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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2014
African philosophy today is a complicated and dynamic discipline. This presentation will concentrate on two topics that are currently of special interest. One concerns the meaning of the term ‘communalism’ when it is used to express a defining characteristic of Africa's cultures. The other concerns the reactions on the part of African philosophers and scholars to the movement that has come to be known in Western academia and culture as ‘feminism’.
1 ‘Hence any group of humans that can be credited with any sense of morals at all – surely, a most minimal species credential – will have some sense of human sociality. But in the consciousness of moral humankind there is a finely graduated continuum of the intensity of this feeling which ranges, in an ascending order, from the austerely delimited social sympathies of rigorous individualism to the pervasive commitment to social involvement characteristic of communalism. It is a commonplace of anthropological wisdom that African social organization manifests the last type of outlook. [My own] Akan society is eminently true to this typology.'
2 Wiredu, Kwasi and Gyekye, Kwame. Person and Community (Washington, DC: The Council for Research and Values in Philosophy, 1992), 199Google Scholar
3 Wiredu and Gyekye. Person and Community, 196.
4 Wiredu and Gyekye. Person and Community, 200 (my italics)
5 Ibid., 195
6 Wiredu and Gyekye. Person and Community, 197
7 Ibid., 197–198
8 Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 29 (my italics)
9 ‘The basis of the quest for consensus in many Africa systems of moral thought is said to be social rather than religious. Morality in the African communal setting is therefore also regarded as primarily humanistic in character.’ This limits the role of religion in many African systems of moral thought. ‘One important implication of the founding of value on human interests is the independence of morality from religion in the Akan outlook: What is good in general is what promotes human interests. . . . Thus, the will of God, not to talk of any other extra-human being, is logically incapable of defining the good.’ Wiredu and Gyekye. Person and Community, 194
10 Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, 29
11 Ibid., 29
12 Ibid.
13 Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, 29 (my italics, in part)
14 Ibid., 29 (my italics)
15 Ibid.
16 Wiredu, Kwasi. Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective, 72 (my italics)
17 Ibid., 30
18 Ibid., 28 (my italics)
19 Amadiume, Ifi. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion & Culture (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1997), 197Google Scholar
20 Amadiume, Ifi. Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion & Culture, 18, 84
21 Amadiume, Ifi. African Matriarchal Foundations: The Igbo Case. (London: Karnak House, 1987)Google Scholar
22 Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1987), 185Google Scholar
23 Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands (London: Zed Books Ltd., 1987), 90Google Scholar
24 Ibid., 34 (my italics)
25 Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 36Google Scholar
