THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY IN EAST AND CENTRAL AFRICA.

The Keynote Speech by Prof. Ernest Wamba dia Wamba at the Second Philosophy in East Africa Conference 2010 held at the Blue Pearl Hotel, Ubungo Plaza, Dar es Salaam.The Conference was organized by the Philosophy Association of Tanzania(PHATA).

                                              Ernest Wamba dia Wamba

I.                   Introduction.

The world has been facing major crises for some time now. They range from the crisis of the biosphere (hit by climatic changes), through that of the world capitalist economy (as revealed by financial crisis) to that of the political kingdom (as democracy is imposed even by military force.) While tremendous amount of food is produced in the world (it is said that in the USA 9 million USD worth food being burned everyday), world hunger is rising. While sex has been liberalized, raping of women and men is rising, etc.  Most current ideas, values and beliefs (influencing behaviours and attitudes) are failing to tackle those problems.

Philosophy (not as knowledge, but philosophizing or thinking) is being interrogated. Some fairly new positions or schools have come out, such as Roy Bhaskar’s Dialectical Critical Realism, Alain Badiou’s Dialectique des Vérités éternelles and the so-called movement of break from homo sapiens sapiens towards “homo universalis”.

We do witness a lot of thinking being done on spirituality and the critique of organized religions.  It is said that world fundamental beliefs about God and Life are not working and in fact are leading towards world suicide. The ideas that people are separate from God and life and life is not one and that there are not enough resources for everyone and one needs to struggle to have access to resources, etc. are leading to even wars as legitimate means.  It is said that new beliefs have to be produced before it is too late if we really want to survive.

On the other hand, as science is being transformed, from an emphasis on the physical to that on life sciences, the belief that it is the last salvation resort is also relaxed. Commodity fetishism putting up spectacle (Guy Debord) or the world of images (Plato’s cave) as the horizon for most of the commoners makes it difficult to these for reality to be grasped. This may be one reason for the re-emergence of Plato as a major philosopher, after such a long time of ant-platonism (Alain Badiou).  His metaphor of the cave and his concept of Idea are useful to critique the dominant regime of opinions. As says Badiou: “Without the Idea, there remains only an animalized humanity. Capitalism is the animalization of human beast.  What is not under the reign of the Idea will be under that of death. Human species cannot be animal-like innocently.  Man is such a species that needs the Idea to inhabit reasonably his own world.” Either we stand up with an Idea or we perish as species.  Difficult as it is, we must find/produce/discover the Idea.

It was not accidental that, by the time of his death, Mwalimu Nyerere had translated into Kiswahili Plato’s Republic.  He had finished proofreading the manuscript for publication when he died. It is a pity that it got misplaced or hidden, hopefully not destroyed and will some day resurface.  It would be a major instrument in this region, where Kiswahili is a major language, to teach philosophy with a new touch.

On the other hand, the task that African philosophy was supposed to have assumed –that of an African reconstruction of world philosophy, as a spiritual and intellectual completion of colonial freedom and healing—has not been completely addressed. Although freed from capitalist slavery and colonial oppression/exploitation, the African is not completely free, let alone emancipated.  So far, it seems, African philosophizing is just another footnoting of Plato—in the sense that Whitehead characterized Western philosophizing. The outcome of the asian journey of the soul is hardly taken up by African philosophy.  Should it not that, the violent freeing or self-liberating of the most humiliated soul in the world, have produced a thundering impact on world thinking?  As it said the last will be the first and the first will be the last!

If Deleuze was right that one thinks only when forced to; maybe, no major events, powerful enough, have taken place to force the African to think and produce the idea of his/ her emancipation and that of the world.  It is understood, since Plato, that immediate knowledge is not conducive to emancipation. The notion or paradigm, popularized as a model for reaching awareness, that the acquisition of new knowledge will lead to the break away from the regime of ordinary knowledge—as a way of coming out of the cave or seeing beyond the spectacle—is mistaken.  It is in this perspective I want to say something about teaching philosophy in East and Central Africa.

        II   East and Central African regions: a challenging human predicament.

What is in this area?  Do we have a measure for this apparently incommensurate region?  The “States” are without nations, despite all the proclamations of nation-building. Are they not just fragments of former colonial implant-States—with some exceptions, of course?  Are people satisfied with these?  Do people, everywhere here, have a subjective consciousness of belonging to a Nation?  Is what Soyinka calls ‘national space’ organized by a national consciousness?  Are we members of tribes, nationalities, ethnic groups, negro-africans? Are these active ways of naming what is there?  Are Hutu or Tutsi a people, a race, a tribe, a caste, a nationality, an ethnic group, a class? Do the members view themselves as being so?  We have, have we not, to clarify the ontology of this area?  The epistemic and ontological fallacies should be exposed.

Suffering, in this area, has been apocalyptic: from the brutal capitalist slavery, to the Leopoldian heart of darkness (not that we have now heart of enlightenment) to the colonial regimentation and apartheid to post-colonial genocides, suffering lingers on.  The human person has been so harsh to another human person here. The maxim of equality, the main category of emancipative politics, has been very remote. What Idea of politics must be discovered to have peace here?  How much healing is needed?  After slavery, in former kingdom of Kongo, Lemba healing, briefly made it possible for the family to again be possible; it was a non-statist people initiative, it emerged from a distance from the State.  People in the region are calling for more State presence, where the very little there is, is so brutal.  When you are called into the “security” office, in Kinshasa, most often chances of coming back home safe are nil.  What Idea of State will bring enlightenment?  We face the worst variant of a Hegelian State whose truth, as Hegel said, is war (inside by the criminalization of oppositions; and outside by the redefinition/reconsolidation of State space.) 

What about this fatalism we face, intimidating especially the youth: the belief that the powerful and rich “international community” (often viewed wrongly as being unified) decides everything for us. People reject the little free choice they have as being irrelevant.  Is not democracy making choices; it is not being imposed a rich sponsored ruler. What Idea of democracy will effectively serve the people here? Even arithmetic honesty in counting the votes is here lacking. There seem to always be two different people winning in the voting, officially and otherwise.  Democracy as a mirage joins the spectacle.

The religious fatalism also still holds on: the belief that time will come when the Lord will intervene and the clean, God-fearing rulers are going to rise! Prophecies of Kimbangu Simon, for example, galvanize consciousness, and people just wait.  Just in Kinshasa alone, about 8000 new Churches of Spirit (“églises de réveil”) have been counted. Some are, of course, shops of selling a spiritual something for the benefit of ministers of church. Poverty, misery and threats from sorcery, incurable and curable diseases etc. are dealt with by activating a healing spiritual feeling, in the victim. Satanic religious fatalism as well is rampant: spiritual houses, magic, ngangas, marabouts---a thriving business. Philosophy must deal with these as well to re-responsabilize people.  Maybe, should we add also this most powerful variant of fatalism that is not traced to somebody: the belief that money decides everything and is right?  Even some fatalism concerning identities: big posters are seen in Kinshasa urging people to use chemicals to have fairer skin to become “more beautiful”.  Is this not a form of rape of identity?  One wonders that the Congolese Information minister, speaking of 3 raped women in Kinshasa, refers to them as “fait divers”, as nothing.

Negative values are pointed the finger to as responsible of our region’s problems.  All the governments, in the region, have each a program to eradicate corruption, for example. On would think that, teaching about values and valuation would be part of it. There is nowhere a child is taught the experience of positive values.  He/she does not learn what it means to be honest, to be just, or to be responsible for everyone’s survival with dignity. Not only families are in crisis, the ontology prevailing there creates biases: “you are a Mungala; you have to be careful with Bakongo!”the child learns in the Bangala family, as an example.  The schooling system is based on a curriculum of memorization of facts—these become obsolete by the time the last graduation takes place.   Departments, commissions, organizations of defence of human rights are plenty; would it not be better to get children learn the respect for everyone’s human rights early on? Just the fact of the general atmosphere of poverty, conducive to lack of self-esteem, makes positive valuation difficult.  In the DRC, 6% of the working people have jobs, for example; one person works for 15 people. Teachers are so impoverished that the sacred profession of theirs has been spoiled. Who constitutes, here, the social forces for a new measure? And how do we overcome their disjunction?

Fundamentally, it is critical awareness that seems to be lacking. Even genocide seems to have generated more feelings of revenge than the needed critical awareness that humans are one and what happens to one may happen to the other. Even just for these few things said here, teaching philosophy in these regions may be worthwhile.

III.                 Teaching of philosophy in East and Central Africa.

In many places philosophy is taught in the area, of course.  It would be good if we could make a survey of how it is done and what impact it has generated on the terrain. This could help us bring to the fore the things that render its teaching important.

I cannot do it here, due to the fact that I have not been involved recently in any Department of philosophy at all.  I have been asked recently to teach one course. We shall try, in the future, to do such a survey.  

We have briefly shown that there are issues, in the regions, requiring, to be addressed, a critical awareness. It has always amazed me that those who oppose the teaching of philosophy would want to adopt the outcomes of what philosophy orients, if not gives foundation to, rather than the foundations themselves. It is the whole question of the relationship between the Idea and reality or the Idea and action which is at stake.  The usual way of viewing this is to view the idea as guideline to action (leading to the notion of a program) or as a moral judgement of actions; but not seeing the Idea as creating its own places or actions per se, the idea as a prescriptive possible.

We often do not ask ourselves: what is the measure of a learned African in “liberal arts,” for example?  In the West, the learned liberal art person needs to know the traditions: Ancient Greek and Latin tradition, Jewish and Christian tradition, the Enlightenment tradition and Science.  Is there something that would make the learned African differ from that measure?  Just his/her being incomplete—ignoring the Western foundations, for example-- will be celebrated?  In the West, the Asian traditions and even the African ones (not withstanding the fact that Africa is a constitutive part of America) are increasingly included in the measure. The ancient Greek philosophers, for instance, went to Ancient Egypt and used the insight gained from there to reconstruct and rethink their traditions.  I advocate the study of the whole world philosophy and the African reconstruction of it.

It is the nature of philosophizing, as a theoretical palaver, that makes philosophy capable of enticing critical awareness.  As Bhaskar wrote (Plato ETC, 194:9): these are some of the enduring features of the philosophical tradition:   “a)its concern with giving a rational account or logos of the nature of things, as opposed to one accepted, say, purely on the basis of authority( Hegelian ‘positivity’) or faith or force or caprice or tradition or convention; b) its concern with the perplexity of phenomena, with paradox and the problematicity of being.”

Kwame Nkrumah speaks of social contention in philosophical systems (Consciencism, 1974: 5) and Louis Althusser spoke of it as “class struggle in theory”.

Alain Badiou (Manifeste pour la philosophie, 1989) approaches it in terms of its conditions.  Philosophy is prescribed or called for by conditions which are generic procedures of truth, procedures through which truth emerges as an event.  Philosophy is seen as a dialectics articulating the compossibility of various truths.  It asserts that there are truths in the world.  Four generic processes of truth have been identified by him: science (mathesis), a deductive and demonstrative procedure leading to discoveries; love as a procedure of truth giving rise to figures of love such as courtly love: art (more precisely: poem) giving rise to masterpieces; and politics or more precisely emancipative politics (progressive, revolutionary, self-referent politics) such as the invention of democracy in ancient Greece.  Philosophy is the site through which is made the enunciation: “there are truths”; philosophy is a seizure of truths, it grasps these in their compossibility, it exhibits the unity of thought.  The emergence of truths motivates philosophical thinking. In its very practice, philosophy reflects the system of its conditions: its argumentative exposition imitates science; its persuasive style of exposition imitates art; the intensity of the philosophical act imitates love without an object; and it addresses itself to all so that all may grasp the existence of truths, as such, it imitates political strategy without having power as its target.

It is a matter of pedagogy that philosophy will be taught as practice of philosophizing, that is, of thinking, and not as simple knowledge acquisition. It has to be constitutively dialogical and aporetic. In its orientation to rationality, it is required that rationality be accountable and self-reflexive.  In view of our conditions of rampant unfreedom--even when rights of freedom are incorporated in our constitutions-- appropriate strategies of teaching have to be found.  In Kenya, philosophy used to be taught on the radio. I do not know what impact this had on the terrain. While reason is shared among humans, its use cannot be improvised.  That is why past experiences of people, who used effectively their reason, have to be a starting point. Making Plato be recast in a contemporary mode may be the way to go about teaching him.  Where mathematical examples he used were wrong, we correct those and replace them with correct ones.  I think that some of the conditions he set to study philosophy, such as to be a geometrician, should be probably followed—within the spirit of Badiou’s suggestion.

There is a lot of talk about empowerment; this is often understood in terms of practical professions and arts.  Should there also not be an empowerment of the mind and the spirit? Should we not start thinking  beyond narrow uses of subjects and pose the crucial issues of why our graduates fail to be creative, taking real initiatives and discovery-inclined in their work?  Is this not also what philosophizing can help achieve?

Nothing in our countries should be taken as given. In our condition of oppression, any given is oppressive.  Not even the Hegelian creative and self-destructive World Spirit should be taken for granted.  If philosophy teaching can generate such critical awareness in our countries, then, hope may ensue.

Those are the few ideas I would like to put to you colleagues.  Mfumu na Mfumu!

Nganga na Nganga! Bana Batele Bana basekole!  (The politician measures up with a politician; the scientist measures up against a scientist; some affirm others counter).

                                       Dar-es-Salaam, November 18^th, 2010.