Abstract
Beninois philosopher-politician, Paulin J. Hountondji, born on 11 April 1942 in Treichville, Côte d’Ivoire, is arguably Africa’s most influential philosopher, with an impact that spans Africa’s francophone-anglophone divide. Hountondji stands out as the most consistent and eloquent advocate for the scientific integrity and political efficacy of knowledge production in post-colonial Africa1. Beyond this, he belongs to a rare breed of African academics who have been able to combine their intellectual pursuits with political activism and public service. Schooled at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in the philosophical works of Karl Marx and Edmund Husserl in the early 1960s by Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur (his doctoral supervisor at the University of Paris), Hountondji devoted himself to the contextualisation and application of this European intellectual heritage to the African problematique, and attained the status of one of the most rigorous proponents of African philosophy. He is renowned for his critique of the mode of thought that he seminally isolated as “ethnophilosophy”2 in his seminal 1983 work,3 African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. However, as this essay will demonstrate, Hountondji’s life and mission extend beyond the domain of the discipline of philosophy. His fundamental concern is how research and education in Africa, and on Africa, can be of such quality that it will enable and sustain the structural transformation of social life on the continent. Within his working problematique l’ Afrique, Hountondji posed practical questions such as: “How can the state be transformed . . . How can fear be overcome, and [how can] it be ensured that in this small corner of the globe . . . dictatorship and arbitrary rule become things of the past for ever?”4 . Hountondji is Emeritus Professor at the National University of Bénin, an institution he has been devoted to since 1975. Between 1991 and 1995, he held various government positions of minister of culture and communication, minister of education, and Chargé de Mission du Président de la République in Benin. This experience of a scholar-practitioner informs Hountondji’s life project, expressed in a 2009 lamentation that: Despite all progress . . . we are still a long way from what should be perceived as our final goal: an autonomous, self-reliant process of knowledge production and capitalisation that enables us to answer our own questions and meet both the intellectual and the material needs of African societies.5 Along this vein, Kenyan Professor of African Philosophy, Frederick Ochieng-Odhiambo has examined Hountondji’s work as an archetype of a revolutionary African academic within the tradition of Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramci,6 Hountondji is a crusader for the ontology7 of African intellection as a mode of knowledge that is self-dependent, scientifically rigorous, and emancipated from genitive entanglements with the colonial metropole. The examples of the titles of his research output bears this out: “Scientific Dependence: Its Nature and the Ways to Overcome It”8; and “Knowledge as a Development Issue”9...