Reject epistemology/decolonize the mind claims- rejection of “colonial” knowledge/language masks via euphemism

(Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. His research interests and writings cover Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Spindel Supplement (2019), 135–159)

There are significant differences between Ngũgĩ’s and Wiredu’s tones and recommendations, respectively. For Wiredu, there are no ideological issues involved. The simple fact is that African philosophers labor under the weight of assumptions traceable to “foreign philosophical traditions.” What is not clear is why this is a significant problem. For it to be so, it must be the case that the operation of these superimposed “foreign categories of thought on African thought systems” blocks us from certain significant insights into the perennial problems of philosophy occurrent in African thought systems or distorts them such that we are hampered in our search for answers to those problems or, at the extreme, led to such outcomes that are detrimental to our lives. Ngũgĩ was more forcible in this respect. I do not see the same vehemence in Wiredu. Wiredu does not claim that these foreign-derived frameworks alienate us from our names, our history, or our language. But both share the belief that those frameworks do terrible things to our language. For Wiredu, in thinking about our problems, we end up deploying solutions that we have not critically examined. Finally, for both, what makes these frameworks problematic is owed, in part, to their colonial provenance. With reference to the linguistic situation, Wiredu asserts that “By definition, the fundamental concepts of philosophy are the most fundamental categories of human thought. But the particular modes of thought that yield these concepts may reflect the specifics of the culture, environment and even the accidental idiosyncrasies of the people concerned.”16 This leaves us vulnerable to carrying other peoples’ baggage insofar as we are enslaved to the concepts their linguistic and other cultural conventions foster. One cannot overemphasize the importance of heeding Wiredu’s wisdom in this respect. For example, many have argued that the reason for the repeated failure of liberal representative democracy to take root in Africa is, in part, the alienness of its package of ideas, institutions, practices, and processes. We shall have more to say about this presently. Wiredu would later canvass what he calls “no-party, consensus democracy” as an option that is more in tune with African temperaments and memory.17 To avoid untoward outcomes, “the simple recipe for decolonization for the African is: Try to think them [concepts like reality, being, meaning, freedom, etc.] through in your own African language and, on the basis of the results, review the intelligibility of the associated problems or the plausibility of the apparent solutions that have tempted you when you have pondered them in some metropolitan language.”18 Wiredu’s simple injunction—think through in your own African language—is teeming with assumptions that are not always, or for the most part, plausible. Let us explore this passage. Wiredu assumes that his audience is bilingual, minimally speaking—possessed of an African language and a colonially-imposed one, say, English. But given how the scenario is designed, the colonial language is the primary language, the one that triggers thought and in which thought is originally formulated. This is where the problem begins. The thinker here is supposed to “think through in her own language” the relevant concepts. Why wait to be prompted in the colonial language? Why not proceed to think through the concepts in your primary African language in exactly the way, I believe, that a Chinese or Portuguese thinker will do in similar situations? The answer, of course, pace Ngũgĩ and Wiredu, is that we have separated ourselves from “belief in our languages” and embraced instead the colonial ones. If this is true, then it is problematic to assume that those who have been thus separated from their languages could summon, without more, the requisite facility and grounding in those languages of the recondite thinking that we associate with philosophy and other advanced modes of intellection. If what I say is plausible, then Wiredu’s facile recommendation is neither easy to indulge nor likely to be productive of exactly the kinds of insights that theoretical explorations are designed to elicit. This is where we must begin to acknowledge the sad fact that where recondite intellectual activity is concerned, many African scholars are not bilingual in the relevant sense. Our languages are already afflicted with a severe case of fossilization that continues to elude our attention. Few of us can think in “our own African languages” deep thought respecting many of those concepts in Wiredu’s list. No whit of this affliction is removed by our repeated declamations to decolonize our intellectual production. Yes, we deploy our languages for colloquial, quotidian purposes. This deceptively makes us think that our facility at this level and versatility in everyday exchanges amount to an easy shifting of gears from here to theoretical or philosophical discourse. It takes only a little bit of attention to realize that this is a mistaken assumption. The upshot is that there is little, if any, autochthonous recondite intellection in many of our original languages, especially where research and knowledge production presented by our tertiary institutions are concerned. What we have mostly is equivalence-ism where many labor to find equivalents in our original languages for the concepts that we encounter in the metalanguages furnished by the colonial languages. To limit myself to the Yorùbá that I know intimately, the original work being done at a higher level takes place in Sociology, Art History, Language and Literature, and Linguistics.19 It may not be what Wiredu intended but it is what dominates much writing in academic and professional African philosophy. Words are routinely yanked out of their semantic and hermeneutic contexts and made to stand as equivalents for concepts derived from elsewhere. There hardly is any effort at sustained analyses wholly or even mostly in our original language. To the extent that this is the case, the promise of decolonization in the sphere of language may have been oversold.