and generative. Africans have even articulated
this with “it takes a village to raise a child” as if
to imply that the meaning of a person is deriva-
tive from the community.
Some may say that, as far as Africans are con-
cerned, the reality of the communal world takes
precedence over the reality of individual life histo-
ries, whatever these may be. From the supposed
primacy of the reality of the community, one can
say that (a) in the African view it is the community
which defines the person as person, not some iso-
lated static quality of rationality, will, or memory;
(b) the African view supports the notion of person-
hood as something acquired; and (c) it is possible
for personhood to fail or, rather, that someone
cannot gain personhood ever. The position of
Kwame Gyekye, the philosopher, on this point is
that these premises might need to be reexamined.
There is a view that the social conception of the
African social order is communal through and
through, and therefore one denies the notion of
individuality in African thought. Historically, this
was the idea promoted by Kwame Nkrumah,
Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, and others who
argued for a relationship between African social-
ism and African communalism in the spirit of the
socialist movement of the Cold War.
Thus, Nkrumah observed that if one sought the
sociopolitical ancestor of socialism, one could find
it in African communalism. In socialism, the prin-
ciples underlying communalism are given expres-
sion in modern circumstances. Senghor believed
that African society was collectivist or, more
exactly, communal because it was rather a commu-
nion of souls than an aggregate of individuals.
These ideas led to the belief that African social
order was communal in the traditional situation.
Indeed, this would mean, if it were true, that the
direct path to socialism was natural. In the period
of the persistent and unrelenting quest for social-
ism, the status of the individual person in the eyes
of the world was simply communal. In fact, per-
haps only Senghor spoke a little about the individ-
ual in ways that differed from the general trend.
The idea that the individual is, in Europe, the man
who distinguishes himself from the others and
claims his autonomy to affirm himself in his basic
originality is a different idea from the African con-
ception. The member of the community society (by
which one means African) also claims autonomy
to affirm self as a being. But one feels and thinks
that human potential can only be fully expressed in
union with other humans. This is the African ideal
in many discourses. Nevertheless, the idea of the
individual is not carried through in the writings of
most African intellectuals, and this may be a
minority view.
Thus, many interpretations of the metaphysic
of the person and the status of the individual per-
son in the African social order grant primacy to
the community vis-à-vis the individual person:
Metaphysically, the reality of the person is held
as secondary to the reality of the community;
socially, the individual is held as less significant, or
rather his status has been diminished, whereas
that of the community is augmented and made
more prominent.Ontology
We have learned enough from philosophers such
as Maulana Karenga, Kofi Asare Opoku, and oth-
ers that the traditional African philosophers and
thinkers often spoke in proverbs, so we do not
need to make an argument for that here. One
understands that the world of social, political, and
ethical ideas was a world of folktales, proverbs,
and wise sayings. It is possible that the fragments
that come to us from the times of the ancestors
might be used to understand how they understood
human communication. One can reconstruct
African thought by using these wisdom fragments.
Consider the wisdom fragment “All persons are
children of God; no one is a child of the earth”
(nnipa nyinaa ye Onyame mma; obiara nnya asase
ba). It can be inferred from this fragment that a
person is conceived in Akan thought as a theo-
morphic being, having in his or her nature an
aspect of divinity. This is what the Akan people
callokra, soul, described as divine and as having
an antemundane existence with divinity. The okra
is held as constituting the innermost self, the
essence of the individual person. A human person
is thus metaphysically conceived as more than just
a material or physical object. As a child of divin-
ity, a person must be held as intrinsically valuable.
As an end in him- or herself, and, therefore, as
self-complete, this makes it strange, in the Akan
sense, to speak of the community conferring per-
sonhood (or selfhood) on a person.522 Personhood