Eurocentrism assumed Africans could only express philosophy through ritual, not discourse.

Evidence

This opinion stems from the derogatory, Eurocentric conception that Africans live in a world that is essentially symbolized and ritualized in character. This implies that indigenous African peoples predominantly articulate their beliefs and values through rites, rituals, and masquerades, rather than using discursive verbal statements, such as proverbs and myths. Such an argument calls for the intercultural fieldworker, who is professionally trained, to be active in trying to decode (interpolate the meanings of) such behaviour (symbolic and ritual), proverbs, and myths in a comprehensive and discursive manner, as seen in the works of Marcel Griaule (1965) and Alexis Kagame (1956). — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 534

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the ethnophilosophy assumption that Bantu thought is primarily ritual-symbolic rather than discursive-verbal.
• XREF: Griaule’s Dogon fieldwork evokes the kind of expert-decode-the-ritual pattern critiqued throughout African philosophy.