An Unlikely Author for a Foundational Text
In 1945, a Belgian Franciscan missionary named Placide Tempels, who had spent more than a decade posted to the Belgian Congo, published a small book, La philosophie bantoue, translated into English in 1959 as Bantu Philosophy, that would, remarkably, become the single most influential and most contested starting point for essentially all subsequent debate about African philosophy as a formal field. Tempels was, by his own admission and by the assessment of virtually every scholar who has examined his work since, neither African nor a trained philosopher; he was a missionary who had spent nearly three decades in the Congo and believed he had identified, through careful observation of Bantu-speaking peoples' language and worldview, a coherent, systematic philosophical structure underlying their understanding of reality.
Force as the Foundation of Being
Tempels argued that Bantu-speaking societies across Central, East, and Southern Africa shared a fundamentally different metaphysical starting point than European philosophy. Where European thought, in Tempels's analysis, treated reality as composed of fixed, static things, atoms, minds, bodies with stable, unchanging natures, Tempels argued Bantu ontology instead treated reality as composed of dynamic, hierarchically organized forces, arranged in a graduated order running from divine force downward through celestial, terrestrial, animal, plant, and mineral forces to human forces, all interconnected and capable of strengthening or weakening one another through relationship and interaction. Tempels summarized this core claim in a phrase that would echo throughout subsequent debate: "being is force, force is being."
A Genuine Complication Worth Naming Directly
Here is where this unit must introduce the specific tension that has shaped nearly seventy years of subsequent argument. Tempels claimed that this philosophical system, however coherent and sophisticated, existed only unconsciously within Bantu-speaking communities themselves; it took, in his own explicit framing, the trained Western missionary's mind to actually recognize, articulate, and make this philosophy known to the world, and, notably, to the Bantu peoples themselves, who Tempels believed possessed this philosophy without being fully, explicitly aware they possessed it. This specific claim, that Africans held a genuine philosophy but required a European observer to identify and formally articulate it for them, would become the central point later critics, examined in this unit's next lesson, found most objectionable about the entire ethnophilosophy tradition Tempels's book launched.
An Immediate, Sustained African Response
Tempels's book triggered immediate and sustained engagement from African intellectuals, some defending and extending his framework, others challenging it directly. The Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame, working within a framework closely related to Tempels's own, published his own extended analysis, Bantu-Rwandan Philosophy, in 1956, using close linguistic analysis of Kinyarwanda grammar and vocabulary to identify what he argued were four fundamental philosophical categories embedded in Bantu language structure itself, force, becoming, place, and modality, extending and reinforcing Tempels's basic claim that African philosophical categories could be identified through careful analysis of African languages, rather than requiring Africans to first produce written philosophical texts in the style of European academic philosophy. Kagame's specific method, deriving philosophy directly from linguistic structure, would itself later come under the same critical scrutiny this unit's next lesson examines in Hountondji's broader rejection of the entire approach both Tempels and Kagame represented.
Setting Up the Debate's Central Fault Line
This lesson's material establishes the specific approach later critics would come to call, often pejoratively, "ethnophilosophy": treating an entire African ethnic or linguistic community's shared, collective, largely unwritten worldview as constituting philosophy in its own right, identifiable through careful outside analysis of language, custom, and belief rather than through individually authored, argued philosophical texts in the style traditionally recognized by academic Western philosophy. Whether this approach genuinely captures something philosophy should recognize as legitimate, or whether it fundamentally confuses ethnography, the descriptive study of a culture's beliefs and practices, with philosophy itself, is exactly the question this unit's next lesson examines through the work of the philosopher who gave this entire debate its enduring name.
