This article argues that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) instrumentalised ubuntu to promote forgiveness as a moral obligation for victims of apartheid violence. It argues that the TRC’s ethical framework misrepresented ubuntu by conflating it with amnesty and emotional closure, thus imposing undue pressure on victims to forgive in service of national unity. Drawing on transitional justice theory, the article traces how the TRC positioned restorative justice as a “third way” – a mechanism meant to achieve the goals of both retributive and reparative justice. Through public truth-telling and full disclosure by the perpetrators, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34 of 1995 (PNURA) sought to validate the victims’ suffering while ensuring a form of moral accountability. However, in practice, truth-telling was framed as a substitute for accountability, and reconciliation was treated as contingent on the victims’ willingness to forgive. The article contends that this framework not only marginalised those unwilling to forgive but also transformed personal trauma into a political tool, thereby reinforcing state narratives of unity at the expense of the victims’ autonomy. Through a critical reading of ubuntu – particularly as interpreted by the philosopher Mogobe Ramose – the article shows that genuine ubuntu is not reducible to forgiveness, but rather grounded in accountability, restitution, and relational integrity. It concludes that the TRC’s approach betrayed the very ethical principles it claimed to uphold, undermining both justice and reconciliation. Instead of fostering healing, the TRC’s demand for state-mediated forgiveness risked retraumatising victims and distorting ubuntu into an instrument of political expediency rather than a meaningful path to communal restoration.

This article focuses on academic endeavours which philosophise in Wolof, from Cheikh Anta Diop to Souleymane Bachir Diagne. For each example, it offers a contextualised analysis, revealing elements of personal biographies and historico-political context. It makes these contexts and debates intelligible for a non-Wolophone readership beyond Senegal. The article discusses the Wolof notions proposed for concepts such as philosophy, epistemology, knowledge, and thinking. The examples show that questions of translation and multilingualism are always directly linked to the definition of philosophy. By highlighting the (dis)continuities of philosophical terminology, the article sheds light on the implications of translating philosophical concepts and texts into Wolof or choosing selected Wolof terms for a philosophical contribution. Therefore, the article provides a template for questioning philosophical translations into and from African indigenous languages.

The opinions expressed here are in his personal and private capacity and not linked to the above-mentioned tertiary institutions. This article appeared earlier in the Mail & Guardian (Thought Leader), 29 April-5 May 2022. Permission was kindly granted by the M&G to republish the article.

In this article, I draw attention to the value of community in John Mbiti’s philosophy using his famous axiom by reconciling the tension between the individual and community his philosophy envisages. To do this, I offer a reconstruction of Mbiti’s communitarian axiom: “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” Mbiti is considered one of the forerunners of the communitarian debate in African philosophy. His axiom, which describes his idea of Afro-communitarianism, accounts for the importance of individual and community in thinking about social existence in African thought. However, Mbiti’s argument for the direct influence of the community in the formation of the individual is taken to mean the supremacy of the community over the individual. Mbiti’s concept of community has implications for the idea of personhood in that it raises the question of individual agency. This has affected the reception of Mbiti’s contribution to the idea of community in African political thought. While Mbiti’s contributions to Afro-communitarianism transcend the discourse of personhood, I argue that maximising the potential of his idea requires reconstruction and a critical analysis of his axiom. In doing that, I demonstrate that a possible relationship exists between the “I” and “we” in his axiom that represents a harmony between the community and individual and does not suggest a primacy of either but the significance of community. This analysis will enable fair engagement with Mbiti’s conception of community.

We live in a time of major events in civilisational history, currently centred on the so-called Covid-19 “pandemic.” In this global context, contemporary people are at the mercy, largely, of powerful media companies that disseminate officially sanctioned news and opinion pieces about all aspects pertaining to the “pandemic.” The very same thing that makes this mainstream media hegemony possible, however, namely the Internet, also allows alternative news sources to circulate censored news and critical opinion so that one witnesses an information and communication-divide on a scale never seen before in history. This paper sets out to reconstruct this information and communication chasm with reference to representative instances of each of the adversarial sides in what may be called a “war of information” and attempts to make this intelligible by interpreting these mainly through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida, supplemented by a coda enlisting Jürgen Habermas’s work on communication. While the latter does foresee the possibility of authentic communication (“communicative action”) despite the constant spectre of miscommunication (“strategic action”), Derrida is less optimistic about this. Instead, taking his cue from Joyce’s Ulysses, he insists that the very means of “reaching” the other in the act of communicating are also, ineluctably, the means for failing to reach them, and that “receiving” a message from someone can thus either result in a mechanical repetition of the message, or a paradoxical “repeating differently.” Moreover, elsewhere he indicates the paradoxical implications of a change of “context” as far as an utterance is concerned. This difference between these two thinkers allows one to get an intellectual grip on the situation unfolding in the world in 2021–2022; a world of ubiquitous information exchanges, implicitly claiming to be communicational exchanges. More specifically, Derrida and Habermas equip one with the communication-theoretical means to ascertain what this plethora of information exchanges amounts to.

African philosophy, at least the modern modality of its practice, is said to have been initiated by the overwhelming question concerning its existence: Is there an African philosophy? No doubt such radical questioning concerning “knowledges” from Africa is determined by an overarching, indeed imperial, definition of what is understood to be “philosophy”; in other words, this question sought to determine whether those knowledges from Africa fit the category of what is known to be “philosophy” in the Western world. In this paper, I deal with the historical question pertaining to the existence of an African philosophy and the present reiterations of this question. I begin in the first section with an interrogation of such questioning concerning doubt about African philosophy’s existence: 1) to subvert the question and thereby undermine the basis of its questioning; 2) to examine the underlying structures of coloniality in Western philosophy and its colonising effects—showing how such a question is rooted in doubt, ignorance and power as functionaries of the European epistemological paradigm facilitating epistemological dominance; and 3) to use such questioning as a basis from which to develop an account of what African philosophy is.

A discursive canon around transhumanism and posthumanism as beliefs in the efficacy and necessity of technology as the beneficial transformer of human life “for the better” is well-established in the Western philosophical tradition. However, none of the theorists and protagonists of this technological reconfiguration of humanity could ever have predicted that what they envisaged would be propelled into manifestation with as dramatic and phenomenal momentum such as has been ushered in by the mainly technology-driven interventions introduced in various measures globally to curb the SARS-CoV2 virus. The effect of these responses to the pandemic, it is here demonstrated, have set humanity into a technogenesis, a transformative ontological process headed towards a machinistic and de-anthropic life idealised by posthumanists. Apropos, a set of three intertwined tasks are here executed. Firstly, I explicate my foregoing claim, namely, how at the helm of the variety of measures to control Covid-19 is a discernible socio-scientific movement that is directed at inaugurating and regularising a posthumanist consciousness and de-anthropic modes of sociality. Secondly, I venture a critical understanding of “the Covid-19 moment” that exposes the quadripartite alliance of a postmodernist Western philosophy, technoscience, commercial interests, and politics as the systemic drivers of this technocratic philosophical anthropology. Thirdly, or rather concurrently, taking the work of Nick Bostrom as the theoretical heuristic advocating human technological transformation, I normatively alert of the ramifications of this emerging human ontology.

In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, where death, sickness and suffering persist, there is some hint that there is nothing so special about the human race that particularly makes it immune to decimation. This is at odds with the general feeling that there is something significant, purposeful and/or meaningful about human life. Thus, the question that immediately comes to mind is whether the present pandemic and the negative situations it presents, destroy any hope of attaining meaning in life. In this article, we critically examine how the Covid-19 pandemic affects meaning in life. While it is not far-fetched to assume that the pandemic, suffering, isolation, economic hardship, and so forth disrupt humanity’s abilities at creating moments of meaning in life, it is our claim that it does not destroy it altogether, as many persons have found new ways of creating such moments, albeit small, through self-sacrifice/care, solidarity, and more. Finally, we conclude that in the face of this tragedy, what humanity can best hope for is the continuous creation of moments of meaning in life in order to reduce despair and sustain hope, however small. We expect that this article will foster future discussions about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the question of meaningfulness.

I examine colour-branding of humans, a phenomenon I denounce as leading to a dangerous “politic.” My lead questions shall be: Is it correct to profile or brand different peoples with colours? Do the symbolic meanings of different colours correctly describe the attributes and attitudes of peoples they are used to categorise? I argue that the mainstay colour descriptions of peoples amount to contradictions. The contradiction arises if we take into consideration the symbolic meanings of such colours on the one hand, and the human attributes on the other hand. A positive way of reading the colour-branding of peoples would be to suggest that colours are used to denote racial variety and not racial hierarchy. This suggestion is arguably a strong point, but when we take the semantics of colour and the events of history seriously, we might understand that racial subjugation is the inspiration behind colour-branding. I label the preceding “colour politic” and discuss it as the last frontier of racism.

Plato constructs the philosopher in contrast to the sophist. Both sophistical and rhetorical logos, in their epistemic closeness to philosophical logos, require a constant act of demarcation throughout Plato’s works. The challenge posed by the sophists creates a constant, instable tension in several Platonic dialogues. Why is the Athenian philosopher obsessed by a different yet comparable approach to virtue, knowledge and social order? Why does the Athenian philosopher need and, at the same time, reject the sophist when it comes to shaping his own self-image? To try to answer these questions, I will go back to a foundational moment where the Platonic philosopher is theoretically constructed and conceptually produced against the sophist, namely, Plato’s Sophist, Statesman, Protagoras, Gorgias and Phaedrus. The aim of the article is to show how the Platonic philosopher is conveniently defined through a series of partisan demarcations grounded on ontological privilege, epistemic exclusion, ethical circularity and, ultimately, political delegitimation.