Paulin Hountondji, Progressive African Thinker, Dies at 81

Paulin Hountondji, a thinker from Benin whose critique of colonial-era anthropology assisted renovate African mental way of life, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Cotonou, Benin’s best metropolis. He was 81.

His demise was verified by his son, Hervé, who didn’t cite a induce.

As a youthful philosophy professor on a continent that was throwing off the colonial grip within the Nineteen Sixties, Mr. Hountondji (pronounced HUN-ton-djee) rebelled versus makes an attempt to drive African methods of contemplating into the European worldview. Himself steeped in European believed — he was the preliminary African admitted as a philosophy college pupil on the most prestigious school in France, the École Normale Superieure — he made a critique of what he referred to as “ethnophilosophy,” a concoction of Europeans.

His operate has formed the evaluate of philosophy in Africa ever contemplating the truth that. It turned a type of 2nd declaration of independence for Africa — an psychological a single this time — within the see of the African philosophers who’ve adopted Mr. Hountondji. It was “very important and actually liberating,” the Columbia School thinker Souleymane Bachir Diagne talked about in an interview.

In his introduction to the information “Paulin Hountondji: Leçons de Philosophie Africaine,” by Bado Ndoye (printed in 2022 however not nonetheless translated into English), Mr. Diagne named him “probably the most influential determine in philosophy in Africa.”

A modest one who spent his profession educating in African universities, principally at Benin’s nationwide faculty, with fast forays into the turbulent politics of his smaller West African coastal homeland, Mr. Hountondji realized that there was a factor amiss in initiatives by Europeans to inform Africans how they need to actually really feel about their space within the universe.

He additionally realized that the rising strongman rule of the Nineteen Sixties, with its enforced groupthink, spelled points for the continent. He positioned the roots of that concept of collective believed — wrongly deemed a all-natural attribute of Africans — within the “ethnophilosophy” that he so strongly criticized.

Armed together with his carry out on the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, in his late 20s and early 30s Mr. Hountondji undertook to confront head-on “Bantu Philosophy,” a e e-book by a Belgian missionary priest, Placide Tempels, that for nearly 30 a long time skilled established the tone for African philosophy.

When Father Tempels, an ecclesiastical insurgent who lived for a very long time in what’s now the Democratic Republic of Congo, revealed “Bantu Philosophy” in 1945, it was noticed by a primary period of pre-independence African intellectuals as groundbreaking. It purported to revive mental dignity to a continent thought of as “primitive” within the colonialist worldview.

Opposite to European perception that Africans have been incapable of summary believed, Father Tempels suggested that they mainly did have a philosophy, a method of observing on their very own within the universe.

However in a collection of essays beginning in 1969 and gathered within the e-book “African Philosophy: Delusion and Actuality” (printed in 1976 in French and in 1983 in English), Mr. Hountondji got down to demolish the Belgian priest’s operate as no further than ethnographic musings that in the long run bolstered colonialism.

No matter whether or not or not 1 agreed with Father Tempels’s central thesis — that for the “Bantu,” or African, “being” implies “energy” — his full strategy was flawed, Mr. Hountondji argued. Philosophy can not emanate from a workforce, he wrote, however must be the obligation of distinctive philosophers, an idea influenced by Mr. Hountondji’s experience of Husserl.

However that accountability was absent in Father Tempels’s principally anonymous band of “Bantus,” he talked about.

In a memoir, “Combats Pour le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain” (1997), launched in English in 2002 as “The Wrestle for This implies: Reflections on Philosophy, Custom and Democracy in Africa,” Mr. Hountondji turned down “the constructing, as a norm for all Africans, earlier, current and upcoming, of a type of contemplating, a program of beliefs, which might at finest solely correspond to an presently established stage of the mental journey of Black peoples.”

So, Mr. Hountondji wrote, “what was so offered as ‘Bantu philosophy’ was not truly the philosophy of the Bantu, however of Tempels, and engaged solely the accountability of the Belgian missionary, proudly owning turn out to be, for the scenario, the analyst of the approaches and customs of the Bantu.”

These views skilled the impact of a bomb in African psychological way of life. Mr. Hountondji was criticized for elitism, for “Eurocentrism” and for rejecting Africa’s oral traditions. However these criticisms shortly fell by the wayside, and now his “critique of ethnophilosophy enjoys canonical standing in modern African philosophy,” Pascah Mungwini wrote in his 2022 research, “African Philosophy.” He known as it a “philosophical masterpiece.”

African thinkers had been free of an immemorial established of beliefs to which European thinkers like Father Tempels, and the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule, had chained them.

“What the Belgian Franciscan was that includes was significantly a process of collective assumed, which was supposedly a helpful African attribute,” Mr. Hountondji defined to Radio France Internationale in a 2022 interview. “This isn’t the sensation of the time period ‘philosophy.’”

Mr. Hountondji “wished the purity of the thought,” Mr. Diagne said. “What skilled to be cleared absent was all of the picturesque of ‘anthropology.’’’

Within the early Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy at universities in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area was then “residing lower than the boot of a traditional,” Mobutu Sese Seko, who employed “conventional ‘philosophy’ to justify or cowl the worst excesses, probably the most atrocious human authorized rights violations,” Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoir.

Mr. Hountondji’s “refusal of the unanimist message” within the Zaire of Fundamental Mobutu, as Mr. Diagne put it, echoed his rejection of the missionary Father Tempels, who, like the fundamental, proposed that Africans all spoke with 1 voice.

These reflections on autocracy and the enforced political support it entails influenced Mr. Hountondji’s reluctant entrance into group lifetime in Benin, wherein, as a professor on the Nationwide School, he had chafed beneath the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of Gen. Mathieu Kérékou. What Mr. Hountondji known as Widespread Kérékou’s “regime of terror” ended simply after a 1990 nationwide assembly of Benin residents summoned by the everyday unexpectedly turned versus him.

Mr. Hountondji was invited to the assembly and immediately zeroed in on the central problem, to the displeasure of the overall’s subordinates: whether or not or not the accumulating might select the nation’s future. Mr. Hountondji’s was the “solely professional and potential decision,” the historian Richard Banegas wrote in “La Démocratie au Pas de Caméléon” (2003), his political heritage of Benin.

Mr. Hountondji’s aspect gained, and Benin turned a democracy — for a time. Mr. Hountondji unexpectedly uncovered himself minister of education within the new federal authorities, from 1990 to 1991, and minister of custom and communication from 1991 to 1993.

He was unsuited to political lifetime, his son, Hervé, talked about in an job interview, as a result of “it was out of the question for him to close himself up in a political event.” Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoir that one specific day he would produce his ideas on “the cynicism, the hypocrisy, the on a regular basis lies, which make up day-to-day political life.” He on no account did.

He went again once more to instructing on the nationwide college, now the Université d’Abomey-Calavi, wherever he was to proceed being for the remainder of his vocation.

Paulin Jidenu Hountondji was born on April 11, 1942, in Treichville, now aspect of Abidjan in Ivory Shoreline, to Paul Hountondji, a pastor within the Methodist Church, and Marguerite (Dovoedo) Hountondji.

He acquired his baccalauréat (the equal of a considerable school diploma) on the Lycée Victor-Poll, a school the place the nation’s elite had been educated, in Porto-Novo, Benin’s funds. He went on to receives a commission a level in philosophy from the École Normale Superieure in Paris in 1967 and his doctorate in philosophy from the College of Paris lower than Paul Ricoeur, with a thesis on Husserl, in 1970.

As a pupil in Paris within the very first days of African independence, Mr. Hountondji wrote, he grew disturbed by the willingness of different African faculty college students to paper above the crimes of one of many continent’s new heroes, the Guinean dictator Sekou Touré, who was to wind up driving considerably of his state into exile.

Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy on the Nationwide School of Zaire in 1971 and 1972 earlier than returning to his indigenous Benin. From 1998 till ultimately his loss of life he was director of the African Coronary heart for State-of-the-art Research in Porto-Novo.

Along with his son, he’s survived by a daughter, Flore, and his spouse, Grâce (Darboux) Hountondji. Two earlier presidents of Benin spoke at his funeral in Cotonou on March 1.

In in a while a number of years, Mr. Diagne reported, Mr. Hountondji “believed he skilled absent far an excessive amount of in his radicality” in his beforehand skepticism of African oral traditions.

Nonetheless he remained firm to the end that Europeans ought to actually not be doing the imagining for Africans. “There’s a colonialist concern of perspective that every one Africans concur with nearly each different, and have the identical mind-set,” Mr. Hountondji instructed French radio in 2022. “The colonialist see is insensitive to the plurality of ideas in an oral civilization.”

Flore Nobime contributed reporting from Cotonou.