RCCS Annual Review

A selection from the Portuguese journal Revista Crítica

de Ciências Sociais
1 | 2009
Issue no. 1

Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two

Perspectives on African Studies
Paulin J. Hountondji

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/174
DOI: 10.4000/rccsar.174
ISSN: 1647-3175

Publisher
Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra

ELECTRONIC REFERENCE
Paulin J. Hountondji, “Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two
Perspectives on African Studies”, RCCS Annual Review [Online], 1 | 2009, Online since
01 septembre 2009, connection on 28 juin 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/
rccsar/174 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rccsar.174

RCCS Annual Review is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
2
 RCCS Annual Review, 1, September 2009: 121-131

Paulin J. Hountondji
National University of Benin
African Centre for Advanced Studies, Benin

Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two Perspectives on African Studies *

How African are the so-called African Studies? The study of Africa, as developed so far by a long
intellectual tradition, is part of an overall project of knowledge accumulation initiated and
controlled by the West. This article advocates an active, lucid, responsible appropriation by
African societies themselves of the knowledge capitalised over centuries about them. It advocates
more generally the development in Africa of an autonomous, self-reliant tradition of research and
knowledge that addresses problems and issues directly or indirectly posed by Africans. It calls
upo épisté ologies du Sud. It calls upon African scholars in African Studies and in all other
disciplines to understand that they have been doing so far a kind of research that was massively
extraverted, i. e. externally oriented, intended first and foremost to meet the theoretical and
practical needs of Northern societies. It invites a new orientation and new ambitions for research
by Africans in Africa.
Keywords: African Studies; research; knowledge; Southern epistemologies.

A la mémoire de John Conteh-Morgan

1. By African Studies we usually mean not just one discipline but the whole range of
disciplines that take Africa as a subject of study. Among other such disciplines are often
e tio ed Af i a histo , Af i a so iolog a d a th opolog , Af i a li guistics,
Af i a politi s, Af i a philosoph , et . A fi st uestio the efo e e o es u a oida le:
is there any kind of unity between these disciplines? Do they just relate to Africa each on its
own without being anyhow interrelated? Are they simply juxtaposed to one another while
studying the same object from different angles and perspectives, or are they instead
interdependent in such a way that they are bound to grow or fade together? One easily
perceives the implication: if these disciplines do not need one another, if each of them can
flourish by its own without drawing on any neighbouring discipline, then there is no need to
put them together in the same institution, no need to create institutes of African Studies, let
alone something as big as BIG-SAS is expected to be.
We assume actually that these disciplines are somehow interrelated and we have good
reasons to do so. Between African history and African sociology, for instance, there is
*
Article originally published in RCCS 80 (March 2008). It is a revised version of a lecture delivered during the
opening ceremony of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS), University of
Bayreuth, Germany, on December 13, 2007. I am grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for giving
me the possibility to have another three months research stay in Germany during that period. My first
Humboldt fellowship dates back to the years 1980-1982. I was hosted by the Philosophy Institute of the
University of Düsseldorf, then directed by the late Professor Alwin Diemer.

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obviously an objective complementarity inasmuch as the present situation of any society

derives directly or indirectly from its past. On the other hand, a good knowledge of the
p ese t a d of the logi of e e ts i toda s life a gi e useful i sights i to the
comprehension of the past. Synchrony therefore refers to diachrony and vice-versa. History
and sociology are just an example. Similar relations can be found between all the disciplines
that constitute African Studies.
There is more, however. Beyond the special links that unite disciplines studying the same
object, there is an overall solidarity between the sciences both intellectually and historically.
Not only do the so-called African Studies rely on methodologies and theories which
consolidated in various fields, like general history, sociology, linguistics, economics, political
science, etc., long before they were applied to Africa as a new field of study, but moreover,
as everybody can see, BIG-SAS is part of the Institute of African Studies, which itself is part of
the University of Bayreuth, i.e. an institution where many other disciplines, including
mathematics, physics, computer science, biology, chemistry, geology, business and
administration, philosophy, engineering, are taught and researched in, in addition to African
Studies and to the mother disciplines of African Studies themselves. And it is the same
everywhere. This institutional setting is not peculiar to Bayreuth. It clearly indicates how
deeply the different areas of research are interconnected. Such interconnection, as is well
known, is at the root of the very idea of university (Universitas) as was thematised among
others by a man who was not only a thinker but also the real founder of the
Wissenschaftspolitik in 19th century Germany: Wilhelm von Humboldt.

2. There is at least one more question: how African are the so-called African Studies? By
African history, for instance, we usually mean the historical discourse on or about Africa and
not necessarily a historical discourse coming from Africa or produced by Africans. In
grammatical terms we mean the history of Africa: historia Africae in Latin, where Africae,
the genitive of Africa, would be said to be an objective genitive rather than a subjective
genitive. In the same line, African sociology or anthropology means the sociology or
anthropology of Africa as an objective genitive, that is a sociological or anthropological
discourse on Africa and not a sociological or anthropological tradition developed by Africans
within Africa. Similarly, African linguistics is understood as the study of African languages
and not necessarily a study by Africans. Imagine a group of African scholars studying

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Japanese, for instance, or English, German or Portuguese. They would not be said to be
contributing to the development of a linguistic research tradition in Africa. Instead they
would be said to be doing Japanese linguistics, English, German or Portuguese linguistics.
In my own intellectual development I was sensitised to this problem and started
pe ei i g it as a p o le hile eadi g ooks o Af i a philosoph o Af i a s ste s of
thought. The authors usually assumed that Africans themselves were not conscious of their
own philosophy, and that only Western analysts observing them from without could give a
systematic account of their wisdom. Father Placide Tempels, a Belgian missionary working in
the former Belgian Congo, must be credited for giving the most explicit formulation of this
assumption:

Let us not expect the first Black-in-the-street (especially if he is young) to give us a systematic
account of his ontological system. Nevertheless this ontology exists; it penetrates and informs
all the p i iti e s thi ki g a d do i ates all his eha iou . Usi g the ethods of a al sis a d
synthesis of our own intellectual disciplines, we can and therefore must do the p i iti e the
service of looking for, classifying and systematizing the elements of his ontological system.
(Tempels, 1969: 15)

And further on:

We do not claim that the Bantus are capable of presenting us with a philosophical treatise
complete with an adequate vocabulary. It is our own intellectual training that enables us to
effect its systematic development. It is up to us to provide them with an accurate account of
their conception of entities, in such a way that they will recognize themselves in our words
a d ill ag ee, sa i g: You ha e u de stood us, ou k o us o o pletel , ou k o i
the sa e a e k o . (Tempels, 1969: 24)

What is wrong about this alleged unawareness of the natives about their own philosophy
is that the latter is said to be the most self-conscious discipline, at least in a certain
philosophical tradition, precisely the one in which I had been brought up myself: the
philosophy of consciousness as developed from Plato to Descartes, Kant and Husserl, to
mention just a few important landmarks in this tradition.
What bothered me most was the fact that an increasing number of African intellectuals
were stepping in the same direction. African academics doing philosophy in or outside
Western universities spent most of their time writing M.A. theses, Ph.D. dissertations,
articles, books, conference papers or monographs of all sorts on such topics as the
philosophy of being among the people of Rwanda, the concept of time among the people of

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East Africa, the perception of the old man among the Fulas of Guinea, the Yoruba conception
of human being, Yoruba metaphysical thinking, moral philosophy among the Wolof, the
Akan doctrine of God, the conception of life among the Fon of Dahomey, etc. I found these
topics interesting per se and some of the monographs particularly insightful. But I could not
admit that the first duty, let alone the only duty of African philosophers, was to describe or
reconstruct the worldview of their ancestors or the collective assumptions of their
communities. I contended therefore that most of these scholars were not really doing
philosophy but ethno-philosophy: they were writing a special chapter of ethnology aimed at
studying the systems of thought of those societies usually studied by ethnology 1 – however
such societies are defined or characterised.2
At the same time, however, I drew attention to the very existence of these monographs.
To me they were part and parcel of African philosophy in a radically new sense. In my view
African philosophy should not be conceived as an implicit worldview unconsciously shared
by all Africans. African philosophy was quite simply philosophy done by Africans. There was a
contradiction in Western philosophy while thinking of itself as the most self-conscious of all
intellectual disciplines and at the same time assuming that some non-Western philosophies
could be self-unconscious.
I drew attention, therefore, to the existence of an African philosophical literature. The
very first sentence of my little book, African Philosophy, Myth and Reality, made this

1
As is ell k o , the o d eth o-philosoph as used i the ea l se e ties al ost at the sa e ti e
colleague Marcien Towa from Cameroon and myself in a derogatory and polemical sense (Hountondji, 1970;
Towa, 1971). But the word itself was older. It dates back at least to the early forties when Nkrumah used it in a
quite positive sense to describe a discipline to which he himself wanted to contribute. As mentioned in his
autobiography, Nkrumah got his M.A. in philosophy in 1943 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and
egiste ed soo afte fo a Ph.D. i eth o-philosophy. He a tuall ote the thesis ut ould ot defe d it
before leaving in 1945 to Britain, where he served as secretary to the fifth Pan-African Congress. I am indebted
to Willia A aha fo p o idi g e ith a op of the t pe itte a us ipt. The o d eth o-philosoph
already appears in the title: Mind and Thought in Primitive Society: a Study in Ethno-Philosophy with Special
Reference to the Akan Peoples of the Gold Coast, West Africa (Nkrumah, 1945; 1957).
2
There is a broad consensus today that notions traditionally used to identify the kind of societies studied by
ethnology (as opposed to sociolog a e st o gl Eu o e t i a d i this se se iased o ideologi al. “ hola s
are at pains to explain exactly what they mean by p i iti e so ieties. Alte ati e otio s supposed to e
more politically correct, su h as a hai so ieties, t aditio al so ieties, i dige ous peoples, et ., a e ot
much clearer. Describing ethnology as the study of illite ate so ieties is ot ette eithe , insofar as the
societies concerned are thus characterised negatively by something which they do ’t have: literacy. It is more
productive to pay attention to the specific ways and devices through which knowledge is transmitted without
using writing in the way it is used in the West. For this reason they should be called, as suggested by the French
linguist Maurice Houis, ivilisatio s de l’o alité – oral civilisations. Mamoussé Diagne, a philosopher from
Senegal, has carefully analysed in his Critique of Oral Reason this logi of o alit , as opposed to the logi of
writing described by Jack Goody, and the impact of this specific way of transmission on the knowledge
produced (Houis, 1971; Goody, 1986; Diagne, 2005).

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state e t hi h a appea et ospe ti el toda as a vérité de La Palice, a

commonplace idea, something quite simple indeed, which, however, due to the intellectual
and ideological landscape of the time, seemed extraordinarily new: B Af i a philosoph I
mean a set of texts (Hountondji, 1977, 1983). If this book has made such a strong
impression, to the extent of being awarded the Herskovits prize in Los Angeles in 1984 and
being more recently selected in 2002 at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in Harare
among the hundred best African books of the 20th century, it must be due to this simple and
apparently naive statement whose implications and consequences, however, were far-
reaching.
One immediate implication was this: the new concept of African philosophy allowed a
distinction between Africanists and Africans in the field of philosophy. Many Western
thinkers who wrote extensively on African systems of thought could no longer be viewed as
belonging to African philosophy in the new sense, while the works by their African
counterparts were part of the African writings in ethno-philosophy and therefore were part
and parcel of the African philosophical literature. This does not mean that the works by
Africans were better in any sense of the word. Besides, nobody can ignore the thematic
solidarity or even the intellectual complicity between African and non-African ethno-
philosophy, nor deny the genealogic filiation that makes African ethno-philosophy the
daughter of Western engagement with exotic worldviews. Drawing this kind of demarcation,
however, made it possible to call attention to the African reception of Western research
traditions and get African scholars to face their own intellectual responsibility.
There is still another implication: African philosophy also includes writings that criticise or
question ethno-philosophy, which clearly indicates that there is no unanimity whatsoever
within Africa on this specific issue. Equating African philosophy with African philosophical
literature made it possible to perceive the internal debates and contradictions, the
intellectual tensions that make this philosophy a vivid one, and African culture as a whole a
living, not a dead culture. Ethno-philosophy was based, among other assumptions, on the
idea that, in small-scale societies or so-called primitive societies, there was total unanimity
and, so to say, everyone agrees with everyone. Moreover, this alleged unanimity was viewed
as a virtue, and dissent as something bad or dangerous. I called this double assumption the
unanimist illusion. I drew attention instead to the virtue of pluralism as a factor of progress
and to the fact that not only modern Africa but even the so-called traditional Africa have

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been experiencing pluralism over time in all domains. As far as philosophy is concerned, this
kind of pluralism appeared to me as something most valuable and fruitful (Hountondji,
2002).
Needless to say, African philosophy extends to a whole range of works that have nothing
or very little to do with the specific issue of the existence of African philosophy, and
therefore cannot just be classified along the line Ethno-philosophy vs. Critical Philosophy.
Some writings develop African attempts to think, rethink or simply understand Western
philosophy and appropriate, so to say, non-African traditions of thought. They give birth to
African interpretations of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, the Critical School of
Frankfurt, Islamic thinkers, maybe tomorrow Indian and Chinese philosophies, and many
other intellectual traditions from outside Africa. Some others work on universal issues and
concepts, including issues on mathematical logic or the foundations of science, the history
and sociology of science, the anthropology of knowledge, ethics and political philosophy,
philosophy of language, etc. Such attempts, of course, are part and parcel of African
philosophy.

3. Now, how does all this apply to African Studies? In a sense, the study of Africa is stamped
with a kind of original sin in view of the objective role it played in the history of colonisation.
In the case of Germany the problem is even more serious, given the way the discipline was
instrumentalised during the period of national-socialism.
This, however, is part of history. The historical complicity has been denounced again and
again not only by non-Western scholars but also, and this is more important, by Western
scholars themselves. Moreover, as far as the Hitlerian period is concerned, there must have
been at the very height of this awful dictatorship at least some shy protests which could not
be loudly articulated unless one wanted to commit suicide. I would assume, as was written
recently by a German anthropologist, that, despite p o i e t e a ples, it ould e
misleading [...] to see all e e s of Af i a studies as pla i g a a ti e ole i Hitle s
Germany. The appropriate picture was rather, as Dostal has called it, silence in darkness
(Probst, 2005; Dostal, 1994).
Despite this original sin, therefore, Western scholarship including German Afrikanistik has
made a huge contribution to the knowledge of African languages, societies, history and
cultures. Some names remain unforgettable, su h as Adolf Bastia , the fathe of the

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German Völkerkunde, to use the o ds of a African anthropologist;3 Carl Meinhof, the

specialist of Bantu languages; Diedrich Westermann, who was missionary in Togo before
starting his brilliant career as an anthropologist; Leo Frobenius, whose work contributed a
lot to giving Black writers like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sedar Senghor better awareness of
the fundamentals and value of their own culture; Janheinz Jahn, who was so strongly
impressed while listening to a lecture by Senghor in 1951 that he started almost immediately
his u ti i g olle tio a d t a slatio of Af i a lite atu e (Probst, 2005: 415); and nearer
to us a man like Ulli Beier, who founded in Bayreuth the institution called i Ge a I a-
le a Haus e ause the sou d like i do i E glish does ot e ist i Ge a ,
where the Yo u a p o ou es I a le a – eaut is ha a te , e.g., the eautiful
woman is the one who behaves well. We cannot forget the late Georg Elwert, to whom the
peasants of Ayou, the village in Benin where he did most of his fieldwork, paid a vibrant
homage in October 2006.4
As an external observer I would probably not describe, as Peter Probst does (2005: 405),
African Studies i Ge a as ei g et i t a d et ee [...] two major spheres of
influence, the French and the British ones – assise entre deux chaises, as would be said in
French: sitting between two chairs without its own identity. Instead, the German tradition
seems to me the model of what we should try to build in Africa. First, it speaks its own
language, German. Second, by way of implication, it addresses primarily a German-speaking
audience and evolves first and foremost as an internal debate within Germany and German-
speaking countries, including Austria and part of Switzerland, where scholars question one
another, respond to and discuss with one another. Third, the debated issues are significant
for, and largely shared by, the German-speaking academic community – which allows the
development of a horizontal and self-sustained debate. We are not in a situation where the
individual scholar shares in a problematic developed elsewhere, say, in the French or the
English-speaking world, over the shoulder of his/her own community. Fourth, debating

3
See Diallo, 2001.
4
The villagers were invited to attend a two-hou sessio i ho age to Geo g El e t, a Ge a Af i a ist
(1947- du i g a international conference organised in Cotonou from 0ctober 16 to 19, 2006 by the
African Centre for Advanced Studies. Instead of one or two delegates, they brought in a big delegation of 25
people with drums and other sophisticated instruments. They explained in Aizo (a variant of Fongbe) what that
man meant to them, recalling, among other things, how he taught them to write and read their own language,
how he helped them to find out funds to sink wells and get drinking water in their villages. With permission of
their elders, they executed sacred dances that could only be danced in special circumstances. This amounted,
in fact, to organising a second burial ceremony.

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endogenous issues does not amount to scientific autarky or intellectual self-imprisonment.

Not only do some scholars publish part of their work in French or more often in English, the
new lingua franca of international scholarship, in order to reach a wider audience, but it can
be assumed that whenever a discussion originally launched in Germany becomes significant
for the international scientific community, non-German scholars themselves feel the need to
have it translated as soon as possible.
This way of doing research can be said to promote an autonomous, self-reliant scientific
activity. Instead, I am afraid the way we do research in Africa is just the opposite. Too often
do we tend to investigate subjects which are of interest first and foremost to a Western
audience. Most of our articles are published in journals located outside Africa and are meant
therefore for a non-African readership. Even when we happen to publish in Africa, the fact is
that African scholarly journals themselves are read much more outside Africa than in Africa.
In this sense, our scientific activity is extraverted, i.e. externally oriented, intended to meet
the theoretical needs of our Western counterparts and answer the questions they pose. The
exclusive use of European languages as a means of scientific expression reinforces this
alienation. The majority of our country people are de facto excluded from any kind of
discussion about our research outcome, gi e that the do t e e u de sta d the
languages used. The small minority who understands knows, however, that they are not the
first addressees but only, if anything, occasional witnesses of a scientific discourse meant
primarily for others. To put it bluntly, each African scholar has been participating so far in a
vertical discussion with his/her counterparts from the North rather than developing
horizontal discussions with other African scholars (see Taiwo, 1993, Hountondji, 1988a;
1990; 1995; 2006).
Am I going too far? No doubt this description would have been quite adequate fifty years
ago or so. But things have changed ever since. We do have today in Africa, in the various
fields of academia, national, sub-regional, regional scientific communities. We have
universities and research centres and some of them are very good. We have brilliant
scientists and scholars, and some of them are doing quite well. Despite all this progress,
however, we are still a long way behind what should be perceived as our final goal: an
autonomous, self-reliant process of knowledge production and capitalisation that enables us
to answer our own questions and meet both the intellectual and the material needs of
African societies. The first step in this direction would probably be to formulate original

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p o le ati s, original sets of problems that are grounded in a solid appropriation of the
international intellectual legacy and deeply rooted in the African experience (Hountondji,
1988b; 1997; 2002).
In this perspective, the discipline or set of disciplines called African Studies will certainly
not have the same meaning in Africa as in the West. In Africa it is or should be part of a
wider project: knowing oneself in order to transform. African Studies in Africa should not be
satisfied with just contributing to the accumulation of knowledge about Africa, a kind of
knowledge that is capitalised in and managed by the North as all other sectors of scientific
knowledge. African scholars involved in African Studies should have another priority, which
is to develop first and foremost an Africa-based tradition of knowledge in all disciplines, a
tradition where questions are initiated and research agendas set out directly or indirectly by
African societies themselves. Non-African scholars will then be expected to contribute to
solving these questions and implementing these research agendas from their own
perspective and historical background.
Things should also happen in Africa, therefore, and not always or exclusively outside
Africa. Fairness to the Black continent demands that all the knowledge accumulated
throughout centuries on different aspects of its life be shared with the people who live
there. It demands that adequate measures be taken to facilitate a lucid, responsible
appropriation by Africa of the knowledge available, the discussions and interrogations
developed elsewhere. Such appropriation should go hand in hand with a critical re-
appropriation of Af i a s o e doge ous k o ledges a d, e o d, a iti al app op iatio
of the very process of knowledge production and capitalisation.5

5
It has been shown in a convincing manner how deeply the study of Africa has impacted on the mother
disciplines in the social sciences and humanities (Bates, Mudimbe & O Ba , 99 . While a k o ledgi g this
important fact, the point I am trying to make here is slightly different. Both these core disciplines and African
Studies have been so far developing mostly in the West. But Africa should now develop its own process of
questioning and accumulating knowledge, not only in the field of African Studies, but in all academic
dis ipli es. I this se se it should e oted that ‘esea h i Af i a, as mentioned in the subtitle of the book,
does not mean research within Africa, but just research about Africa or research in African Studies. The point
here is that Africa should not be reduced to a subject of study. Geography matters. The more things are done in
Africa the better for the present and future of this continent.

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