Philosopher
Henry Odera Oruka
1944–1995
Also known as Odera Oruka, H. Odera Oruka
Kenyan philosopher whose Sage Philosophy project interviewed wise men and women in rural Kenya to show that critical, individual philosophical reflection has always existed in Africa.
Henry Odera Oruka grew up among respected elders in Ugenya, in Kenya’s Nyanza Province, and went to Sweden on a scholarship to study geography at Uppsala, where the philosopher Ingemar Hedenius drew him to philosophy. Trained there and at Wayne State University in Detroit in a strongly analytic, empiricist tradition, he returned to Kenya in 1970 as one of the first two African philosophy lecturers at the University of Nairobi.
In the mid-1970s he began the Sage Philosophy Project, interviewing sages, mostly elderly and unlettered but not only so, about questions such as the nature of God, the person, freedom, equality, death and the afterlife, and named it the most promising of four trends in African philosophy. His Sage Philosophy (1990) collected the dialogues, and in 1992 he extended the project to a book on the Kenyan politician Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. He believed that sages could voice a fearless moral criticism of Kenyan society, troubled by poverty, corruption and the curtailment of liberties. He died in 1995.
Key ideas
- Philosophic sagacity
- Some people recognised as wise in African communities do not merely repeat tradition but examine it, giving reasons for their views and sometimes rejecting what their communities believe. Interviewing them, and engaging with what they say, recovers a body of African philosophy that was never written down.
- Philosophy with philosophers
- Placide Tempels, John Mbiti and others had presented African thought as the anonymous consensus of whole peoples, “philosophy without philosophers”. Oruka insisted on naming individual thinkers: people are shaped by their community but not determined by it.
- Folk sages and philosophic sages
- Oruka distinguished folk sages, who can recount their community’s beliefs, from philosophic sages, who take a critical, evaluative stance towards them, much as philosophy distinguishes first-order from second-order thinking. Critics have argued that the line was drawn too narrowly.
- Against mythology as philosophy
- In his early essays Oruka attacked much of what passed for African philosophy as dressed-up mythology, and called for traditions harmful to Africa’s future to be set aside; he later judged those essays simplistic and needlessly offensive.
- Tradition
- African
- Region
- Nairobi, Kenya
- Period
- Critical reconstruction
Influences
Where these links come from
- Henry Odera Oruka drew on Frantz Fanon. Source: Gail M. Presbey, African Sage Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Henry Odera Oruka drew on Paulin Hountondji. Source: Gail M. Presbey, African Sage Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Key works
- Mythologies as African Philosophy, 1972
- Sage Philosophy: Indigenous Thinkers and Modern Debate on African Philosophy, 1990
Sources
- Gail M. Presbey, African Sage Philosophy, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Dismas Masolo, African Sage Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy