‘I was born in the land of the priests of Aksum,’ ZeraYacob is believed to have written in the 17th century. ‘But I am the son of a poor farmer in the district of Aksum.’ So begins the Hatata (a Ge’ez word meaning ‘enquiry’) of ZeraYacob, in which he documents his spiritual journey against a backdrop of intense religious controversy. He proceeds to reflect on the nature of God and human existence, the essence of evil and the basis of morality. A second Hatata, commonly attributed to WeldaHeywat, concentrates on issues of justice and moral truth. These two short texts are at the centre of Ethiopian philosophy. They have been generating intense controversy for generations because their authenticity and philosophical value have a crucial bearing on the very existence of Ethiopian philosophy and how it should be done.

There are, very roughly, two camps within Ethiopian philosophy today. The universalist approach to Ethiopian philosophy starts with the historical narrative that philosophy is a refined intellectual exercise that serves as a foundation for societal progress and individual enlightenment. This approach sees philosophy as one continuous dialogue, each philosopher learning from another in order to come up with new ideas. The universalist approach is founded on a cumulative and linear path that sees philosophy as starting at the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, developing through the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest of the ancients, on to the medieval age, and finally into the modern era that was inaugurated by René Descartes and that is currently dominated by German and French Continental philosophy.

Other traditions of philosophy, such as the many strands of Indian philosophy, the philosophy of the Aztecs, the Japanese and the Chinese and so on, are, for the universalist, subsumed under the label of ‘comparative philosophy’. The value of non-Western philosophical traditions derives from what we might call an intercultural perspective. All philosophies are concerned with universal truths – all philosophies can be put into dialogue around this universal search for the conditions that make our existence possible and the reasons we have to live the way that we do. In general, the universalist position does not pay attention to the qualifiers of a tradition: it is not Indian or Aztec or Chinese philosophy that is at issue, but simply philosophy itself, philosophy as such.

The other camp we’ll call Africanist. For the Africanist way of doing Ethiopian philosophy, the history of philosophy is a process of deliberate exclusion that consists primarily in epistimicide – the systematic process of obliterating the knowledge system of the Other. In Africa, epistemicide was committed by colonisers in the name of disseminating the values of the Enlightenment and modernity. The Africanist approach sees itself as the saviour of, specifically, Africa and Ethiopia’s history. It is engaged in the search for a philosophy in the past that can serve as a foundation for cultural pride and recognition. Challenging the superior epistemic and cultural position that has been occupied by the West, Africanists see themselves primarily as countering the influence of Eurocentrism. In the words of Bekele Gutema, what is needed is ‘a robust understanding of philosophy that recognises the existence of philosophy in many cultures’.

The universalist camp charges the Africanists with blurring the distinction between the study of culture and the study of philosophy by trying to reduce philosophy into an ethnophilosophy (that is, the body of beliefs of a particular culture, usually indigenous, which is regarded as the expression of the collected beliefs of all the members of a given community and can be applied to the present moment without any change). In response, the Africanists see the universalists as worshipping the Eurocentric metaphysical structure and thereby losing sight of what it means to practise philosophy from a specifically African, Ethiopian and intercultural vantage point.

The essential question is this: should Ethiopian philosophy be practised from a universalist perspective – therefore taking Ethiopian philosophy to be part of the universal quest for wisdom – or from an Africanist perspective that sees Ethiopian philosophy as a means of cultural reaffirmation?

In 2022, I arrived at the University of Oxford to debate the very existence of Ethiopian philosophy: is there even such a thing that we can call ‘Ethiopian philosophy’? The conference was part of a renewed interest in Ethiopian philosophy spurred on by the widespread interest in the Hatatas. I was once an Africanist philosopher who believed that the Hatatas of ZeraYacob and WeldaHeywat served as the foundation of an indigenous Ethiopian philosophy. But, after coming across the works of the French historian Anaïs Wion and the Ethiopian politician Daniel Kibret, I abandoned that position. The more I looked at the Hatatas, the more I came to believe that the texts are........

© Aeon