Tempels’s claim for African philosophy came from living with the Baluba

Evidence

Elsewhere I have extensively argued that Serequeberhan’s comment is deliberately negative and interculturally misleading (Mosima, 2016). Tempels wrote his book not because he was forced to, as Serequeberhan opines, but because he had lived with the Baluba. Throughout his encounters with the Baluba, he was convinced of and open to Africa’s capability to build a philosophical life-world. The situation of living with the Baluba did not force him to admit but rather forced him to proclaim the fact of the existence of an African philosophy in the face of widespread racialist assumptions to the contrary at his time. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 502

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s interest in Bantu philosophy’s origins as lived, embodied encounter rather than armchair theorizing.

Related

• Tempels generalized the Baluba worldview to all Africans (similarity 0.90)
• Tempels claims Western philosophy is needed to articulate Bantu thought (similarity 0.89)
• Tempels’s question about African ontology counters Western denial of African philosophy (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels framed Bantu Philosophy as a hypothesis, not a settled doctrine. (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged Western philosophy’s universal claims in 1946 (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels grounded philosophy in local orientations rather than Western universals (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial paternalism toward African intellectual capabilities. (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s thought is best understood through his whole corpus, not just Bantu Philosophy (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels equated African Vital Force with Western philosophical Being (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels helped initiate the debate over whether African philosophy exists (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy aimed at more effective Christianization of the Bantu. (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels equated African force with Western being and misconstrued its meaning (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy was written as evangelization strategy responding to Luba resistance (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy remains seminal to African philosophy despite its missionary origins (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels’s book targeted colonial practitioners despite his anticolonial aims (similarity 0.86)