, 284–86; relational property 279; relational social ontology 277–80, 284, 290; of seniority 297; symmetrical 282; unilateral 282; see also capacities; goods relationships 4, 5, 15, 36, 44, 51, 52, 56n3, 70, 98, 102, 132–33, 136, 138–40, 154–57, 160, 161n8, 165–66, 172–73, 176–77, 189, 197, 235, 250–52, 258, 260–64, 269, 271, 273–75, 277, 279–86, 286n16, 290, 292, 294, 296; as constituting (good) character 154, 274; doctor–patient 302n8; master–slave 111 relativism 8–10, 15, 44, 51–52, 55, 132, 228–29, 240–41, 283; conceptual 9, 228–29, 231–32, 244; cultural 51; methodological 228, 235; ontological 9, 229, 232, 242, 244; about the nature of philosophy 213; value 228, 234 religion 6, 7, 11, 17n10, 28–29, 32, 36, 43, 60, 67, 71n1, 77, 85, 98, 140, 175, 177, 199, 205, 224, 232, 251; see also Christianity; Hinduism; ideology; Islam; Judaeo-Christian tradition; science reparations 64, 138, 141 repression 105, 124, 126, 128; epistemic 126 The Republic (Plato) 198 republicanism 270, 274–76, 281; neo-republicanism 15, 270, 275–77, 279–85, 286n4 research subjects 46, 48–50, 52–53, 56 rheomodes 225 rhetoric 105, 215, 222, 249 Rhodes, Cecil John x, 1, 68 Rhodes Must Fall movement x, xiii, 1–2 Rhodes University 57n8, 115n17 Ricoeur, Paul 221 rights: of community 289; democratic 76; indigenous rights 44; and privileges 137; right to exist 61; see also conquest The Rights of War and Peace (Grotius) 28 ritual 85, 159, 166, 175–76, 204, 241–43 Robben Island 81, 87

318 Index Rome 197, 207, 275, 282 Roodt, Vasti 144n19 Roppongi 151 Roux, A. P. J. 170–71 Russell, Bertrand 240 Sàam, Moses Bon 35 sacred 93n21, 170, 205 sages 4, 17n16, 213, 216–17; see also African philosophy Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de 26, 28 San 66, 77, 98 Sancho, Ignatius 33 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 222 Sartre, Jean-Paul 37, 103, 113–14; see also bad faith sasa 218 Scheer, Jessica 292 Scheffler, Samuel 133, 139 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 220–21 schizophrenia 302n6 scholarship xiii, xv, 2, 11, 46, 48, 50, 81, 255, 259–60, 263; critical 259–60; scholarly cognition 222 science 60, 62, 85, 230, 244, 261, 296; biomedical 44, 47; moral 31; natural 50; philosophy of 215, 293; as a “religion” 60; social 4, 14, 50; see also cognition Science and an African Logic (Verran) 239–44 The Sculptors of Mapungubwe (Mda) 66 Second World War 80, 87 sectional mobilization 86; manufactured sectional mobilization 86–87 secular 205; secularism 201, 204 Seinsfrage (Heidegger) 215 self see personhood self-consciousness 4, 101–103, 109 self-expression 198–99, 201, 207 selfishness 16, 130, 135–36, 141, 143, 155, 160, 273 Selope-Thema, Richard Victor 92n11 semantics 121, 185, 230, 244 Senegal 171, 174, 260 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 171, 198, 260; see also Négritude sense see meaning Sesotho 82 sex 297–99; biological conception of 297–98; sexual essence 297–99 sexism 199 sexual abuse 160 sexuality 296

Shakespeare, William 60; see also Hamlet shame 30, 63, 150, 151, 156, 157, 199, 202 Sharp, Granville 33, 35 Shutte, Augustine 155, 273 Siame, Chisanga N. 198 silencing 9, 37, 49, 122 Simons, Mary 92n10, 93n30 Sinason, Valerie 301 Sindima, Harvey 171 Singer, Peter 203 Sisulu, Walter 81 slavery 10, 11, 25–38, 38n2, 60–61, 63–64, 68, 71, 76, 92n9, 92n13, 98, 101, 111, 275; abolition of 26–27, 32–34, 36, 38; of Africans 25–37, 64; canonical philosophers on 25–33, 36–38, 38n2; Committee for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade 33; by contract 29; of debtors 32; epistemic 60–61, 77; indentured servitude 29–30; moral responsibility for 34–35, 37; of prisoners captured in war, 28–30, 32, 36; see also emancipation social cohesion 91, 156, 197, 277, 279; see also harmony socialism 91, 92n14, 93n18, 144n17 social roles 140, 290–91, 297, 299 Socrates 202, 213, 215, 251 Sodipo, John Olubi 3, 8–9, 15, 17n20, 229–35, 245; see also Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft Sogolo, Godwin S. 295–96 solidarity 5, 52, 64, 91, 106, 149, 156, 158, 160, 161n9, 197, 199, 201, 207, 271, 273 Solomon, Andrew 294 Soudien, Crain 92n6, 93n30 soul 97, 120, 202, 205; schöne Seele 203 sour grapes 139 South Africa x–xiv, xvin2, 1–2, 5, 10–14, 16, 18n29, 56n2, 56n3, 61–70, 75–91, 92n4, 92n13, 92n14, 93n23, 93n24, 93n30, 97–100, 104–106, 110, 114, 115n18, 116n33, 126–27, 130, 133, 135, 137–38, 140–43, 143n10, 156, 174, 201, 223, 270, 286n5; black South Africans 12–13 , 97–114, 118–26, 128–43, 143n10; white South Africans 16, 81, 84, 87–89, 93n23, 97–114, 118–26, 128–43, 143n10, 144n11 South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) 81 South African Communist Party (SACP) xii

Index  South African Congress of Democrats (SACOD) 81 South African Constitution (1961) 67 South African Constitution (1996) 65, 68, 69, 137; see also Constitutional Court South African Indian Congress (SAIC) 76, 81, 91, 92n5 South African Labour Party (SALP) 92n10 South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) 12, 97, 104, 107, 111, 115n7, 115n19, 118, 122, 128 sovereign title to territory 65, 69 Soweto Uprising x, xvn1 Soyinka, Wole 71n1, 218 sperm banks 206 spina bifida 206 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu) 31 spirits 165, 170, 175–77, 205–206, 295–96 spirituality 68, 106, 135, 199, 204–205, 207, 217, 253, 295; African 199, 205; Afrikaner 68; Celtic 205; Franciscan 205; see also poverty Stalinism xii state capture 69–70 Stellenbosch University xii Die Stem van Suid-Afrika 67, 69 stereotypes 15; cultural and racialized 55 Stoics 221 street savviness 138 stress 295–96 stupidity 214, 220–22, 225–26, 301; distinguished from dull-wittedness, ignorance, incompetence, etc. 220; see also bêtise subservience 104, 122 supernatural 119–20, 199, 201, 204–205, 207, 295, 299; see also spirits; spirituality Svensson, Frans 161n10 Switzerland 93n24 symbolism 1, 66, 68–69, 175–77, 185, 197, 243–44 sympathy 16, 82, 119, 121, 126, 151, 155– 57, 159, 177, 182, 188, 190–92, 230, 244; negative 157; see also impartiality The Symposium (Plato) 202 synonymy 6, 230–31, 236–38, 246n6 Tabata, Isaac Bongani 76, 78, 80–81, 83–84 taboo 176 Talle, Aud 292 Tangwa, Godfrey 18n38, 170–71, 203, 205–206

319

Tayed, Roger 71 Taylor, Steven J. 302n7 Teale-James, Gabriele 93n30 technology 206, 224, 296 Teffo, L. J. 170–71 teleology 28, 114, 179n16 Tempels, Placide 3, 4, 17n12, 165–66, 173, 178n4, 217, 222, 251, 253–55; see also Bantu Philosophy testimony xii, 4, 48–50, 115n7, 115n19, 160, 231, 233–34; appropriate uptake of 49; testimonial quieting 49; testimonial smothering 49; see also injustice Thales 251 Thompson, Robert Farris 202 thought: capacity for 286n13; commonable 279; norms of 188 Thoughts and Sentiments (Cugoano) 27, 33–37 Thoughts on the New South Africa (Alexander) 90–91 time 17n10, 62, 63, 64, 65, 71, 93n30, 106, 136, 138, 139, 174, 176, 204, 216, 218, 244 Tobin, James 28, 34 townships (South Africa) xvn1, 105 trade unionism 77, 79 Trafalgar High School (Cape Town) 75 “transformation” xiv, 71, 90, 124, 138, 144n17; of institutions 138; of university curricula xiv, 138 translation 1, 33, 61, 123, 128, 166, 178n4, 193, 229–31, 233, 235, 237–39, 244–45; indeterminacy of 229–31, 246n2, 254, 270, 291, 292, 297; radical 229–30 Trotskyism 82, 93n18 truth 7–9, 10, 32, 60–61, 65–66, 75, 118–19, 123–26, 142, 205, 216, 217, 223, 228, 232, 235–38, 256, 261–63; coherence theory of 235; conceptual 236–38; correspondence theory of 235; deflationist theory of 237; Hegel’s concept of 301n1; pragmatist theory of 235; see also Truth and Reconciliation Commission Truth and Method (Gadamer) 215 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) 201 truthfulness 10, 60, 63 Tryon, Thomas 28 tuberculosis 57n7 Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond M. 154–56

320 Index ubuntu 5, 10, 51–52, 149, 154–56, 159–60, 195, 197–201, 203, 207, 207n1, 207n3, 222–25, 270–78, 280–85; as antiegoistic 155, 273; consequentialist account of 286n9; deontological account of 286n9; feminist account of 52; as gerund 278; as gerundive 278; intersectional capacity of 52; as a metaphysical system 5, 217, 222; perfectionist account of 271–74; as a politico-ideological project 51, 270–71; see also African Philosophy through Ubuntu; umuntu Uganda 46, 47 ujamaa 198 umuntu 155, 224–25 unfairness 1, 50, 136, 141, 142, 250, 251, 252, 258, 260 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) 91 United Democratic Front (UDF) 81, 93n17 United Nations (UN) 56n3, 92n7, 93n23 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 44, 55; Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights 44, 55 United States of America (USA) 2, 12, 28, 31, 56n3; United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 56n3; United States Information Agency, 45; see also Americans; Peace Corps Unity Movement (South Africa) xii, 13, 75–88, 91, 92n7, 92n14, 93n19, 93n20; New Unity Movement (NUM) 93n15; splits over the land question 92n14; Ten Point Programme 76, 92n14; three-pillar structure of 82–83 universalism 99, 185; cognitive universals 182, 187, 189–90; conceptual universals 186–87; epistemic universals 187, 190; about propositional attitudes 9, 229, 232–33; about values 44, 51–53; see also culture; numbers universities: university-type activity 255, 257–64; “Africanization” of 10; idea of a university 6, 250, 254–60, 263–64; public 258; see also decolonization University College London xiii University of Cambridge x, 31, 33 University of Cape Town (UCT) x–xii, 57n8, 116n35, 287n20; A. C. Jordan Chair in African Studies xi; African Studies Special Collection 93n30; Centre for African Studies (CAS) xi–xii,

1, 2, 179n17; Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) xiii; Humanities Faculty xiv; Philosophy Department xii–xiv, 1, 161n10, 179n17; Postgraduate Conference on African Philosophy 16n1; Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) 92n13; Vice-chancellor (VC) of xiii; see also “Philosophy in Africa, Africa in Philosophy” research seminar series; isiXhosa University of Durban Westville 115n4 University of Fort Hare 115n4 University of Glasgow 30, 38n2; Chair of Moral Philosophy 30 University of Natal 115n17 University of Oxford x University of Pretoria 66 University of South Africa xii University of Turfloop 115n4 University of the Witwatersrand 70, 115n17, 287n20 Urdu 82 utilitarianism 5, 132, 149, 150, 152, 208n11 values 56n3, 63, 78, 93n25, 120, 123, 125–26, 130–32, 134–35, 137–43, 153, 156, 157, 159, 167, 178n5, 193, 198, 201–207, 228, 232–34, 260, 270, 274, 276, 280–81, 283, 300; African values 54, 164, 175, 177, 178n1, 197, 201, 203–205; biological basis of 185, 188; changes in 48–51; colonialist 50; common framework for 44; conversion of 43, 45–50, 142–43, 144n20; cross-cultural judgement of 44; epistemic 9, 233–34; European 201; instrumental 4, 133, 154; intrinsic 4, 133, 164–66, 168–70, 172–73, 175–76, 178, 179n16, 271–73, 277; practical 107, 234; presented as universal 9, 43–47, 53; value systems 43–47, 50–51, 53, 55, 164, 175–77, 234; see also community; nature (non-human); objectivity; practices; universalism Van der Ross, R. E. 93n18 Van Norden, Bryan W. 2 Van Riebeeck, Jan 65–68 Verran, Helen 239–44, 246; see also Science and an African Logic vice 151 Vice, Samantha 15–16, 161n10 The View from Nowhere (Nagel) 131, 142

Index  violence 33, 37, 48, 56n3, 91, 102, 112–13, 125, 216, 220; colonial 51, 54, 225; epistemic 256 Virginia 248 virtue 5, 44, 63, 149–50, 152–54, 156–60, 161n6, 161n7, 202, 270, 285; Afrocommunal theory of 157, 160; civic virtue 275, 281; as loving the good 153; martial virtues 199, 201, 207; see also ethics vitalism 217 vitality 166–70; vital force 3, 166–70 Voortrekker Monument (Tshwane) 68–69 Wallace, John 230 war 3, 28, 29, 36, 60–61, 63, 65, 69, 81, 87; class war 188; just war doctrine 36, 65, 67; warriors 201; see also Cold War; Second World War Wasserman, David 292, 295 Wayland, Francis 35 Weiss, Bernhard 8–9, 15, 116n35 Westerners 17n12, 124, 203, 294; Western-centrism 46; see also biology; feminism; media; philosophy West Indies 27, 32, 33, 45 Whately, Richard 215 wheelchair 300 white people, 2, 13, 16, 28, 34, 36, 37, 66, 69, 75–79, 81, 84, 87–89, 93n23, 97– 114, 118–26, 128–43, 143n10, 144n11; anxieties of 136; “blanc” 101; category white 12–13, 15, 99–114; white global dominance 50; white ignorance 48, 50, 56; “whiteness” 97, 99, 102, 106, 128, 135, 140; white supremacy xiii, 37, 53; see also privilege; South Africa Whyte, Susan Reynolds 291–92 wickedness 34, 52, 155

321

Widdows, Heather 43–45, 47 Wigen, Kären E. 219 Wilson, Anne 293–94 Wiredu, Kwasi 3, 4, 7–8, 9, 15, 16, 16n3, 18n24, 182–93, 197, 202, 217, 235–39, 245, 262, 263, 302n5 Wirth, Jason 220–21 Wiśniewski, Andrzej 215 witches 295 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 128, 213, 240, 241 Wolff, Jonathan xiii Woodstock (Cape Town) 77 working class 13, 76, 77, 79–80, 86–87; “labour aristocracy” within 79, 86–87; upper vs. lower strata of 79 X, Malcolm 37 xenophobia 218 amaXhosa 77, 86, 98 isiXhosa 82, 98, 128, 190; “Xhosa for Philosophers” course (UCT) xiii Yale University x yet-to-be-born 286n6 Yoruba 8–9, 51, 202, 207n4, 207n9, 208n10, 229–34, 239–44, 246n8, 263, 297–98 Young, Iris Marion 48 Yu Chi Chan Club (YCCC) 81 zamani 218 Zambia 46, 198 Zeno 215 Zimbabwe 71, 171, 174, 270 Zola, Irving Kenneth 300, 302n8 amaZulu 69, 82, 86, 98 isiZulu 82 Zulu, Shaka 199 Zuma, President Jacob 68–69