Abstract
The concept of ancestors is a theme in the African philosophical literature that is either brushed aside as magic or religion (Chimakonam, 2019: 45-46); or reduced to something sublime and evil (Tagwirei, 2017:23). In my research essay, I provide a hermeneutical analysis of the work of three of the most prominent contemporary theorists in the field in order to extract their position regarding the role of ancestors in African thought. I analyse the works of Kwame Gyekye, Kwasi Wiredu and Thaddeus Metz, to demonstrate how all three theorists either directly or indirectly reject the supernaturalist approach to African thought, and so relegate the concept of ancestors to the inconsequential in African metaphysics. I then draw on the work of Motsamai Molefe (2015) in order to develop an argument for a supernaturalist approach that acknowledges the important role that the ancestors play in African relational ontology. I will illustrate how all these thinkers take a fundamentally humanistic approach to their views on morality, consequently limiting and reducing the role of ancestors to something less significant than African reality. I conclude that their theories makes use of Western principles to come to their respective conclusions. By reducing the role of ancestors to something religious and choosing to ground African moral theory in a Western concept such as humanism, these thinkers unwittingly perpetuate the negative perception of African thought as well as maintaining the reductive view of the role that ancestors play in African relational ontology.