Africana Philosophy quotes

What needs to be characterized and critically examined are African ideas and beliefs… philosophy is about what people say rather than what they do.

There is nothing that is absolutely material. There is nothing that is absolutely non-material. And in all phenomenons in the world, the two are there together.

It would be ridiculous to raise the question as to whether or not Ọ̀rúnmìlà was religious. He was the leader of a religious cult which established a school structured like Plato's Academy.

Look at Christianity and Islam. They have the Bible and the Koran… Now, where is our own book on Orunmila? It is a question that should worry all rational Yoruba and African people.

By decolonization, I mean divesting African philosophical thinking of all undue influences emanating from our colonial past. The crucial word in this formulation is "undue".

A language, most assuredly, is not conceptually neutral; syntax and vocabulary are apt to suggest definite modes of conceptualization.

On the negative side, avoiding or reversing through a critical conceptual self-awareness the unexamined assimilation in our thought of the conceptual frameworks embedded in the foreign philosophical traditions that have had an impact on African life and thought. And, on the positive side, exploiting as much as is judicious the resources of our own indigenous conceptual schemes in our philosophical meditations.

It was a democracy because government was by the consent, and subject to the control, of the people as expressed through their representatives. It was consensual because, at least as a rule, that consent was negotiated on the principle of consensus.

By contrast, the majoritarian system might be said to be, in principle, based on consent without consensus.

A theory of truth is not of any real universal significance unless it offers some account of the notion of being so.

Governments are not formed by parties but by the consensus of elected representatives. Government becomes a kind of coalition of citizens.

By 'African philosophy' I mean a set of texts, specifically, the set of texts written by Africans and described as philosophical by their authors themselves.

So for us African philosophy is a body of literature whose existence is undeniable, a bibliography which has grown constantly.

In fact, it is an ethnological work with philosophical pretensions, or more simply, if I may coin the word, a work of 'ethnophilosophy'.

I observe that it does exist, by the same right and in the same mode as all the philosophies of the world: in the form of a literature.

Contemporary African philosophy, inasmuch as it remains an ethnophilosophy, has been built up essentially for a European public. The African ethnophilosopher's discourse is not intended for Africans.

The thought of an African sage, even if he purports to be the spokesman for a group, is not necessarily that of all the individuals in that group, and still less that of all Africans in general.

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.

The black man is not. Any more than the white man.

I am not a slave of Slavery that dehumanized my fathers.

Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.

National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

Emotion is Negro, as reason is Hellenic.

Négritude is the sum of the cultural values of the black world.

The whole system is founded on the notion of vital force. Pre-existing, anterior to being, it constitutes being.

The African does not stand outside reality but enters into communion with it; knowledge is participation, not only analysis.

Our ambition is to help build a Civilization of the Universal, a rendezvous of giving and receiving among the cultures of the world.

Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another.

The version of cosmopolitanism that I favor is exactly about balancing universality and difference.

Relativism of that sort isn't a way to encourage conversation; it's just a reason to fall silent.

A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one.

Cosmopolitans begin with a sense of one thing we all certainly share, which is our fallibility. Nobody has reason to be confident that they're right about everything.

We have obligations to others that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by ties of kith and kind; and we must take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives.

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = "thingification."

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape… No human contact, but relations of domination and submission.

The human mind, insofar as it is a simple substance distinct from the body, can neither suffer from the body nor be confused with it, but by itself, according to its own operations, understands and wills.