African philosophy and Cosmopolitanism

2015

The paper analyzes the nature, objectives and trends of African social and political philosophy. It distinguishes two major axis: identity and emancipation of Africa as well as democracy and cultural diversity. The former includes theories such as negritude, African socialism, African humanism, pan-Africanism, while the latter concentrates on ideas of democracy, civil society and cultural diversity. 1

Modern Africa, 2019

African Research Review, 2016

The certainty of African philosophy during pre-colonial Africa is no longer in doubt. Doubting such a claim is denying the existence of the African race which may be self contradictory. As this work observes, African philosophy which is all encompassing, is inbuilt in African communalism through which indigenous Africans expressed communal feelings, world views, moral and cultural values based on closed-knit relationship among their kith and kin within a socio-cultural setting. In this connection,

BETWEEN COMMUNALISM AND INDIVIDUALISM: WHICH WAY AFRICA?, 2018

Due to its encounter with the outside world, Africa has lost and is on the verge of losing most of its traditional values. One of such cherished values is communalism. Since communalism is variously considered to be the distinguishing mark of Africa, many scholars advocate the reinvigoration or strengthening of communalism in Africa. Using the philosophical methods of critical analysis and textual studies, this paper took a deep look at this quest and find out that communalism is the problem of Africa and thus, recommended that it should be allowed to die out. The paper concludes that until Africa, shakes off the yoke of communalism and wears the apron of individualism, it will perpetually find itself unable to overcome the challenges facing contemporary African societies.

The principle of communality is denoted in the paper as ability of originally and essentially communal socio-political norms and relations, worldview and consciousness, behavioral pat-tern, to spread on all the levels of societal complexity including, though in modified or some-times even corrupted forms, sociologically supra- and non-communal. (The modern African city as a holistic phenomenon and in many concrete manifestations of its social life is a striking example of this). Thus, the nature and fundamental importance of the principle of communality follows from, but is by no means reduced to, the fact that the local community has always – from the earliest days of history to the present – remained the basic socio-economic institution and nucleus of political organization in Africa. The principle of communality is also irreducible to those of kinship (as in the most typical African community kin ties are compromised by those of other kinds) and collectivism (actually, one of the reasons for the “African socialism” projects’ failure was that their ideologists tended to ignore the dualistic nature of the commu-nity overemphasizing its collectivistic side and underestimating individualistic). As a pivotal socio-cultural foundation, the principle of communality has a direct impact on all subsystems of the African society at all the levels of its being throughout its whole history. Precisely this is what can explain to a large extent the originality of African civilization, as notwithstanding the immense changes, including those of the colonial and postcolonial eras, today the cultures of Africa still preserve their identity, what means that beyond the visible novelties, they are still based on the fundamentals characteristic of them since olden times. Hence, in the embodiment of the principle of communality it can make sense to seek the roots of specificity of the socio-political processes in postcolonial Africa, including the processes of nation- and state-building.

Introduction The word 'Africa' and 'African' here, refer to the 'continent' and 'her people', and by division 'Igbo' and the 'Igbo people'. Two reasons are behind the usual reference to 'an ethnic nationality' with the 'African' as if 'Africa' is 'an ethnic nationality'. (1) The spirit of 'Pan-Africanism' which is an ideology that aims at the recollection of the African-consciousness, and the unification of African peoples after the existential uprootedness (enslavement, colonialism, etc.

The Philosophical Ascent of Contemporary Political Theory & Development Edicts: Quo Vadis Africa? Seventh International Conference on African Development (7th ICAD) - Challenges and Opportunities for Sustainable Development through Pluralistic Good Governance and Global Partnerships with African States, Jul 27-29, 2012, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA, Abstract Africa heralded the birth of a new consciousness, a kind of non-identity that was based on determined bonding acts of human societal formations and not on geological precincts. More than millennia, the Axumites united into an Abyssinian kingdom, not by vouching their uniqueness but by exalting it and merging it in the new one. Today, of course, plaguing guerrilla-cum-military dictators, that openly deny and denounce the value of the rational dialogic, have isolated themselves, choosing to suppress citizens that have risen against deceit, betrayal and even treason. They shattered multi-ethnic human formations and replaced it with a series of war hawk ethnic regimes; spawning in the end, irredentist splinter groups. Philosophers from Marx and Adam Smith to contemporary pundits including Croce, McIlwain, Crowther, Azar Gat, Inglehart, Welzel, Avineri, and Birdsall have argued intelligently and scripted road maps for political change. This think piece in political theory is predicated on an analysis of pluralist societal transformation and developmentalism promoted by regimes and their Nobel Prize flaunting patriarchs, as against real politic in currency today that augurs on freedom from fear and want. It delves into the penury of ideological narratives of post-colonial regimes: developmentalism, which conformed to neither the delusionary neo-liberal camp nor the insipid venom of African Socialism. In combination with the vacuum in political theories and the resultant paradigmatic gridlock, the ills of governmentality were predicated upon the perpetuation of unbridled power. Hence, in political theory, openness of pluralistic liberalisation process can be understood as a dynamic two-way operation of generic forms on particular contents and particular contents on generic forms. Deployment of the conceptual and institutional machinery of pluralism is at the same time the representation of specific needs, interests, motivations, claims, rights and obligations by individuals and groups. Going beyond structuring or rearranging political actors and institutional activities in their spontaneous, often turbid reality, such operations should result in their transformation into transparent agency and practice within a plural political system. Key words: pluralism, developmentalism, neo-liberalism, generic vs. particular representations

In this essay, an attempt is made to re-present African Communitarianism as a discursive formation between the individual and community. It is a view which eschews the dominant position of many Africanist scholars on the pri- macy of the community over the individual in the ‘individual-community’ debate in contemporary Africanist discourse. The relationship between the individual and community is dialogical for the identity of the individual and the community is dependent on this constitutive formation. The individual is not prior to the community and neither is the community prior to the individual. Contemporaneity explains this dialogic relationship and to argue other- wise threatens the individual’s subjectivity to a vanishing point, or simply, to deny the individual a presence. On this trajectory, the politics of common good within the African value system can neither be described nor represented through consensus or unanimity but through a realist perspectivism or a worldview not held in abstraction from living traditions, cultures, and values that characterize the people(s) of sub-Saharan Africa.

I revisit the question of the possibility of political integration of the African continent, which was first proposed by Kwame Nkrumah, and re-proposed by Muamar Gaddaffi. My focus here is not to examine the extent of willingness by African leaders to bring this about, or with the political intrigues surrounding it (though these will be briefly acknowledged), or in contesting Nkrumah’s economic argument (which is commonsensically correct and concurs with mainstream economics), but with a more normative question of the possibility, and thus practicability, of political integration in the light of cultural and ethnic heterogeneity on the continent. I argue that political integration is possible, and support the gradualist viewpoint by drawing lessons from Nicholas Taleb’s concept of antifragility, and pointing to almost as much heterogeneity at individual and simpler society levels as there are in ethnically diverse societies.