Cultural Hermeneutics

Cultural Hermeneutics in Tsenay Serequeberhan
By
Ameh Francis Imaben
Introduction
The split of African philosophical thinking between the schools of the traditionalist, the universalist and the hermeneutic shows the involvement of philosophical issues in the African development process. Indeed, the philosophical debate does no more than revive the entrenched paradigm of development theories and hypotheses, presuppositions and assumptions as well as the beliefs and claims, namely the conflict between tradition and modernity in Africa.
For instance, the traditionalists claim that philosophy is cultural. They are of the view that the rehabilitation of African traditions conditions the drive to successful modernization, especially after the disparaging discourse of colonialism. The universalists disagree and insist that philosophy is universal. They are of the argument that success depends on the exchange of the traditional culture for modern ideas and institutions. However, those who take the hermeneutic bent are of the opinion that African philosophy as well as culture is gathered in the midst of struggles. They posit that philosophy emerges from a seasoned clarification of meaning in the life experience of African peoples. Theorists of the hermeneutical tradition are interested in pointing out that ‘African philosophy’ has a task to reclaim the African personality for the degraded and distorted status quo created by slavery, slave trade and colonialism. They believe that there is need to pay attention to the meaning that is imposed on the theoretical tools employed in trying to free the blacks from the clutches of western domination.
In view of the foregoing, this essay shall give an exposition of the hermeneutics of culture in relation to Tsenay Serequeberhan. To do this, this essay shall first look at Serequeberhan’s position. This will be followed by a brief examination of cultural hermeneutics beyond Serequeberhan. This shall then be followed by the conclusion of the essay.
Cultural Hermeneutics in Tsenay Serequeberhan
Serequeberhan, an Eritrean philosopher, believes that “the indisputable historical and violent diremption effected by colonialism and the continued ‘misunderstanding’ of our situation perpetuated by neo-colonialism calls forth and provokes thought in post-colonial Africa.” In his opinion, the present African thought-frame is a condition which emerges in between two realities, namely: the colonial obliteration of ‘standards and practices of our forefathers’/African heritage and “the consequent neo-colonial inertness of our contemporary situation.” The present call for stock-taking or ‘culture-criticism’ is, according to Serequeberhan, “a time of prolonged, deep reflection and self-examination.” Against this milieu then, post-colonial African intellectual work will have to take on board the victories and defeats of the African conflictual identity or conscience.
He is of the view that philosophical hermeneutics unlike ‘‘orthodox’’ phenomenology is always explicitly and self-consciously sited in a specific historico-cultural context. Indeed, as far as Serequeberhan is concerned, all philosophy – not just the hermeneutical – must be so situated and, no matter how meticulously neutral and universal it pretends to be, it must also have a political dimension. He therefore castigates the Western philosophical establishment for playing along with the intellectual and political issues involved in the portrayal of Africa as irrational and primitive, especially when viewed against the background of European colonialism. Western civilization (philosophy included) was indeed propagandized as the cultural paradigm, and most things African were viewed as negations of that ideal.
Furthermore, Serequeberhan posits that all philosophizing has political ramifications. And at the same time, he does not hesitate to condemn Western icons like Heidegger, Marx, Hegel, Locke, Levy-Bruhl, Hume, and Kant for the racist content to their writings. For him, it would be hypocrisy for contemporary African intellectuals, philosophers included, to pretend they remain unaffected by the colonial experience and the Western elements introduced thereby into Africa’s own intellectual heritage. It makes more sense for Africans to come to terms with all of this in a deliberate and forthright manner. If that also involves the adaptation of an approach like hermeneutics to the African context, then that may be all well and good, provided it is done in a positive, progressive manner – a manner that will benefit Africa rather than demean it.
Serequeberhan appears to have a fairly low tolerance for other methodological approaches to African philosophy. He rebukes the so-called ‘‘ethnophilosophers’’ for introducing themselves to the international community (and Africa) as a kind of ‘‘new wave.’’ They may argue that Africa’s cultures have always contained a philosophical dimension, but it still took them to identify, codify, and somehow, in the end, take the professional credit for developing it. He further criticizes Bodunrin, Hountondji, and Wiredu for too easily advocating, adopting, and imposing an essentially Western tradition of philosophy upon the African context.
Serequeberhan reminds us that in the midst of lamenting over cultural and social alienation brought by colonial administration, some salt has been added to the wound inflicted by colonial government by present domination of the ‘new world order’ championed by the US. The whole rhetoric of the UN boils down to the fashioning of the world conceived by the US. The point, as explained by Francis Njoku, Sereqeberhan is driving at is that “the fight against colonialism in post-colonial Africa has added difficulty. The more the African plays or fights, the more he scores goal elsewhere and against his home front.” For this reason, Serequeberhan insists:

In fact, the 1970s and 1980s have already been for Africa a period of “endemic famine” orchestrated by the criminal incompetence and political subservience of African government – European, North American, and Soviet interests. Thus, irony of ironies, the official inheritors of the legacy of the African liberation struggle today preside over – or, more appropriately, dictate – the neo-colonial demise of the continent. This is the paradox and ‘dark’ enigma of contemporary Africa.

Neo-colonialism solicits the support of Africans in giving away their riches and identity. Without a doubt, the struggle for liberation has become confused “for the naive mid-century (of the twentieth century) euphoria of ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’ has come to naught. It has been callously dashed on the historically languid violence of neo-colonialism. These very terms, ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’ – the proud, clear and popular slogans of yesterday’s anti-colonial struggle – are today’s opaque, obscure and ambiguous enigma. In the midst of famine, political terror, Western or Eastern (‘democratic’ or socialist,’ as the case may be) military intervention, ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’ have become the words with which Occidental power imperiously proclaims its military might and political pre-eminence.
In Serequeberhan, the meanings of ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’ have been enslaved in the context of struggle itself. A linguistic psycho-analysis, he would think, is needed to help people realise that the struggle has been misconceived along the line. In this regard, Serequeberhan avows that “to explore and decipher the source of this vexing ‘misunderstanding’ is the proper task of contemporary African philosophy. For it is only by challenging and contesting this situation at its source that African can put behind it the subordinate status imposed on it by European colonialism and perpetuated by neo-colonialism.” In this way, Serequeberhan believes that the hermeneutical approach is the only intellectual approach that can deliver the needed re-orientation and deconstruction of the present shadows militating against a true African existential recuperation. In other words, it is the only approach which, for Serequeberhan, can help deal with neo-colonialism.
In fact, Serequeberhan is convinced that just like the hermeneuticity of philosophical discourse, the hermeneuticity of contemporary African philosophy consists of the interplay of horizon and discourse. For it will explore and be rooted in the history of the specific African lived experience. He points out that African has its own horizon within which are rooted the realities that provoke its philosophical discourse. Hence, Africa has its own concerns and worries which dominate its philosophical space and discourse. He writes:
In our case, on the other hand, it is neither the theoretical exigencies of modern science, nor the crisis of faith in confrontation with a foreign and aggressive piety that provokes thought. Rather, it is the politico-existential crisis interior to the horizon of post-colonial Africa which brings forth the concerns and originates the theoretic space for the discourse of contemporary African philosophy. In each case, then, it is out of the concerns and needs of a specific horizon that a particular philosophic discourse is articulated.

Serequeberhan also contends that the common horizon of all Africans is the post-colonial condition, and hence that it is against and in response to this historical backdrop that the discourse of African philosophy should be articulated. Thus:
To interpretatively engage the present situation in terms of what Africa ‘has been’—both in its ambiguous pre-colonial ‘greatness’ as well as in its colonial and neo-colonial demise—is the proper hermeneutical task of African philosophical thought.

Along the line, Bruce B. Janz argues that hermeneutics itself has grown out of a set of questions. In the West, those questions have revolved around science’s claim to universal knowledge, and the resultant limitation of all human meaning to that which is examinable in scientific categories. In African history, at least in Ethiopia, the hermeneutic was one built on an encounter with a “foreign and aggressive piety”. These are not the questions that need to be addressed now. The salient issue is the crisis resulting from the colonial project of Europe.
With regard to the issue of whether there was philosophy in so-called ‘‘traditional’’ or pre-colonial Africa, Serequeberhan is open to the idea that Africa’s cultures are entitled to claim their own philosophical heritage, even if manifested in a substantially different form from that taken as conventional by other societies and as a result, he states:

The foundational wondering and musing of traditional African sages have – in their continuous critical and safeguarding relation to the traditions (i.e., the ethnic world-views) they inhabit – a hermeneutic and philosophic function. To this extent, it has to be conceded in principle that their reflections and intellectual productions are products of philosophic effort.

Serequeberhan also recognizes that failures of understanding must be defined in encounter, not in some essentialized manner. It is not, for example, that Africa does not “work”, that there is slow economic or technological progress that brings us to reflective thought. While Heidegger does spend a great deal of time talking about the way technology “enframes” the world and produces a certain kind of non-critical, derivative understanding, he (Serequeberhan) is mostly concerned with a product of European rationality and the kinds of questions it poses. It is an encounter, for him, between ourselves and our interaction with the milieu around us.
So, the failure at stake here is one which has enframed discourse about Africa, both by Africans and by the rest of the world, and has led to certain kinds of metaphysical assertions being made. The encounter has set the stage for a certain kind of alienated self-understanding; this is interpreted metaphysically by some, as a statement about “the way Africans are”. As a point in fact, Serequeberhan notes that African philosophy in its hermeneutical orientation needs a rethinking of African tradition and a recognition that it is “thematically and historically linked to the demise of direct European colonial dominance and is aimed at the de-structuring of the persistence of neo-colonial hegemony in contemporary African existence.” Serequeberhan is aware that colonialism was a violent imposition; therefore the struggle for liberation, Serequeberhan thinks, will follow the same approach.
In a similar fashion, Serequeberhan, in his book, Our Heritage continues the project of imagining what a hermeneutic theory of violence and emancipation might look like. The central question is that of how existence might be exercised in the face of pervasive violence. The crucial element in answering this question is the notion of heritage, and so, Serequeberhan articulates it in clear terms: “this identity, this in-between, is the ambiguity of our heritage. For we are the ones – in one way or another – who live and have experienced this “ambiguous adventure” and feel, in the very depth of our being, the unnerving experience of being two in one, Europe and non- Europe.
It is an “in-between”, specifically in-between two places which in themselves have coherence and identity, but this is not simply an alienated space. It is a place in its own right. Existence happens here, and it does not owe its integrity to the oppression which produced the in-between in the first place. African culture does not owe its integrity to the racism which hems it in. Against this background, Serequeberhan suggests that:

The heritage of the struggle beyond the defeat of colonialism, this “new humanity” ... this is what Fanon calls us to. It is an Other-directed openness, not “an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world.” it is an open-ended project of a humanity, in process, that finds itself in joint struggles.

He recognizes the fact that identity is earned, not simply presumed. One might think that a hermeneutics of place cannot take struggle into account. After all, struggle seems like a spatial concept – it occurs under dissatisfaction, it often is connected with living space, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. A person struggles when she has been hemmed in. Hemming in means taking away choice, but it also means an attempt to externally determine identity. Serequeberhan’s insight, drawn from Fanon, Du Bois, and others, is that thinking in place means thinking about the struggle of existence. This struggle, for him, is the response to a call , one which is out of the non-place, the between place which nevertheless has a sort of integrity. Thus, there is need to have a practical understanding of ourselves and the situations in which our actions have meaning.
Cultural Hermeneutics beyond Serequeberhan
Following Serequeberhan’s position, Marcien Towa, a Cameroonian, criticizes the brand of Africanity proposed by Senghor and negritude poets as only validating European prejudices against Africa. Here, Towa’s annoyance with the negritude movements is that it ends up as a mouthpiece through which European stereotypes of African are propagated. Senghor’s declaration of emotion for Africa and reason for Europe excludes Africa from the power of the intellect. Contrarily, Towa argues that the philosophy that will lead Africa forward must be conceived in pragmatic terms. He states:
In this sense, African philosophy is the exercise by Africans of a specific type of intellectual activity (critical examination of fundamental problems) applied to the African reality. The type of intellectual activity in question is, as such, neither African, European, Greek, nor German; it is philosophy in general. What is African are the men of flesh and bones who are and who evoke the problems of supreme importance and on whom these same problems are applicable immediately.

Towa’s definition of African philosophy approximates Hountondji’s universalist approach. This is for the reason that philosophical problems are universal. However, Towa parts company with Hountondji’s position on the grounds that Western literacy or literary tradition sets the paradigm for philosophy. With this model of Hountondji, the wealth of African tradition loses its originality, since literacy has set the condition for accepting something as philosophy or not. Against this view, Towa maintains that philosophy expresses itself essentially in discourse, oral or written and it is from this discourse that one has to start, that is, from texts. The understanding of oral tradition and text shapes Towa’s hermeneutic approach and so, he writes:
We are not in agreement with Hountondji, who wants to exclude oral texts. After all, Socrates did not write anything. That is not enough reason to pretend that he is not a philosopher. The ethnophilosophers, on the contrary, utilise any cultural element indiscriminately. They interrogate rituals, myths, art, poetry, language, social, political, and educational institutions on the pretext that philosophy is incarnated in the life of a people.

Towa believes that there can be a mid way between ethnophilosophers and Hountondji. On the one hand, one recognises that there are meaningful texts which will contribute to the political and economic rejuvenation of Africa. On the other hand, it is not everything that is cultural that is philosophical as conceived by ethnophilosophers. Thus, Towa proposes, as Imbo reports, “a careful sifting through the oral literacy texts for inconsistencies, irrelevancies, and untruths. Only the texts that survive this test can be relied upon to contribute to making Africa powerful again.”
To broaden this view, Theophilus Okere outlines a program for how a hermeneutic approach might be implemented. The first major issue he addresses is what should be the proper relationship between such a hermeneutic philosophy and Africa’s cultural heritage. He dismisses the work of the so-called ‘‘ethno-philosophers’’ as not worthy of the label ‘‘philosophy.’’ At the most, these collections of myths, proverbs, and worldviews qualify as ethnography, as compendiums of cultural beliefs and practices. It is on such materials that hermeneutic philosophers might labour so as to render them philosophical by interpreting them – distilling and assessing their meanings, their true significances, and their values to and for Africa’s cultural present and future. More so, Okere opines that ‘‘all philosophical discourse is first and foremost an answer to problems and questions raised within a questioning horizon which means always, a culture.’’
Additionally, the Congolese philosopher Okonda Okolo applauds the hermeneutical approach to African philosophy outlined by Towa and Okere. And to further its development, he proposes to provide African-oriented hermeneutical interpretations of two notions of fundamental importance to Africa’s indigenous cultures – Tradition and Destiny.
In view of the above, Okolo proposes to reinterpret and reappraise each of these notions, and to do so he disagrees fundamentally with the image of tradition involving unchanging beliefs and practices that are handed on from generation to generation. Tradition does involve a sense of transmission and of reception, but in a context where the meanings of any particular tradition are constantly being interpreted and reinterpreted – and therefore always changing – by different individuals and in different historical contexts over the passage of time. Tradition therefore does not inhibit invention or change, as new interpretations are made as a natural and normal part of making ‘‘tradition’’ meaningful to the people who ‘‘inherit’’ it. Hence, Okolo writes that “it is the African tradition that ought to assure the hermeneuticity, the philosophicity, and hence the Africanity of a determined practice.
Destiny involves a people’s ‘‘vision of the world’’ and, as such, represents the history of a people, of a culture, in the world. It represents people’s past, present, and future, and whatever sense of identity they create and then recreate for themselves on the basis of reinterpreting and reinventing tradition(s) over the passage of time. Consequently, Okolo maintains that these elements (tradition and destiny) must constitute essential parts of the framework that will define African hermeneutics, reinterpreting the nature of the African identity as expressed by and through African culture.
Conclusion
This essay has attempted an exposition of Serequeberhan’s view on the hermeneutics of culture. From the various positions of the hermeneutic philosophers discussed in this essay, it is obvious that the purpose of hermeneutics is to overcome ruptures by instituting the continuity of change. Be that as it may, it could howbeit, be concluded that the survival of contemporary African philosophy depends on the reinterpretation of our traditional cultures such that novel ideas and events are integrated and continuity restored to African philosophy. Clearly, instead of the conflict between tradition and modernity, there is need to interpret African philosophy with the aim of integrating modern values into the mainstream of African worldview. This does not bring back the past; rather, it recreates and revitalizes African culture as it consists in challenging the West and the resolution to fight back.
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