## 1. Oruka's Project



The following two examples from this text illustrate the method and
purpose of Oruka's questioning. When asked what he thought of his own
(Luo) community's idea of communalism, Paul Mbuya Akoko responded as
follows:



> 
> Now the sense in which we may justly say that the Luo in the
> traditional setting practiced communalism is not one in which people
> generously shared property or wealth. Their idea of communalism is, I
> think, of a co-operative nature. For example, where one person had
> cattle, everybody 'ipso facto' had cattle. For the owner
> of the cattle would distribute his cattle among people who did not
> have cattle [of their own] so that the less well-off people may take
> care of them...[but] never completely given away...The
> result is that everybody had cows to look after and so milk to drink.
> (Oruka, 1990: 141)
> 



Another sage, Okemba Simiyu Chaungo from the Bukusu community,
responded to the question, "What is truth?" as follows:



> 
> When something is true, it is just as you see it ... it is just
> what it is ... just like this bottle ... it is true that it
> is just a bottle... just what it is. Truth is good. Falsehood is
> bad. It is evil. He who says the truth is accepted by good people. A
> liar may have many followers ... but he is bad.
> [*Obwatieri* ... *bwatoto*. *Bwatoto nokhulola
> sindu ne siene sa tu ... nga inchpa yino olola ichupa ni yene sa
> tu*.] (*Sage Philosophy*, p. 111)
> 



And in response to an Interlocutor, who asks "Why would people tell
lies?", he responded:



> 
> So that they may eat... so that they may get empty prestige. They
> want to profit fraudulently. (*Sage Philosophy*, p. 111)
> 



From these examples some of the distinguishing characteristics of Sage
Philosophy can be gleaned. First, they display the deeply personal
nature of the ideas, or opinions, that the sages expressed in response
to the questions. Akoko's insight derives from his individual
reflections on the practice of communalism to consider its
justification. Second, they provide evidence of abstract thought about
philosophic topics. Chaungo considers what it means for a proposition
to be true and expresses what turns out to be a correspondence theory
of truth -- according to which the proposition "This is a
bottle" is true if the object it refers to, this thing, is
indeed a bottle. By pointing out that some people choose deliberately
to be untruthful for unjust gain he also addresses the moral aspects
of truth.



Oruka's survey of sages aimed to counter three negative claims
regarding the philosophical status of indigenous African thought:


1. Unlike Greek sages who used reason, African sages do not engage in
philosophic thought.
2. African sages are part of an oral tradition, whereas philosophic
thought requires literacy.
3. African traditions encourage unanimity regarding beliefs and
values and discourage individual critical thought.



His reply to these claims has significantly shaped the discourse on
Sage Philosophy. In what follows the criteria he proposed to determine
what counts as Sage Philosophy will be considered in the light of his
critique of the Eurocentric bias against African philosophic thought
and the question of whether literacy is required.


## 2. The African Sage Tradition and Eurocentric Bias



First, Oruka was concerned about the picture created under colonialism
that, while the sayings of numerous Greek sages such as Thales,
Anaximander, Heraclitus, and other pre-Socratics, were regarded as
"philosophical," those of traditional African sages were
not. This bias arises out of the implicit belief that philosophy is
the privileged activity of certain races. He believed that this
unjustified belief had further led to the image of philosophy as the
restricted property of Greeks, or Europeans, and, even more
exclusively, the property of white males. Partly concerned with
exposing the falsehood of this Eurocentric attitude, he recognized
that what had raised the apparently simple sayings of the
pre-Socratics to the status of philosophy was the subsequent sustained
commentaries by later philosophers. He maintained that the ideas
expressed by indigenous African sages were no different from those by
the earlier Greeks. When recorded later in books, the sayings of Greek
sages came to be widely regarded as "philosophical," and
the people who produced them as "philosophers." Given such
a scenario, Oruka was led to wonder, why would the sayings of Akoko,
or those of Chaungo, for example, not be similarly regarded after they
are committed to writing by a professional philosopher?



Oruka supports his comparison of indigenous African sages with the
pre-Socratics by citing two methods that have contributed to the
growth of philosophy in the West, beginning with its Greek roots. One
direct method of using dialogues is exemplified in the early Platonic
works. Socrates asks primary questions upon which the exposition of
ideas by his interlocutor is based. Oruka viewed his own dialogues
with the sages as an example of this practice in the African context.
Socrates regarded himself as a "mid-wife" of sorts,
because he merely helped those with the knowledge to bring it out. He
brought out what was in each case really the property of his
interlocutors, not his own. Oruka meant his dialogues, in similar
fashion, to capture both this method and its outcome. He maintained
that the sages he and his disciples interviewed were the owners of
their own ideas. The Western-trained philosopher, he says,
"plays the role of philosophical provocation" (*Sage
Philosophy*, p. 47). The other method, exemplified in the later
Platonic works, involves indirect engagement with the sayings of the
sages through a commentary on their ideas -- derived from these
dialogues, or from general acquaintance with the sages' views. Oruka
believed that, by these two methods, the growth of African philosophy
can take place in a manner similar to the growth of Western
philosophy. Underlying Oruka's position was his hope that trained
philosophers, regardless of their origins, could take on the sages on
their claims in their commentaries and critiques as this is how
advancement and growth of knowledge partly takes place. This is to
say, in hindsight, that even in Oruka's own view the sayings of the
sages were not free of critique.


## 3. Literacy and The Oral Tradition in Sage Philosophy



The influence of colonial bias against unwritten thought was also
challenged by Oruka's project. By publishing his interviews with the
sages he aimed to counter the second negative claim regarding the
denigration of African thought, namely that "philosophy is and
can only be a 'written' enterprise; and so a tradition
without writing is incapabale of philosophy [and that any claim to the
contrary] ...is a non-scientific, mythological claim"
(*Sage Philosophy*, p.xv). He insisted that there are African
thinkers, not yet absorbed into the tradition of the written word,
whose memories are, in terms of consistency and organization, as good
as the information recorded in books (*Sage Philosophy*, pp.
49-50). Responding to adversaries, he cautioned that:



> 
> to argue like the critics, not just of Sage philosophy but of African
> philosophy generally have done that Africa is having a late start in
> philosophy just because we have no written records of her past
> philosophical activities is, wrongfully, to limit the sources from
> which we could detect traces of such activities (*Sage
> Philosophy*, p. 50).
> 



Peter Bodunrin was particularly critical of Oruka's method of
extracting Sage Philosophy. He argued that to show that there were
people, like the indigenous sages, who were capable of philosophical
thinking was one thing, but it was a completely different thing to
show that there were African philosophers who have engaged in
organized systematic reflections on the traditions of their people.
Regarding Bodunrin's first objection, Oruka's response, as already
indicated above, was that philosophers often work in response to other
ideas, whether they are the ideas of other philosophers, or popular
ideas in the philosopher's own setting. Oruka had a relatively longer
response to Bodunrin's second objection. In another essay popularly
associated with his name, Oruka identified four main trends to be
constitutive of African philosophy, namely (i) African
ethnophilosophy, (ii) African nationalist-ideological philosophy,
(iii) professional African philosophy, and of course, (iv) the African
Sage philosophy under consideration here. Not only do these trends
show different approaches that African philosophers have adopted to
unravel and systematically to expose the underlying principles on
which different departments of African life are based, they also
demonstrate that African philosophy is not limited or confined to the
academic institutions.



Indeed, many African philosophers look far beyond the traditional
philosophical texts for sources and subject matter of philosophical
reflection. For example, while engaging in subtle analytic
philosophical reflections, African philosophers incorporate with great
ease narratives from everyday lives and from literature into their
reflections of the philosophical implications of their cultural
events. Oruka was especially wary of the sub-group among professional
African philosophers whose position regarding African traditional
modes of thought was analogous to European bias in denying reason to
Africans in their traditional settings. It was this attitude,
according to Oruka, that amounted to a claim that Africans lacked a
tradition of organized systematic philosophical reflections on the
thoughts, beliefs, and practices of their own people. He thought that
this view was exemplified in its most eloquent and strongest form by
Peter Bodunrin. In his (Oruka's) own estimation, Bodunrin had
seriously underestimated the central point in the long tradition of
Western scholarship, popularized by the works of Levy-Bruhl,
that denied Africans not only the existence of organized systematic
philosophical reflection, but reason itself. Oruka thought that this
view was rather absurd, for no society of humans can live for any
reasonable amount of time, let alone making any advances in their own
ways of seeing and doing things, if they do not have reason, or if the
ideas and concepts upon which their cultures are built do not make
sense. If, on the other hand, critics of African Sage philosophy based
their refutation of the possibility of sage philosophy on the lack of
written philosophical treatises, Oruka countered such a position by
arguing that to exist as a philosopher it is not necessary that one's
thoughts must be written, or that they must progress -- meaning
that they must be commented on or even be available to future
generations. While systematicity is important to the structure and
consistency of good thinking, neither it nor preservation of thought
necessarily requires literacy. Preservation in particular, he thought,
was done selectively by generations for divers emerging reasons and
circumstances, and so was not, in and of itself, the measure of the
philosophical quality of someone's thoughts. For just as thoughts can
be expressed either in writing, or as unwritten oral reflections,
e.g., sayings and argumentations of sages, so they may be preserved
for a long time by sages, or quickly forgotten and cast into
historically insignificant bits of a community's past, only to be
remembered by the few whom they touched in some special way.



Oruka's position, as is also argued forcefully by Kwasi Wiredu,
another African philosopher and Oruka's contemporary, is that there is
no harm in African philosophers' creative fusion of influences from
other traditions into their critical evaluations of African beliefs
and practices in different fields ("The Ghanaian Tradition of
Philosophy" in *Person and Community*, p. 2). Such a fusion is
part of bringing into focus the interplay between philosophy and
practice. Oruka believed, as he explains in *Trends in Contemporary
African Philosophy* (pp. 17-18), that this is precisely what Kwame
Nkrumah (1964), Leopold S. Senghor (1962), and Julius K.
Nyerere (1968, 1968a), for example, had done in forming their
political-philosophical positions (what Oruka calls "ideological
trends"), all with different results.


## 4. Ethnophilosophy, Unanimity and African Critical Thought



Although it had been used previously by other writers, the term
"ethnophilosophy" acquired its notoriety in the work of
the Beninois philosopher Paulin Hountondji (1970, 1983). Perhaps
unaware that the term had been used earlier, Hountondji criticized the
Belgian missionary, Placide Tempels' book, *Bantu Philosophy*
(first French ed. 1945, and Eng. tr. 1959), as well as his disciples,
among them the French philosopher and ethnographer Marcel Griaule, the
Rwandais philosopher Alexis Kagame, and the Kenyan theologian John
Mbiti, for casting African philosophy as an anonymous system of
thought, without individual thinkers to claim or account for it. By
the end of the 1960s, the positive reception in Anglophone Africa, not
only of Tempels' Bantu Philosophy, but also John Mbiti's *African
Religions and Philosophy* (1969) and Marcel Griaule's
*Conversations with Ogotemmeli* that had recently been
translated into English (1965), coincided with the rising tides of
political and cultural nationalism throughout the continent.



The third negative claim Oruka aimed to challenge pertains to the
philosophical status of indigenous African thought. Ethnophilosophy
had falsely popularized the view that traditional Africa was a place
of philosophical unanimity and that African traditions encouraged
unanimity regarding beliefs and values. If this were true it would
allow no room for individual thinkers like, say, Socrates or
Descartes, with their own independent views on such matters. Oruka was
concerned that African intellectuals were drawn into this false
assumption regarding the intellectual inclination of African people,
maintaining the belief that critique is absent from indigenous African
thought. This situation was worsened by the new political movements of
postindependence African nations where one-party political systems
sprang up. By outlawing opposition politics as being both unAfrican
and antinationalist, political leaders often appealed to this view of
unanimity. The Sage Philosophy project objected to this claim
regarding unanimity in Africa, which Oruka regarded as absurd, by
presenting empirical evidence of the diversity of thought among
indigenous thinkers. Oruka insisted that, while rulers everywhere will
always crave unanimity, thinkers thrive in dialogue and diversity of
opinion. He pointed out that Sage philosophy was about thinkers, not
rulers.



Oruka's desire to distinguish Sage philosophy from ethnophilosophy was
also in response to another false view, partly created by
ethnophilosophy, that indigenous African thought is anonymous. An
important charge against ethnophilosophy has been that, by simply
presenting the teachings of African beliefs in the allegorical modes,
the impression is created that indigenous African modes of thought are
deeply grounded in their mythical representations of reality, thus
leaving the philosophic ideas largely unexplained. With this in mind,
Oruka's project aimed to counter two types of false perception of
indigenous African thought. First, he separated the myths from the
clearly thought out and logically valid philosophical ideas of
indigenous individual thinkers to make clear what he frequently
referred to as the "anthropological fogs" (*Sage
Philosophy*, pp. xxi-xxix). Secondly, he contested the idea that a
qualitative mental leap from myth is required for Africans to embrace
philosophical thought. Such a view had been expressed by the Belgian
philosopher Franz Crahay in a widely read article, "Le
decollage conceptuel: conditions d'une philosophie
bantoue" (1965). Although he was critical of ethnophilosophy,
Hountondji was the first philosopher to distance himself from Crahay's
position, arguing that local knowledge systems were already separate
from myths, as no humans can live on myths. Moral principles, for
example, would have to be abstract in character to be applicable in
general terms beyond one person (Hountondji 1970). According to Wiredu
(1996: 182ff), such independent and critical thinking was available in
varying forms in Akan communities and was the basis of frequently
protracted disputations among elders in search of a consensus
regarding matters that required negotiations. Thus, contrary to the
view that knowledge at the communal level was anonymous, Wiredu argues
that it is precisely in regard to the importance of consensus on
matters of common good that disputation and careful navigation through
different opinions was not just considered to be crucial, but was put
on transparent display until some form of consensus was attained. In
other words, consensus was not imposed, but relentlessly pursued. Such
important matters like just claims to different kinds of rights were
not adjudicated without the input of those members of community who
were well regarded for their independent opinions.



Another point that Oruka makes against the perception of unanimity in
African traditional thought can be found in the expressions of
thinkers whose ideas are grounded in critical analysis and evaluation
of everyday experiences in their communities. Another example of this,
besides such figures as Paulo Mbuya Akoko and others who Oruka
mentions and discusses in the book *Sage Philosophy* is the
famous Swahili poet, critic, and philosopher Shabaan bin Robert from
then Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Shabaan, famed as a pioneer in the
interface between the oral and the written traditions, has established
a unique legacy as an indigenous independent thinker, whose focus in
his written work was to theorize about metaphysical and social ideals.
About the former, Shabaan theorizes in his work entitled *Utubora
Mkulima* the attributes of ideal personhood by arguing strongly,
in a dialogical setting, that an ideal person is one whose moral
righteousness is aimed at being a perfect member of community, and
therefore his concerns for common good supersede individual interests
(pp. 26-28). Regarding social ideals, Shabaan argues in
*Kusadikika* that a good society is defined as one in which all
members are accorded their basic rights and treated with equality
regardless of gender, age, or social status (pp. 29-43). This makes
Shabaan Robert an example of a liberal thinker whose ideas bridge
between indigenous or pre-colonial social structures and values, and
the so-called modern society whose values were significantly
influenced by colonial occupations and interests, as well as new
economic, political, and moral values. In these senses, Shabaan Robert
thought and works complement those of other indigenous thinkers in
critiquing both indigenous and new modes of existence. To Oruka, these
are signs that indigeneity is not, as is widely but falsely thought,
synonymous with anonymity and stagnation in thought.


## 5. What counts as Sage Philosophy?



According to Oruka, Sage Philosophy is "the expressed thoughts
of wise men and women in any given community and is a way of thinking
and explaining the world that fluctuates between popular wisdom (well
known communal maxims, aphorisms and general common sense truths) and
didactic wisdom, an expounded wisdom and a rational thought of some
given individuals within a community" (*Sage Philosophy*,
p. 28). Oruka, however, had very definite ideas about who qualifies as
a philosophic sage and how such persons are to be distinguished from
other sages. When asked whether or not philosophy advances knowledge,
Barasa is quoted as saying: "Yes. Being a rational method of
inquiry into the real nature of things, philosophy is a means to
re-examine knowledge and belief" (*Sage Philosophy*, p.
150). The tendency to express dissatisfaction with the status quo
belief system of their communities is an important critical component
and a criterion Oruka used to identify sages as philosophical.
Dissatisfaction sometimes motivates the philosophic sage to advance
the knowledge that everyone has by subjecting it to scrutiny in order
to determine its validity and worth. While philosophic sages may still
share with others some customary practices and beliefs, or aspects of
them, unlike other members of their community, they emphasize rational
explanations and justifications of courses of action. They owe greater
loyalty to reason than to custom for its own sake. As a result, not
only are sages often a source of new knowledge, but they are also a
catalyst to change within their communities.



In the example cited above, Mbuya defines communalism in terms of a
morality that appeals to the welfare of others as a guide to action.
He indicates its goals, and limitations as a principle that aims at
minimizing socio-economic disparity between the haves and the
have-nots. On Oruka's view, not every member of society carries out
these kind of elaborations and conceptual clarifications of the
principles that underlie what the majority live at the pragmatic level
only as custom. While he recognizes that there are other indigenous
sages in African communities, he distinguishes these from philosophic
sages such as Mbuya and Chaungo, who are committed to critical inquiry
and to the rational grounding of values and beliefs. Other indigenous
sages, who may be wise in some sense, but not critically oriented, act
as repositories of the statements of the beliefs of their communities,
which they have learned and can repeat, or teach, to others exactly as
they are supposed to be remembered.



This lattter group is exemplified by Ogotemmeli, a sage from the
Dogon community in present-day Mali. His teachings were transcribed
and commented on by the French philosopher and ethnographer Marcel
Griaule in the now classic text, *Conversations with
Ogotemmeli: Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas* (Eng. tr.
1965), one of the outstanding texts of indigenous African thought.
Ogotemmeli presents the commonly shared knowledge of the Dogon
community, including not only their very complex theories about the
origin of the universe and the subsequent development of material and
non-material entities in it, but also a startling astronomical system
that points to the Dogon's pre-telescopic knowledge of the Sirius (A
and B) and their paths across the skies. Yet, despite this pioneer
scientific and mathematical genius, at no time throughout the entire
presentation does one encounter Ogotemmeli as a thinker, only as
the representative and narrator of the collective memory of his
community. His own voice is submerged into a communal mode of
expression. According to Oruka, the absence of any personal direct
reflections on the issues at hand qualifies Ogotemmeli only as a
folk sage. A folk sage is a highly intelligent and good narrator of
traditionally imposed beliefs and myths. He, or she, may explain such
beliefs and values with great detail and may even expound on the
relation between the mythical representations and the lessons in and
for society that they are intended to illustrate. But while the folk
sage hardly veers off the narrative, by contrast, a philosophic sage
is a person "of traditional African culture, capable of the
critical, second-order type of thinking about the various problems of
human life and nature; persons, that is, who subject beliefs that are
traditionally taken for granted to independent rational reexamination
and who are inclined to accept or reject such beliefs on the authority
of reason rather than on the basis of a communal or religious
consensus" (*Sage Philosophy*, pp. 5-6).



The onisegun, deliberately kept anonymous by Hallen and Sodipo for
reasons of privacy, and who expound and elucidate the traditional
thought of the Yoruba, are certainly wise and very knowledgeable
people. On Oruka's criteria for philosophic sagacity, however, they
too are only folk sages. They are like Ogotemmeli, whose
presentation, however complex and amazing in details, is exactly what
every wise Dogon person is expected to know (*Sage Philosophy*,
pp. 9-10). Oruka distinguishes between folk and philosophic
sages, in terms of those who pursue the rational grounding of beliefs
and values, as opposed to those who merely narrate them as they appear
in their commuity's belief systems.



W. V. O. Quine's indeterminacy thesis of radical translation presents
a major difficulty for the explanations of the conceptual content and
meaning of terms in Yoruba language provided by the onisegun to Hallen
and Sodipo. Quine attacked the concept of universal propositions and
meanings that are frequently assumed by translators to exist across
all languages. This draws in question the practice of anthropologists
studying African belief systems. Following Quine, Hallen argues that
"Given the cumulative effects of the indeterminacy of
translation between radically different languagaes, an alternative
explanation for such inconsistencies could be that translators have
recourse to contradiction because they, perhaps unwittingly, have not
been able to arrive at a determinate or precise translation"
(*A Short History of African Philosophy*, pp. 37-8).
Failing to find in non-Western modes of thought precise translations
of comparable rational expressions in their own languages,
anthropologists hastened to conclude that the problem must lie with
the non-Western modes of thought which appear to lack ways of
accommodating rational expressions. Yet, Hallen and Sodipo's own
conversations with the Yoruba sages illustrate what happens when one
tries to translate, among others, the English term "know"
into Yoruba. The outcome of their comparative analyses shows that our
conceptual assumptions about reality are often tied to the natural
languages we speak. To be fair, Hallen's and Sodipo's work is not a
simple description of what the onisegun said. Rather, they attempt to
tease out what was intended conceptually in a language translated as
faithfully as possible into propositions which they contrast with
comparable ones in English. Nonetheless, Oruka maintained that any
such use of Western philosophical language to analyze indigenous
African thought leads to the separation "between an insider in
traditional African philosophy and the outsider analyzing or
describing this philosophy in a language of Western thought. Given
this, the two cannot really meaningfully express their thought to each
other and it would be absurd to find that one can be an expert in the
thought of the other" (*Sage Philosophy*, p. 15).


## Conclusion



It is not entirely clear what Oruka believed ought to be the
relationship between the indigenous philosophic sage and his or her
Western-trained counterpart. What is clear from his remarks is that
the use of Western philosophers, like Quine or Wittgenstein, for
example, as tools for analyzing the conceptual content of African
modes of thought has allowed some scholars to champion "what
they term 'African philosophy' by using terminology given
in 'Western philosophy'. None, so far, has given an
account of what is to be treated as the language of African
philosophy" (*Sage Philosophy*, p. 15). On this point at
least, Oruka seems to position himself away from philosophers such as
Appiah, Wiredu, and Gyekye. He understood the work of professional
philosophers to be distinct from that of the philosophic sages and
expressed the wish that they could remain so, as a way of preserving
traditions. This idea appears to be implied by his regret that
"The tragedy for man is that the Western intellectual elite has,
over the years, successfully imposed its own culture and philosophy
over the masses. So, British philosophy, for example, is taken to be
the texts of Lockes, Humes, Bacons, Russels, etc." (*Sage
Philosophy*, p. 16). Oruka's concern with the preservation of
indigenous thought suggests that he desired to keep the professional
school of philosophers separate from that of the philosophic sages to
ensure the preservation of the intellectual integrity, not only of the
sages, but of the African heritage as a whole. He was concerned that
the language of African professional philosophers was too dependent on
the Western conceptual lexicon and that its unchecked imposition on
indigenous conceptual schemes might finally contribute to the demise
of the latter.



Among African philosophers, Kwasi Wiredu is particularly sympathetic
to Oruka's concerns. Writing on the need for conceptual decolonization
in African philosophy, Wiredu claims that such a need would mean both
"avoiding or reversing through a critical conceptual
self-awareness the unexamined assimilation in our thought (that is, in
the thought of contemporary African philosophers) of the conceptual
frameworks embedded in the foreign philosophical traditions that have
had impact on African life and thought...[and] exploiting as much
as is judicious the resources of our own indigenous conceptual schemes
in our philosophical meditations on even the most technical problems
of contemporary philosophy" (*Cultural Universals and
Particulars*, p. 136). At the same time, Wiredu agrees with other
philosophers like Appiah and Gyekye in insisting that while the
beliefs, proverbs, and customs of African cultures should be included
in the philosophical reflections of the professional, such cultural
elements of folk knowledge also must be subjected to critical analysis
and evaluation because, "There is no pretense...that
recourse to the African vernacular must result in instantaneous
philosophic revelation" (*Cultural Universals and
Particulars*, p. 138).



Oruka believed that professional African philosophers could interact
with their sagacious counterparts, provided there was sufficient room
for each to flourish separately. This idea suggests that he desired to
expand the location of legitimate philosophical activity beyond the
institutional confines of the academy, which he considered to be
intricately connected to the colonial legacy. It is in this regard
that the idea of African Sage philosophy has provided an important
intervention in the development of contemporary African philosophy,
addressing many crucial issues African philosophers continue to face
in the wider context of postcolonial cultural inquiry, of which
philosophy is only a part. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in *A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing
Present* (1999) has suggested that the self-awareness stage in
postcolonial theory is largely over and that the formerly colonized
cultures are settling down to utilizing their respective cultural
reservoirs without significant attention to the need to reclaim their
indigenous voices, and without minimizing the need for a continued and
sustained awareness of the ever-present Eurocentric impositions. This
orientation is displayed, for example, in Wiredu's independent, but
comparative, analyses of Western and African concepts, whose
widely-debated epistemological position that "truth is nothing
but opinion," hinges on the contrast between the objectivist
implications of the claim "I know that" in English and the
non-objectivist implications in the Akan language.



Along with Wiredu, Hallen and Sodipo also hold that very complex
philosophical views are already signaled by many sayings in African
languages, and wait to be teased out through careful analysis and
interpretation. Although Oruka's idea of the sages as philosophically
savvy in their own languages raises methodical questions as to whether
sage philosophy is the property of the professional philosopher, or of
the indigenous wise person, and only teased out through the prompting
of a professional philosopher, Hallen, Sodipo and Wiredu agree with
his insistence that the distinguishing marks of African philosophy
emerge precisely out of analytical involvement by Western-trained
philosophers, who raise questions regarding the conceptual
underpinnings of indigenous beliefs, values, and languages, and
critically examine their meaning and implications. They propose, on
this basis, to accommodate both indigenous sages, and Western-trained
professionals, as philosophers.