‘Imagine a world where a researcher has found that all cases of high blood pressure in his hospital had very low magnesium. He gets a grant and surveys all cases of high blood pressure in Massachusetts. They all have very low magnesium levels. He writes a paper arguing that the medical cause of high blood pressure is low magnesium levels – Theory A. Further researchers extend the research studying cases all over Eastern USA and find exactly the same results. Extensive further study involving sample sets of hundreds of thousands across Northern USA find the same result and it is now ‘established’ that the cause of High Blood pressure is low magnesium levels. A decade later a researcher in Southern USA, based in Texas, does a replication study and finds thousands of cases of high blood pressure where there is no low magnesium level. Other researchers across Southern USA find similar results.
What should be the consequence? A normal expected response is that these new studies have proven that Theory A is wrong. Simple.
However, consider a world where the medical establishment in Northern US States says Theory A is correct but people in Texas are stupid or the people in the South of USA have deficient bodies. Would this not be strange? Further, imagine that the people of Texas and southern USA complain that the problem is with northern medical science and that they need their own science and begin to seek money to develop a Texan medicine, aSouthern medical science, to replace Massachusetts science. This would all be very strange, if not plain nonsense.
However if we replace Texas with Nigeria and the south of USA with Africa or other parts of the Global South that is exactly what has happened. When contemporary Western philosophers descriptions of how people should behave, Theory B, are contradicted by behaviour in Africa or China the Western philosophers conclude that Africans and Chinese are ‘not rational’. In Africa a movement arose that we in Africa need an African philosophy of our own because Theory B does not apply to us. Just as in the earlier case you might think the correct answer is to point out that Theory B is simply WRONG!
This relates to the debate on African philosophy as follows; The intellectual space created for African philosophy is a violent castration of intellectual life. In this space Africans can have a view of the soul, of life and purpose that has no connection with anywhere else. How can there be a philosophy that has no engagement with any other ideas? These views need no challenge from Confucius or Lao Tzu let alone Wittgenstein. Africa had trading relations with China since ancient Egypt. But we are to believe there was no exchange of ideas. Philosophy in Africa goes back to Kemet and never stops. Contemporary writers never mention the Coptic Church or later doctrines of the light. This historical neutering is amazing.
Any description of philosophy is itself bought lock stock and barrel from a deeply infected self description of Western philosophy by mostly non-practitioners! At no point do I hear mention of neoliberalism or any of the major intellectual disruptions of today . At no point do I hear the question: what does this tradition or that tradition have to say about western liberalism? What does it say about gender? Africa has believed in gender equity since 3,000 BC. If it has nothing to say about these issues what is the point of it? Hegel at one point said that it was only when an age is old that its contours can be more clearly seen. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk (3) . Many of these commentators seek to play Minerva on a corpse of African thought. (2)This field should be closed and reopened under new management.
Note:
- ‘The African Philosophy Reader’ by Coetzee & Roux
- ‘African Philosophy’ Mungwini
- ‘Philosophy of Right’. Hegel