African Worldview Theory

The African worldview theory is essentially a combination of the classical and contemporary, continental and diasporic African overarching outlook on human experience and the natural and phenomenal world. It is distinguished from the worldviews of other peoples in so far as it is grounded in and grows out of African history and culture. African peoples' beliefs about God, nature, and major life rituals—such as birth, puberty, adulthood, marriage, elderhood, and death—exhibit enough commonalities to warrant being called an African worldview. These commonalities in many areas of the life-worlds and lived experiences of African peoples render interminable philosophical disputes and semantic discussions as to whether there exists a general or universal African worldview utterly unnecessary and unrewarding. One can know the African worldview by knowing what tasks are performed by a discussion of it.

The key tasks in any discussion of the African worldview are to bring to the fore what African worldview theorists mean by commonalities in African cultures and societies and to lay bare, in a critical and culturally grounded fashion, what many of these theorists are pointing to in their discussions of differences in and among the various African cultures and societies.