Reader, be warned: this column won’t be an easy read this week. We are entering the slippery world of philosophizing for the public which, I argue, carries more responsibility than philosophy itself. This will invite unwieldy material that could tax your patience. The good news: this will be a one-time affair after which I shall return the instigator of the present effort to where he belongs: watch his weekly exertions in bemused silence. Bear with me. “Philosophers”, according to Karl Marx’s famous conclusion to Theses on Feuerbach, "have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” This axiom presupposes a number of fundamental caveats. The act of interpretation implies acquisition and ordering of knowledge in order to generate desired realities and narratives. Interpretation is knowing, which never operates ex nihilo – there is always a point of departure. The world we are being asked to change by Karl Marx was first known, packaged, and narrativized into specific realities by folks rooted in specific cultures and histories that enabled them to produce specific orders of knowledge and create certain universes of meaning.
When you do something as mundane as stopping when the traffic light goes red, you may not know it but that reflex action of yours is rooted in a long history of philosophizing about the interface between individual agency, civic belonging and the responsibilities therefrom, submission of the self to the hegemony of rules and regulations collectively agreed upon – deviation from which eventuates in established protocols of discipline and punish. In essence, you stopped at that red light because names as disparate as Michel Foucault, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu and so many others philosophized. It is even possible to extend this filiation of thought all the way to the Greeks, showing how a concatenation of philosophical thought you may not even care about made you apply the brakes at the red light but that is beyond the purview of this treatise.
What I hope to have done minimally and in passing in the preceding paragraph is to calm the anxieties of not a few participants in public discourse who invade Sahara Reporters and other Nigerian internet forums with rather ill-informed comments about the futility of writing and thought to the current Nigerian situation. Often, you encounter funny comments like: “we don’t need writers and thinkers now. What we need right now is action!” They proceed from this fundamental illogic to dream of a Nigeria where things would “work” like Europe, America, and other advanced societies. As if they have ever encountered a society anywhere in history whose advancement into techno-rational modernity was not rooted in thought and writing! These Nigerians salivate over the order, neon, and gloss of Europe and America but do not connect these things to the body of foundational thought and writing that guided these societies from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment to the postmodernity of our moment. Our Nigerian quickfixers and haters of thought and writing can see modern Japan but are blind to the fact that the thinkers and writers of the Meiji Restoration (1868 – 1919) wrote, thought, and imagined the Japan they see today into reality. Okey Ndibe, Odia Ofeimun, and Wale Adebanwi are irrelevant because all they do is write and whine but we need action right now, not whiners! We must tell these naïve fellas that all the societies they salivate over emerged because they were philosophized first by “whiners” like Ndibe, Ofeimun, and Adebanwi.
To philosophize means to rebel in the domain of interpretation of phenomena. From the ancient times to our days, the philosopher has always been the man or woman who doubted, who queried, who restlessly said no. Descartes, Nietzsche, Sartre, and the world’s great Prophets and interpreters were all fundamentally doubters and rebels, some of whom even paid with their lives. In his influential 1951 book, The Rebel, Albert Camus uses rebellion and revolution as grids for tying together the writings and thought of a very expansive array of Western thinkers and writers. What do those who philosophize rebel against? What do they doubt? What do they reject? What do they question? If you look at history, you will be sure to find that philosopher who doubted or rejected the totality of thought and interpretations that preceded him – Nietzsche doubted and killed the Christian God, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed phenomenological alternatives to the core ideas of René Descartes; there could be that philosopher who rejects aspects of or even the totality of his people’s norms, cultures, rites, and other established modalities of experiencing the human; you could even have that doubter and rejecter of entrenched heritage and inheritances such as Martin Heidegger; there could even be that rebel who is not so much interested in doubting the past as in rejecting much or all his contemporaries and people have to say – Raymond Aron.
In essence, because they are rebels, those who have philosophized in the West across the ages have never been afraid to say: my people are wrong to see or do things this or that way. My people are wrong. That is a weighty statement that demands a little examination. The first point we must establish very firmly is that the philosopher – no matter how radical and countercultural – does not make the shift from my people are wrong to my people are collective imbeciles and/or psychologically deficient juveniles. Secondly, the philosopher who says my people are wrong often has specific fragments or sections of society in mind – fellow thinkers and interpreters, the politico-economic elite, the religious leadership, men, women, adults or even the peasantry – hardly ever a totality without an exception. When you encounter a philosopher lumping people or societies into an undiscriminating basket of collective denigration, he is more often than not talking about other societies, other people, not his. Witness Hegel on Africa and blacks. Witness Wole Soyinka’s different procedure: recently, he disagreed with “his people” in specific, unmistakable reference to an infinitesimal fragment of Yoruba peoplehood – some voices in the YCE. Never willing to read things correctly and in context, mischievous ethnicist heehawers ran away with his statement and proceeded to excuse the man from the collective damnation they routinely reserve for his people. Soyinka thus became the only Yoruba soul to make it to their Noah’s ark and escape the flood.
Why do Soyinka and the generations of thinkers from across every culture who have philosophized rebelliously before him indulge in nuance? At the height of his career, Jean-Paul Sartre was too globally famous and influential to be touched by anybody no matter what he wrote or said. He could condemn the entirety of French history, culture, and civilization and get away with it. When the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, he flung it back in their faces and got away with it. He was that powerful. But he remained nuanced and discerning in his recriminations of France and the white race, whether he was condemning the brutality or France in Vietnam or Algeria, whether he was philosophizing against colonization in general, whether he was writing the most celebrated essay to introduce Négritude to the world or whether he was writing introductions to the books of Frantz Fanon. Why the nuance? Why the discernment? Why the avoidance of collective baskets of denigration of a people?
Those who philosophize do nuance because they understand the fact that there is no Archimedean point from which to perorate on the imagined collective deficiencies of a people. More importantly, they understand that their own thought, no matter how radical, revolutionary, or dissentient, still reflects the collective cultural and historical genius of the people they critique. They realize that all people have philosophized and that they are dealing with a body of thought and modes of interpretation that have been established and built upon through the ages, no matter how faulty. You may philosophize radically against everything your people believe and may even stumble in the process on epiphanic truths that may alter the course of history and change the direction of your people. Yet, your production only becomes part of the history and culture of your people.
No Archimedean point of escape. Socrates understood that when he uttered this immortal wisdom: "The only true knowledge comes from knowing that you know nothing". Knowing this, he never sought to excuse himself from the purview of his own critique. He never felt he was superior to Athenians. He never sought an arrogant pedestal from which to proclaim the superiority of his mind. He thought differently from his people, believed they were wrong on so many counts, and died for it. Yes. Today, his thought is part of Athenian-Greek-Western genius. As dissentient and critical of France as he was, Sartre is still French thought. That is how it works.If Socrates philosophized that true knowledge devolves from the prior admission of one’s ignorance, I daresay that the only foolish knowledge comes from believing that you are different from and superior to your own supposedly deficient people. This explains why, for me, no philosophy is superior to the collective genius of the Yoruba people housed in Ifa divination corpus. If you know what the Ifa corpus is all about, you will understand that all Yoruba artists, writers, and thinkers have ever done is to continuously amplify, interpret, and reinterpret the holistic gamut of experience lodged in the corpus. There is no understanding the philosophizing we find in the works of thinkers, writers, and artists as disparate as D. O. Fagunwa, Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo, Wole Soyinka, Adebayo Faleti without an understanding of the epistemological universes of the Ifa corpus. There is more. Let’s listen to Nelson Fashina:
“The subject of Ifa corpus raises a lot of fundamental questions bordering on available data on its history, myth and science. And if, I think, the entire gamut of Western theories and epistemology derives from the interactive interpretations of these tripod stand of philosophical knowledge (history, myth, science), then we of the humanities research in Africa need to know more about the potential wisdom and relative science encapsuled in Ifa divination, and how this may be appropriated to the postmodern life of Africa. Historically, Ifa was not a product of traditional religious fundamentalism. Rather, it was a composite corpus of human existence whose inextricable religious resorts are found in those prescribed ritual sacrifices which are not to be viewed or read as literal scripts, but as symbolic codes. And as symbolic codes, they are quasi-scientific formulas delineating by every atomic and molecular sense, the gravity, trigonometric and numeric range of Earth magnetic force energies and potential energies in measures and degrees of solution to human problems. Thus, there is need to review Ifa corpus in the context of primeval and contemporary contributions to human knowledge in science and technology rather than using Ifa like the raw palm-oil we used to eat roasted yam in my father's farm in the early sixties! Here lies a great task for contemporary researchers in African studies!”
Fashina’s statement is sufficiently self-explanatory. What we must add is that there are hardly any people in Africa, from the Gikuyu to the Igbo, without their own equivalent of the epistemological resources of the Ifa corpus. The difference often lies in cultural details and the peculiarities of historical trajectory. The disaster is that, unlike the Europeans and later the Asians, we did not separate the science from the history and the myth. Why we never did will forever remain in the realms of conjecture but a few chapters of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a good starting point, never mind the watery postulations of the funny Eurocentrist who would attribute this to the congenital irresponsibility of the African. Because I consider the Ifa corpus as complete a philosophy as can be, because I read it and see in it a people’s genius in history, myth, and science in their attempts to make meaning out of primordial chaos, it follows that I do not invest in French existentialism or phenomenology because I believe that French philosophy has anything to say that I have not encountered in my forays into Ifa corpus; I do not read German idealist philosophers because I foolishly believe that they have anything to say that the Ifa corpus didn’t spell out more brilliantly centuries before them; I do not read the philosophies of China and India – ancient and modern – because I believe that the explanations they propose on the mysteries of the universe and the riddle that is man are superior to what I find in the verses of the Ifa corpus. Rather, I read these other philosophies to determine how they explain phenomena differently from what I consider my own source-text: the Ifa corpus. I try to understand what informs the differences. In the process, I enrich my mind, expand my world, and marvel at the epistemological wonders of the Yoruba world.
In essence, I consider every philosophy that I read an ancillary to the Ifa corpus, the root from which I approach all discourses and epistemologies. Although I do this out of the conviction that no philosophy is superior to the Ifa corpus and that any philosophizing that takes as its starting point the elevation of foreign knowledges and the ignorant dismissal of what one’s people have to say, I must say that I am not doing anything original. If you study the works of Africa’s most famous philosophers – Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kwame Gyekye, Odera Oruka, Segun Oladipo, Valentin Mudimbe, Theophile Obenga, P.O. Bodunrin, Emmanuel Eze, Godwin Sogolo, Sanya Osha – you will discover that their unrivalled mastery of what Western and Oriental philosophers have to say in such sub-branches of philosophy as ethics, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology is ritualistically secondary to their validation of what Africa and Africans have had to say in those areas. Kwasi Wiredu’s Cultural Universals and Particulars: an African Perspective offers a quintessential demonstration of the procedure I am describing and should be read by those genuinely interested how Africans philosophize.
If professional African philosophers, who write mostly for audiences cocooned in academia, work in full consciousness of nuance, it follows therefore that an Ozodiobi Osuji, who has elected to instruct the general public by philosophizing for it in easy-access online format, must do a number of things. First, make sure you have read the books you recommend routinely to them as “further reading” at the end of most of your essays. Even if none of the stuff you write can stand preliminary peer-review by the most elementary journal in the field, you still need to respect your audience at chatafrikarticles.com by getting your references right. No self-respecting public philosopher of African descent should be caught dead misspelling the names of Frantz Fanon and the irritant, Octave Manoni, while recommending them to the public for further reading. Getting your references right is, of course, only just the beginning if you want to philosophize for your own people. You are welcome to suffer irredeemably from a Messiah Complex and to believe that you have been anointed to rescue your people from whatever afflictions your conjurer’s handbook told you they all suffer from without exception. Just don’t be caught dead writing asinine sentences like this about any people, any African people – and certainly not your own people:
1) “Igbos are truly a childish people; one must help them become adults but not relate to them as one’s equal”
2) “Igbos remind me of folks mental health professionals call multiple personality disordered”
3) “As an Africanist, I have not seen an Igbo Africanist that I respect. This is probably due to Igbo identity crisis, their not knowing whether they are Africans or whatever they want to become”
This, I guess, seals the fate of Africanists like Michael Echeruo, Chinweizu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Ernest Emenyonu, Chimalum Nwankwo, and Obioma Nnaemeka. I meet some of these senior colleagues annually at the African Literature Association. The last I consider and have always related to as a sister. I never knew that they must not be respected because they suffer from an identity crisis and do not know whether they are Africans or not. And who is this “Africanist” that one never meets in the regular circuitries (professional gatherings of Africanists) of the field in North America but who singularly decides which Africanist deserves respect or not? Of course, when a druid mixes indigested German idealism with ill-comprehended French existentialism, the end result can only be the highfalutin verbiage that is so often the fate of the ‘philosophy’ audience of chatafrikarticles.com.
Now, here is how another thinker writes about this same people who are constantly and routinely philosophized with the vocabulary of mental health disorders in Osujiville:
“Indeed, in one of his greatest acts of overeach, Amadioha displaced the shrines/temples of Anyanwu the sun-god… and decreed his own deification by theologizing that the sun god as an all seeing universal deity required no shrine since He was already immanent and everywhere. It was he, Amadioha, who in attempts to domesticate energy and create a silver bullet for conquest, experimented with rocketry (“Egbe Elu Igwe”), created “nsi Egbe” (gunpowder and other fissile materials) and caused the first fissile cataclysm that led to the destruction of the first human civilization by flooding. In his experiments with energy (“ike”), he blew himself and his scientists and engineers skyward into smithereens”
Our thinker this time is Professor Obi Nwakanma who needs no introduction to Nigerian audiences. He is philosophizing the history, the myth, and the science for the Igbo world in much the same way as we encountered it earlier in the thoughts of Nelson Fashina in respect of the Yoruba world. This is the beauty and intellectual power you get from Nwakanma’s philosophizing of his people whenever his work escapes that frequent and regrettable descent into needless narratives of Igbo racial superiority, which always makes it necessary to constantly break the news to one of the finest poets and deepest thinkers of my generation that there is no such thing as a racially and culturally superior African people towards whom less developed African races must evolve in a linear progression. Do the African people we encounter at the centre of Nwakanma’s philosophizing look anything like the people we always encounter in Osujiville?
Now, you are familiar with Sango’s theory of and experimentations with electricity and rocketry in the Yoruba world. Perhaps you have read Marcel Griaule’s famous book, Conversations with Ogotommeli and you know about the Dogon people of Mali. The Dogon are famous for their monumental knowledge of astrology, especially the Sirius star, which is the center of their religious teachings. The Dogons know that Sirius A, the brightest system in our firmament, is next to a small white dwarf called Sirius B, which was identified by western scientists only in 1978! The Dogons knew about it some one thousand years before modern/western science discovered it! Sirius B has been the basis of the holiest Dogon beliefs since antiquity. Western astronomers did not discover the star until the middle of the nineteenth century, and it wasn't even photographed until 1970. The Dogons go as far as describing a third star in the Sirius system, called Emme Ya that, to date, has not been identified by astronomers. Dogon mythology also includes Saturn's rings and Jupiter's four major moons. They have four calendars, for the Sun, Moon, Sirius, and Venus, and have long known that planets orbit the sun.
What do the perspectives of Fashina, Nwakanma, and Ogotommeli tell us about the Yoruba, Igbo, and Dogon worlds? It tells us that our ancestors were not the pre-rational and pre-logical fools we encounter in Osujiville. It tells us that our ancestors were no strangers to science. It tells us that our ancestors played their part in marketplace of explanations of man and phenomena. We are the ones who have tragically failed to build on their foundation by separating the science from the myth and the history. What is the role of the public philosopher who knows all these details about the African world? Insist that every African without exception is irresponsible and all we have ever contributed to history and civilization is selling our people to slavery? Insist that Africans are congenitally inferior to the German, Indian, and Chinese philosophers you read and misapply, while deluding yourself that you are the only who reads them? What is intellectual responsibility? Must one philosophize if all one has to offer are fallacies spiced up as knowledge and erudition?
Above all, how should I process these weekly sorties in faux-philosophizing at chatafrikarticles.com and other Nigerian cyber-spaces? Because I am not Igbo, I may take dangerous comfort and pleasure in the epistemic violence that the Igbo suffer routinely in the writings of a prodigal son on rampage against his race. I may elect to object only when he extends his riotous tar brush to Nigerians and Africans as he routinely does in the name of philosophy. That would be the wrong thing to do. If I embrace one ethnic group’s prodigal son because of the unbelievable things he has to say about his people, then I shouldn’t complain if and when a similar character from my own ethnic groups goes on cyber-rampage against his own people and is embraced by the other ethnic group.
But that is only part of the problem. What does it make of my claim to post-Enlightenment rationality and humanism if I embrace the faux-philosophy that is regularly dumped at chatafrikarticles.com because of the politics of MAH (Mutually Assured Hatred) going on between Yoruba and Igbo cyber warriors? Do I subscribe to the ‘intellectual’ notion that there is any people who are all collectively “truly childish” and who deserve to be tar-brushed in registers of “mental disorder without exception?” How do I subsequently enter a graduate seminar and teach that grand essentialisms and unsubstantiated generalizations go against every rule of scholarly and intellectual engagement? That would be aiding and abetting intellectual dishonesty for those claims are not true of any African people. Should total, uncompromising rejection of Osujist tar-brushing prevent me from taking on any Igbo thinker who slips, wittingly or unwittingly, into discourses of Igbo racial and cultural superiority while trading disagreements with people of other ethnicities? No. Should I give a rat’s ass about the noisemaking of preprogrammed ethnicist heehawers who take every disagreement with an Igbo intellectual as Igbophobia? Definitely not. Should I give a rat’s ass about the Hobbesian rantings of any contemptible deviant from Yoruba protocols of earned elderhood who deludes himself that any meeting of minds between a Yoruba and an Igbo thinker is racial treachery? Certainly not. In fact, such deviance from Yoruba protocols of elderhood is the subject of a full length treatise I am working on, now that I have found an excellent specimen in America.
Philosophizing for the public then should be about trying to understand why and how a people in remote Mali discovered astrology almost a thousand years before the West and why the instrumentalization of such knowledges was arrested all over the continent. Philosophizing for the public should teach that Igbo fella to be proud of the genius that Obi Nwakanma has so brilliantly compressed into the passage I quoted; philosophizing should remind that Igbo fella that his people actually separated the science from the myth and the history during the civil war when necessity forced them into the creation of their own weaponry and that that truncated process of scientific creativity can still be resumed. Philosophizing for the public should be about helping that ‘modern’ Yoruba fella understand that no philosophical text is superior to the Ifa corpus produced by the genius of his people; that the Western progress and modernity he celebrates while recoiling in Christian or Islamic horror at the first mention of the Ifa corpus were also once part of a Western “pagan” intermesh of history, myth, and science until fellas like him applied themselves and separated the science from everything else; that the microphone that his pastor uses to give him the gospel every Sunday was part of that pagan mix until the separation; that there is still room to separate that science from the Ifa corpus for the elevation of humanity if only he and I would study it, apply ourselves to a creative extraction of that knowledge, and stop dismissing it as an inferior pagan text. Philosophizing should remind us all that MAH is an expensive distraction from these monumental tasks.