Review: Appiah's Humanistic Africanism

Reviewed Work(s): In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture by Kwame

Anthony Appiah
Review by: RICHARD H. KING
Source: The Mississippi Quarterly , Spring 1993, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 267-271
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26475728

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ESSAY-REVIEW

RICHARD H. KING

University of Nottingham

Appiah's Humanistic Africanism

In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, by Kwame Antho
ny Appiah. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 219 pp. +
index, n. p.

When W. E. B. Dubois prefaced The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with the
assertion that the "problem of the twentieth century is the problem of
the color line," he hit upon a formulation which has seemed more power
fully prophetic the longer the century has proceeded. Indeed, at the rate
things are going, it will probably be the problem —or a major one —of
the twenty-first century as well.

Yet part of the achievement of Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My

Father's House is, first, to take DuBois seriously and then challenge his
conception of race and Pan-Africanism, while trying to formulate an
alternative way to talk about the phenomena that "race" and "Africa"
refer to. Born of a Ghanaian father and an English mother, educated
at Cambridge and now teaching at Harvard, conversant in various
modern literatures and in literary theory but also trained in analytic
philosophy in England, Appiah seems ideally situated to address him
self to problems of great moment to intellectuals on at least three con
tinents. He doesn't disappoint. His book combines personal
reminiscences of life in Ghana, extended meditations on Africa and Pan
Africanism, and closely reasoned arguments about race and ethnicity,
literature and philosophy, and religion and science.

The central purpose of In My Father's House is Appiah's desire to

formulate a fresh vision of what unites as well as divides "us" and to

assert Africa's place in what Richard Rorty calls the "conversation of

culture." In short he is aiming at a new form of humanism. Appiah
claims, for instance, that "what the postwar British Africans took from
their time in Europe, therefore, was not a resentment of'white' culture"
(p. 9), in large part because European penetration failed to shatter Afri
can cultures to the extent that it had damaged the heritage of Africans

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brought to North America. Rather, according to Appiah, African in
tellectuals tend to see European culture's experience of modernity as
something to be learned from, not eternally resented or its value de
nied. In other words, historical experience can be transmitted across
cultural boundaries.

Second, Appiah rejects "racialism," which is the belief that various

races manifest particular traits or virtues; "extrinsic racism," which holds
that gross physical differences, e.g. skin color, indicate shared capaci
ties or characteristics, e.g. a sense of rhythm or capacity for self
government; and "intrinsic racism," which believes that races, like fam
ilies, demand loyalty or solidarity, aside from any demonstrable traits.
Thus Appiah rejects any form of Pan-Africanism based on extrinsic or
intrinsic racial grounds, the position he associates with DuBois and most
Pan-Africans. Pan-Africanism's concept of African identity, according
to Appiah, was a reaction against European ideas and thus was tainted
with the racism of nineteenth-century Europe. There is no purely Afri
can commonality of lived experience: "We do not have a common tradi
tional culture, common languages, a common religious or conceptual
vocabulary" (p. 26).

But there would be, for instance, a shared Asante identity, since
there is a common Asante culture and heritage. To identify oneself with
such a group yet to live under institutions originally imposed by the
colonizers does not necessarily deprive someone of his or her identity;
at best, it adds to one's repertory of skills. In DuBois's terms, Appiah's
claim is that we all must realize the "doubleness" of our cultural con

sciousness and negotiate our way among multiple cultural worlds.

Nor does Appiah fall into the trap of thinking every culture must
have what every other culture has in order to count for something. For
historical reasons, philosophy at present just is that discourse whose
origins and development are "Western." But there is no particular rea
son why every other culture must have its own particular philosophy.
Such is the claim of ethno-philosophers who set up "folk philosophy,"
which all cultures do have, as a rival to Western philosophy. To Appi
ah's way of thinking, they simply aren't the same activity. "There is," he
writes, "no possibility of not bringing a Western philosophical training
to bear" (p. 98).

Put in positive terms, Appiah contends that "unless all of us un

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derstand each other, and understand each other as reasonable, we shall
not treat each other with the proper respect" (p. 134). This may sound
anodyne and clichéd; certainly these are hardly words to mount the bar
ricades. But Appiah's hope is earned in the context of a rigorously ar
gued comparison of science and traditional religion. It is important to
understand what Appiah means by reasonable: it is the nurtured propen
sity to learn from experience and beliefs; but more importantly, to be
open to the exchange of reasoned arguments. Such arguments justify
themselves precisely by reasons, not with claims that "this is the way
it's always been done." Indeed, for all their other differences, modern
science and traditional religion both aim at "explanation, prediction
and control" (p. 120). What Appiah proposes, then, is a kind of "transi
tional solidarity" or "humanism" (p. 156), one which is pessimistic but
not without hope.

Thus, if Appiah challenges Pan-Africanism on the issue of race and

racism, he challenges Euro-American postmodernism on the issue of
"humanism," which has come to represent all that which postmodern
ists/poststructuralists reject in the post-Enlightenment world. Rightly
concerned with the destructive force of Western racism and racial domi

nation, recent theorists have come to suspect —and usually reject —any
claim that there are shared human values (or rights or needs or desires).
They reason that such so-called universals have been used to justify the
global hegemony of the West, whether under European or American
aegis, over the rest of the world. Privileging reason privileges those who
define reason as that which describes what they do and believe.

But this rejection of humanism has come at considerable intellec

tual and moral cost. In positing cultural "difference" and "otherness"
as quasi-metaphysical entities, never to be diluted by Western practices
or policies, contemporary theory has become tongue-tied and lacking
any way to talk about what unites rather than what divides individuals
and cultures. Appiah suggests, however, that "we are all already con
taminated by each other . . . there is no longer a fully autochthonous
fc/î^-African culture awaiting salvage by our artists (just as there is, of
course, no American culture without African roots)" (p. 155). More acer
bically, Appiah also observes that "as intellectuals —a category institut
ed in black Africa by colonialism —we are always at risk of becoming
Otherness-machines. It risks becoming our principal role." But, he adds,
"in Africa's cultures, there are those who will not see themselves as Other"
(p. 157).

APPIAH'S HUMANISTIC AFRICANISM 269

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 Finally, Appiah's humanism does not depend on any notion of a
metaphysically shared essence based on Reason, a coherent self, or a
master-narrative of historical progress. These phenomena may or may
not be desirable, but they are to be achieved within history, not assumed
to pre-exist it. Humanism should be, he writes, "provisional, historical
ly contingent, antiessentialist (in other words, postmodern) and still be
demanding. We can surely maintain a powerful engagement with the
concern to avoid cruelty and pain while nevertheless recognizing the
contingency of that concern" (p. 155). In sum, Appiah is gesturing toward
a kind of postmodern humanism which soi-disant postmodern thinkers
have given up on.

There are of course all sorts of implications and caveats to be raised

about Appiah's In My Father's House. For one thing Appiah can be read
to suggest that most forms of the "Great Tradition" vs. "Multiculturism"
debate are a waste of time and shot through with bad faith. Both sides
exemplify what Jürgen Habermas calls a "performative contradiction."
Defenders of a pure Western tradition often do so in the name of open
ness, experimentation and toleration, while advocates of Afro-centric
education usually speak from within the university, a largely Western
institution for the transmission of learning. It is as though both posi
tions really think that intellectual traditions or cultures are different
because of the presence or absence of some atemporal essence.

But, though I am deeply sympathetic with Appiah's position, the

disparities of power at a macro- or micro-level mean that African cul
tures are still more vulnerable to forced penetration from the West than
vice-versa. At times his position can resemble the claim that the rich
and the poor can both enjoy free speech, the former exercised from
their country houses, while the latter can declaim from their cardboard
boxes. What Appiah is trying to combat, I suspect, is the "victimology"
and sheer anti-intellectualism present in much of the discourse about
cultural difference. But there are real differences in power between po
litical blocs and between individuals. More discussion of the ways such
power-disparities create barriers to reasonableness within and between
cultures would have been welcomed.

Appiah's book has been, and should be, compared with Edward
Said's Orientalism (1978). One hopes that it will have as much influence.
But the two works are quite different, though perhaps complementary.
Where Said traces the intellectual-political process by which the Orient

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was constructed by the West, while avoiding much discussion of the real
ities constructed by Orientalism, Appiah writes from within the con
struct "Africa"; or better, with one foot inside and one outside. He wants
to destroy the racialized Africa of the Western Africanists (and of Pan
Africanists) by exposing the variety of forms of life within the conti
nent. In the process, Africans are granted a degree of agency and ac
tivity, of cultural self-determination, which Said seems at times to deny
those living as "Orientals."

Most welcome is Appiah's insistence upon complexity —of analysis

and of remedy. Though "race" and "tribe" must be resisted as fixed en
tities, Pan-Africanism as a developing historical entity can be political
ly creative in some settings, while "self-isolating black nationalism" (p.
180) in Europe or America is a dead-end. Appiah works primarily in
the area of philosophy and literature, and thus his position can and
should be supplemented by much of the valuable work done in politi
cal theory at present. Does his humanism provide the basis for a theory
of human rights? Isn't more than sympathy for the oppressed and the
suffering necessary to give his humanist vision political bite and ap
peal? It should not be impertinent to wonder what Appiah's intellectu
als have to contribute to the fight against the horrors of famine and
AIDS which threaten whole regions of the African continent. Perhaps
no more than intellectuals elsewhere. Still, in such an intellectually
vigorous and personally moving meditation, these problems deserve
some sort of address.

Yet, if one tries to do everything, the result is often nothing in par

ticular. Appiah's In My Father's House deserves the widest hearing and
debate for what it does. Perhaps it marks the opening of a new stage
in the debate about race and culture which will dislodge us from the
rigid positions to which we now seem captive.

APPIAH'S HUMANISTIC AFRICANISM 271

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