## 1. Degrees of Personhood




In an attempt to express the essence of the Akan concept of persons,
Kwasi Wiredu refers to former Zambian President Kaunda's praise
of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as "truly a
person." The concept of person to which Kaunda referred has a
particular significance within the African cultural context. As Kaunda
explains, "personhood is not an automatic quality of the human
individual; it is something to be achieved, the higher the
achievement, the higher the credit" (Wiredu 1992, 104). The
view of personhood as a matter of degrees, as exemplified in
Kaunda's remark, is also a defining characteristic of the Akan
notion of personhood.




The Akan word *onipa* is an ambiguous term, sometimes referring
to a member of a biological species and sometimes referring instead to
a human who has attained a special kind of social status (Wiredu
1992). According to Wiredu, this dual meaning reflects an important
conceptual distinction between a *human*--a biological
entity--and a *person*--an entity with special moral
and metaphysical qualities. Status as a human is not susceptible to
degrees, nor is such status conferred on an individual as a
'reward' for her efforts. One is either a human or one is
not--there is no such thing as *becoming* a human. In
contrast, personhood is something for a human to become to different
degrees through individual achievement. An individual's human
 status, then, is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for
 personhood.[1]




Under this interpretation, the 'payoff' for attaining
higher degrees of personhood is directly related to rights and
privileges that can make a significant difference between success
 and
 failure.[2]
 The more
rights and privileges an individual enjoys, the more social capital
that individual acquires (in the form of access to lineal networks and
the resources they control). A person--taken in its fullest
sense--is therefore an individual who, through mature reflection
and action, has both flourished economically and succeeded in meeting
her (often weighty) responsibilities to her family and community.




The distinctive qualities of this concept of persons (as interpreted by
Wiredu) are brought out when contrasted to the analysis of another
leading African philosopher, Kwame Gyekye, who takes issue with this
graduated conception of person. Gyekye specifically objects to the role
that social status plays in Wiredu's view of personhood, arguing
that that is inconsistent with the natural or innate moral equality of
persons derived from their common humanity. That is, we are human
persons before we are anything else and it is the human person that
matters from the moral point of view. Not surprisingly, Gyekye quotes
Kant's categorical imperative approvingly when arguing that human
persons are, as members of the 'kingdom of ends,' equal
independent of their empirical or accidental characteristics (be they
social or even genetic qualities.




According to Gyekye, it is our essentially human capacity for
reason--not other fortuitous or accidental predicates--that
serves as the basis for moral worth. In this respect, one cannot point
to such accidental characteristics as height, gender, age, marital
status, or social class as basis for personhood:



> 
> 
> [W]hat a person acquires are status, habits, and personality or
> character traits: he, *qua* person acquires and thus becomes
> the *subject* of acquisition, and being thus prior to
> acquisition process, he cannot be defined by what he acquires. One is
> a person because of what he is, not because of what he acquires
> (Wiredu & Gyekye 1992, 108).




Gyekye is quick to note that there are some Akan expressions and
judgments about the life and conduct of people that appear to give the
impression that personhood is something that is acquired or bestowed
upon one in virtue of taken responsibility in the community. For
example, *Onnye 'nipa* is a moral judgmental expression
used among the Akan to describe someone who appears in his conduct to
be wicked, bad, and ungenerous to others. In fact, a person of high
moral standards or conduct would be described approvingly as *oye
onipa paa*--literally, she is a real (human) person. In
contrast, an individual who fails in his striving in the Akan community
may be judged as *onipa hun*, which literally means
"useless person," an opprobrious expression.




According to Gyekye, however, these locutions should not be taken
literally, but instead merely to reflect "status, habits, and
personality or character traits" that one acquires over the
course of the one's life, not personhood (Wiredu & Gyekye
1992, 108). For Gyekye, personhood is prior to and independent of
such acquisitions. To conceive of personhood as a continuous property
capable of degrees is to confuse conventional notions of
status--a highly variable quantity--with the notion of
personhood, a constant for all human persons.




The relationship between Wiredu's and Gyekye's analyses of
personhood is brought out more clearly by considering the status of
infants, vis-a-vis personhood. Akan linguistic conventions distinguish
infants from full persons on the basis of their lacking intellectual
and moral maturity. This aspect reflects the continuous character of
personhood stressed by Wiredu. Yet the infant (or *onipa*) is
also accorded a baseline level of respect by virtue of her possessing
the *okra*. In that respect, an infant is entitled to the
respect due to any other human, regardless of age, or
 capability. (Wiredu & Gyekye 1992)




As interpreted by Wiredu, these conventions clearly indicate that
certain kinds of achievements--be they moral, intellectual, or
social--are, for the Akan, *constitutive* of personhood,
not merely indicators of such status. But at the same time, Wiredu
takes those conventions to indicate the importance of the
infant's status as a human, since it entitles the
infant--and, for that matter, all other humans--to a minimum
level of respect. The significance of humanity, he argues, is that it
is a necessary (albeit not a sufficient) condition for personhood. From
Wiredu's perspective, possession of the *okra* confers one
*condition* of self-respect, not self-respect itself. To acquire
self-respect itself, one must build upon that basis to achieve greater
degrees of moral agency, and in so doing, achieving greater degrees of
personhood.




The difference in status between those possessing merely the
*okra* and those who have achieved a higher degree of personhood
can be thought of in terms of the difference between the quality of
moral *agency* and degrees of moral *responsibility*.
Among the Akan, phrases like *onye' nipa* ("he is
not a person") or *onipa hun* ("useless
person") indicate that an individual is a moral agent, one that
is equal to all others with respect to having the potential for full
personhood--albeit a potential that the individual has not
realized. In fact, to pass a judgment that someone is an
*onye' nipa* is a way of respecting the person as a moral
agent; not holding an adult responsible in this way would be tantamount
to failing to respect their moral agency.




The two levels of personhood (one discrete, the other continuous)
posited by Wiredu allows him to account for much of the social and
linguistic data while also satisfying many of the moral intuitions
underlying Gyekye's own purely discrete interpretation. Think
again, for example, about the concept of a human being. As explicated
by Wiredu, what makes an entity a human being is simply his or her
possession of the *okra*. This can be translated into
Gyekye's Kantian parlance as the claim that one's status as
not just a human being but as a moral agent rests solely on one's
capacity for reason. The normative implication of possession of the
*okra* or the capacity for rationality is that the entity is
entitled to an irreducible respect matched by irreducible
rights--like the negative right not to be killed unjustly, or the
positive right to be given what is needed to sustain life. The social
bases of personhood supplement this minimum level of inherent
respect. In this wise one can say that all persons are human
beings but not all human beings are persons. At bottom, all human
beings are potential moral agents. This is a status (capacity for
rationality and morality) that a colt cannot be accorded because even a
horse cannot become a moral agent. An infant can.




The implications of the two-tiered view of personhood presented by
Wiredu are nicely illustrated by Akan practices following the death of
an infant. Despite the obviously tragic circumstances of such a death,
no funeral ceremonies are permitted in Akan society for infants.
According to Wiredu, the reason for this naturally follows from the
minimal level of personhood achieved by infants: It isn't that
infants are not valued or cherished by the Akan; rather, it is that
they are just not the kind of individual for whom such a ceremony is
appropriate. The Akan funeral is a form of send-off for the departing
soul on the journey to the ancestral world--a journey for which a
child does not qualify because she hasn't attained personhood.
Thus, the death of a child is not a time for mourning. Instead, parents
are expected to behave normally and cheerfully.




The different treatment accorded to deceased adults and children is a
manifestation of what we can refer to as the Akan theory of selective
reincarnation, a view that postulates that otherwise deserving humans
who have failed to fulfill their potential for achieving a higher
degree of personhood a second chance in the
 world.[3]
 For the Akan, those who die in
infancy are obvious candidates for this form of reincarnation, since
they have failed to make good on their potential but not through any
lack of effort on their part. In that respect they are what Wiredu
calls 'limbo people,' humans with an untapped potential for
full personhood and the opportunity to return to life to make good on
that potential.




On its face, the theory of selective reincarnation may appear to be
nothing more than a curious feature of Akan cosmology. As presented by
Wiredu, however, it is part of a general process of making moral
agents. Appreciating the role of selective reincarnation among the Akan
thus requires acknowledging the whole process by which morally
responsible agents come to be, as well as how individuals become
motivated to be moral. Critical to this appreciation is the
understanding that the entity underlying this process exists beyond the
life of a physical human being. The *okra* that forms the
'core' of the human being (and the returns through the
process of selective reincarnation) precedes one's life as a
human and constitutes one end of this process. At the other end
is the Akan ancestor, the culmination of the process of becoming a
person whose memory serves as a moral exemplar to the living that
guides the moral journey of the Akan. Those who become ancestors are
those who, through their imagination, intelligence, and empathetic
identification with their fellow human beings, excel not in spite of
but because of all the challenges that are put before them. After
having lived a full life, they obtain their 'ticket' (to
use Wiredu's imagery) to the ancestral world and are reincarnated
into service-ancestors.




Gyekye rejects this explanation, along with Wiredu's analysis of
Akan personhood. He argues instead that any such explanation of Akan
social and linguistic conventions must presume the personhood of even
the youngest human:



> 
> 
> [A] human person is a person whatever his age or social
> status. Personhood may reach its full realization in community, but it
> is not acquired or yet to be achieved as one goes along in society.
> What a person acquires are status, habits, and personality or
> character traits: he, *qua* person, thus becomes the
> *subject* of acquisition, and being thus prior to the
> acquisition, he cannot be defined by what he acquires. One is a person
> because of what he is not because of what he has acquired (Wiredu
> & Gyekye 1992, 108 note 22).




For Gyekye, then, differences with respect to personhood cannot
account for the difference in how the Akan deal with the death of
infants and adults. He prefers instead to account for these differences
in terms of the utilitarian value of cultural practices such as the
different treatment of the deaths of infants and adults. The most
obvious reason for the difference, according to Gyekye, is that the
size and magnitude of death celebration depends on the social status of
the deceased
 individual.[4]
 The death of a wealthy and well-connected
person will naturally call for a more elaborate ceremony than the death
of a newborn, quite independently of their status as persons.




This is not to say that Gyekye denies the role that the *idea*
of reincarnation plays for the Akan in the formation of persons. For
him, however, the idea of reincarnation (and of the graduated concept
of personhood) is less a factual account of personhood than a moral
narrative, such as the ones postulated by Aquinas, Kant, Bentham, and
John Stuart Mill to explain and justify moral precepts. The central
narratives of Western moral philosophy (such as the social contract)
provide vivid images that motivate individuals to act in certain ways.
In the same way, the Akan narratives of reincarnation and personhood
serve to reinforce socially valuable traits and practices such as
cooperation and industriousness.




From this perspective, the sage Akan elders who insure death
celebrations for full persons grasp what a casual onlooker might often
overlook--namely, that the most important effects of a death
celebration are on the onlookers, rather than the deceased. What might
be called the expressive content of public action--the message to
the Akan community conveyed by the ritual and symbolic performance, the
public utterances of the Akan leaders--is the most important
effect of such ceremonies. These ceremonies are a powerful symbolic
mechanism for both expressing and shaping the values and beliefs of the
Akan people. Thus, the Akan may abstain from mourning a rapist or a
murderer to express their collective abhorrence of the offending
act.


## 2. Achieving Personhood




The criteria for achieving personhood in Akan society are based on two
kinds of considerations. The first is the natural fact that we tend to
care for our kin and feel responsible for those with whom we are in
close reciprocal relationships. The second is that societies need some
way to encourage and support members' feelings of empathy for
those beyond their families.




According to Wiredu, in Akan society marriage and procreation are a
necessary, but not a sufficient condition of personhood. It is
important that an individual's household be administered by a
joint equal partnership of spouses and that the children are healthy
and well nourished. If an individual were to take responsibility for
the upbringing of distant relatives or were to shoulder the burden of
rearing non-relatives and allow his household to become a magnet for
relatives and extended family, then such an individual will score very
high in personhood, as indicated by references to him as *oye
'nipa*, meaning, he is "a real person" indeed.
According to Wiredu,



> 
> 
> More than this one is required to make concrete material contributions
> to the well-being of one's lineage, which is quite a sizeable
> group of people. A series of events in the lineage, such as marriage,
> births, illnesses and deaths, gives rise to urgent obligations. The
> individual who is able to meet these in a timely and adequate manner
> is the true person (Wiredu & Gyekye 1992, 107 note 2).




Individuals failing to meet these standards attract opprobrium.
Other members of Akan society will point to them and say
*onnye' nipa* ("he is not a real person"). As
a literal rendition from the Akan language, this expression could
simply mean that the person is not doing her part.




Criteria pertaining to one's relationship to those in the
community beyond one's immediate family include being an active
and unstinted participant in community projects (such as building
bridges, constructing roads, and cleaning public spaces, as well as
attending to the death, burial and mourning of a deceased member of the
community). Along with activity in community projects is involvement in
civic rituals (such as fellowship associations, rotating credit groups,
extended family gatherings, secret societies, hunting groups, village
watch groups, and civil militia groups) that have face-to-face
meetings. Requiring participation in these practices, in effect, solves
what economists refer to as "free rider" problems by
allowing information about each person's efforts and
contributions to spread quickly through the community. Everyone takes
mental note of those missing from such events and repeated
foot-dragging during community work is rebuked. Although the emphasis
is on negative scoring, when individuals score very high they receive
community titles that, on their death, bestows upon them special honors
from other members. These departed individuals are treated as living on
in a social sense, reincarnated in the ancestral world where they
continue to guard the living. While there is no limit to how high one
can rise on the scale that indicates degrees of personhood achieved,
there is a limit to how far one can fall.




An adult 'do little' might descend to the level of simply a
human with only the basic dignity and the unconditional rights inherent
in that status. The fall ends there, because all individuals possess an
*okra* which sets a lower bounds on how far they may descend on
the scale of personhood. In this sense all humans have moral value that
entitles them to basic dignity and unconditional rights whether they
have attained personhood or not.


## 3. Individual and Community




Wiredu's critics have argued that he fails to recognize that
individuals have their own wills and can, at least to some degree,
choose their own goals. His position seems to endorse a form of
'tyranny' of the community over the individual. Gyekye
insists that this is wrong--both descriptively and normatively
(Wiredu & Gyekye 1992, 105 note 20). He agrees that "the
whole gamut of values and practices in which the individual is
necessarily embedded is a creation of cultural community and is part
of his history" and that this indicates a close relationship
between the communal structure and individual's goals (Wiredu
& Gyekye 1992, 112 note 20). Yet this close relationship hardly
implies that the communal structure is the only factor the individual
is required to consider in analyzing these goals. According to
Gyekye,



> 
> 
> [I]ndividual persons as participants in the shared values and
> practices, and enmeshed in the web of communal relationships, may find
> that aspects of those cultural givens are inelegant, undignifying or
> unenlightening and can thoughtfully be questioned and evaluated. The
> evaluation may result in individual's affirming or amending or
> refining existing communal goals, values and practices; but it may or
> could also result in the individual's total rejection of them.
> The possibility of reevaluation means, surely that the person cannot
> be absorbed by the communal or cultural apparatuses (Wiredu &
> Gyekye 1992, 112 note 20).




By reserving for individuals at least the potential for responding to
or rejecting the communal consensus, Gyekye locates a source of
identity that is in some meaningful way independent of any particular
society. This is a self that can "participate in the
 determination or definition of its own 
 identity."[5]
 (Wiredu & Gyekye 1992, 112).




Gyekye correctly recognizes that the possibility of self-criticism
requires that one be able to distance oneself from one's own community
or circumstances: However, it is not clear that this is a particularly
serious problem for Wiredu's account, for even Wiredu allows that
individuals can critically assess their communal values. It is, after
all, this ability to look at one's culture with new (and critical)
eyes that makes moral reformers (of which there have been many among
the Akan) possible. These moral reformers may stand against the
communal values but the ones that may make an impact and be selected
for reincarnation as an ancestor is one that give *reasons* to
reject or revise values that persuade the community. Understood in
this way, moral reformers not only have a place in Akan society, but
qualify as persons with secured 'tickets' to the ancestral
world.


## 4. Responsibility and Free Will




An important condition for achieving personhood is that the agent has
the ability to act on the basis of rational reflection. Wiredu
indicates what is meant by "damaged personhood" by
pointing out that an Akan adult of unpredictable behavior will bring
the judgment that "so-and-so is not a person (*onye
'onipa*)," (Wiredu 1992, 108) a comment that leaves
open for further investigation whether the damage was done by
psychological or environmental factors, or by brute bad
luck. "The problem in Akan is 'when is an individual
responsible?' And the answer in this brief account of the Akan
approach to deviant conduct is that an individual is responsible to
the extent that his conduct can be modified through rational
persuasion or moral correction" (Wiredu 1992, 108-09).
Wiredu concludes that once the cause of the unpredictable behavior is
determined, irresponsibility may change into nonresponsibility, for in
the Akan philosophy of person, where there is free will there is
responsibility.




Since there is a merit component to personhood, it is relevant to talk
of the distribution of the *opportunity* of achieving personhood
so as to secure respect over and above the threshold respect that is
due to human beings in virtue of their status as human beings. Goods
like positions of prestige that are conferred to individuals who have
achieved personhood are limited by their very nature, but given
equality of opportunity, no person should be denied from the outset the
chance to secure those goods. Here, then, is a tension, for what does
the society do to those who are born handicapped or crippled in such a
way that they are not in the position to achieve personhood in ways
that able bodied people can? What happened to Shijuruh born in a family
of thieves and in a neighborhood full of burglers? Surely, Shijuruh did
not choose to be born in that family much less in the neighborhood and
this may affect his performance in an attempt to achieve personhood. In
other words how does one account for equality in unequal
circumstances?




The answer provided by the Akan, according to Wiredu's
interpretation, is to conceive of the status required for personhood as
defined relative to an adult individual's starting position or
initial capacity. Wiredu explains that, for example, an adult who
behaves erratically or in an immature manner would be presumed to have
failed to be a full
 person.[6]
 Such a presumption, however, is
*merely* a presumption, an inference drawn from the superficial
qualities of the individual's action relative to what could be
expected of the average individual. If the individual changes his or
her behavior, that inference may be revised. If, however, the behavior
persists, the individual's family members may summon an
expert--a geomancer--capable of determining if he or she is
acting out of free will.




Provided that the behavior is found not to be deliberate or that she is
not acting from her free will, the community will gather and it will be
said of her a message of this tenure: "It is not her eyes, it is
not her head, it is not her mind," i.e., she is not responsible
for her erratic actions. In making this judgment, the community will be
changing irresponsibility to non-responsibility. This is the way the Akan
has for equalizing background conditions of individuals in their
attempt at dealing with the difficulties of equality in unequal
circumstances. It is against this background that we can begin to make
sense of Wiredu's claim that freewill and responsibility are two
sides of the same coin among the Akan.


## 5. Personhood and Social Status




Many commentators agree with Gyekye that the essential ingredient of a
human is what the Akan refers to as *okra*. There is, however,
some disagreement over the nature of *okra*. According to
Gyekye,



> 
> 
> the *okra* is that which constitute the innermost self, the
> essence, of the individual person. *Okra* is individual's
> life, for which reason it is usually referred to as
> *okrateasefo*, that is, the living soul, a seeming tautology
> that yet is significant. The expression is intended to emphasize that
> *okra* is identical with life. The *okra* is the
> transmitter of the individual's destiny (fate:
> *nkrabea*). It is explained as a spark of the Supreme
> Being. The presence of this divine essence in a human being may have
> been the basis of the Akan proverb, "All men are the children of
> God; no one is the child of the earth (Gyekye 1987,
> 85).




While Gyekye maintains that *okra* can be accurately rendered
into English as 'soul,' Wiredu insists upon drawing a
somewhat more subtle distinction between these concepts. For Wiredu
*okra* is "that whose presence in the body means life and
whose absence means death and which also received the
individual's destiny from God" (Wiredu 1983, 119). Of
pivotal importance to their disagreement is the normative implication
of the presence of *okra*. The normative implication is that
*okra* bestows on its possessors basic irreducible respect
matched by basic irreducible human rights.




Like Wiredu, Gyekye recognizes that there are standards for which
individual persons aim that have an important role in how people think
of themselves and their place in society. Unlike Wiredu, however,
Gyekye denies that facts about a person's ambitions or goals add
or subtract from that individual's status as a person,



> 
> 
> The individual may fail in his strivings and, in the Akan community,
> for example, may consequently be judged as a "useless
> person" (*onipa hun*), an opprobrium term. But it must be
> noted that what the individual would be striving for in all these
> exertions is some social status not personhood. The striving are in
> fact part of the individual's self-expression, an exercise of a
> capacity he has a *person*. Even if at the end of the day he
> failed to attain the expected status, his personhood would not for
> that reason diminish, even though he may lose social respect in the
> eyes of the community. So that it is social status not personhood at
> which individuals could fail (Wiredu & Gyekye 1992, 111 note
> 20).




Instead, then, of treating persons as a kind of individual that
admits of degrees, Gyekye employs criteria of personhood that are quite
independent of individual aims and actions. He maintains that, while
persons may differ with respect to how they are treated in a community,
this difference is a matter of the social status accorded each, not
facts about their status as persons. 


## 6. Conclusion




Personhood defined in terms of social achievement and personal
relationships aptly serve to establish those networks conducive to
creating the flow of information and obligation necessary for the
promotion of communal trust. So conceived, the Akan notion of
personhood helps to support social cooperation and provides a
framework superbly suited to resolving collective action problems. The
Akan have fashioned a means of motivating individuals to contribute to
the social good while still insuring that the moral value of even the
most unproductive individual is retained. For the Akan, personhood is
the reward for contributing to the community and the basis of the
individual's moral worth is located in an independent source--a
common humanity.