Social Philosophy in Postcolonial Africa: Some Preliminaries Concerning Communalism and Communitarianism

Abstract

There is one thing about some of the first crop of post independence rulers of Africa that I admire greatly. It is their keen sense of the practical importance of philosophy.
Preeminent among them were leaders like Nkrumah, Senghor, Nyerere, Awolowo, Kaunda, and Sekou Toure. Amidst the awesome exigencies of postcolonial reconstruction they still devoted considerable attention to the philosophical bases of their programs. It can be debated whether the limits of the appreciation of the relevance of theory to practice were not touched in Nkrumah's Consciencism in which proof of the consistency of his “revolutionary” propositions was offered by means of mathematical logic, but there can be no doubt of the sincerity of the underlying passion.

South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 27 (4) 2008: pp. 332-339