Who Gets to Be a Philosopher? The Case of the African Sages

Imagine you meet an old woman in a village who has spent her whole life thinking hard about things. She can tell you what truth is, why people lie, what makes a fair society, and whether people really own property or just borrow it while they’re alive. She’s never written a book. She’s never been to a university. She couldn’t name a single Greek philosopher if you asked her.

Is she a philosopher?

This isn’t a trick question. It’s a real debate that has split the world of philosophy for the last fifty years. And it started because a Kenyan philosopher named Henry Oruka decided to go talk to some wise old people in rural communities—and became convinced that what they were doing was every bit as philosophical as what Plato or Descartes did.

The Sages Speak

Oruka asked a man named Paul Mbuya Akoko about something called “communalism”—the idea that in traditional African societies, people shared everything. Akoko didn’t just repeat the usual story. He thought about it and said: look, it’s not that people generously handed out wealth to the poor. It’s more like this—if one person had cattle, then in a real sense everybody had cattle. Because the owner would give his cows to people who didn’t have any, so those people could look after them and get milk. The cows never fully left the owner’s hands, but everyone benefited. It was cooperative, not charitable.

Another sage, Okemba Simiyu Chaungo, was asked: “What is truth?” He picked up a bottle and said: “When something is true, it is just as you see it… just like this bottle… it is true that it is just a bottle.” Then he added that truth is good and falsehood is evil—and that liars usually lie to get something, like food or status.

Now, here’s what’s interesting. Chaungo was doing something that professional philosophers call “correspondence theory of truth”—the idea that a statement is true if it matches reality. And he connected it to ethics without missing a beat. He never read a philosophy textbook. He just thought about the world honestly.

So why doesn’t he get called a philosopher?

The Problem with Philosophy’s “Club”

Here’s the uncomfortable thing Oruka noticed. The ancient Greek thinkers like Thales and Heraclitus—the ones every philosophy textbook starts with—were originally just people talking and arguing. Some of their sayings sound almost like proverbs. “You cannot step into the same river twice.” “All is water.” These are not complicated arguments. They’re short, puzzling statements that later philosophers spent centuries writing books about.

But those Greeks got called philosophers. And people like Chaungo and Akoko got called… well, mostly they got ignored, or studied by anthropologists as examples of “traditional African thought.” Nobody said they were doing philosophy.

Oruka thought this was unfair. He had three specific accusations he wanted to fight back against:

That African sages, unlike Greek sages, didn’t use reason—they just repeated folk wisdom.
That you can’t have philosophy without writing—and African traditions were mostly oral.
That African cultures demanded everyone agree with each other, so there was no room for individual, critical thinking.

These claims, Oruka argued, were not neutral observations. They were leftovers from colonialism—the assumption that only certain kinds of people (Europeans, or people who write things down) could really think philosophically.

Two Kinds of Wisdom

To make his case, Oruka had to do something delicate. He had to argue that there are real philosophers in African villages—but also that not every wise person is a philosopher. He needed a way to tell the difference.

He came up with a distinction between two kinds of sages.

Folk sages are people who know their community’s traditions very well. They can tell you the myths, the proverbs, the rituals. They’re like living libraries. A famous example is Ogotemmêli, a man from the Dogon community in Mali, who explained to a French anthropologist an incredibly complex system of beliefs about the stars, the origins of the universe, and how everything connects. The Dogon apparently knew about a star called Sirius B—which you can’t see without a telescope—long before Western astronomers discovered it. This is remarkably smart stuff.

But Oruka noticed something: in all his explanations, Ogotemmêli never once said “I think” or “I disagree with the tradition on this point.” He was just the voice of his culture. He never stepped back and questioned the beliefs he was describing.

Philosophic sages are different. They do step back. They take the beliefs of their community and poke at them. They ask: is this really true? Does this make sense? They might still end up agreeing with tradition, but they’ve thought it through for themselves. Reason matters more to them than custom.

This is what Oruka saw in Akoko and Chaungo. Akoko wasn’t just saying “we share things because it’s our tradition.” He was analyzing what sharing actually means in practice. Chaungo wasn’t just reciting a proverb about truth. He was picking up a bottle and building a theory about how language connects to reality.

The philosophic sage, Oruka said, is someone who “subject[s] beliefs that are traditionally taken for granted to independent rational reexamination.” That sounds exactly like what we expect philosophers to do. The question is why we usually only expect it from people in universities.

But Is It Really Philosophy Without Writing?

This is where things get tricky. A critic named Peter Bodunrin argued that Oruka had only proven there are smart people in villages who can think philosophically in conversation. But philosophy, Bodunrin said, requires something more: organized, systematic reflection that builds on itself over time. And that, he argued, requires writing. You need books so that later philosophers can argue with earlier philosophers and improve on their ideas.

Oruka’s response was: why? He pointed out that a philosopher doesn’t need to write to be a philosopher—they just need to think clearly and critically. And writing doesn’t automatically make someone a philosopher either. There are plenty of terrible books.

More importantly, Oruka argued that the kind of thinking you find in philosophy doesn’t require paper. The sages he interviewed had memories that were, in his words, “as good as the information recorded in books.” They could hold complex arguments in their heads, compare ideas, notice contradictions, and revise their views. The only difference was that no one had bothered to take them seriously as thinkers.

This connects to a deeper point about how philosophy gets defined. The Western philosophical tradition starts with the Greeks partly because the Greeks wrote stuff down—and then later philosophers wrote commentaries on those writings. But if we define philosophy as “the stuff that got written down and commented on,” we’re basically saying that only people in literate cultures get to be philosophers. That doesn’t sound like a very philosophical argument. It sounds like an accident of history.

The Unanimity Myth

The third claim Oruka wanted to fight was maybe the most political. Some African intellectuals themselves had come to believe that traditional African cultures were places of “unanimity”—everyone agreed about everything, and individual critical thinking was discouraged or even impossible.

This idea was partly spread by a type of work called “ethnophilosophy.” Ethnophilosophers would describe the beliefs of a whole culture as if they were a single philosophical system. They’d say things like “the Bantu believe this” or “the Yoruba think that.” The problem is that whole cultures don’t think anything. Individual people think things, and they often disagree.

Oruka thought this was dangerous for two reasons. First, it was simply wrong. His interviews showed lots of disagreement and independent thinking among the sages. Second, it was being used by African political leaders to justify one-party rule. If “true African tradition” means everyone agrees, then opposition is un-African. So the myth of unanimity wasn’t just a philosophical mistake—it was being used to crush dissent.

Oruka insisted that sages are thinkers, not rulers. Rulers want everyone to agree because it makes governing easier. But thinkers thrive on disagreement and dialogue.

Whose Language Should Philosophy Speak?

Here’s a final puzzle Oruka left us with, and it’s still unsettled. He worried that when African philosophers get university training in Western philosophy and then try to analyze the ideas of the sages, they end up forcing those ideas into Western categories. They translate “truth” into the language of correspondence theory. They turn Akoko’s insight about cattle-sharing into a debate about property rights in the style of John Locke.

Maybe that’s fine—maybe ideas are universal and can travel between languages. But Oruka suspected something was being lost. He wanted the sages’ own voices to survive, not just as raw material for academic philosophy, but as a different way of doing philosophy altogether.

Another African philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, took a middle position. He argued that African philosophers should use their own languages and conceptual resources when thinking about philosophical problems—but they should also be free to borrow from other traditions when it helps. The goal is not purity. The goal is understanding.

So Who Gets to Be a Philosopher?

Oruka died in 1995, and the debate isn’t settled. Most philosophy departments still teach almost exclusively Western thinkers. The sages’ names don’t appear in textbooks. But the question Oruka raised won’t go away: when we decide who counts as a philosopher, are we making a judgment about the quality of their thinking—or are we just repeating old prejudices about whose thinking matters?

Chaungo, holding up his bottle and saying “truth is just what it is”—was he doing philosophy? He was doing something that looks a lot like it. He was thinking about what it means for statements to match reality. He was connecting truth to ethics. He was trying to understand something abstract by looking at something concrete.

That’s pretty much what philosophers do.

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it means in this debate
Sage	A wise person in a community, but not necessarily a philosopher
Folk sage	Someone who knows their culture’s traditions well but doesn’t question them critically
Philosophic sage	Someone who examines and questions beliefs using reason, rather than just accepting tradition
Ethnophilosophy	The practice of describing an entire culture’s beliefs as if they were a single philosophy, without naming individual thinkers
Unanimity	The false idea that in traditional African societies, everyone agreed about everything
Correspondence theory of truth	The idea that a statement is true if it matches the way things actually are (“this is a bottle” is true if it’s really a bottle)

Key People

Henry Oruka (1944–1995): A Kenyan philosopher who traveled to rural communities and interviewed wise people, arguing they were doing real philosophy. He created the “sage philosophy” project.
Paulo Mbuya Akoko: A sage from the Luo community of Kenya who gave a thoughtful analysis of what communalism actually meant in practice—cooperative sharing, not just generosity.
Okemba Simiyu Chaungo: A sage from the Bukusu community who explained truth by holding up a bottle and said liars lie because they want to “eat” or get “empty prestige.”
Ogotemmêli: A Dogon sage from Mali who explained his culture’s complex cosmology, but never expressed personal opinions or criticism—making him, in Oruka’s view, a folk sage rather than a philosophic sage.
Peter Bodunrin: A Nigerian philosopher who argued that philosophy requires organized, systematic reflection passed down in writing—not just smart thinking in conversation.
Kwasi Wiredu: A Ghanaian philosopher who agreed with Oruka that African traditions contain real philosophy, but argued that trained philosophers should freely combine Western and African ideas.

Things to Think About

If you met someone who had never been to school but could argue clearly about justice, truth, and whether people really own things—would you call them a philosopher? Why or why not? What’s the most important qualification?
Oruka worried that when Western-trained philosophers translate sages’ ideas into the language of Western philosophy, something gets lost. But if the sages don’t speak that language, how else would you share their ideas with the world? Is translation always a kind of betrayal?
Is writing really necessary for philosophy to happen? Think about what writing makes possible—and what it might block. Could a culture with only oral traditions have a “history of philosophy” in the same way we talk about Western philosophy?
The myth of unanimity got used by political leaders to silence opposition. Can you think of other ideas that seem like innocent mistakes but could be used to justify keeping people quiet? How do you tell the difference between an honest intellectual error and a dangerous one?

Where This Shows Up

When your school or library decides which “great thinkers” to include in the curriculum, they’re making choices about who counts as a philosopher. Oruka’s argument challenges those choices.
The debate about whether philosophy requires writing connects to broader questions about what knowledge counts as “real” in a world that values books and degrees over oral tradition.
Arguments about “cultural unanimity” still appear in politics today, whenever someone says “in our culture, we believe X” as a way of shutting down disagreement.
The problem of translating ideas between languages and cultures affects everything from diplomacy to video game localization to how doctors explain diagnoses to patients from different backgrounds.