Rupturing African Philosophy on Teaching and Learning by Yusef Waghid Faiq Waghid & Zayd Waghid

Author:Yusef Waghid, Faiq Waghid & Zayd Waghid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.2 Reconstituting African Philosophy of Education

African philosophy of education is constituted by at least two notions: African philosophy and education. First, African philosophy is considered an activity of the mind that focuses on forms of inquiry specifically related to the African condition . To talk about African philosophy as an activity of the mind is not new. Paulin J. Hountondji (1993: 63, 65), an African scholar , posits that African philosophy involves promoting and sustaining unconstrained discussion about Africa’s problems on the part of those geographically situated and related to the continent in relation to literature about Africa and the Western world. The aforementioned view of African philosophy seems to underscore Teaching for Change in the sense that problems are identified on the continent, and deliberations about these problems in relation to literature produced by both African scholars and those attuned to the Anglo-Saxon and European traditions of philosophic thought. Consequently, it is not unusual for us to rely on the seminal thoughts of Kwase Wiredu , Kwame Gyekye and N’Dri Assié-Lumumba, together with expositions by Amy Gutmann, Alasdair MacIntyre and Jacques Rancière. In other words, an examination of literature in the contexts of African and Western thought was considered apposite to examine problems on the African continent . The unconstrained discussion that African scholars are encouraged to pursue relates to a particular understanding of African philosophy , which is attuned to ongoing criticism and free articulation of ‘truth’ claims in much the same way that post-structuralism advocates free and rigorous discussions among those intent on keeping philosophic inquiry in potentiality. In other words, African philosophy is constantly developing in the form of literary texts that may have particular (indigenous or local) concerns and universal (global) significance. As a corollary of such a view of African philosophy, Hountondji (1996: 67) avers that “[b]y reorienting their [African philosophers] discourse in this way, they will easily overcome the permanent temptation of ‘folklorism’ that limits their research to so-called African subjects …”. We have aligned our thoughts to a view of an African philosophy that breaks with a distinctive focus on folklore and cultural particularities. However, we have not been oblivious to the significance of folklore, cultural peculiarities and ethno-belief systems. Rather, we have argued for a conception of African philosophy that engages with ethno-beliefs and cultural values in an attempt to contrive a new imaginary of the discourse —that is, an imaginary that draws on a deluge of African and Western literature to be responsive to real problems on the African continent . In the latter regard, it is apposite to refer to Hountondji (1996: 65) at length because his articulation of African philosophy seems most poignantly to have manifested in Teaching for Change:African philosophical literature … include all the research into Western philosophy carried out by Africans . This broadening of the horizon implies no contradiction: just as the writings of Western anthropologists on African societies belong to Western scientific literature, so the philosophical writings of Africans on the history of Western thought are an integral part of African philosophical literature.

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