AN APPRAISAL OF KWASI WIREDU’S CONCEPTUAL DECOLONIZATION

Abstract

Kwasi Wiredu in his work Cultural Pluralism and Particulars advocates for conceptual decolonization. There are twin essential concepts in Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization negative and positive programmes. These, to him are two complementary ideas. In the negative sense, Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization is the process that seeks to avoid and reverse “through a critical self-awareness the unexamined assimilation” in the thoughts of contemporary African philosophers those conceptual frameworks that are found in western or other philosophical cultures that have influenced African habits and thoughts. On the positive sense, it involves the exploitation of the enormous “resources” of African conceptual frameworks in philosophical exercises or reflections on all the fundamental and important issues of contemporary philosophy. Using the combined methods of exposition, thematic content analysis (TCA) and evaluation, this study aims to appraise Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization. The study establishes that the negative programme of Wiredu’s conceptual decolonization which enjoins African scholars to think effectively using African languages as proposed by him is almost impossible to apply. This is because, we are so globalized in such a way that our languages are heavily influenced by other cultures and languages that we cannot think in them effectively and so many ideas which are presumably thought to have African origins could have been adopted and adapted from other cultures but are termed Africans. The work proposes the application of Wiredu’s positive programme through the critical assessment for reappropriation and incorporation of experiences, practices, beliefs, values, and ways of life of sub-Saharan Africans into African universities curriculum in general and philosophy in particular.