Tosin Adeate

The call to decolonise African political philosophy by Michael Eze is necessitated by the question of rights and common good in the African conception of personhood initiated by Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye. Eze sees this debate as influenced by Western thought and concerns. Eze points to a manifestation of the influence of Western dualistic categories in the delivery of the Menkiti-Gyekye debate on rights. A Western dualistic methodology is expressed in the AfroWestern bifurcation in Menkiti and Gyekye's analysis, the attention to rights versus common good, and the dichotomy between the individual and community. Eze questioned the relevance, motivation, and necessity of the dichotomy in Menkiti-Gyekye's conception of rights as well as its epistemic values to African present circumstances. As such, he argues we decolonise African political philosophy by freeing its discourses from the intellectual gaze of Western historicity and philosophising on issues relevant to the challenges in our context. I respond that the call to decolonise African political philosophy is a result of a misascription of coloniality to African political philosophy. I argue that the Menkiti versus Gyekye conceptions of persons and its continuity contribute to thought and practices that are of contemporary significance. I further argue that the dualistic methodological approach is neutral in terms of traditions of thought. Lastly, I note that the core feature of a colonial object is a traceable link with erstwhile colonialization and suggest how we can further transform African political philosophy by increasing women’s representation in its epistemic syllabus.

Afro-communitarian thinkers have often pointed to consensual democracy as a valuable feature of traditional African societies. African philosophers, including Kwasi Wiredu and Bernard Matolino, have drawn attention to this pattern of political arrangement to consider what the political practice means for modern African politics. While Wiredu praissed consensual democracy and sought to explore how it could be relevant for contemporary African democratic development, Matolino finds it undesirable. In the book Consensus as Democracy in Africa, Matolino identifies several significant concerns with the theoretical and practical feasibility of consensual democracy, such as the concern with individual freedom. He rejects consensus as a viable democratic theory for modern African politics. In this article, I respond to Matolino's objection. My responses demonstrate a persuasion for a consensus-imbued majoritarian model of governance. While noting that consensus is conceptually reconcilable with party politics, I argue that a consensual orientation allows for expanded freedom of association that helps check abuse of party-political loyalty.

Aribiah Attoe took issue with the materialist and the non-materialist African conceptions of death by arguing that the reality of death puts pressure on the human conception of life’s meaning. He admits the reality of an afterlife experience through a causal principle that sees events in the world as the product of interactions between predetermined past events. It is an afterlife where a decomposing body continues interacting with other things in the world, not an afterlife involving consciousness. While conscious meaning-making ends in the death of the body in Attoe’s materialist view, thereby affirming the conclusion that human existence is meaningless and the universe is purposeless, the conviction about life’s meaninglessness is also reinforced by the possibility of a second death, that is, the death of the transcendent consciousness in the traditional African view. In this article, I will mount two objections to Attoe’s submission. First, I argue that Attoe’s refutation of life’s meaning may be faulted by a world view devoid of the ideas of the afterlife and immortality. Life’s meaninglessness for him should have been limited to the facts of human existence in the world, not the human inability to continue meaning after death. Second, Attoe’s conception of death as finality questions his principle of causality that suggests the reality of an endless afterlife. Attoe’s overarching submission on life’s meaninglessness gives the impression that theories of life’s meaning must be anchored on the thought of an afterlife and immortality.

The idea of afro-existentialism connotes how Africans make sense of living and the meaning and meaninglessness attached to human existence. Different phenomena inform the way humans interpret existence, and one of such in the contemporary period, with great influence on Africans, is human involvement with non-human intelligence, in its different eruptions. This paper focuses on the second-wave AI, which is a period of improved simulation of natural intelligence, whose singularity principle hypothesizes individualist motives. The paper asks, to what extent do Afroexistential norms accommodate second-wave AI? Partly in disagreement with the claim that AI is for everyone, we argue that second-wave artificial intelligence weakly adapts to Afro-existential practices, which is largely communal, emphasizing shared experience. We justify this claim by arguing that Western ethical patterns, which inform the features of the second-wave AI such as statistical patterns, smart algorithm, specialized hardware, and big data sets, emerge from individualist notions. This paper argues that second-wave AI trends do not reflect African norms of existence being factored into ordering algorithmic patterns that set up AI systems and programs. We infer that Afro-existential practices unsettles with the individualist principle which underlines second-wave AI and therefore, a conversation around the development and application of communal interpretation of AI is important.