Was Marcien Towa Right to Claim That African Ethnophilosophy Drinks from the Dregs of History?
Abstract
Towa’s rejection of myth and defeated culture sharpened African philosophical critique, but may have left the categories of Western domination insufficiently examined.
African philosophy, culture and critique · Full reading edition
Towa’s indictment of ethnophilosophy
Marcien Towa’s Essay on the Philosophical Problematic in Contemporary Africa became a classic through its severe criticism of ethnophilosophy, a contradictory mixture of ethnology and philosophy. Towa rejects the use of African cultures and myths as causal foundations for philosophical speculation.
For him, myth belongs to impersonal hearsay rather than to a conscious subject directing thought beyond opinion. Philosophy must be a deliberate act capable of refusing what a community merely repeats.
A culture disqualified by defeat
Towa considers African myth especially unusable because it belongs to a culture defeated by colonial conquest. A tradition that did not resist domination cannot, in his view, provide the intellectual, political and technical instruments required to recover freedom.
Africa must master the weapons of the victor—science, technology and philosophy—rather than rehabilitate a past whose weakness might confirm the West’s image of Africans as its opposite.
Césaire, Fanon and the impossible return
Towa prefers Césaire’s revolutionary rupture and Fanon’s use of psychoanalysis to Senghor’s reconciliation with inherited culture. Yet Césaire and Fanon were Caribbean thinkers deprived by slavery of an intact cultural reserve to which they could simply return.
Césaire’s departure towards the native land discovers plantations, racism and an abyss produced by uprooting. His return is not restoration but mourning for a world that can no longer be recovered unchanged.
Senghor and the search for continuity
Senghor’s poetry seeks enduring elements of the African past within a compromise between cultures he presents as spiritual and material, joining past and present through rhythm and the French language.
Towa rejects this compromise in favour of rupture. But his opposition risks repeating the binary division that places Africa under myth and the West under history, progress and technical effectiveness.
The need for a metacritique
Is progress necessarily the outcome of history when it is expected to emerge from the white school? Can Western philosophy alone strengthen the resistance of Africans educated in the categories of the dominant subject?
Before using the master’s intellectual instruments, African thought needs a metacritique of their assumptions and their relation to domination. Thought is impossible without inherited language and community; overcoming opinion cannot mean pretending to begin outside every inheritance.
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