Talking of Nigerian philosophy is not precisely like talking of Greek philosophy, a body of profound and often abstruse doctrine on reality and its meaning, laboriously, critically and systematically set out by a few theoretical geniuses tapping the heritage of Greek culture. Very few people in the world have done for their culture what those few Greek authors did and they seem in a way to have been world pioneers in their field. This is also to say that their work transcended the common, popular "philosophy" and culture of Greece even if this latter inspired and nourished it. Subsequent philosophers generally have tried only to imitate them. But basically what they did was critically to scrutinize and systematize, by some stroke of their personal genius, the data already available within their culture in facing the ultimate questions of the truth and of the meaning of life and reality. Using the elements of their particular culture, they spoke to problems and reached generalizations on reality in a way that transcended this culture to reach a level that was relevant and valid for the human condition as such.¹

In this book we are not about to discuss the seminal works of some Nigerian Plato or Aristotle or a local equivalent of a philosophical school or movement such as the Stoic or Epicurean philosophy. Also we would like to presume as settled the long debated question of the difference between philosophy and "philosophy". Philosophy in the strict sense of the term is exemplified by, say, the works of Aristotle and Plato. These works are strictly personal, critical, reflective and ultimate, aiming at making comprehensive statements on the true nature of reality.

On the other hand, "philosophy" in the looser and popular meaning would mean, even in the Greece of Aristotle and Plato, the folk wisdom available or discernible in some privileged elements of the contemporary Greek culture. Such elements may take the form of sayings, epigrams, proverbs, witticisms, values, world views, ideas, ideals, ideologies or other pre-philosophical elements of culture. It might include insightful generalizations in explanation of natural and human phenomena or some teaching and pronouncements on human behavior.

Even though these latter are the very stuff of which the formal philosophy is made, the distinction between philosophy and "philosophy" is real and crucial. It is as real and crucial as the difference between Socrates and those who condemned him to drink the potion of hemlock, though they shared with him the same Greek culture and probably had as good a knowledge of every other element of that culture, but were not "lovers of wisdom" in the strict sense of philosophy as was Socrates.

Furthermore, we put every popular form of "philosophy" on a par, making no special case for any particular one, whether it is Greek or German, Indian or Igbo, and we regard it as strictly speaking pre-philosophical, comparable only to other folk "philosophies" native to each of all the cultures of the world.

Assuming therefore that popular culture and its underlying "philosophy" is the privileged pre-philosophical background that nurtures and inspires formal philosophy, it is quite logical to begin the study of Nigerian philosophy by an exploration of African or, more exactly, Nigerian culture. But as soon as one begins to reflect on it one is struck by the curious fact that this subject can hardly be treated on its own and in isolation. Nearly always it is linked and contrasted with other cultures in terms of old and new, primitive and modern, pure and mixed, authentic and alienated. Although it was already subtly at work in the fantastic narratives of explorers, anthropologists and missionaries who caricatured savage natives in order to highlight the difference between "them and us",² the clash between old and new in Africa has been more forcefully and differently celebrated ever since Africans began to tell their own story.³ Here it takes the form of the ideology of Negritude. There its tensions inspire great literature as in "Things Fall Apart" and "Arrow of God". Or it may dictate the canons of literary criticism, deciding what qualifies or not as authentically African in art, literature, philosophy or theology. Most of the time, however, the contrast and clash seems to be pictured in terms of two static opposites.

As a result, African culture especially has not been accurately characterized in the actual dynamic whirl in which it has found itself in the last five centuries. It has generally been pictured as fixed in the past which is conceived as a pretty well defined era of innocence, much as if one could treat English culture by an exclusive focus on the era of Beowulf. This obviously would be an impoverishing abstraction that is as good as a denial of the greater part of the reality of the culture.

The African thinker is a bearer of his past, that is, of the total experience of his culture. Every culture that exists at all today has, of course, its own past. This past, as past, can be more or less faithfully reconstructed as history, thanks to such resources as written documents, archaeological finds and oral literature. Falling back on such tools to reconstruct a culture already passé, to recoup what African ancestors thought or said, their ancient religious beliefs or cosmogony, moral law or worldview is legitimate, desirable, and even necessary. To a certain extent the past has its own intrinsic value and a historian or a cultural anthropologist could research it for its own sake, le passé pour le passé, the past as an object. This should be acceptable, provided the dynamic, open-ended and unfinished nature of such a past culture is kept always in view; provided it is understood that the present is not to be held hostage by such a past as the exclusive norm and paradigm of authenticity; provided the journey back-to-the-past is meant to seek some understanding for the present, or to enable the present to work out the future; provided it is not a nostalgia for the past that merely calls back yesterday.

An historian, an anthropologist, even a novelist can attempt to recapture, reconstruct or imaginatively isolate a section of his past. Even so, hardly could he pretend to himself that in his reconstruction he was making no contemporary and personal contribution in the form of imaginative guesses, as well as the intrusion of his own prejudices, personal experience or peculiar reading of history. An African contemporary philosopher a fortiori is only too much aware of the hermeneutical impossibility of such an objectifying treatment of his past. With no more success than Shylock could be cut off an isolated pound of flesh of his philosophy based on his African past, without spilling in the process an ounce of the Christian, Moslem or, at any rate, modern portion of his blood. Because philosophy is a totalizing labor of reflection where each stage of reflection carries the burden of the philosopher's total experience, the contemporary African philosopher, even while concentrating on the thought of the past, brings along with him his whole load of experience where culture and life meet in creative symbiosis. The tortoise, the wisest of the animals, always carries along his entire house as he moves.

Whereas every statement does not exhaust the philosopher's experience, each statement reflects this experience in its entirety and pretends to have its truth vindicated by this experience in its totality. Thus each reflection shares from the totality and continuity of this experience. Only by way of mere abstraction could this be expunged from reflection in order that this be valid for but a fraction thereof, be it the past or the present alone, be it the pure uncontaminated African culture or the modern, post colonial culture alone. At this stage the philosopher is already contaminated by the culture which he has inherited and to the extent that that culture has been, and continues to be, itself contaminated and influenced by other cultures. All his past and present merge in the single experience which has been his from his first dawn of consciousness. It is too late therefore to treat the past as some object that is distinct, distant and apart. The past is always mine, and in its being mine it involves my present consciousness. One may recreate the past, but real philosophical creativity is perforce in the present, from the totality of the "as is."

It is an act of respect for the facts such as they are today that we have chosen the particular approach adopted for this first study of Nigerian philosophy. In exploring the roots of African philosophy, naturally and appropriately we go to African culture. But here, perhaps a little differently from usual, we have opted for an all-inclusive definition of African culture. Our concept of culture includes not only the way we lived yesterday, but the way we live today; not only the heritage of our ancestors, but also that of our contemporaries. Above all, it emphasizes the meeting of old and new, the impact made on the ancestral heritage by the colonial experience and its tributary forms of culture contact--religion, morality and values. It pays homage to the areas and degrees of assimilation, to continuities already forged or in the process of being forged between the ancient and modern, the native and the foreign.

The contemporary phenomenon of urban agglomerations, more visibly perhaps than anything else, symbolizes and epitomizes this historic meeting of old and new. Here institutions, structures and ideas, old and new, native and foreign, clash and impact each other, modifying, supplanting, eliminating each other. In one melting pot, despite our protests or our preferences and wishes, they continue inexorably to forge into a unity what we were, what we are and what we will be. In this melting pot are contained all the ingredients of any expression of what it means to be authentically, genuinely and realistically African.

The consequences of this meeting of old and new in the modern Nigerian city are discussed in this volume in the contributions of Joseph Asike in his "The City in Modern Nigeria, a Force in Rapid Social Change" and C. B. Okolo in "Urbanization and African Traditional Values". Asike regards the rise of the cities as a major factor in the transformation of contemporary Africa, an agency of change and instrument of modernization. The modern African city mediates and narrows the conflicts between old and new, prevents the dualism or polarization between the traditional and the modern, promotes ethnic and political integration, and thus maximizes the opportunities of interaction.

Okolo for his part, dwells on the deleterious effects of the new reality of urban life on the mores and values of the African. In the dynamics of its influence and that of other accompanying factorseducation, technology, Christianitymany values disappear, others are disrupted, some are reversed, others are transformed and yet new ones are created. The accelerated urbanization is only one aspect of this modernity mostly resulting from the colonial experience.

This experience brought in also other conceptions of power and authority, of social organization, and of law and morality. I. M. Onyeocha's "Formation of Character in Traditional Nigerian Moral Education" and T. Okere's "Religion and Morality, Private or Public?" deal with morality in the tradition (Onyeocha) and in modernity, especially in Christianity (Okere). The latter studies the waning influence of the Christian religion upon public morality in the West and the impotence of a purely private or individualistic morality in the face of the most tragic crimes of modern history perpetrated with impunity and, apparently in good conscience, by anonymous collectivities. He contrasts this with the African concept of social and collective responsibility, corporate sin and guilt, contending that the latter is better suited to found a morality that can more credibly deal with today's mass crimes against humanity.

Nze in "The Influence of Christian Values on Culture" credits Christianity with injecting into African cultures a welcome dose of moral universalism. Nonetheless it is seen as remaining intolerant or even destructive of social values, and, by its overly rationalist approach and massive opposition to traditional religion, sowing the seeds of unbelief.

The question of the identity of the African is broached in I. M. Onyeocha's "Africa: The Question of Identity", where a search for a defining ideology or definitive image remains inconclusive. But the identity of African culture itself such as would give basis and background to African philosophy is discussed in T. Okere's "African Culture: The Past and the Present as an Indivisible Whole", which can be regarded as programmatic for this volume. For the African philosopher African culture is not to be limited to the distant past, but must take in the full diapason of Africa's experience, the totality of its past in the fullness of its present consciousness.

But this book does not only discuss and seek to extend the philosophically acceptable limits and the scope of the concept of culture, much as that corrective emphasis was necessary to help regain a nearly hopelessly abandoned territory. It dedicates a chapter to an inquiry into a privileged cultural source of philosophical activity--the connotation of names in one Nigerian culture. Okere's "What's in a Name? Names as Building Blocks of an African philosophy", explores the rich meaning of statements hidden in Igbo names as they relate to such concepts as God, man, destiny, life, death and values. This, of course, is only a sample of the rich mine of philosophoumena of which one of Africa's cultures is pregnant. Several other topics are equally suggestive philosophically and will no doubt be the subject of future reflection. It should be rewarding for instance to go into more explicit analysis and reflection of such subjects as: the self in society; Chi, the God in man; the concept of man and nature; the basis of authority in an acephalous society; reincarnation and destiny; the interaction between spirit and matter; causality; origins; the nature of spirit; the values implicit in the world of folktales; the notion of sin in and out of the community; the nature of corporate sin; the meaning of modernity; and the limits of cultural pluralism.

But to have mentioned them is to say how much our present effort is essentially a laying of foundations, and only a mere hint of the challenge ahead.

Theophilus Okere

1. Greek philosophy in the strict sense used here would include the doctrines of those authors taught in the schools as such, starting from the so-called pre-Socratics through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans and NeoPlatonists, until it merges into the Hellenism of the early Christian era. Excluded from this classification, despite close affinities, would be the works of Homer and Hesiod, the works of the Greek dramatists, historians, orators and scientists (mathematicians and astronomers), but especially the popular traditions of the generality of Greeks as expressed in their folklore, proverbs, cosmologies and religious conceptions.

2. As an example of the cultural superiority complex of the early missionaries and their typical demonization of African society, consider the following piece from missionary Fred W. Dodds, reporting in The Primitive Methodist Leader in 1917: "In February 1915 for the third time I arrived at Bende to attempt anew the dredging and purifying of that ugly jungle pool of heathenism, with its ooze-life of shocking cruelty, reptilian passions and sprouting evil, spreading itself broad in the shadows amidst the most fruitful land on earth. . . . Thus Christianity views her domain-to-be, lifting herself high above the secret springs of paganism's turgid streams below."--Quoted by Ogbu U. Kalu in African Theology En Route, Kofi Appiah-Kubi & Sergio Torres eds. (New York: Orbis Books Maryknoll, 1979), p. 18.

3. African novelists took an early lead in depicting the culture clash that resulted from the Western incursion into Africa. Cf. C. Achebe in Things Fall Apart and in Arrow of God; T. M. Aluko in One Man One Wife; Nkem Nwankwo in Danda. Culture clash was, of course, the motive force behind the Negritude movement. Obiechina regards culture change as "the all-pervasive theme in the West African novel." Emmanuel Obiechina, Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 263.