Any attempt at writing the history of African philosophy is doomed to be frustrated by the glaring absence of originality, individuality, and creativity in the body of works that come under the heading of African philosophy. In the first place, most of what is called African philosophy is in fact ethno-philosophy, consistingchiefly of researches into the traditional worldviews of various African tribes in the light of Western philosophy. In this intellectually instigating paper I attempted the question whether African philosophy is progressing by showing that there has been some progress, albeit a slow one. I demonstrated this by tracing thedevelopment of a genuine African rationalism from Senghor’s famous idea of negritude to Asouzu’s recent notion of complementary reflection, which finds culmination in the emergent synthesis of consolationism. In the latter rationalism, veiled in Senghor’s metaphysical vision and liberated in Asouzu’s robustindividualism, aspires to a completion never before seen in African philosophical thought. I concluded by saying that the time has come for African thinkers to make African philosophy a tradition that will command universal respect by the radicalization of individual initiative with ethno-philosophy serving only as thefoundation of our 21st century inspiration.

I want to do a couple of things in this essay. First, I want to articulate the central direction that postmodern thinking or philosophy (or postmodernism or postmodernity) takes. Second, I want to present a brief sketch of African philosophy, focusing mostly on some aspects of African ethics. Third, I want togesture towards the view that while postmodern thinking seems to suggest that African philosophy is a legitimate narrative or “language game” it could beargued that given its central ideas and doctrines African philosophy may be open to some of the worries facing modern thinking (or modernism or modernity).

This paper is of the view that it is not bad for the Africans to defend their philosophy and their origin, as against the claims and positions of the few African thinkers, who do not believe that African philosophy exists, and a great number of the Westerners, who see nothing meaningful in their thoughts and ideas, but in doing so, they became biased and elevated their philosophy and relegated other philosophies to the background. This charge of ethnocentrism against those who deny African philosophy can also be extended to those African philosophers who in a bid to affirm African philosophy commit the discipline to strong ethnic reduction. This paper using Innocent Asouzu’s Ibuanyidanda ontology, observes that most of the African scholars are too biased and self aggrandized in doing African philosophy, and as such have marred the beauty of African philosophy, just in the name of attaching cultural value to it. Innocent Asouzu’s Ibuanyidanda ontology is used in this paper to educate the Africans that in as much as the Westerners cannot do without them, they too cannot do without Westerners. This paper therefore, is an attempt to eradicate ethnocentrism in and beyond Africa in doing philosophy through complementarity and mutual understanding of realities, not in a polarized mindset but in relationship to other realities that exist.

Africa is in economic and social terms widely regarded as an underdeveloped continent even though we in interrogatory theory (IT) would prefer the termdeveloping instead. Its societies are characterized by unstable institutions. Societies ride on the wheels of institutions. Institutions are social structures orbuilding blocks of any society. Repressive colonial times replaced traditional institutions with non-compatible ones ignoring any usable part of tradition andadmitting without censorship every element in the imposed modernity. My position in this essay is that social structures in postcolonial Africa are ramshackledhence the massive retrogression of the continent’s social order. To get Africa on its feet and moving in the right direction requires the reconstruction of the social structures of Africa’s modernity and the construction of its futurity. I postulate interrogatory theory (IT) as a conversational algorithm that would provide the theoretic base for the authentic African renaissance. It is constructively questioning rather than being exclusively critical i.e. it questions to reconstruct rather than being merely critical to deconstruct; dialogical rather than merely individualistic; rigorous rather than merely informative; yet radical rather than being conventional.

What is it that constitutes personal identity, is a question that has engaged the minds of scholars for eons of years. This question has become more complex inrecent times with the emergence of biomedical technologies like allotransplantation, xenotransplantation and other forms of genetic engineering, which have tended to obliterate the uniqueness that hitherto existed in individuals. With organs and tissues being transplanted at will from one human to another, it becomes difficult to define what constitutes personal identity of person A who received an allotransplant from person B. Is he person B or Person A or both? This question would be a hard nut to crack for the adherent to a bodily theory of personal identity like Chimakonam. To assume that personal identity resides in the continuation of the same body will amount to a conclusion that Mrs. B who had a face and breast transplant is not Mrs. B but somebody else. The society Chimakonam holds as a judge of personal identity, would actually see her as not Mrs. A. But is she really not Mrs. A? This work concludes that she is Mrs. A because it is the individual that is the judge of personal identity and not the society. Personal identity resides in the consciousness. This is because it is consciousness that marks human from animals. This is not to say that the body is not a criterion of personal identity, personal identity resides more in consciousness than in the body. The body could only serve as a criterion, where the consciousness is lost, but when consciousness is regained, the body ceases to be the criterion. The body could at best be said to be a temporary criterion of identity, and would give way when consciousness returns.