WIREDU’S CONCEPTUAL DECOLONIZATION

WIREDU’S CONCEPTUAL DECOLONIZATION

            The controversy about how best to do African philosophy has perdured for up to three decades now. Colonialism and colonial influence seems to have bred a widespread involuntary intermixing of western and African intellectual categories. This presents the need to be cautious of saying we are doing African philosophy while colossally employing western intellectual categories and thought patterns. It also presents the need to be circumspective of conceptual entanglements, conceptual cobwebs. According to Kwasi Wiredu, there is the danger of cultural alienation implicit in an uncritical adoption of European languages as the linguistic means of philosophical ruminations on African problems. This poses the question, can we as Africans view our own philosophic inheritance in its true lineaments? Responding to this, Wiredu avers that there is the need for a critical spirit, one that filters and sieves the elements of foreign philosophic thought. Only by the cultivation of this spirit, says Wiredu, can we construct a philosophy well-suited to present-day African existence and experience and capable of addressing African problems. However, the cultivation of this spirit should not be thought of as implying the total disavowal of all foreign sources of possible edification, or, a total valuation of African thought resources, rather, an African synthesis of indigenous and western elements.

            The challenge then facing the African philosopher is that of how to interrogate these colonial encrustations through the process of what Wiredu sees as the domestication and decolonization of foreign ideas. The foregoing makes crystal clear the quest not just for African philosophy now, but, for a good African philosophy, as this assures the preservation of our cultural dignity and primitive integrity. The achievement of this quest and objective, Wiredu opines, is longed on the precondition of conceptual decolonization. But, what is conceptual decolonization? According to Wiredu, conceptual decolonization is the elimination from our thought, modes of conceptualization that came to us through colonization and remain in our thinking owing to inertia rather than our own reflective choices. This decolonization agenda is mitigated by the fact that, African philosophy, both in its gestation and dissemination, is done mostly in western languages. Languages (in their natural groupings) carry their own kinds of philosophical suggestiveness, and, if one is bred and trained in a particular language, certain basic ways of thought that seem natural to those native speakers might become natural to him/her too. Strong as this impediment appears, it is not without an antidote. The antidote of this impediment, Wiredu identifies, is for Africans to try to think philosophically in their own vernaculars, even if they still have to expound their results in some western language.

This antidote appears onerous, but however herculean a task it appears, human beings can, so to speak, step aside from language, or figuratively be in two places at the same time, namely, both within and above a language. We are not prisoners to language, says Wiredu. This is particularly why people from diverse cultures can hold philosophical conversations, converse and thence, converge.

            Furthermore, for Wiredu, the resort to language in the program of conceptual decolonization in African philosophy, is not a resort to an eternal source of difference, rather, a remedy for colonialism. Despite all odds, the decolonizing program has some Afri-permanent and trans-african significance. One of such is that, conceptual decolonization becomes an aid to the probing of perennial issues that must continue after the eventual obsolescence of the anti-colonial motivation. The institutional soaking of the minds of many African philosophers in western modes of philosophical thinking is a defect that the conceptual decolonization therapy aims at rectifying. We must, says Wiredu, become sensitive to our own indigenous conceptual frameworks, and this may come only after protracted linguistic introspection, hence, conceptual decolonization.

            On the whole, Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization proposal is a kind of intellectual liberation bearing the potential of enlightenment far beyond the confines of one’s own culture. Conceptual decolonization is contemporarily beneficial as it excises colonial encrustation and brings one (the African philosopher and African) to a vantage point for viewing the African thought materials in their true light. It further brings out the true character of African traditional philosophy by means of conceptual clarification and reconstruction and tries to find out what is living or fit to be resurrected in the tradition

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