Philosophy in Africa in general and in Ethiopia in particular is an academic subject that started to be taught in colleges relatively lately, as the first department of philosophy at the Addis Ababa University was established sometime in the early 1980s. This does not however imply that African, and by implication, Ethiopian philosophy is only about 50 years old. It does only indicate that the relatively late introduction of philosophy in academic circles although African philosophy must be centuries old in existence without anyone being aware of it or without anyone paying attention to it.
Philosophy was first invented by the Greeks and then transferred to Europe and America in the course of centuries while African or Ethiopian philosophy remained uncovered or unknown although the people were practicing for a very until they gathered the dim awareness that they existed in a state of nature until the dawn of the last century. Africans in those distant times existed as human beings without being aware of how they looked at the world around them. It was later on that they were practicing their own brands of traditional beliefs or perceptions which later on became to be known as their spontaneous percepts. They had still to wait for a long time before their daily experiences found articulation and became collective conscious.
According to Oxford Languages Dictionary, philosophy in its universal and modern sense is defined as, “The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline” or “A theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behavior.”
What philosophy is good for, or what human objectives it serves has remained the perennial question that has pitted philosophers against each other and continues to do so around many academic institutions around the world. Apart from the interminable arguments it often provokes about something rather esoteric, philosophy continues to provoke debates around many controversial and highly abstract concepts.
In my freshman year at college, I had to take a course called phil.101 or Logic. It was a basic introduction to philosophy because logic is considered a formal science that investigates how conclusions follow from premises. Out of a term-long course, what I now remember more than anything else is the broad smile on Professor Claude Sumner’s face and bits and pieces of his utterances like “Man is mortal. Aristotle is a man. Therefore Aristotle is mortal.”
I could not see why he was smiling while philosophy was no joke. I think he was trying to smooth the rough edges of the subject with his smile. I guess now that teaching philosophy with a serious mien on one’s face could have spoilt the show.
Another unforgettable expression was when he spoke about death and said, smiling of course: “A dead Einstein does not know what one plus one is equal to.” Personally, I was more interested in Sumner’s ubiquitous and trade-mark smile than in logical thinking because I could not grasp what was the use of inference, deductions or conclusions from given premises and what practical relevance they had in real life.
The practical application of philosophy is still a hotly debated topic and more so during my student days when studying philosophy had no visible relevance in life and the number of students who enrolled in the department of philosophy could be counted on the fingers of one’s hand. Obviously man cannot live in pure speculation of the nature of life, death and the other dimensions of existence. If you studied English language you could become a teacher of a foreign language, but if you study philosophy you cannot become a teacher because you are supposed to learn educational philosophy as well as methods of teaching and related courses.
When Marxism-Leninism was introduced to the college philosophy curriculum, it appeared that learning philosophy had finally found purpose or objective. Although a transient one. Logic was switched for Marxist philosophy. Marxism was stylish and we all became Marxists to join the chorus without knowing the consequences of our decision. Professor Sumner, may his soul rest in peace, who was head of the philosophy department at that time was branded an “idealist philosopher” good for nothing by the new “Marxists” because of his religious affiliation as a Jesuit, and therefore an opponent of Marxism whose basic foundation was dialectical materialism. Professor Sumner was subsequently downgraded to the status of lecturing in general philosophy or wait until he could be retired without dignity.
A few dozens of students who graduated from the philosophy department have become lecturers while others went abroad to do their PhDs. Still others found “jobs” in non-philosophical occupations that had nothing to do with philosophical speculation. They became editors or journalists or what we may call ‘undefined professionals’. The few among the remaining degree holders were lucky enough to land jobs in some dark corners of well-paying NGOs where they languished for the rest of their lives.
African philosophy was not much known at that time. Ethiopian philosophy was even unthinkable. So, whenever some academics raised these topics, they considered both philosophies underdeveloped; looking at African philosophy through the distorted and biased prisms of Western philosophical paradigms.
It all boiled down to showing how African philosophy was undeveloped or useless something that amounted to the same a Western academic criticism of its “backwardness”. This is what is called the Eurocentric view on African philosophy, which is based on the assumption that Africans can’t have a philosophy of their own, a view that was further elaborated during European colonialism.
Tsenay Serequeberhan, an Eritrean academic who published a collection of philosophical essays on African philosophy quoted Jacque Derrida, a French philosopher of Algerian descent, who said that, “Metaphysics-the white mythology which resembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of idiom, for universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.”
As such, he search for African philosophy in the post-colonial period is a rebellion against this Eurocentric bias that colonialists used to justify their colonial conquests in the name of “civilization” or as a civilizing project. In his essay entitled, “Is there an African Philosophy?”, Innocent Onyewuenyi says that, “The Africa that is portrayed in books by Western ethnologists and historians is the Africa of savage Africans who did nothing, developed nothing, or created nothing historical.
The man who brought out African and Ethiopian philosophy from darkness to light was Professor Sumner who used his time of academic isolation to articulate the basic premises of Ethiopian philosophy that centered on Zara Yacob and his disciple Wolde Hiwot.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there were many African academic philosophers who lectured or wrote about African philosophy, but none of them had developed a systematic study of this philosophy. Professor Sumner was the first to unearth what he called “the philosophy of man” from under the centuries old rubbles of African traditional thoughts and brought it to international attention; thereby turning it into a respectable field of philosophical inquiry.
It was largely after Claude Sumner’s books were published and attracted so much attention that African philosophers took their philosophy African philosophy seriously and somehow disputed the Western bias that prevailed for so long concerning the non-existence of African or Ethiopian philosophy. According to one source, “The greatest contribution of Claude Sumner is as such found in proving the existence African philosophy through his studies of Ethiopian philosophy,
Such a study identified oral, written, adaptive elements in Ethiopian philosophy.” This is to say that Professor Sumner did not directly study the philosophies of African people everywhere but he studied Ethiopian philosophy and through it he logically inferred the existence and substance of African philosophy at large.”
What is Ethiopian philosophy according to Professor Sumner? According to Fasil Merawi’s thesis entitled, “Claude Sumner and the Quest for an Ethiopian Philosophy” said that, “Contemporary discussions on Ethiopian philosophy are directly influenced by the works of Canadian philosopher Claude Sumner who developed most of his life in studying the different dimensions of Ethiopian philosophy and wisdom. He produced volumes of books and numerous articles that demonstrated the existence of philosophy and its varying manifestations of Ethiopian philosophy.
Professor Sumner’s inquiry of Ethiopian philosophy was directed towards, “written philosophy, traditional oral wisdom found in narratives and proverbs and finally foreign philosophical wisdom that is synthesized and creatively adapted to the Ethiopia context.” Professor Sumner did that by questioning the Eurocentric bias that denied the existence of a non-Western philosophy, escaping the charge of ethno-philosophy and situating Ethiopian philosophy on different modalities of Ethiopian experience.”
Eurocentric perspective in any academic discipline consists of, “focusing on European culture or history to the exclusion of a wider view of the world implicitly regarding European culture as pre-eminent.” In philosophy, Eurocentric views are those that only European philosophy is authentic, preeminent and universal while the world views or beliefs of other peoples are regarded as irrelevant or non-existent or if they existed, they were in their infancies or unable of further development. The indirect implication of this Eurocentric amounted that only the philosophical traditions of Europeans should be allowed to exist and be imitated by others as the pinnacles of universal truth.
The Eurocentric view of philosophy in turn served as a justification of the political domination of Europe over Africa and the then unknown or undeveloped parts of the world. Thus is a typical example of philosophy serving the ideological and material supremacy of Europe over Africa for many centuries. However, Eurocentric views did not lose their supremacy without a fight.
It required centuries of struggles on the part of the oppressed people of the world to shake off the ideological and philosophical shackles imposed on Africa by colonialists and their intellectual defenders, whether they were artists, writers, diplomats and politicians. Unfortunately decolonization in the 1960s and 70s did not automatically lead to the weakening of Eurocentric philosophy and its negative impact on modern African philosophical traditions. The struggle is still underway, mostly silently and sometimes vocally whenever a breakthrough appears in the going debate in favor of African philosophy.
To make a long story short, philosophy in general, African and Ethiopian philosophy in particular continues to thrive as tons of new discoveries are being made that confirm and reconfirm their existence. Thousands of books and essays are written to this effect. However, the major issues of African philosophy that should provoke informed debates nowadays should be how to develop African philosophy in a way that would accelerated the spiritual and material renaissance of the African man and the building of a modern African civilization based on its ancient traditions, value systems, literature and anything that touches upon African thinking and African being in the broadest sense of the terms.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The Ethiopian Herald December 7/2023
