A Note on Bantu Philosophy
Most of my readers are familiar with the Western philosophical tradition and will recognize my touchpoints from that tradition: Heraclitus, Diogenes, Epicurus, Lucretius, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Derrida, Deleuze, etc.
Few of my readers, however, are likely to recognize my touchpoints from the African philosophical tradition: Alexis Kagame, Ogotemmêli, John Mbiti, Paulin Hountondji, Kwasi Wiredu, Odera Oruka, etc.
This is my fault. Insofar as I have oriented my works towards Western(ized) readers who have no interest in learning anything about African philosophy, I have not thought to cite African philosophers and acknowledge their deep influences on my work.
With this dispatch, I hope to begin some reparative work in this regard by talking about the influence of Alexis Kagame on my own theoretical framework.
Alexis Kagame — who is a problematic but profound figure in African philosophy by my estimation — effectively abstracted a philosophical cosmology from Bantu languages and from the etymologies of Bantu words, much like Heidegger effectively abstracted much of his philosophical cosmology from the Greek language and the etymologies of Greek words.
Kagame performs this feat by thinking with and through the work of Placide Frans Tempels and by working from Kinyarwanda, his own native language and one of the many Bantu languages — Kiswahili, Kijita, Kikerewe, and Kabwari are a few among the many Bantu languages that members of my family have spoken.
According to Kagame, the philosophy that can be abstracted from Bantu languages assumes (i) a cosmos that is constituted by a play of forces, termed “ntu” and (ii) that four different kinds of forces are at play in the constitution of the cosmos, these being “muntu”, “kintu”, “hantu” and “kuntu”.
“Muntu” refers to forces that give rise to mental phenomena (i.e., affected/affecting phenomena) — I have taken to calling such phenomena “complexes” in my theoretical framework.
“Kuntu” refers to forces that give rise to modal phenomena [language itself being one such modal phenomena] — I have taken to calling such phenomena “systems” in my theoretical framework.
“Kintu” refers to forces responsible for material phenomena (i.e., effected/effecting phenomena) — I have taken to calling such phenomena “mechanisms” in my theoretical framework.
“Hantu” refers to forces responsible for spatiotemporal phenomena — I have taken to calling such phenomena “constructs” in my theoretical framework.
The “nkisi” figure of the Kongo pictured here is a mental phenomenon — that is to say, in other words, that it is a phenomena characterized by MU-ntu (mental forces). The “mu” prefix that precedes the “kisi” suffix had a nasal “n” sound in vernacular speech and, as a result, it was transliterated with the character “n” when written down in the Western (Roman) phonetic alphabet by Europeans during the nineteenth century (the Dutch used the transliteration mokissie during the 17th century, given that the “mu” was more pronounced at that time). I imagine that, had a native Bantu script emerged and developed characters that were actually reflective of Bantu languages, a Bantu script may very well have developed a special character for the prefix “mu” that could be accented in order to indicate that the “mu” should be pronounced with a nasal “n” sound when speaking in the vernacular.
To understand what all of this means, let us describe a practical situation using the cosmology that Kagame claims is built into the languages of the Bantu peoples. The situation: some scientists are conducting an experiment with light in which an apparatus consisting of prisms is being used to refract light. Thinking with and through the languages of the Bantu peoples, we might say the following.
The scientists conducting the experiment with light are mental forces (muntu);
The model of light being tested in the experiment — i.e., a model that assumes light to be a wave or, alternatively, a model that assumes light to be a particle — is a modal force (kuntu);
The prisms being used in the experiment with light are material forces (kintu);
The direction from which light is cast during the experiment, the duration for which light is cast during the experiment, and the date and time that the experiment is being run are all spatiotemporal forces (hantu);
Finally, the existence of light, as the subject of the experiment, is the play of all four of the aforementioned forces (ntu).
Thinking with and through languages of the Bantu peoples, then, it makes little sense to ask whether an experiment proves that light is a wave or a particle or something in between. This is because, according to the languages of the Bantu peoples, light has no nature of its own to reveal to us. Light’s existence (“ntu”) at any given moment is nothing other than an index of an ever changing play of mental forces (muntu), modal forces (kuntu), material forces (kintu), and spatiotemporal forces (hantu). For those of us thinking in Bantu terms, the notion of wave-particle duality is a chimera. If light appears as a wave sometimes, as a particle at other times, and occasionally as neither one nor the other, this is because the play of forces differs during these different times. Ay, and that is what matters most — the ways in which the play of forces can differ across time.
In other words, those of us thinking in Bantu terms don’t bother to ask ourselves questions about the fundamental nature of any “objective” reality. Instead, we ask ourselves questions about how the forces at play in nature can differ across space and time so as to create a procession of different realities, none of which are any more “objective” than any other.
By contrast, Western(ized) languages — including Bantu languages that have been subjected to Western(ized) linguistic analyses and are now being taught using Western(ized) methods of language learning — assume that light is a passive object that can be acted upon by a subject in some adverbial fashion so as to reveal to us that light is objectively characterized by certain adjectives: e.g., the experiment(alist) as an active subject probes light as a passive object in a manner that can be adverbially described as diffractively and, in so doing, the experiment(alist) reveals to us that light can be objectively characterized by the adjectives "wave-like" and "particle-like", and so Western(ized) scientists speak of “wave-particle duality” as if it were an objective reality.
Many of the extremely tortured English sentences to be found in my writings are the product of my trying to articulate a philosophy abstracted from Bantu languages in English: I am always trying to avoid claiming that there is one objective reality and, instead, trying to claim that the forces at play in nature differ across space and time and create a procession of different realities, none of which are any more “objective” than any other.
