EXPRESSIONS OF TRADITIONAL WISDOM
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
Brussels,
Thursday 27 – Friday 28 SEPTEMBER 2007

The Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences,
in collaboration with
the Royal Museum for Central Africa and the Royal Museums of Art and History,
is organizing an international symposium devoted to
“Expressions of Traditional Wisdom” of cultures from “overseas”, i.e., Africa, Asia, Oceania and
the Americas including the ancient civilizations of these continents.

proposed keynote address:

‘African wisdom today: Appropriative reification or global resource?’

Wim van Binsbergen (binsbergen@ascleiden.nl)

the speaker is Professor of Intercultural Philosophy at the Philosophical Faculty, Erasmus University, and Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden, where his research around the theme ‘Connections in African knowledge’ is part of the ‘Theme Group on Connections and Transformations’

Africa has been invented, and for a purpose (Mudimbe).

A common feature of the North Atlantic region since the Enlightenment has been the tendency to construct its own identity (however multifarious and shifting throughout these two centuries) by contrast with carefully constructed and selected images of ‘Africa’ – of societies and cultures in the African continent south of the Sahara. Hegel’s historical dialectics sought, and found, a negation in Africans, upon whom such images of childishness and non-historicity were projected as ensured (at least, in the eyes of North Atlantic intellectual elites) the banishment from the realm of history, of this sizeable section of humanity until as late as the middle of the 20th century (Trevor-Roper). In the field of religion, it was images of African superstition, witchcraft and slavery against the shining light of the Christian faith. The latter came to engage in competition with Islam for the conversion of Africans. In Africa, North Atlantic religion brought in its wake new forms of education and medical care, it often was the harbinger of the colonial state and of capitalist relations of production – and these were all fields in which the North Atlantic exploited, to the full, the contrastive, northern-identity-boosting potential of Africa and Africans.

Yet already from the 19th century, the researches of selected missionaries and anthropologists and the personal experiences and testimonies of selected people from the North Atlantic outside these professional groups (and from North Atlantic enclaves in Africa), began to produce very different images: images of Africa as a fount of a wisdom that was manifestly capable of producing coherent, meaningful and beautiful socio-cultural ensembles on African soil, – a wisdom that might even be hoped to be relevant and redeeming for the increasingly conflict-ridden, disorientated and secularised North Atlantic region itself.

Meanwhile the end (already half a century ago) of colonialism – with all the vicissitudes of sub-Saharan African states and economies ever since – ; the socio-cultural and political emancipation of some of the most conspicuous and oppressed (but also most westernised) African and Africa-derived populations in South Africa and the New World; massive migrations from Africa to northern continents (with African forms of spirituality in their wake); globalisation on the wings of ICT, leading to new and low-threshold (albeit inevitably distorting) forms of representation and circulation of African wisdom; the effective incorporation of science, technology and formal organisation structures in African life today; the systematic reflection on indigenous knowledge and its ownership; and above all the manifest failure of the North Atlantic region to solve its huge problems with North Atlantic means (problems such as conflict, violence, the environment, meaning, legitimation, intergeneration relations, diversity and the absence of consensus, and the ensuring traumas)– these have been some of the developments in recent decades that make us pose the question of African wisdom from a rather different perspective today.

My forty years of Africanist research started out with the appropriative fascination of the young professional insisting on method, control and initiative in his contact with Africans. It was no doubt African wisdom that led me, rather soon, to a point where I could give up this condescending North Atlantic attitude of distant objectification. Instead I was allowed to enter a situation where I could afford to let go the initiative and where I learned my way about in the diversity of African languages, the communities, the customs and representations, and especially the spiritualities that were so generously extended to me. Seventeen years ago I made the step (like quite a few other Northerners over the years, of course) from being a specialist observer of African religions, to the status of diviner-priest-healer in the Southern African tradition. I then felt I had validly appropriated African wisdom, not for its circulation value in the context of my North Atlantic academic career, but for the intrinsic value it constituted in its own right: in its original context in the first place, but also, beyond that context, for the world at large. Since that time I have been a vocal representative of African spiritualities, therapies and of (moderate and non-dogmatic) Afrocentrist ideas – in the North Atlantic, in Africa, and (via the Internet) on a global scale.

However, what was the significance of such a step? Was it not just an epistemological mid-life crisis? Or another, deceptively sympathetic and affirming, phase in the transformative appropriation of African achievements, now even of a domain that so far had resisted Northern penetration fairly effectively. Was I not the credulous victim of the commoditization (by my African teachers, in the first place) and global circulation of an African form which, in order to be and to remain ‘the real thing’, had to remain safely out of Northern hands? Was I not the naïve victim of an anthropological illusion – the one that posited that, by going through the motions of another culture, one would share the experiences of the locals, even though one brought a fundamentally different cultural upbringing to every local event; and even though in the last analysis one was supposed (as an anthropologist) not to live a different culture, but merely to represent it in text, before an alien and distant audience? How much counter-difference violence was invested, anyway, in my attempt to resolve my longing for the African otherness through a movement of trying to become the other  and to thus benefit from her wisdom? In 1998, I was in the lucky circumstance to be able to trade my chair in anthropology for one in intercultural philosophy, which somewhat facilitated my and my students’ systematic and intersubjective reflection on these points. And I am writing out these awkward questions, not to make my own life difficult and my own intellectual stance impossible, but because I am convinced that they are eminently relevant in any debate on ‘African wisdom’ in the global context today.

In the body of my keynote address I will present, reticently, some of the answers to these questions – the disparate and provisional results of nearly two decades of intercultural manoeuvring. I will simply observe that I have indeed incorporated a considerable amount of African wisdom into my personal life and (with the assistance and loyalty of the members of my family) into our family life. I will stress that that incorporation is selective and situational, sometimes capable of dealing with the great challenges of life wherever and whenever, and often less so. I will dwell on the logic of reconciliation, the negotiation of boundaries, and the spiritual and therapeutic cultivation of sociability, as some of the salient contexts in which such incorporation of African wisdom may be effected. I will explore how an African spirituality can be combined with the kind of detached rationality that is, rightly, expected to be implied in my qualities as an empirical researcher, a philosopher, and a professor. And I hope to demonstrate that such a negotiation cannot be based on African wisdom alone, but requires some sort of global poetics of African wisdom, whose logic is not the standard Aristotelian one of the excluded third – hence ‘poetics’.

Having taken my own situation as some sort of laboratory for the exploration of the global challenges and applicabilities of African wisdom today, I will then conclude by probing into the possibilities for rendering this ultra personal account less solipsistic, and formulating some of the conditions under which African wisdom may be recognised, also by opthers then myself and my Afrocentrist heroes, as a global resource – without allowing that kAfrican knowledge to be appropriated, bowdlerised and transformed beyond recognition, in the process.

Mudimbe, V.Y., 1988, The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press/London: Currey

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2003, Intercultural encounters: African and anthropological towards a philosophy of interculturality, Berlin/Boston/Muenster: LIT (610 pp.); see: http://www.shikanda.net/intercultural_encounters/index.htm

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2004 ‘African spirituality: An approach from intercultural philosophy’, in: Polylog: Journal for Intercultural Philosophy, 2003, 4. Also spanish version: ‘Espiritualidad africana: Un enfoque desde la philosophia intercultural’; at: http://them.polylog.org/4/fbw-en.htm

van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 2005, ‘ ‘‘An incomprehensible miracle’’ -- Central African clerical intellectualism versus African historic religion: A close reading of Valentin Mudimbe’s Tales of Faith’, in: Kai Kresse, ed., Reading Mudimbe, special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies, 17, 1, June 2005: 11-65; also at: http://www.shikanda.net/african_religion/mudil0.htm

and in general the very extensive website: http://www.shikanda.net