COMMUNITARIANISM IN AFRICAN THOUGHT.

This essay explores representative Africanist thought on personhood and community, highlighting especially the debate between Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye on communitarianism, defined generally as relating to social organization in small, cooperative, partially collectivist communities. The general debate on these issues in Africa can be traced to important studies of personhood and psychology in African life and thought championed by French ethnologists and British and American social anthropologists as well as African scholars in different fields. The groundbreaking work, La notion de personne en Afrique noire, edited by Germaine Dieterlen (1973), which grew out of the French ethnological tradition, inaugurated a vigorous debate on personhood that has bearing on questions of individualism and communitarianism. In his insightful 1986 essay, "The Person and the Life Cycle in African Social Life and Thought," Paul Riesman explored Africanist literature relevant to personhood, individuality, and community. Riesman argued that the Marcel Griaule school developed interest in personhood and community and that scholars such as Griaule and Dieterlen underscored concepts of individuality and community. In British social anthropology, Meyer Fortes grounded his studies of personhood in customs, behavior, and personality. Other scholars focused on the powers of a person's obligations and social roles as well as on conflicts, legal systems, and individual responsibility.

The 1987 Uppsala symposium "African Folk Models and Their Application" also addressed personhood and personal experiences. Introducing the book published after this conference, Ivan Karp argued: "Quite simply, persons sometimes experience themselves in a human way, sometimes in a Lockean way, and sometimes, as in the case of positivist social scientists, as Kantian transcendentalists. However, these modalities of experience should not be reified and then debated as competing epistemologies. Rather they should be seen as descriptive of the varying ways human beings experience the world according to widely varying needs and interests" (Jackson and Karp, p. 17). Victor Turner's studies also called attention to individuality. Jean Comaroff argued that there was widespread conception of an "essence" of the person, whose soul was not a privatized interiority but a being-in-the-world. Ellen Corin argued that societies do not always overshadow individuals because certain modalities allowed an individual to particularize to defend himself or herself from "'collectivizing' pressure of the clanic image" (p. 146). Michael Jackson also highlighted individuality in the phenomenological approaches, and V. Y. Mudimbe approached the subject from the viewpoint of inequality of power.

Since 1950 the Africanists Elinore Bowen, Mary Smith, Sarah LeVine, and Marjorie Shostak have articulated person-hood, individuality, self-consciousness, and self-identity in community. Philosophers Ifeanyi Menkiti of Nigeria and Kwame Gyekye of Ghana have brought the debate into sharp relief by articulating positions on individualism and communitarianism. Menkiti has articulated a communitarian ethos, while Gyekye has defended a balanced perspective, which he calls moderate communitarianism. Gyekye has pointed out that the debate on individualism and the community in Africa affects the way people think of philosophical and moral issues. Philosophically, the debate probes whether an individual stands on his or her own and does not depend on the community or the individual is naturally embedded in social relations and a community. The moral concerns explore whether individual rights are primary and cannot be violated for any reason or people should instead pursue the common good.

Menkiti on Communitarianism

In "Person and Community in African Traditional Thought" (1984), Menkiti argued that, in Africa, the community had priority over the individual. He distinguished between Western views, which generally hold that a person is a lone individual, and African views, in which a person is defined "by reference to the environing community," quoting John Mbiti's statement, "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am," to support his thesis (p. 171). According to Menkiti, "as far as Africans are concerned, the reality of the communal world takes precedence over the reality of individual life histories" (p. 171). Thus the communal ethos has ontological and epistemological precedence. Menkiti also defended the communitarian view on biological and social grounds because the individual comes from a common gene pool and belongs to a linguistic community: "Just as the navel points men to umbilical linkage with generations preceding them, so also does language and its associated social rules point them to a mental commonwealth with others whose life histories encompass the past, present, and future" (p. 172). Menkiti stated emphatically that personhood is defined by community and not by qualities such as rationality, will, or memory.

Menkiti underscored his views of personhood by affirming a processual, or procedural, mode of being in African thought in which an individual becomes a person through social and ritual incorporation. Menkiti conflates the facticity of personhood with quality. He does this by distinguishing between muntu mutupu (a man of middling importance) and muntu mukulumpe (a powerful man, a man with a great deal of force). It is not clear why both persons cannot hold the status of "person," even though one is "middling" and the other is already great. Menkiti rejects the Western minimalist definition of a person, "whoever has a soul, or rationality, or will, or memory; the African view is 'maximal'." Menkiti uses the word maximal to indicate that the African view of personhood includes other criteria and is not limited to soul, rationality, or will. Since personhood is achieved, not endowed, in Africa, one could fail at achieving it. There are rules governing social rituals of incorporation that are designed to help the individual attain selfhood. The older an individual becomes, the more of a person that individual becomes. Menkiti quoted an Igbo proverb, "What an old man sees sitting down, a young man cannot see standing up," to support his claim that personhood is a quality acquired as one gets older. While this proverb hints at differences of perspective between older and younger individuals, it is not implicit that personhood is an acquired quality. Opponents might agree with Menkiti that a youth has a different point of view from that of an older individual but might also affirm, in contrast with Menkiti's views, that both are persons.

Menkiti defended the communitarian ethos by arguing that people use the neuter pronoun it to refer to a child rather than the personal pronouns him or her because the child has not yet attained personhood. He also stated that when a child dies, the funeral ceremonies are brief. However, when an older person dies, elaborate funeral celebrations take place because the older individual has achieved personhood and has now become an ancestor who lives among the people. In general, when one dies, he or she ceases to be a person. At the beginning of life, an individual who has no name will work toward personhood, and at the end of life, that individual loses personhood because he or she has departed for the next world. The departed ones may be referred to with the neuter pronoun it because their contact with the human community has been severed.

Thus it is clear that people at both ends of life are not persons because the young have yet to attain personhood while the dead have completed their development. "It is the carrying out … [of] obligations that transforms one from the "it"-status of early childhood, marked by an absence of moral function, into the person-status of later years, marked by a widened maturity of ethical sense—an ethical maturity without which personhood is conceived as eluding one" (Menkiti, p. 176). Meyer Fortes also argued that, among the Tallensi, "No one can be certainly known to have been a full human person until he is shown, at the time of his death, to have been slain by his ancestors and therefore to deserve a proper funeral" (1987, p. 257).

But Menkiti's view that brief mourning periods indicate the degree of personhood of the deceased is contested. Elias Bongmba has argued that funeral rites of children among the Wimbum are brief and sad for reasons that do not reflect a child's status as a person but because the Wimbum people mourn the fact that the young person has not lived life fully. They take personhood for granted but consider the death of a young person rkwi bipsi shu, meaning "death that has spoiled the mouth." This means that the death of a young person shocks and numbs the appetite for food or drink, which people consume when an elderly person dies (Bongmba).

Menkiti cited John Rawls, who argued that justice is owed a moral personality, "a potentiality that is ordinarily realized in due course," to support his claims that individuals acquire personhood as they carry out their obligations (Rawls, pp. 505–506). However, one could argue that Rawls emphasized moral potential and not personality. Whereas for Menkiti personhood is acquired when one develops and carries out moral acts, Rawls's position is that an individual who is already a person has the potential of becoming a moral person. Menkiti rejected Jean-Paul Sartre's definition of individualism because it stipulated unconditioned freedom and choice, which Sartre assumed was available to all. The African view is that such an idea of freedom is wrong because it ignores the community, which plays an important role in the life of the individual. According to the Africanist view, Sartre was wrong to place children and adults on the same level of choice. Finally, Menkiti rejected Western views that the community is a collectivity of self-interested individuals. This makes the community an aggregation of separate individuals. In Mbiti's phrase "I am because we are," the "we" is not additive "but a thoroughly fused collective we" (Menkiti, p. 179). African societies thus emphasize duty, while Western societies emphasize rights.

Gyekye on Moderate Communitarianism

Gyekye has argued that Menkiti overstated claims and that his views are misleading. Other factors, such as rationality, virtue, evaluation of moral judgments, and choice are important in determining personhood in Africa. People are born into community and have an orientation toward others. The Akan proverb, "A person is not a palm tree to survive alone," summarizes human interdependence. Individual capacities, talents, dispositions, goals, and needs are met in interaction with others in society. Gyekye has also argued that it is a mistake to conclude that there are no individual dimensions to personhood in Africa. He cites another Akan proverb in which the view that individuals exist prior to community is implicit: "One tree does not make a forest." "Community existentially derives from the individual and the relationships that would exist between them" (Gyekye, p. 38). Thus the reality of the community is derivative, not primary, and individuals choose whether they want to belong to a community or not. The community allows an individual to actualize his or her potential and develop personality in the social world without destroying his or her own will.

Gyekye quoted another Akan proverb to support his views of individuality. "A clan is like a cluster of trees which, when seen from afar, appear huddled together, but which would seem to stand individually when closely approached." Two other Akan proverbs underscore individuality: "One does not fan [the hot food] that another may eat," and "The lizard does not eat pepper for the frog to sweat." Individuals have particular attributes, which they often exercise in contrast to the community. In opposition to Menkiti's position that one earns personhood, Gyekye has argued that the term person is ambiguous. For example, what is implied in the expression onye onipa —"He is not a person"—is that the person does not display the norms of human behavior such as kindness, generosity, compassion, benevolence, and respect for other people. The Akan also say of someone, "He is a person," meaning the person fulfills his or her obligations. Personhood also involves responsible action that leads to success.

Exercising one's potential cannot be seen as the process of becoming a person in the sense in which Menkiti describes it. Individuals have a rational, moral sense and a capacity for virtue and judgment that the community nurtures. Individuals can also question what they do not agree with. Individuals are self-directing and self-determining and for that reason possess autonomy. Individual autonomy should not be equated with morality; instead, a moral agent must have the capacity to distinguish between good and evil. Although there is no conceptual link between autonomy and morality, there is a link between autonomy and freedom. Actions that result from a person's vision (visionary acts) concretize individuality because visionaries are always ahead of the public. Individuals who have visions can come up with innovative things to do even though such innovation might draw from the past history and narrative of the community.

Gyekye also has advocated moderate communitarianism because communities are more than associations of individuals; communities share values and obligations, and members of the community often express a desire to promote communal interests. Thus members of the community often invest intellectual, ideological, and emotional attachment to the community and engage in reciprocal social relations within the family, clan, village, ethnic group, neighborhood, city, and nation. Community, in this sense, refers to a cultural community, one that shares values and practices, not simply to a language group. The idea of community implies a common good, which is not merely the combination of individual interests but shared values, working together to meet the necessities of life and a common humanity, and not merely a surrogate of total individual goods. Thus "the common good" refers to all the values a community shares: peace, freedom, respect, dignity, security, and satisfaction.

Gyekye has argued that Western communitarians like Alas-dair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, who argue that individuals are only part of a community because they inherit their narratives from the community in which they are embedded, have overstated their case. One may indeed start from a certain narrative, but the fact that one can also reject sections of the narrative or practice one finds immoral is an indication that an individual person is not entirely constituted by the social. Radical communitarians thus exaggerate the impact of history and communal structures on individual autonomy. Furthermore, communitarians have rejected the construction of political thought solely from a foundation of individual rights. According to MacIntyre, "the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with the belief in witches and in unicorns" (1984, p. 69). Communitarians would want to replace the politics of right with the idea of common good. By contrast, Gyekye has argued that rights are indispensable to self-assertion and the evaluative process. The idea of rights strengthens human dignity. Advocates of rights anchor their beliefs in the theistic perspective that human beings have intrinsic value because God created them.

Finally, rights can also be derived from nature because an individual has a rational faculty that allows him or her to strive to be the best he or she can be. Therefore a community cannot disregard individual rights. Moderate communitarianism, however, is not obsessed with rights alone but also emphasizes, according to Gyekye, social values such as peace, harmony, stability, solidarity, mutuality, and reciprocity. Individual rights should be matched with responsibility. A sense of responsibility implies that supererogation is not necessary to morality, but that morality should be open, with no limits placed on individual self-sacrifice.

This view of personhood allows for consideration of, among other things, human rights in the African context. Postcolonial leaders stressed communitarian views, assuming that this kind of communal spirit would easily translate into the more complex needs of a nation-state. Politicians were eager to champion socialism and communal essentialism, and their preference for a communitarian ethos has compromised the debate on human rights in Africa. The human rights question suggests and implies that individuals have certain rights and should therefore possess self-determination. Strengthening individuality cannot be seen then as a concession to Western values because the Western tradition also supports communitarian perspectives. Moderate communitarianism is appealing because a radical communal thesis paints only a partial portrait of the dialectic between individualism and communitarianism.

See also Africa, Idea of ; Humanity: African Thought ; Identity: Personal and Social Identity ; Life Cycle: Overview ; Person, Idea of the .

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Elias K. Bongmba