Fear of ethnophilosophy makes African thinkers abandon their living traditions

Evidence

This is the apparent persistence of a deplorable attitude among philosophers who disregard the suggestion that an anonymous corpus of writings that includes myths, legends, poetry, song, and proverbs is truly worthy of philosophical attention. It is precisely this attitude which has driven some African philosophers to hover above concrete cultural realities, preventing them from engaging fully in the philosophical exploration of the living traditions of their culture for fear of “ethnophilosophical contamination.” Elsewhere this unfortunate tendency has been characterised as self-betrayal (Mungwini 2019b, p. 74). The effort to develop a comprehensive history of African philosophy will remain problematic until we are able to lift the intellectual curfew imposed on the African mind in the form of the inherited understanding and definition of philosophy. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 381

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and glosses the charge of ‘ethnophilosophical contamination’ and the notion of an ‘intellectual curfew’ on the African mind.