Interrogating the Concept of Personhood in African Thought

Beyond the Communitarian Debate

Abstract

Conceptualization of personhood by Menkiti’s (1984) Person and Community in African  Traditional Thought, Gyekye’s (1992) Akan Concept of a Person and Mbiti’s (1970) African Religions and Philosophy has shown that communal intimate belongingness is mostly limited  to a micro community more than the totality of a larger African community. Within the  context of this communal living, they have argued that, an individual owns no personality, and only becomes a person through social and ritual incorporation. For these scholars, personhood has been pictured as a state of life that is acquired “as one participates in communal life through the discharge of the various obligations defined by one’s stations” (Menkiti, 1984 p.176). Personhood they say, is a quality acquired as one gets older. Hence, according to them age is the determinant factor. This paper argues that, this mode of thinking not only ignores the essentials of personhood, namely, self-determination and the rights of the individual but it also, exposes the overbearing mode of the community and scuttles the inherent freedom and primacy of the individual thought and his right to question communal ideas. The youth has a different point of view from that of an older individual, though both are defined by the quality of personhood. African wisdom literature upholds that life in its existential meaning is human fellowship and solidarity among individuals though, the rights of individual persons and freedom of self-expression within the communities are not in doubt. The paper argues the conclusion that, while communal ethos matures the individual in the community, such conclusion does not have ontological and epistemological precedence over individual persons. In his lone level, the individual experiences varying modes of competing epistemologies that activates his moral arsenals to evaluate, protest, distance and effect reform on some features of the community to ingratiate his widely varying needs and interests.