Speaker Abstract: The story told about the development of African philosophy since the 1940s has, to those trained in the area, a familiar cast of characters and a well-known set of central concepts and controversies. This story contains “events”, turning points or formative moments in the narrative. The task of the historian of philosophy is to chart those events; the task of the philosopher is to create new ones. African philosophy, I want to claim, has largely been dominated by the first, to the detriment of the second.
I will sketch out a way of focusing on those events in the historical narrative and asking what other opportunities there might be for an opening of thought within African philosophy. I will work through a couple of examples (Mogobe Ramose on ubuntu and Sylvia Wynter on the ceremony, among other possibilities) that illustrate how African philosophy might be not considered to be a tradition of thought, or a body of thought, or a style of thought, but rather a space of thought, one animated by its own unique questions rooted in place.
