13- The Cultural Foundations of Philosophy

Résumé

The Struggle for Meaning:
Reflections on Philosophy,
Democracy, and Culture in Africa
by Paulin Hountondji
Ohio University Press, 2002, 308 pp.
+ xxiv, $28 (paper)

The work under review is a quasibiographical text by one of Africa’s most important post-colonial philosophers and intellectuals. Hountondji is known in Africana philosophical circles for having produced two important paradigmatic works representative of the attempted autonomy of Africa’s thinkers as they sought to come to terms with Africa’s experiences at the end of the colonial era. That era represented the culminating point of the clash of European and African civilizations dating from the fifteenth century. The expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the three hundred year Atlantic slave trade constitute key moments in this ongoing encounter.