Paulin Hountondji, revolutionary African philosopher, dies at the age of 81

Paulin Hountondji, a Benin philosopher whose critique of colonial-era anthropology helped transform African intellectual life, died on February 2 at his home in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by his son Hervé, who did not mention a cause.

As a young professor of philosophy on a continent that was shedding its colonial grip in the 1960s, Mr. Hountondji (pronounced HUN-ton-djee) rebelled against attempts to force African thinking into the European worldview. Himself steeped in European thought – he was the first African to be admitted as a student of philosophy at France’s most prestigious school, the École Normale Supérieure – he developed a critique of what he called ‘ethnophilosophy’, a mixture of Europeans.

His work has since shaped the study of philosophy in Africa. It became a kind of second declaration of independence for Africa – this time an intellectual one – in the eyes of the African philosophers who have followed Mr Hountondji. It was “very important and very liberating,” Columbia University philosopher Souleyman Bachir Diagne said in an interview.

In his introduction to Bado Ndoye’s book ‘Paulin Hountondji: Leçons de Philosophie Africaine’ (published in 2022 but not yet translated into English), Mr Diagne called him ‘the most influential figure in philosophy in Africa’.

A modest man who spent his career teaching at African universities, mainly at the National University of Benin, with brief forays into the turbulent politics of his small homeland on the West African coast, Mr. Hountondji knew something was wrong in the attempts by Europeans to tell Africans how to think about their place in the universe.

He also knew that the emerging strongman rule of the 1960s, with its enforced groupthink, would spell trouble for the continent. He found the roots of that idea of ​​collective thinking – wrongly regarded as a natural characteristic of Africans – in the ‘ethnophilosophy’ that he so vigorously criticized.

Armed with his work on the German phenomenologist Edmund HusserlIn his late twenties and early thirties, Mr Hountondji decided to confront ‘Bantu Philosophy’, a book by a Belgian missionary priest, Placide Templesthat had set the tone for African philosophy for almost thirty years.

When Father Tempels, an ecclesiastical rebel who spent decades in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, published “Bantu Philosophy” in 1945, it was seen as groundbreaking by a first generation of pre-independence African intellectuals. It aimed to restore the intellectual dignity of a continent that was considered “primitive” in the colonialist worldview.

Contrary to the European belief that Africans were incapable of abstract thinking, Father Tempels suggested that they did have a philosophy, a way of seeing themselves in the universe.

But in a series of essays that began in 1969 and was collected in the book “African Philosophy: Myth and Reality” (published in 1976 in French and in 1983 in English), Mr. Hountondji attempted to demolish the work of the Belgian priest as nothing more than ethnographic musings that ultimately reinforced colonialism.

Whether or not one agreed with Father Tempels’ central thesis – that for the “Bantu” or African “his” means “power” – his entire approach was flawed, Mr Hountondji argued. Philosophy cannot emerge from a group, he wrote, but must be the responsibility of individual philosophers, an idea influenced by Mr. Hountondji’s knowledge of Husserl.

But that responsibility was missing from Father Tempels’ largely anonymous band of “Bantus,” he said.

In a memoir, ‘Combats Pour le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain’ (1997), published in English in 2002 as ‘The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa’, Mr Hountondji rejected ‘the construction, because a standard for all Africans, past, present and future, of a form of thought, a system of beliefs, that at best could only correspond to an already determined stage of the intellectual journey of black peoples.

Thus, Mr. Hountondji wrote, “what was thus presented as ‘Bantu philosophy’ was not really the philosophy of the Bantus, but of Temples, and was solely the responsibility of the Belgian missionary, who was the analyst for the occasion of the customs and customs of the Bantu.”

These thoughts had the effect of a bomb in African intellectual life. Mr Hountondji was criticized for his elitism, his “Eurocentrism” and his rejection of the oral traditions of Africa. But this criticism soon fell aside, and today his “critique of ethnophilosophy enjoys canonical status in contemporary African philosophy,” Pascah Mungwini wrote in his 2022 study, “African Philosophy.” He called it a ‘philosophical masterpiece’.

African thinkers were freed from an age-old set of beliefs to which European thinkers such as Father Tempels and the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule had chained them.

“What the Belgian Franciscan offered was in reality a system of collective thinking, which was supposedly a positive African attribute,” Mr Hountondji said. told Radio France Internationale in a 2022 interview. “This is not the meaning of the word ‘philosophy.’”

Mr Hountondji “wanted the purity of the idea”, Mr Diagne said. ‘What had to be cleared away was all the picturesqueness of ‘anthropology’.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy at universities in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country then lived ‘under the boot of a general’ Mobutu Sese Sekowho used “traditional ‘philosophy’ to justify or conceal the worst excesses and the most heinous violations of human rights,” Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoirs.

Mr. Hountondji’s “refusal of the unanimist message” in General Mobutu’s Zaire, as Mr. Diagne put it, reflected his rejection of the missionary Father Tempels, who, like the general, suggested that Africans all spoke with one voice.

These reflections on autocracy and the coerced political support it entails influenced Mr Hountondji’s reluctant entry into public life in Benin, where as a professor at the National University he chafed at the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of General Mathieu Kérékou. What Mr. Hountondji called General Kerekou‘s “reign of terror” ended after a national conference of Benin citizens, convened by the general, unexpectedly turned against him in 1990.

Mr. Hountondji was invited to the conference and, to the dismay of the general’s subordinates, immediately addressed the central issue: whether the meeting could decide the country’s future. Mr. Hountondji’s was the “only legitimate and possible solution,” wrote the historian Richard Banegas in “La Démocratie au Pas de Caméléon” (2003), his political history of Benin.

Mr Hountondji’s side won and Benin became a democracy – for a while. Mr Hountondji unexpectedly became Minister of Education in the new government, from 1990 to 1991, and Minister of Culture and Communications from 1991 to 1993.

He was unfit for political life, his son Hervé said in an interview, because “it was out of the question for him to join a political party.” Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoirs that he would one day develop his thoughts on “the cynicism, the hypocrisy, the daily lies that make up everyday political life.” He never did that.

He returned to teaching at the national university, now the Université d’Abomey-Calavi, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

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

He received his baccalauréat (the equivalent of a high school diploma) from the Lycée Victor-Ballot, a school that educated the country’s elite, in Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin. He subsequently obtained a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1967 and his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris under Paul Ricoeurwith a dissertation on Husserl, in 1970.

As a student in Paris during the early days of African independence, Mr. Hountondji wrote, he became disturbed by the willingness of other African students to cover up the crimes of one of the continent’s new heroes, the Guinean dictator. Sekou Tourewho would eventually drive much of his country into exile.

Mr Hountondji taught philosophy at the National University of Zaire in 1971 and 1972 before returning to his native Benin. From 1998 until his death, he was director of the African Center for Advanced Studies in Porto-Novo.

In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Flore, and his wife, Grâce (Darboux) Hountondji. Two former presidents of Benin spoke at his funeral in Cotonou on March 1.

In later years, Mr. Diagne said, Mr. Hountondji believed “he had gone too far in his radicalism” in his earlier skepticism about African oral traditions.

Yet he remained determined to the end that Europeans should not do the thinking for Africans. “There is a colonialist position that all Africans agree with each other and have the same way of thinking,” Mr Hountondji told French radio in 2022. “The colonialist position is insensitive to the plurality of opinions in an oral civilization.”

Flore Nobime contributed to the reporting from Cotonou.