Personhood

Personhood in the African religious system begins with the question, “Who is a human?” In effect, personhood is the quality of acquiring the status of being human. One example of this African notion of personhood is seen in the case of the Akan people. Those who have little conception of the role that humans play in the social reality may have distorted the entire issue of the Akan's relationship to the community or the African connection to the collective group. There are those who maintain that the African view, including that of the Akan, makes being primary. In fact, the notion that ontological primacy trumps community primacy is anathema to most of these thinkers. Actually what this means is that the reality of the person is secondary and derivative and the community is basic, original, [Page 521]and generative. Africans have even articulated this with “it takes a village to raise a child” as if to imply that the meaning of a person is derivative from the community.

Some may say that, as far as Africans are concerned, the reality of the communal world takes precedence over the reality of individual life histories, whatever these may be. From the supposed primacy of the reality of the community, one can say that (a) in the African view it is the community which defines the person as person, not some isolated static quality of rationality, will, or memory; (b) the African view supports the notion of person-hood as something acquired; and (c) it is possible for personhood to fail or, rather, that someone cannot gain personhood ever. The position of Kwame Gyekye, the philosopher, on this point is that these premises might need to be reexamined.

There is a view that the social conception of the African social order is communal through and through, and therefore one denies the notion of individuality in African thought. Historically, this was the idea promoted by Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, and others who argued for a relationship between African socialism and African communalism in the spirit of the socialist movement of the Cold War.

Thus, Nkrumah observed that if one sought the sociopolitical ancestor of socialism, one could find it in African communalism. In socialism, the principles underlying communalism are given expression in modern circumstances. Senghor believed that African society was collectivist or, more exactly, communal because it was rather a communion of souls than an aggregate of individuals. These ideas led to the belief that African social order was communal in the traditional situation. Indeed, this would mean, if it were true, that the direct path to socialism was natural. In the period of the persistent and unrelenting quest for socialism, the status of the individual person in the eyes of the world was simply communal. In fact, perhaps only Senghor spoke a little about the individual in ways that differed from the general trend. The idea that the individual is, in Europe, the man who distinguishes himself from the others and claims his autonomy to affirm himself in his basic originality is a different idea from the African conception. The member of the community society (by which one means African) also claims autonomy to affirm self as a being. But one feels and thinks that human potential can only be fully expressed in union with other humans. This is the African ideal in many discourses. Nevertheless, the idea of the individual is not carried through in the writings of most African intellectuals, and this may be a minority view.

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