Two Basic Books on African Culture and Philosophy
By Bert hamminga
Cultural Research Centre Jinja

In my endeavour to understand African culture I notably benefited from work of two scholars who did pioneering work. Their work became widely known among those interested in what can be provisionally dubbed "African philosophy". Understandably, as a result of the spread of their work, it became object of the less interesting types of discussion and academic controversy. The two are Placide Tempels Bantu Philosophy, and John S. Mbiti African Religions and Philosophy.

I do not believe that Temple really thought, like the title of his book suggests, that Bantu "have a philosophy". "Philosophy" is a word that he used in order to achieve initial understandability to Westerners, who, reading further, discover that really all Bantu concepts differ so much from the Western ones that communication and explication could best not proceed at all in familiar terms like "philosophy". But one has to start somewhere hasn't one? The tremendous achievement of Temple is that he, as a philosophically trained Westerner construed the first reasonably meaningful translation of basic Bantu concepts of life into Western (philosophical) language. It is highly instructive to follow his astonishing attempt sentence by sentence. Many times he deliberately chooses at first to be understandable to the Westerner rather than right in Bantu terms. For instance when he starts saying that the world consists of "things" that have a "force". At the end of his explanation he feels that those Western readers who still follow will now be ready to swallow that according to Bantu any reference to "things" is really void of meaning, and that the world consists of forces period.

Mbiti made the long journey of thought and understanding in the other direction. As an African, he studied Western religion and philosophy, and set out to explain African thought using these Western terms in order to give to Western readers a not too bad idea of what he was going to deal with. Like Temple's, Mbiti's book hence is primarily meant to be a contribution to the Western understanding of African thought. (Like Temple's, Mbiti's book also provoked, among African scholars, the inverse discussion on the African understanding of Western thought, and attempts to improve African self-understanding by its confrontation with Western articulations of African culture) Temple's and Mbiti's views and strategies of translation are astonishing intercultural achievements.

Mbiti, J.S. (1969) African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann)

Tempels, Fr. Placide ([1945] (1959) Bantu Philosophy, Paris: Pr�sence Africaine