Post-Colonial Reconstruction of Africa

Pieter H. Coetzee is an independent scholar and retired lecturer in philosophy at the University of South Africa.

• Chapter 1: How Tradition made way for the Modern—The Search for the Native Universal and an Inclusive Notion of the ModernChapter 2: Kwasi Wiredu—Traditional CommunitarianismChapter 3: Kwame Gyekye—Moderate CommunitarianismChapter 4: The Liberty Limits of Communitarianism—A Critique of Gyekye’s Alternative to Wiredu Chapter 5: Paulin Hountondji—Marx, Individualism and Pluralism, and the Critical Celebration of Nkrumah’s socialismChapter 6: How McClendon’s African American Idea of Race might have primed Hountondji’s attack on Colonial Exploitation—An Appreciation of the limits of Hountondji’s Lament with Special Reference to South AfricaChapter 7: Kwame Anthony Appiah—Liberal CosmopolitanismChapter 8: Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism and Mogobe Ramose: Rethinking the Post-Apartheid state—Outline of an Alternative to Appiah’s Cosmopolitan SolutionChapter 9: The Return of the Communitarians

In this illuminating scholarly text, Coetzee challenges Western, Eurocentric claims to exclusivity in philosophical discourse by drawing on pioneers of African philosophy such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, Paulin Hountondji, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mogobe Ramose, Ato Sekyi-Otu, and Bernard Matolino. Embedded in their African-centered logical and epistemic frameworks are interpretations of what have been identified as African communitarianism (traditional, moderate, and otherwise) and variations of liberal cosmopolitanism. By exposing readers to these luminaries of African philosophy, the author highlights African philosophical discourse in its complexity and, in the process, discusses the implications of such intellectual engagement for the postcolonial era. Land rights, reparations for past injustices, affirmative action, and the fundamental reconceptualization of civil society are among the complex web of inherited anomalies and prescriptions that the philosophers directly and indirectly contemplate. Granted, the sages, including the author, are caught between the quest for Black communitarian democracy and restitution on the one hand, and the theoretical preoccupation with individual rights and a so-called raceless identity on the other. Recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals.