///This is Part 2 of an essay pulled from my undergraduate thesis on comparative African philosophy. Part 1, an introduction to the project, can be found here. Part 2 includes a tentative mapping of Akan personal ontology based on the divergent interpretations of contemporary Akan philosophers, and then an analysis of the relation of these differing interpretations to the thinkers' differing opinions regarding broader social organization. Kwame Gyekye has recently died and I humbly dedicate whatever small effort I'm taking here to his memory.//
///"Re-Fanging the Python" is a series of posts drawn from my undergraduate thesis project, which is a comparative analysis of Akan and Western European Enlightenment ontological assumptions, especially as far as they relate to personhood. More broadly, it is an attempt to move towards a way of doing comparative philosophy that avoids the sterile, quasi-anthropological trappings of an academia that largely recognizes that it is dominated by Western, Euro-Christian modes of thought, but sees the solution as a museum of discourses in appropriately labeled vats (tour guides providing plenty of qualifiers that the museum itself is of course a discursive system while the guests tap on the glass). A sincere engagement with the reality of difference requires the acknowledgement of the real histories, divergences, and struggles constitutive of difference -- and crucially, a serious consideration of the positioning and responsibility of that engagement. What does it mean to do a responsible comparison of European and African thought? I don't think it means maintaining a catalogue of cultural novelty. The patronizing attitude in which the academy refuses real contact (questioning, debating, comparing) with the philosophy of a people who have been and remain under colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism, undermines the effective existence of such a philosophy, bleeding the life from it and pinning it to a cork-board with the rest of the samples on their way to the British Museum.
The python is a holy animal across various West African traditional religions, and the slaughter of pythons and defacing of the temples where they were kept was a common tactic among European missionaries. "Re-Fanging the Python" then refers to an attempt to not only acknowledge African philosophy as existing and worthy of study, but actively working towards conditions that allow the exercise of its potency and vitality, something to challenge and be challenged.
Most of the research and preliminary notes and writings for this project was done in Ghana.///
Kwame Gyekye and Kwasi Wiredu's analyses of the traditional Akan ontological schema, and philosophy more broadly, provide a ground for differentiating Akan from Western European ontology. Gyekye in particular provides a highly detailed breakdown of the conceptual assumptions of the Akan in his work "African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme" in which he uses his own background in Akan life and specialization both in Akan culture and language to draw conclusions about the common elements of a tangible common African philosophy. Wiredu diverges from Gyekye in some notable instances (regarding the extent of a social constitution of personhood, for example), but where they agree despite their differences is where we can find the firmest ground for assertions about Akan ontology. Wiredu and Gyekye both also detail the connection between Akan ontological assumptions and their role in Akan social formations (Wiredu understands this as democracy based on consensus as opposed to majoritarianism), which will provide us with an appropriate marker to contrast with Euro-Christian social formation in our approximation of the interplay between the materialized social forms and conceptual schemas.
To those familiar with the Euro-Christian ontological schema, the assumed dualism is that of division between a divine, immaterial soul and the earthly, material body. Despite sharing emphasis on spirituality and divinity in humanity and their relation to the material, Akan ontology of the person does not orbit a fundamental division between the two, and much of Akan divinity has a "quasi-physical" (1) status. The extent of this quasi-physicality is a subject of dispute between Gyekye and Wiredu, with Gyekye believing that Wiredu and his school exaggerates the case. Much of their general disagreement involves Gyekye holding Akan spiritual faculties as more similar to Euro-Christian conceptions of the soul than Wiredu, who maintains that they are distinct, and that attempts to draw equivalencies between Akan and European faculties smuggles incompatible Euro-Christian philosophical baggage into an analysis of African philosophy. Wiredu writes:
"The differences between this [Akan] ontology of personhood and certain well known Western ones are obscured when what we have called the life principle is identified with the Western notion of the soul. This translation was initiated by Western scholars, but now many Africans vie with them in sponsoring it. Yet, by this one act of assimilation, the African brings upon herself all the intellectual perplexities of the body-and-soul enigma of Western philosophy." (2)
Wiredu then sees the parallel between these principles as not only something of debatable accuracy, but the invocation of such parallels as itself a process that obscures the unique qualities of African thought and assumption. Because of this, Wiredu avoids delineating a definitive schema of personal ontology, seeing such an effort as founded on an assumption of a similarity he disputes — of certain immutable faculties similar to the soul that operate within the individual with origins in and/or access to a divine plane. To consider the question of what exists as such, without spatial relation, is contrary to basic assumptions that in direct translation lose their philosophical import.
"In at least many African languages existence is locative, that is, to be is to be at some place...in the Bantu languages the expression for existence always has an adverb of place. To exist is to Liho or baho where the ho means there, at some place...in the Akan language to exist is to wo ho, and the ho means exactly the same as in the Bantu case. Actually, in English also to exist is to be there; but the existence of the word “exist” and of phrases like “to have being” make it look like existing can mean something other than being there."
This is in contrast to Gyekye, who provides a particular mapping of the Akan ontological schema of the person, because such a mapping is that of the person as-such, unlocated and hypothetical. Wiredu believes this already to be a deviation from Akan philosophy. But because Gyekye provides detailed description of concepts that are ubiquitous (if not uniform) in Akan thought and life, his ontological schema of the Akan person does provide a useful avenue for exploration.
Gyekye sees Wiredu's description of the ɔkra being "near physical" as necessarily in conflict with a ubiquitous belief in a world of spirits inhabited by the ancestors, a world that one transfers to upon death. It is our view that this conception of a quasi-physical soul does not seem to be necessarily in contradiction with a persistence of the person into a spirit world, and though the project would not be entirely derailed by working within Gyekye's line of thought, their divergence on this point is illustrative and is here explored.
The ɔkra is "the spark of the Supreme Being in man", the presence of which is a necessary condition for personhood. In this sense it seems somewhat like the Euro-Christian soul, in that (within Euro-Christianity) the soul is also bestowed onto the human animal to complete them as a person, divinely endowed. There is interchange between the body and the soul, largely in the shape of the body's temptations towards the soul and the soul's disciplining of the body. But the Euro-Christian soul, whatever variety of potential it may contain within itself, is a unified pole opposed to materiality. The interaction of these poles serves as proof of their fundamental opposition — the person themself is that space of contact, a battlefield of the irreconcilability of the soul and body. (3) This is not the case in Akan ontology, where there are distinct conceptual faculties for a variety of phenomena, most with elements of both the divine and physical present in them, the nature of these faculties requiring a broader community as a sensible space of action, as opposed to the individual as the primary space. The exact nature of these faculties (their distinctness from each other and their physical and divine qualities) are where Wiredu and Gyekye disagree. But even Gyekye's reading of Akan personal ontology as closer to the Euro-Christian soul has meaningful distinctions — this shorter range of differentiation is useful in itself, placing an Akan personal ontology closer to the Platonic personal ontology than the latter is to the Euro-Christian, despite the Euro-Christian claiming direct descent from it. Here is one of the contexts where the distinction between "European Philosophy" and "Western European Enlightenment Philosophy" becomes relevant. While Plato's considerations on the soul were enormously influential in the development of Enlightenment dualism, his tripartite model of the soul (4) shares significant elements with the Akan ontology of a person's ontology, especially Gyekye's reading of it.
The main constituent elements of a person in Akan ontology are the ɔkra ("soul"), the sunsum ("spirit"), and the honam ("body"), though minor elements such as honhom ("breath" in the abstract) occupy distinct spaces that interact with but are not necessarily contained within the primary three. Wiredu, and Danquah to some extent, hold that there is a quasi-physical and physical quality to these elements that is distinct from the Euro-Christian ontology of the person (in which only the body is physical and the qualities of personhood are purely immaterial and merely occupy the physical). Gyekye seems very invested in opposing this quasi-materiality, and it is not clear that he is doing so on the most consistent grounds. Danquah finds that "sunsum is, in fact, the matter or the physical basis of the ultimate ideal of which ɔkra is the form and the spiritual or mental basis." (5) The sunsum is also contrasted to the ɔkra with the sunsum as the "sensible form" and the ɔkra as the "intelligible form", as well as a description of the sunsum as the "material mechanism" that interacts with the ɔkra. This seems perfectly understandable: the ɔkra is the spark of the divine that is necessary though not sufficient for the existence of a person, whereas sunsum is the instantiation of that divine endowment of life, its lived reality of sense and passion, meaningfully distinct from the ɔkra in that it is the conduit of physical experience. Though Gyekye presents the sunsum's relationship to dreams as in support of his argument as to its strict immateriality, it seems rather to support Danquah and Wiredu's understanding. Gyekye says regarding sunsum and dreams: "[Unlike the ɔkra,] in sleep the sunsum is said to be released from the fetters of the body. As it were, it fashions for itself a new world of forms with the materials of its waking experience...the sunsum, which thus can leave the body and return to it...must be immaterial." But is this not a wonderful example of a quasi-material element of a person? The sunsum does not obey the laws of the purely physical, but it does realize itself only in relation to them; it is driven by sense and desire, in dreams placing itself "standing atop a mountain or driving a car or fighting." Gyekye seems to be grasping at those functions of the sunsum that are not strictly physical and taking them as evidence that there is no physicality to it as a faculty, but each of these functions of sunsum he presents seem to agree with its description as a quasi-physical element of the person. Besides its activity during sleep, he presents its relation to personality with the assumption that personality is inherently non-physical — but the examples of sayings he provides all equate the personality with physical phenomena. "He has a strong personality" is more literally translated as "His sunsum is heavy"; generosity is a "good sunsum" (generosity being a matter of some physical scarcity, be it time, energy, or goods); a sunsum may be "gentle" or "weak." Gyekye, after presenting this, goes on to claim "It is now clear that in Akan conceptions the sunsum is the basis of a man's personality…[Therefore] it cannot be a physical thing." This does not follow from the examples Gyekye has provided, at least not without further qualification that he does not provide. It seems like Gyekye is working backwards for the sake of his assumption that the sunsum is a non-physical, subordinate component of the ɔkra rather than a distinct quasi-physical faculty. Both of his examples (from which he concludes, absolutely, that the sunsum must be purely immaterial) seem to suggest, if not the opposite, at least a stronger argument for some level of materiality or essential interaction with materiality, and these are meant to be the arguments against any potential physicality of the sunsum.
Gykeye's investment in the non-physicality of the sunsum perhaps becomes more transparent with his explicit linking of it to the "broad context of the African belief in the activities of the supernatural (spiritual) beings in the physical world," which he describes as if it is the ultimate conclusive evidence that the sunsum is wholly spiritual, because being spiritual does not mean being fundamentally unable to interact with the physical world.
"...spiritual beings are said to be insensible and intangible, but they are also said to make themselves felt in the physical world. They can thus interact with the physical world. But from this it cannot be inferred that they are physical or quasi-physical or have permanent physical properties. It means that a spiritual being can, when it so desires, take on physical properties. That is, even though a spiritual being is nonspatial in essence, it can, by the sheer operation of its power, assume spatial properties."
Gyekye here acknowledges the significant overlap of the spiritual world with the physical and the widespread cultural assumption of transience across these categories. But because he assumes the material manifestations of the spiritual as inherently subordinate to their spiritual categorization, (instead of viewing such transience as evidence of the categories non-viability) he sees it as evidence that the spiritual can manifest in physical ways while still remaining purely immaterial. He even claims that this "constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the view that sunsum can be a physical object." His claim is then: the spiritual cannot be physical because if it were physical it would not be spiritual; the transient physicality of the spiritual is no evidence that it is quasi-physical, because it is spiritual. We can see Lewis Gordon already relevant in that the decadence of philosophy as a discipline seems here to overrule sensible observation about the circumstances philosophy is meant to make sense of. Wiredu approaches here with his objection that spirituality in the African and European conception are not nearly similar enough to be conflated, referring back to the spatial character of African languages to justify this:
"...from the standpoint of a language in which to exist is to be in space, nothing spiritual in the sense of being nonextended, immaterial, can exist. But the soul is supposed to be spiritual in exactly this sense. Hence it cannot have a place in the African ontology of personhood."
Beyond disputing the particular extent of the spiritual nature of the sunsum, Wiredu objects even to spiritual as a descriptor, since a language that refers only to that which is spatially located cannot contain the description of something that is non-located.
As we stated previously, however much we may dispute Gyekye's view of the potential quasi-physicality of the sunsum, we are not attempting to find the correct analysis of the Akan worldview but rather to understand in what way Gyekye and Wiredu exist on a common field of debate that is, despite its internal conflict, meaningfully separate from the field of Euro-Enlightenment ontology. And Gyekye is certainly on a common, though disputed, field with Wiredu. Despite his insistence on the purely immaterial nature of the sunsum, he fully defends the existence of the sunsum as a distinct aspect of the Akan ontology, with its own unique functions and referential tradition, which cannot be consistently conflated with the ɔkra. He provides Akan descriptors and proverbs concerning the ɔkra and sunsum that are unique to each and cannot be used interchangeably. The ɔkra may be sad, worried, fortunate, or happy; the sunsum may be heavy, big, generous, or gentle (these being physical descriptors referring to qualities of a person: to have a heavy sunsum is to have an imposing presence, to have a gentle sunsum is the inverse.) Gyekye notes that a student of his has argued against the use of these descriptors to determine ontology, claiming that these were simply idioms that were only non-interchangeable on the grounds of linguistic intelligibility, and that this should not be taken as evidence of difference in what is being referred to. But Gyekye robustly defends the distinction of sunsum from ɔkra, primarily (though not exclusively) on the grounds that the idioms being referenced are not only grammatically strange or unconventional in their use of language, but that they have completely incompatible meaning, referring to entirely different phenomena. It can be said that someone's sunsum is large or small — to say someone's ɔkra is large or small is meaningless, as it is in no way spatially constituted. To say someone's ɔkra is not good refers specifically to that person being unlucky and prone to misfortune, whereas to say someone's sunsum is not good is to claim that they are literally an evil spirit, or possessed by one. From this discrepancy between the sunsum and ɔkra Gyekye recognizes their distinctness: "I once thought that the sunsum might be characterized as a state, an epiphenomenon, of the ɔkra. I now think that characterization is wrong, for it would subvert the entitative nature of the sunsum." Unlike Wiredu, however, Gyekye does not see this distinctness as evidence that the sunsum is fundamentally separated from the ɔkra in an ontological sense, with reference to the Platonic tripartite conception of the soul which does not preclude its overall "ontic unity." The basis of Gyekye's understanding of Akan personal ontology is that the ɔkra and the sunsum are distinct parts of an otherwise unified Akan soul roughly similar to the European tradition's soul. It is significant here that his bridge to the European tradition is a bridge to the ancient Greek tripartite soul and not necessarily the Christian soul, so that even in his opposition to the quasi-physicalist interpretations of these elements, the dualism he comes to is of the sort that allows for the relevance of the soul and the exchange between it and the body. Plato's conception of the soul contains appetite and spirit, unlike the Christian interpretation (in general, though this is of course itself a fully varied tradition) of the body as the seat of appetite and spirit, which finds in appetite and spirit (spirited in Plato's sense of eagerness, anger, vitality) the production of sin. So on the contested field of analyzing Akan ontology, the coordinates that bring us closest to Euro-Christian conceptions of the soul are bringing us to those particular European conceptions of the soul that do not isolate it from the body or in its unity necessitate an elimination of absolute internal distinctions (whereas the modernist Euro-Christian conception is, roughly summarized, of the soul as primarily the presence of the divine in the individual, any faculties it possesses being subsumed into the Good of the divine, only subverted by external corruption).
Gyekye's dispute with Wiredu, and the background of their respective positions, has additional import in our considering the relationship of personal ontology to social organization. Gyekye's disputing of the quasi-physicality of personal ontology leads him to dispute the socially composed personhood posited by Wiredu and his camp, and from there Gyekye makes his departure from an understanding of African society as rooted in communitarian philosophical assumptions. Wiredu progresses (6) from an understanding of Akan personal ontology as containing significant quasi-physical components to an understanding of the individual's personhood as composed by their social relationships, and from there to claims of a basic communitarian element to Akan (and wider African) worldview and socio-political circumstance. It should be noted that despite our divergence from Gyekye on the question of quasi-physicality and drawing a connection between his rejection of it and his advocation of a more moderate communitarianism that is careful to reserve space for an individual with their own fundamental rights, (7) this is not necessarily a condemnation of his advocation for such a moderate communitarianism. His criticisms of Menkiti in particular are valuable for the problematization of a wholly social determination of personhood. Though Gyekye focuses moreso on disputing the accuracy of assuming this was the case in traditional African society, his concern with claiming it was the case would be relevant as a criticism of such a traditional ethic being worth preserving, even if it were determined to have historically been the case. Just as we can identify in Hegelian and Kantian thought an ideological precedent for the many genocides of European colonialism, 1930s Germany, and 1990's Balkans (via the necessity of the individual to serve historical progression and their duty to perform their social roles), there is through Gyekye's concerns a space opened for the interpretation of the genocides of 90's Rwanda, and the ongoing slavery and genocide of the Twa Congolese by various Niger-Congo speaking groups, as injustices having legitimate origins in traditional African beliefs regarding personhood and community. This is opposed to the questionable assignment of all responsibility for such crimes onto European colonialism and the nested implication that either the colonial project was entirely successful in the erasure of indigenous knowledge and beliefs (which conveniently allows any onus to actually study African philosophy to be substituted with the same entirely decontextualized engagement with European philosophy that the theorist is already engaged in) or that traditional African knowledge and beliefs have only ever existed insofar as they are good which would require an explanation of empirical historical injustices among Africans as unrelated to knowledge or belief (what is the cause then? Animalistic impulse, while all bad things Europeans do are attributed to bad ideas? Or are the bad African ideas not really African, an African totality being somehow impossible?).
Gyekye's "Socialist Interlude" in Tradition and Personhood is more problematic, though still constructive in its divergence from standard readings of African socialism. Gyekye lays the blame for the failure of revolutionary socialist African states (noting Touré and Nyerere, conspicuously leaving out his own countryman Nkrumah) on the inconsistency of their avowed socialist ideologies with the free market tendencies of traditional society, which he sees as obscured in popular interpretation by the assignment of the designation "socialism" to basic humanistic elements of traditional society. The fact that Gyekye feels he can make such an enormous claim regarding the socio-political history of postcolonial African states as a simple aside is itself telling. The claim that revolutionary socialist African states stagnated and even regressed due to the "devastating effects" of socialist ideology is at the very least partially (and we would claim almost completely) ahistorical considering the concentrated imperialist and neocolonial efforts to isolate and undermine every instance of African socialism. This is of course not to claim that such states would be perfect if not for outside interference, but they certainly did not have the chance to fail by their own merits, (8) and their significant successes are retroactively assumed to have been doomed from the start. Gyekye is very selective in his examples. Nyerere is cited, who surrendered his socialist project of Ujamaa to liberal democracy and his successor Mwinyi after his attempt to grow agricultural socialism from the model of traditional village life failed, but does not mention Ghana's own founding figure Nkrumah who was deposed by a CIA backed coup after taking major steps towards industrialization in the form of the Akosombo Dam, the laying of highways and rail as well as communications infrastructure, and planning for a nuclear power plant that is only now in 2018 being resumed.
Notably, Wiredu is also highly critical of both Marxism and its African applications. The divide in the social implications for Akan personal ontology is not located in a disagreement about African socialism, and both Gyekye and Wiredu mutually consider revolutionary socialism as despotic and unmanageable. But there is potential relevance in distinguishing the nature of Wiredu's critique of socialism compared to Gyekye's as far as it concerns their stances on personal ontology. Gyekye cites the lack of consideration for personal rights and the untenable erasure of free market tendencies that are cemented in a society not only economically, but culturally and politically. His criticism is then well aligned with the standard western liberal-democratic criticism of socialism, just as his analysis of Akan thought finds a personal ontology that is well-aligned with the personal ontology that is (at least formally considered) foundational for western liberal-democratic societies. Wiredu's conception of the person is, in comparison, unapologetically communalistic. He makes no compromises here claiming that "In Africa it is anthropologically verifiable that, generally, the operative ethic is communalism." Wiredu's ontology of the Akan person is not as easily demonstrated in a descriptive schema as Gyekye's, because its priorities are not ontological (determining where which distinct faculties are placed within the person) so much as they are ethical (how a person is defined by their relation to others):
"The African mind is not oblivious to the ontological aspects of the concept of a person, and has ideas thereto. But ethical issues are more dominant. The reason ontological issues are not as worrisome here as they are in Western philosophies of personhood is that sharp dichotomies, such as that between mind, as a nonextended substance, and matter, as an extended one, do not exist on the African side."
Gyekye's similarity in his Akan ontological model to the European ontological model allows an easy link to the political models of European liberal-democracies that assume the relevance of the hypothetical person as such (the undefined subject who rights are written for, laws apply to, the government is justified on the basis of, etc.) But Wiredu's model of Akan ontology cannot serve as the purely theoretical basis of an existing political model in the same sense, since it is an understanding of personhood as something that exists necessarily within a political model and not prior to it. According to Wiredu, this is the basis of the traditional Akan form of governance "consensual democracy." (9) In such a form of governance, the person is not the embodiment of an ideal subject (the citizen) for which abstract social institutions exist (courts, elections). The person is instead socially constituted — their status as a person is composed of their relations to others who are themselves composed of their own relations to others and so on, so that while the person is socially composed, simultaneously the governance is truly composed of people considered in their reality of interaction as opposed to the relation of their ideal legal status to abstract formalities. This shares with Marxism a pragmatic communitarianism prioritizing the social contingencies of lived reality opposed to governance based on discovering better ideas about how to govern. In Marx's case lived reality is contingent on underlying material systems in the process of historical development; in the case of Akan consensual democracy, relations between persons are similarly too contingent and contextual to govern using abstract legalism. But a material-historic methodology for understanding these relations does not have any useful place within Akan consensual democracy. The processes of social interaction Akan governance inhabits is communally phenomenological, and does not leave the room for the kind of material primacy fundamental to the Marxist method, which requires some possibility of real tension between the perceived and the actual. (10)
Akan consensual democracy does however have a serious resemblance both in its basic ethic and its applied form to socialist anarchism, especially industrial syndicalism (historical examples being the Industrial Workers of the World, the CNT-FAI, and the contemporary anarchist neighborhoods of Athens and agricultural communes of the Zapatistas). Though socialist anarchism has among its variety of influences a strong streak of Marxism, theoretical methodologies have in anarchism consistently taken a back seat to the immediate institution of community forms, claiming inspiration in traditional communalisms for the viability of a localist politics. In comparison to Akan governance, the mechanism of bestowing responsibility is different, but the process of actual governance has clear similarities. In anarchist syndicates, governance is synonymous with union representation, in which a local union will debate amongst themselves about their demands, elect a representative to go to present the decision they have come to in a council of representatives from other locals of the same industry (in the broad sense that includes agriculture, service, etc.) who then go on to do the same with representatives from other industries and try to reach an agreement regarding the fair exchange of work being performed. In Akan consensual democracy the opportunity to govern is decided by lineage, and the selection for governance based on certain static factors of age and seniority:
"The lineage is the basic political unit among the Ashantis. Because they are a matrilineal group, this unit consists of all the people in a town or village having a common female ancestor, which, as a rule, is quite a considerable body of persons. Every such unit has a head, and every such head is automatically a member of the council which is the governing body of the town or village. The qualifications for lineage headship are seniority in age, wisdom, a sense of civic responsibility and logical persuasiveness. All these qualities are often united in the most senior, but non-senile, member of the lineage. In that case, election is almost routine. But where these qualities do not seem to converge in one person, election may entail prolonged and painstaking consultations and discussions aimed at consensus. There is never an act of formal voting."
Despite this difference in the determination of responsibility, the effect is largely the same, and Akan governance in larger political bodies representing a geographical area encompassing many towns and cities consists of what are essentially messengers relaying the consensus of their own town or neighborhood to a larger body of representatives that then must reach a consensus among themselves. In both industrial syndicalism and consensual democracy those doing the governing and the actions of the governing body are decided via consensus, in which all people are not represented in the form of a vote but by their de facto engagement in the process that comes with existing as a person living in a society of persons.
The underlying distinction here is between the social implications of Gyekye and Wiredu's ontological considerations. Though they both find the dominant 20th century alternative to liberal-democracy, Marxist socialism, worth condemning, Wiredu finds in Akan ontology the basis of a radically different system of governance that can potentially address the severe flaws of liberal-democracy, whereas Gyekye finds affirmation of the tenability of Euro-American liberal-democracy. This is not meant to discredit Gyekye's anti-colonial credentials. Much of the revolutionary African anti-colonial movements of the 20th century found themselves actively reaffirming many of the assumptions of Euro-American liberal-democracy despite their theoretical bases in African communalism and Marxism. Nkrumah ended up dancing with the Queen, after all. Gyekye and his theory are themselves products of these 20th century African revolutions that, after brutal waves of neocolonialism and internal conflicts, found themselves, at best, the liberal-democratic seats of a staggering developmentalism. His voice is one of the sincere attempts at reconciling African decolonization with the universalist assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism. Ironically, despite his opposition, this means that Gyekye's analysis is probably more compatible with Marxism than Wiredu's, because Gyekye argues that the ideological assumptions of the Akan are, while unique, not in themselves in contrast to the development of market exchange, the viability of attendant state mechanisms, and a basically universal conception of the individual. He defends this historically with the presence of trade and both internal and foreign markets in Akan society; a standard capitalist appeal to the lasting presence of markets as a natural feature of all societies, realized to various extents. But the presence of these historical institutions being in some way separable from the conceptual assumptions of the Akan (in that the concepts do not presume social forms as much as social attitudes, i.e. a moderate communitarian temperament within a society that nonetheless is organized within feudal and then liberal-democratic boundaries and can adapt its ideological priorities to them) provides a more consistent point of departure for Marxism. Wiredu's understanding of these conceptual assumptions as in a mutually vital relationship with the social formations avoids the question of history as a matter of objective developments, instead understanding social temporality as the intergenerational element of the same phenomenological organizational process that governs living interactions in Akan society.
This division returns to the issues Nkrumah had in developing Marxism for the purposes of the mid-20th century African revolutions — he thought that the communal ethic and organization in African traditional society was an existing foundation for socialism, and that this communalism could be reconciled with the modern development of the state in a dialectical fashion that did not necessarily require popular revolution. In this sense Nkrumah's socialism retroactively represents the uneasy presence of both Gyekye and Wiredu's camps in that moment of African anti-colonial revolution. Some contemporary African socialism has sidestepped this issue with a particular reading of Marxism that follows China's Deng Xiaoping, Julius Malema of the EFF in South Africa being the primary example of an African socialist who sees the full implementation of capitalism as necessary to develop a country before, true sovereignty, and then socialism, is possible. Significant that Malema advocates this so assuredly coming from South Africa in particular, which has had its traditional institutions destroyed and sidelined more than perhaps any other African country, whereas in somewhere like Ghana or Kenya the question of destroying the existing communalism present in traditional society for the sake of agonizing historical progression towards a speculative communalism loomed especially large and was a cause for reconsidering certain assumptions. Those elements of African societies that have been branded backwards, tribalistic, or hopelessly crippled by colonialism — always presented as a lack of the factor(s) necessary for liberal-democracy to function properly — are often in fact the presence of elements of a fundamentally different social form that is visible only in its conflict with officially recognized social infrastructure. How much of the poverty of Africans calculated by western statisticians includes agricultural villages where wage-labor and currency is peripheral but there is far less scarcity in the clan compounds than in any workers' household in internationally praised examples of development like South Korea or Hong Kong? Likewise, corruption in the form of bribes is not necessarily the lack of political integrity but the continued presence of a political form that involves gifts, tribute, and the relation of people instead of the relation of offices. That is not to say that corruption is simply a misunderstanding and that it is not overwhelmingly a nefarious and destructive practice within existing African states, but to make the crucial distinction that it is not due to the lack of something the West has but the presence of something Africa has. In the liberal-democratic interpretation the continent is everywhere stricken with some inexplicable malaise halting social progress and economic development. This confusion is due to a post-ideological blockage in insight in which liberal-democracy is treated as the superhistorical form of social organization, any deviation from which is not evidence of the limits of liberal-democracy but is instead transmuted into legitimization. Because liberal-democracies and peripheral forms of nation-states enjoy political hegemony, alternatives cannot exist as anything other than failures of liberal-democracy, transforming them from alternatives to defects.
Africa is unique in that the largely extractive nature of colonialism and imperialism on the continent left so much of the population unintegrated into the imposed governments and economies while still aggressively delegitimizing the indigenous forms of governance. In the neocolonial wake of colonialism, the traditional governments persist in varied though always in uneasy and conflicting ways with the African inheritors of imposed European governance. Sometimes these traditional governments become a legitimizing force for the liberal-democratic management, as with the Asantehene in Ghana, who take on a symbolic role not incomparable with the royalty of Europe. But wherever colonialism did not concentrate industry and infrastructure (whether that is in a rural village or among the displaced villagers in a metropolitan slum; wherever something was not being extracted it did not need managers), the immediate force of governance remains outside the officiated liberal-democracy, in the clans and networks of family compounds. This is the traditional governance that Wiredu refers to and terms consensual democracy. His detractors talk about the viability of "returning" to such a mode of governance, but its presence is abundantly clear in the dissonance of African nation-states. And its presence is justified and accompanied by, if not perpetuated by, the presence of a conceptual framework for the society and for the person, the distinct ontological organization of which can be studied to allow us to identify the existence of other forms of social organization where those who don't engage with the conceptual foundations are instead confronted with error and absence. Wiredu believes that the prioritization and then consolidation of Akan consensual democracy is the preferred alternative to liberal-democracy; Gyekye believes that liberal-democracy is not necessarily a western imposition and can be adapted in a way that is consistent with and effectively promotes the interests of Akan beliefs about person and community.
(1) Kwame Gyekye, African Philosophical Thought, 86
(2) Kwasi Wiredu, An Oral Philosophy of Personhood, 13-14
(3) A more complete analysis of Christianity in general, as opposed to the particular Enlightenment mode of Western Europe Christianity as it comes to actively contrast with Akan and African conceptions, would be a rich topic here, considering the centrality of disputes over Christ's divine and human nature to the history and theology of Christianity. Perhaps significant and certainly notable that Miaphysitism, holding the Divine and Human elements as unified without contradiction in Christ, persisted for so long in Egyptian and Ethiopian Christian theology.
(4) Plato, The Republic, 434d–441c
(5) J.B. Danquah, The Akan Doctrine of God, p. 115
(6) Logically, at least — we of course understand that neither camp started in an unbiased position of ontological analysis and simply proceeded from there to the social assumptions that rationally followed.
(7) Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Personhood, Person and Community: In Defense of Moderate Communitarianism
(8) What it would mean for a nation-state to fail by its own merits of course brings up the issue of the possibility of sovereignty at all, as it is not as if any nation-state has ever existed "by its own merits" in the sense that one has ever been able to demonstrate its sensibility and viability outside of the necessarily international factors from which it is inevitably composed.
(9) Kwasi Wiredu, Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics
(10) This is a rich point of comparison, and one that cannot nearly be developed to satisfaction here, so this is necessarily a reductive and speculative contrast.