Jonathan O Chimakonam: intellectual biography of an African philosopher.
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Date
2021
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Abstract
This dissertation studies the life and work of Nigerian-born philosopher and logician Jonathan
Okeke Chimakonam, who is currently a Professor in South Africa, and is considered a direct
heir of the concepts and ideas of the debates that took place from the 1970s to 1990s on whether
or not African philosophy existed. This dissertation studies that debate and tracks how the
ideas and concepts from it shaped Chimakonam’s philosophical outlook. When a young
Chimakonam joined the academia, he decided to focus on one existential problem: ‘Where is
the African mind?’ This dissertation reads Chimakonam’s search for the African mind as the
direct influence of the debate on the existence of African philosophy.
As this dissertation shows, Chimakonam has argued that the greatest threat faced by Africa
today is the vitiation of African thought systems along with their logic. He believes that one of
the consequences of this decline is that some African leaders commit crimes and atrocities
because they use Western logic. This may have been avoided if they used an African logic. To
Chimakonam there was always a mismatch between African and Western logic such that
anything an African does on the bedrock of Western logic will be tainted, inauthentic, and
unoriginal. If Africans are seeking originality, they should base their ideas on African logic.
Since Chimakonam saw this as a matter of urgency, he constructed a logic from which African
systems of thought could emanate. He called the prototype of that logic Ezumezu logic. This
newly drawn logic needed a methodology that explained it, and Chimakonam proposed
conversational thinking, a method of philosophizing that comes from Ezumezu logic; it is a
concrete way of applying Ezumezu logic.
This dissertation tracks the development of Chimakonam’s idea of African philosophy which
is situated in the broader debate on the rationality of Africans. It further argues that
Chimakonam’s ideas on African logic can be understood to be progressing from radical
relativism, which is a belief that there is a peculiar African logic inaccessible to other cultures,
to a measured relativism, which is a belief that though logic may be relative it can also be
universalizable.
Description
Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.