Africana Philosophy is a gathering notion used to cover collectively particular articulations, and traditions of particular articulations, of persons African and African-descended that are to be regarded as instances of philosophizing. (The notion is meant to cover, as well, the philosophizing efforts of persons not African or African-descended, efforts that are, nonetheless, contributions to the philosophizing endeavors that constitute Africana philosophy.) A central concern of the essay is the question whether there are characteristics of the philosophizing (...) practices of persons identified as members of social groups thought to comprise a geographically and historically dispersed and ethnically diverse race that do, or should, distinguish the practices by virtue of being those of persons African and/or African-descended. Is there, can there be, should there be a properly determined field of philosophy that is constituted, first and foremost, by the efforts of persons of a particular race and its ethnic groups? (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Giving Primacy to Sociocultural Settings Giving Primacy to the Historical and Cultural Conclusion.

This article is a critical philosophical discussion of Lewis Gordon's An Introduction to Africana Philosophy. Gordon in his text does not portray Africana philosophy as an abstract universalism, philosophy as the “view from nowhere” or philosophy as the “god's eye view” on reality. He also refrains from depicting Africana philosophy as a documentary description of Africana identity, thereby indicating a refusal on his part to reduce Africana philosophy to identity (...) politics, to mere psycho-existential babble. Gordon critically engages with race in his text, but his involvement with this concept does not excessively dominate the text. This article critically explores Africana philosophy's involvement with postmodernism, as well as work through Gordon's notions of disciplinary decadence and the teleological suspension of philosophy. The basic analytical thrust endorses Gordon's efforts to represent Africana philosophy as, among other things, an existential phenomenological account of the being-in-the-world of Africana people. This approach represents Africana philosophy as an anti-Cartesian philosophy, precisely because it does not emanate from a theoretically disembodied consciousness nor from an epistemic knowing subject in search of the transcendental foundations of knowledge. (shrink)

In this undergraduate textbook Lewis R. Gordon offers the first comprehensive treatment of Africana philosophy, beginning with the emergence of an Africana consciousness in the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages. He argues that much of modern thought emerged out of early conflicts between Islam and Christianity that culminated in the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula, and from the subsequent expansion of racism, enslavement, and colonialism which in their turn stimulated reflections on reason, liberation, (...) and the meaning of being human. His book takes the student reader on a journey from Africa through Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean, and back to Africa, as he explores the challenges posed to our understanding of knowledge and freedom today, and the response to them which can be found within Africana philosophy. (shrink)

The whiteness of American philosophy must be appreciated as an epistemological and ontological achievement. Thus, I contend that the only way forward for American philosophy entails an Africana philosophical critique, which consists of two methodological ventures—one deconstructive and the other radical. I will briefly present six voices that exemplify this Africana philosophical critique. The deconstructive voices include (1) Sylvia Wynter's genealogy of “MAN,” (2) Leonard Harris's insurrectionist challenge to Pragmatism, and (3) Charles Mills's and Chandra Mohanty's (...) rejection of Ideal Theory. The radical voices include (1) Lewis Gordon's Africana-existential-phenomenology as a decolonial “antidote” to Eurocentrism, (2) Tommy Curry's culturalogical solution to the “derelictical” and “methodological” crises of African American philosophy, and (3) Africana literature as “new” philosophy. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s dialectic plays a crucial role in some of the thought of the most prominent Black thinkers. The role it plays has received little attention. In this dissertation, I begin to fill this lacuna in Africana Philosophy by examining the arguments of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in “The Conservation of Races,” Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, and Cyril Lionel Robert James in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and (...) the San Domingo Revolution and Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. I argue that forms of praxis are the result of their engagement with Hegel’s dialectic: reflexive practice, absolute praxis, and organic praxis respectively. I show that in each of these cases Hegel’s dialectical approach to history (dialectical thinking) was essential to their own attempts to understand the possibility of a positive transformation of the pervasively racist world they inhabited. (shrink)

Critical engagement involving philosophers trained in continental and analytic traditions often takes its purpose to be a reconciliation of tensions arising from differences in style, or method. Critical engagement in Africana philosophy, however, is rarely focused on method, style, or orientation because philosophic research in this field, regardless of orientation, has had to accommodate its empirical grounding in disciplines outside of philosophy. I focus primarily on the comparative dimensions of three important strands of this research: (1) a (...) history of ideas, (2) a problem-orientation, and (3) a sub-area specialization, to indicate why a need to reconcile tensions between continental and analytic orientations has very little currency in Africana philosophy. Socio-economic problems faced by African-descended people require multiple perspectives to accommodate the wide variety of diasporic social contexts for a given proposal. I employ a selection of cases to illustrate how Africana philosophy benefits from an interplay of many intersecting factors and that, as an interdisciplinary area of research with a commitment to the incorporation of multiple perspectives, it fosters cross-pollination and hybridization of continental and analytic traditions. (shrink)

This book is a timely intervention in the areas of philosophy, history, and literature. As an exploration of the modern political order and its racial genealogy, it emerges at a moment when scholars and activists alike are wrestling with how to understand subject formation from the perspective of the subordinated rather than from dominant social and philosophical modes of thought. For Sawyer, studying the formation of racialized subjects requires a new imagining of marginalized subjects. Black subjectivity is not viewed (...) from the static imaginings of social death, alienation, ongoing abjection, or as a confrontation with the treat of oblivion. Sawyer innovates the term "fractured temporality," conceptualizing Black subjects as moving within and across temporalities in transition, incorporated, yet excluded, marked with the social death of Atlantic slavery and the emergent political orders it etched, and still capable of exerting revolutionary force that acts upon, against, and through racial oppression. (shrink)

The following essay is a review of three recent texts in Africana philosophy. These three texts are united by the overarching theme of the teleological suspension of mainstream philosophy. Lewis Gordon takes a global approach to Africana philosophy and his text engages the issue of the historiography of Africana philosophy; George Yancy’s approach is situated within the subtradition of African American philosophy and his text pursues a critical Africana study of the (...) existential reality of whiteness; and Neil Roberts situates his work within the subtradition of Afro-Caribbean philosophy, with the declared goal of tackling the concept of freedom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Guest Editor's Introduction:The Time of Africana PhilosophyOmedi OchiengAfricana philosophy is in the main a philosophy of the present. Many will demur and with good reason. In the first place, in worrying about the definition and animating energies of Africana philosophers, Africana philosophers have looked to the past to furnish answers to the former, and to the future to motivate its orientation to the latter. (...) For Lucius Outlaw, for example, writing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Africana philosophy is a third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bring organizing oversight to various efforts of philosophizing—that is, activities of reflective, critical thinking and articulation and aesthetic expression—engaged in by persons and peoples African and of African descent who were and are indigenous residents of continental Africa and residents of the many African Diasporas worldwide" (2017, first paragraph).If, then, on the one hand, Outlaw's definition points to the past to make intelligible the contours of Africana philosophy—"persons and peoples... of African descent"—it is to the end of mobilizing toward the future. "In all cases," he argues, "the point of much of [Africana] philosophizings has been to confer meaningful orderings on individual and shared living and on natural and social worlds while resolving recurrent, emergent, and radically disruptive challenges to existence so as to survive, endure, and flourish across successive generations." It is striking, for all that, though, that he makes sure to insist on Africana philosophizing, the verb, rather than philosophy, the noun. For Outlaw, "the name [Africana philosophy] does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system, method, or tradition" (2017). Rather, it is primarily a philosophizing, a doing. Where, then, the past and the future are invoked to give Africana philosophy its shape and contours, the doing of Africana philosophy—practices of the moment, of the present—are revealed to be its constitutive marrow.In the history of Africana philosophy few encounters clarify its present stakes as much as the bitter debate that erupted in post-independence African philosophy over whether there could be said to be an African philosophy. For the protagonists and other commentators, those debates seemed overwhelmingly to be fights about the past—specifically, over the [End Page 1] existence of African philosophy in the precolonial past. Those who came to be identified as ethnophilosophers held that worldviews of precolonial African societies constituted coherent systems of thought worthy of the name "philosophy." They were vehemently opposed by those who insisted on a universalist standpoint, led by the redoubtable Beninois Paulin Hountondji. These philosophers argued that those bent on the task of recuperating traditional worldviews were doing anthropology, not philosophy.At first glance, then, it would seem that these debates have little to tell us about the present of African philosophy. Indeed, there is overwhelming weariness among African philosophers regarding the pitched and factionalized disputations that tore through the discipline in the immediate post-independence era. And yet the view that these debates are now passé, relics and distractions from an immature era of a fledgling discipline, cannot account for their stakes; why precisely they were so rancorous, and why, even today, they occasion simmering tensions and embittered eruptions among African philosophers. Ethnophilosophers, after all, were not intent on recuperating the epistemes of traditional African societies out of sheer curiosity. Rather, they were intervening in deeply contested sociopolitical cleavages of their time.Alexis Kagame, for example, is renowned within the field of African philosophy as one of the most prominent ethnophilosophers to have emerged in the mid-twentieth century. His explication of the ontology of the Bantu, as revealed in Bantu languages, ought to be seen as all of a piece with his position as the central court historian and political theorist of the Kingdom of Rwanda. As historian Claudine Vidal (1991) established, Kagame's influential scholarship had as one of its primary goals the justification of a constitutional monarchy. Indeed, half a century after his writings, Rwandese leaders who came to power in the wake of the 1990s genocide would seize on his portrayal of precolonial Rwanda as a pastoral social formation and his testimony to the existence of a Greater Rwanda in justifying their political and... (shrink)

This article seeks to comment insightfully on the way things hang together as we try to chart the history of Africana philosophy. It does so through reflections on the History of Africana Philosophy podcast, part of Peter Adamson's larger series, the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The article is divided into three sections, corresponding to the three parts of the podcast. Important to the first section is a reply to recent criticism by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (...) of use of the term “precolonial” in discussions of Africa's history. The second section includes extended reflection on the special roles of Ethiopia, Haiti, and Liberia in the history of Africana philosophy. The final section explores the significance of writing, in an attempt to explain why the third part of the podcast, which covers the twentieth century, was lengthier than the other two parts of the series combined. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on two main points: early Africana public philosophy critiques of anti‐Black propaganda and how contemporary anti‐Black propaganda has legitimized violence against Africana public thinkers. Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, the propaganda that informed Western perceptions and expeditions to Africa was that Africa was a land full of cannibals and lawless kingdoms. Beginning with slavery, Africana public thinkers were the first to formulate slavery and its associated violence as crimes against humanity and construct (...) more egalitarian notions of human rights, citizenship, economic restitution, and respect for Black people to have self‐governance. The propaganda about the inability of Africans to self‐rule, be ethical, and be law‐abiding influenced the moral sentiments and policies that justified the enslavement of Africans. Lessons from Africana public philosophy warrant serious consideration of how anti‐Black propaganda impacts the future of Black people. (shrink)

A mistaken view of Africana philosophy is that it is parasitic on Western philosophy, and that it is so in a way that limits its legitimacy as an area of thought. This misconception is often alluded to, although not intended, in the phrase “philosophy and the black experience” or “philosophy and the Africana experience”.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Filosofias africanas é uma viagem ao pensamento africano pelos ganhadores do Prêmio Jabuti – Livro do ano. Num sentido amplo, o termo “filosofia” designa a busca do conhecimento iniciado quando os seres humanos começaram a tentar compreender o mundo por meio da razão. O termo pode também definir o conjunto de concepções, práticas ou teóricas, acerca da existência, dos seres, do ser humano e do papel de cada um no Universo. Na prática acadêmica, é usado para designar o “conjunto de (...) concepções metafísicas (gerais e abstratas) sobre o mundo”. A grande crítica que se faz às tentativas de caracterizar o pensamento tradicional africano como filosofia é a de que, na África, os nativos, defrontados com a grande incógnita que é o Universo, seriam incapazes de ir além do temor e da reverência, próprios das mentes ditas “primitivas”. A partir daí, o chamado “racismo científico”, um dos pilares do colonialismo no século XIX – desqualificando as fontes do saber africano conhecidas desde a Antiguidade –, negou a possibilidade de os africanos produzirem filosofia. Então, o reconhecimento como filósofos, no sentido estrito do termo, de pensadores nascidos na África e de uma linha filosófica deles originada só ocorreu a partir do século XX. Filosofias africanas trata tanto dos saberes ancestrais africanos, sua essência preservada nos provérbios, na diversidade multicultural e nos ensinamentos passados durante gerações por meio da oralidade, quanto da contribuição de filósofos africanos e afrodescendentes contemporâneos na atualização desses saberes, muitos dos quais pautados no decolonialismo. Nei Lopes e Luiz Antonio Simas, de maneira didática, mais uma vez escreveram uma obra que evidencia a complexidade, sofisticação e profundidade do pensamento africano e das perspectivas de mundo que sua filosofia provoca. (shrink)

Este livro poderia de facto definir-se também "Razão e Lógicas da Totalidade do Real na filosofia africana contemporânea". Quatro objectivos, por assim dizer, se vislumbram logo duma leitura atenta deste texto: antes de mais a preocupação dos autores de propor nos nossos dias, uma leitura transversal da filosofia africana moderna e contemporânea a partir, diríamos, do conceito da "razão". Trata-se, neste caso, de introduzir os leitores não na história da filosofia africana como tal, mas somente, como especifica (...) Ezio Bono, de delinear "algumas questões principais que consideram ser mais significativas e recorrentes no actual debate" da filosofia africana moderna e contemporânea e a sua "traversée" (Bidima), por assim dizer, no âmbito moçambicano (José Castiano). Este texto, cuja vocação principal é transformar-se, "grosso modo", numa espécie de "Humanidades Clássicas Africanas" (Cheikh Anta Diop), se quer sintético e ao mesmo tempo panorâmico. Ele é sintético, pois os autores partem duma leitura temática (a razão). Ele é também panorâmico, já que partindo deste focus temático, eles oferecem uma visão global desta matéria, do ponto de vista histórico, teorético, epistemológico, cultural, panafricano (Procesi) e particular moçambicano (Bono e Castiano). (shrink)

This paper outlines a code-theoretic approach to the substantive and pedagogical challenges created by the distinct interdisciplinary nature of the field of Africana Studies. It identifies some of the key discourse-constitutive codes and some strategies for suspending disciplinary boundaries created by these necessary codes, which should help us to navigate better the spaces between the disciplines engaged by Africana Studies. After examining these codes and methods for transcending them, the paper concludes with some pedagogical strategies for teaching these (...) interdisciplinary aspects of the field. (shrink)

Sculpted Ambiances in Africana Landscape centers on ambiance as it affects the expanded sculptural field, particularly filling a gap in aesthetics left by a lack of focus on sculptures and installations in the Africana world and elsewhere. This book differentiates ambiance from other affective states and emotions and explores its production. It provides an introduction to the history of ambiance and vividly demonstrates, through immersive and experiential writing, how ambiance manifests in different artistic situations and social settings. The (...) book considers the neglected and unique importance of sculptural ambiance to the history of Africana visual culture, and what these works mean in terms of their social, historical, cultural, political, and ecological imagination of space. The book is written in an episodic style and begins with a description of an image before present an analysis of the artist's style and staging for ambient experience. This book will benefit college and university students; scholars of art, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and sociology; and curators and galleries. (shrink)

This paper examines the long dialogue between Africana phenomenology and Africana feminism. In particular, it examines the exchanges between WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon and Sylvia Wynter on the one hand, and a number of black feminists on the other, including bell hooks, Natasha Barnes, Farrah Griffin, and Joy James. The primary outcome of the survey of these exchanges is that the pro-feminist spaces created by black male phenomenologists have all been insufficient for the full representation (...) of the black female voice. In the words of Sylvia Wynter, such a full representation can only come through "a feminism in its own name". (shrink)

In its efforts toward improving diversity, the discipline of philosophy has tended to focus on increasing the number of black philosophers. One crucial issue that has received less attention is the extent to which black philosophers are delegitimized in the discipline because their philosophical contributions challenge the status quo. A systematic problem that bars black philosophers from equal and full participation, this delegitimization precludes the emergence of genuine diversity and reveals the importance of interrogating broader attitudes toward black philosophical (...) contributions. In this essay, I argue for radical systematic changes to disciplinary hallmarks of professionalization such as pedagogy, mentoring, publishing, and hiring practices with the aim of legitimizing black philosophers and their contributions. (shrink)

In African countries there has been a surge of intellectual interest in foregrounding ideas and thinkers of African origin--in philosophy as in other disciplines--that have been unjustly ignored or marginalized. African scholars have demonstrated that precolonial African cultures generated ideas and arguments which were at once truly philosophical and distinctively African, and several contemporary African thinkers are now established figures in the philosophical mainstream. Yet, despite the universality of its themes, relevant contributions from African philosophy have rarely permeated (...) global philosophical debates. Critical intellectual excavation has also tended to prioritize precolonial thought, overlooking more recent sources of home-grown philosophical thinking such as Africa's intellectually rich liberation movements. This book demonstrates the potential for constructive interchange between currents of thought from African philosophy and other intellectual currents within philosophy. Chapters authored by leading and emerging scholars: recover philosophical thinkers and currents of ideas within Africa and about Africa, bringing them into dialogue with contemporary mainstream philosophy; foreground the relevance of African theorizing to contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of language, moral/political philosophy, philosophy of race, environmental ethics and the metaphysics of disability; make new interventions within on-going debates in African philosophy; consider ways in which philosophy can become epistemically inclusive, interrogating the contemporary call for 'decolonization' of philosophy. Showing how foregrounding Africa--its ideas, thinkers and problems--can help with the project of renewing and improving the discipline of philosophy worldwide, this book will stimulate and challenge everyone with an interest in philosophy, and is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, postgraduate students and scholars of African and Africana philosophy. (shrink)

La síntesis de la filosofía africana aporta datos sorprendentes sobre el origen de la cultura occidental. Ni los filósofos y literatos griegos surgieron de la nada, ni la civilización egipcia nació en sí misma, como un milagro. El hilo conductor, la fuente nutricia de ambos “milagros” culturales “egipcio y griego” está en la cultura africana. Y no podía ser de otra manera ya que nuestra especie, el homo sapiens, surgió en África hace tan sólo 200 milenios. Allí se (...) dieron los primeros logros esenciales de la condición humana: el lenguaje oral y escrito y la emergencia del pensamiento sistematizado, de la dimensión ética y artística del género humano. Con gran profundidad Eugenio Nkogo demuestra que la civilización humanista vino desde África a Occidente a través de Egipto y Roma. Después de sufrir el esclavismo y el colonialismo, el pensamiento africano se está convirtiendo en la vanguardia de un nuevo movimiento que sigue ayudando al género humano en su ruta hacia un mundo más civilizado y libre. (shrink)

Although intersectionality has been widely disseminated across the disciplines as a tool to center women of color's developed perspectives on social reality, it has been notably absent in the scholarship of feminist philosophy and philosophy of race. I first examine the causes and processes of the exclusions of women of color feminist thought more generally, and of intersectionality in particular. Then, focusing attention on Black feminisms, I read Sandra Jackson-Opoku's 1997 novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, with (...) and against Paget Henry's Africana ethnophilosophy. I model an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach to Henry's ethnophilosophy, broadening its philosophical scope by historicizing the liminality that characterizes the realities of many diasporic Black women. I also develop an interpretation of the female protagonists to suggest how many Black women within different historical contexts develop practices to recover African symbolic and discursive registers as a means to claim their subjectivities. Additionally, I challenge Henry's teleological explanation for an increasingly secular Africana philosophical identity. (shrink)

Much of Africana philosophy concerns itself with the social and political; that is, those issues that relate to “racism” or “racialization” as suffered by Africana persons. Within this understanding, Africana persons become defined by and studied through theories which presume a shared anthropology with their white counterparts. This essay argues that Africana philosophy would benefit in thinking beyond “race” and “racialization” towards a theorization of the cultural aspects of Africana persons as the basis (...) of our study and understanding of Africana persons. Specifically, this essay theorizes the relationship between mytho-logos and the culturalogic as offering a new lens through which to analyze the range problems confronting Africana philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract:AbstractDrawing from qualitative data in a Southern African context, this article explores meanings assigned to names for female genitalia to establish whether males and females assign the same meanings to the same vocabulary used in naming or whether they associate the same vocabulary with different meanings. The study illustrates that while males associate the meanings of terms for female genitalia with well-established, stigmatized views of women, female informants associate the same terms with different meanings that provide alternative views about women (...) and, at the same time, appear to be a form of reclamation of Southern African women’s personhood, identity, and agency. Although males, through these vocabulary items, metaphorically associate female genitalia with possession, which discursively constructs women as powerless objects that can be owned and commoditized, females draw from the philosophy of Africana womanism, indicating that even in asymmetrically structured societies, some women subjectively and purposefully construct their own identities as strong, smart, socially conscious, and independent. (shrink)

RESUMO: No centro da filosofia de Kwame A. Appiah encontra-se a questão da identidade. Partindo do conceito da liberdade de Mill, ele considera a criação de uma identidade pessoal, no sentido de individualidade particular, uma tarefa permanente - como projeto individual. Nesse contexto, os planos de vida não devem ser concebidos como genericamente rigorosos, mas sim incoerentes e muitas vezes mutantes. Com isso, a identidade não se deve entender como algo fixo e cerrado, porém, como uma espécie de mosaico de (...) vários elementos que se encontram em reprogramação contínua - como formação híbrida. A construção da identidade encerra a narração de histórias de vida, tanto individual como coletiva. Os respectivos elementos podem recorrer a diferentes experiências transculturais, consoante a história coletiva e a história de vida do indivíduo. Assim, a transculturalidade é importante, não só para identidades coletivas, como também sempre em nível de identidade pessoal. O filósofo africano Achille Mbembe alude ao nomadismo do ser humano e à imersão e dispersão culturais associadas que se deixam ler como processos da transculturalidade. Na arte africana contemporânea, esses processos da formação da identidade refletem-se no transcultural. Como exemplos, devem ser apresentados os artistas Edson Chagas, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare e Romuald Hazoumè, com obras selecionadas.ABSTRACT: The issue of identity is at the heart of Kwame Appiah's philosophy. Taking Mill's concept of liberty as his starting point, he views the development of a personal identity in the sense of a particular individuality as an ongoing task - as an individual project. In this context, life plans should not be understood as strictly linear but rather as disparate and continuously changing. Identity is thus not something which is fixed and closed but rather similar to a mosaic, consisting of various elements which are always shifting - a hybrid entity. The construction of identity includes the telling of life stories, both of a collective and of a personal nature. When doing so, each element may refer to diverse, transcultural experiences in keeping with the history of the collective and the life story of the individual. Transculturality is thus of significance not only for collective identities but also always on the level of personal identity. The African philosopher Achille Mbembe speaks of human nomadism and the associated cultural immersion and dispersion, which can be interpreted as transcultural processes. These processes of identity formation are reflected in the transculturality of contemporary African art. Selected works of artists Edson Chargas, Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare and Romuald Hazoumè will be presented as examples of this. (shrink)

RESUMENDesde la teoría postcolonial se han cuestionado los modelos de historia de las ideas impuestos por el africanismo y el orientalismo. Diferentes teóricos africanos –Bachir Diagne, Mundimbe, Wiredu o Kete Asante– han formulado diversas soluciones para superar las dificultades. Este trabajo explora las principales dificultades y las propuestas para elaborar una historia de la filosofía africana.PALABRAS CLAVESFILOSOFÍA AFRICANA, AFROEPISTEMOLOGÍA, HISTORIOGRAFÍA FILOSÓFICA, TEORÍA POSTCOLONIALABSTRACTThe postcolonial theory was questioning the patterns of History of Ideas imposed by Orientalism and Africanism. Different (...) African theorists –Bachir Diagne, Mundimbe, Kete Asante or Wiredu– developed various solutions to overcome the difficulties. This paper explores the principal challenges and proposals so as to build a History of African philosophy.KEYWORDSAFRICAN PHILOSOPHY, AFRO-EPISTEMOLOGY, PHILOSOPHIC HISTORIOGRAPHY, POSTCOLONIAL THEORY. (shrink)