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. It was 81.
His death was confirmed by his son, Hervé, who did not give a cause.
As a young philosophy professor on a continent shedding colonial rule in the 1960s, Mr. Hundonji (pronounced HUN-ton-djee) rebelled against efforts to force African ways of thinking into the European worldview. Immersed in European thought himself—he was the first African to be accepted as a philosophy student at France’s most prestigious school, the École Normale Superieure—he developed a critique of what he called “ethnophilosophy,” a European concoction.
His work has shaped the study of philosophy in Africa ever since. It became a kind of second declaration of independence for Africa—a spiritual one this time—in the view of the African philosophers who followed Mr. Houdonji. It was “very important and very liberating,” Columbia University philosopher Suleiman Bahir Diagn said in an interview.
In his introduction to Bado Ndoye’s Paulin Hountondji: Leçons de Philosophie Africaine (published in 2022 but not yet translated into English), Mr. Diagne called him “the most important figure in philosophy in Africa.”
A modest man who spent his career teaching at African universities, most notably the national university of Benin, with brief forays into the turbulent politics of his small coastal West African homeland, Mr. Hountondji knew something was wrong with European efforts to they tell Africans how they should think about their place in the universe.
He also knew that the emerging strongman rule of the 1960s, with its enforced groupthink, caused problems on the continent. He found the roots of this idea of collective thought – mistakenly considered a natural characteristic of Africans – in the “ethnophilosophy” he so strongly criticized.
Armed with his work on the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mr. Hountondji set about confronting “Bandu Philosophy,” a book by a Belgian missionary, Placide Tempels, that for for nearly 30 years he set the tone for African philosophy.
When Father Temples, an ecclesiastical revolutionary who lived for decades in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, published “Bandu Philosophy” in 1945, it was considered groundbreaking by a first generation of pre-independence African intellectuals. It is supposed to restore spiritual dignity to a continent considered “primitive” in the colonial worldview.
Contrary to the European belief that Africans were incapable of abstract thought, Father Tempels suggested that they did have a philosophy, a way of seeing themselves in the universe.
But in a series of essays begun in 1969 and collected in the book “African Philosophy: Myth and Reality” (published in 1976 in French and 1983 in English), Mr. Hountondji set out to demolish the work of the Belgian priest as nothing more than ethnographic considerations that ultimately reinforced colonialism.
Whether or not one agreed with Father Temples’ central position – that for the ‘Bantu’ or African, ‘being’ means ‘power’ – his whole approach was flawed, Mr Hudonji argued. Philosophy cannot spring from a group, he wrote, but must be the responsibility of individual philosophers, an idea influenced by Mr. Hudonji’s insights into Husserl.
But that responsibility was absent from Father Tempels’ largely anonymous “Bantus” group, 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, as a rule for all Africans, past, present and future, of a form of thought, a system of belief, which could at best correspond only to an already determined stage in the intellectual journey of the black peoples’.
Thus, wrote Mr. Hudonji, “what was thus introduced as ‘Bandu philosophy’ was not really the philosophy of the Bantu, but of the Temples, and it only took charge of the Belgian missionary, having become, for the occasion, his analyst the ways and customs of the Bantu’.
These thoughts resulted in a bombshell in African spiritual life. Mr. Houdonji has been criticized for elitism, for “Eurocentrism” and for rejecting the oral traditions of Africa. But these criticisms soon fell by the wayside, and today “his critique of ethnophilosophy enjoys a canonical place in contemporary African philosophy,” wrote Pascah Mungwini in his 2022 survey, “African Philosophy.” He called it a “philosophical masterpiece”.
African thinkers had freed themselves from an immemorial 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 really a system of collective thought, which was supposed to be a positive African quality,” Mr. Houdonji told Radio France Internationale in an interview in 2022. “This is not the meaning of the word ‘philosophy. ».
Mr. Hudonji “wanted the purity of the idea,” Mr. Diagne said. “What needed to be cleared was the whole graphic of ‘anthropology.’
In the early 1970s, Mr. Houdonji taught philosophy at universities in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country was then “living under the boot of a general,” Mobutu Sese Seko, who used “traditional ‘philosophy’ to justify or hide the worst excesses, the most horrific human rights violations,” wrote Mr. Hundonji in his memoirs.
Mr. Houdonji’s “refusal of the unanimous message” in General Mobutu’s Zaire, as Mr. Diagne put it, echoed his rejection of the missionary Father Temples, who, like the general, suggested that Africans should all speak to one voice.
These concerns about autocracy and the enforced political support it entails influenced Mr. Houdonji’s reluctant entry into public life in Benin, where, as a professor at the National University, he had suffered under the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of General Mathieu Kérékou. What Mr. Houdonji called General Kereku’s “reign of terror” ended after a national conference of Benin citizens in 1990 called by the general unexpectedly turned against him.
Mr. Hudonji was invited to the conference and immediately zeroed in on the central issue, to the chagrin of the general’s subordinates: whether the gathering could decide the country’s future. Mr. Hountondji’s solution was “the only legitimate and possible solution,” historian Richard Banegas wrote in “La Démocratie au Pas de Caméléon” (2003), the political history of Benin.
Mr. Houdonji’s side won, and Benin became a democracy — for a time. Mr. Hudonji unexpectedly found himself Minister of Education in the new government, from 1990 to 1991, and Minister of Culture and Communication from 1991 to 1993.
He was unfit for political life, his son, Hervé, said in an interview, because he was “precluded from locking himself up in a political party.” Mr. Hudonji wrote in his memoirs that he would one day develop his thoughts on “the cynicism, the hypocrisy, the everyday lies that make up everyday political life.” He never did.
He returned to teaching at the national university, now the Université d’Abomey-Calavi, where he was to 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 pastor in the Methodist Church, and Marguerite (Dovoedo) Hountondji.
He received his baccalaureate (the equivalent of a high school diploma) at the Lycée Victor-Ballot, a school where the country’s elite were educated, in Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the École Normale Superieure in Paris in 1967 and his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris under Paul Ricoeur, with a thesis on Husserl, in 1970.
As a student in Paris in the early days of African independence, Mr. Houdonji wrote, he was disturbed by the willingness of other African students to write papers on the crimes of one of the continent’s new heroes, the Guinean dictator Sekou Touré, who was to end up to 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 1 March.
In later years, Mr. Diagne said, Mr. Hountondji “thought he had gone too far in his radicalism” in his earlier skepticism about African oral traditions.
However, he remained steadfast to the end that Europeans should not think about Africans. “There is a colonialist view that all Africans agree with each other and have the same way of thinking,” Mr Houdonji told French radio in 2022. “The colonialist view is not sensitive to the plurality of opinions in an oral culture.”
Flore Nobime contributed reporting from Cotonou.
