Category: Philosophy – African
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Orunmila was a philosopher, and major intellectual personae of the Yoruba Ifa literary corpus which deals with subjects as diverse as history, geography, religion, or music. Orunmila together with his sixteen disciples is credited with the authorship of most of the four thousand and more verses attached to the Odu Ifa, a record of the…
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Nri Civilization occasioned a medieval Igbo institution, located in the colonial Awka division. The town of Nri was hypothesized by A.G. Leonard, British royal officer in 1902 as the fountainhead from which all the other clans of Igbo, eastern Nigeria’s tribe of the greatest number, sprung. The culture of Nri, as stated by Onwuejeogwu in…
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Garveyism was the Pan-African philosophy of the Jamaican political leader, Marcus Garvey, in the early 20th Century, aimed at precipitating a global movement of economic empowerment. Garvey preached the unity of all blacks, claiming that liberty would come about only through the return of all Afro-Americans to their ancestral home. Although the Universal Negro Improvement…
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Josiah Jesse Ransome Kuti; Hymnist and 19th Century African missionary in the Yoruba country. He is the patriarch of the Ransome-Kuti family of Nigeria, which produced distinguished personalities like his son, Israel Oludotun Ransome Kuti and his grandsons: Olikoye, Beko, and the celebrated Afrobeat performer, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Josiah Jesse Ransome-Kuti was among the pioneers…
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Ethiopianism was a philosophy of several early Christians in Africa, foremost among who was James Johnson, who required his brethren, in the words of Jacob Kehinde Coker, founder of one of the breakaway groups, to worship God as Africans, independently, both in spirit and in truth, applying Christianity to African customs, not repugnant to Christ’s…
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Mojola Agbebi is the native name of the poet and advocate of Ethiopianism, who was born April 10, 1860 as David Brown Vincent in Ilesha. Mojola repudiated his European name in 1894, the year he was ordained as a Baptist minister in Liberia. He frequently used his pulpit to deliver anticolonial sermons, which was also…
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Awoism is the term coined for Obafemi Awolowo’s idea of progressive politics targeted at producing practical social progress. Awoism postulates that man is the sole dynamic in nature and that sound education is his birth right. The notion of innate racial intellectual superiority or natural advantage in mastery is rejected. According to Awolowo, “if you…
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Paganism in different world societies, has been a reserved term for unsanctioned religious practices, used for undeveloped tribal forms of spiritual devotion. The religion of the Yoruba before the advent of Europeans was animistic although the animism curiously features many monotheistic elements, such as the belief in one Supreme Being, Olodumare, who is above all other…