Jéan-Paul Sartre and the Agenda of an Africanist Philosophy of Liberation

Abstract

This chapter is a proposition of a philosophy of liberation that is rooted in Africa’s existential realities. It contends that when philosophical practice in Africa becomes authentically contextual, it will discover that the most critical challenge of postcolonial African life is an imperative for an authentic African identity. In demonstrating this fact, Sartre’s existentialist phenomenological account of selfhood as rooted in radical freedom within a social consciousness that is alert to a Marxian view of the human subject in history, is posited as a theoretical framework that simultaneously delineates and guides the discharge of this imperative. We argue that his praxis of anticolonial activism for the African cause, as well as his postulations on transformative humanism allow for an appropriation into the African context of the corpus of Latin American philosophers of liberation as represented by Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation ([1973]1985). The radical nature of the proposed intervention emerging out of this appropriation leads us to a key proposition of an Africanist paradigm, which is a qualitative emphasis on a philosophical praxis that is deliberately for the cause of Africa’s freedom, as opposed to merely being in Africa.