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Bloomington: Indiana University Press –
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1994.
301 pages
ISBN 0-7486-0496-0
Indiana University Press:
 Website
Edinburgh University Press:
Website
African Edition:
East African Educational Publishers, Nairobi 1995.
East African Educational Publishers Ltd.
Brick Court
Mpaka Road /
Woodvale Grove
Westlands
P.O. Box 45314
Nairobi
KENIA
Online order:
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This book is an authoritatively thorough reconstructive study on the history of intellectual debate on African identity over the last century. It became a classic right away, when it first came out in 1994, and is still without rival. D.A. Masolo starts off in 1939, with Césaire's concept of negritude. He contextualizes the emergence of this notion as a reaction against the dismissive reference to Africa in Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, and traces how the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s has influenced negritude itself. Masolo relates the characterization of the ideological discussion on "African identity" in African and African American intellectual circles, to an underlying but significant theme: the rationality debate that featured prominently in Anglosaxon philosophy and social science in the 1970s and 1980s. Here, previously accepted notions of "rationality" and their derogatory implications were questioned and challenged in regard to other social and cultural contexts.
This sets the scene for Masolo's portrayal of the debate on "African philosophy". The debate itself was sparked off in 1945 by a quasi-ethnological study on African religion and worldview of the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels. What covers much of the following chapters is how African missionaries (Kagame, Mbiti, Mulago) latched on to Tempels' descriptive approach and worked on religious and linguistic systems under the assumption that African worldview is naturally prone to submit to Christianity. Interestingly, into the portrayal itself Masolo integrates the fierce criticisms of such "ethnophilosophy" by anticolonial, Marxist, and philosophically trained African thinkers (Cesaire, Hountondji, Towa). His discussion, which is ordered according to conceptual issues of the rationality debate, also touches on significant projects and trends that go beyond that basic opposition of "traditionalist" and "modernist" thinkers. To a varying degree, Oruka's sage philosophy project, Sodipo and Hallen's analytic studies of Yoruba epistemology, and Mudimbe's archaeology of Africanism, are treated. But, with the hindsight of seven years, one wishes they had been discussed more thoroughly.
Having proven itself as the major reference work on African philosophy, this thorough and reliable book, which leaves few controversy behind, is expected to remain an indispensable tool for students and scholars in this field for some years to come.
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