United Wisdom
← In Plain Words

World and Consciousness

African Philosophies of Personhood: Why Raising You Doesn't Grant Anyone Title to Your Passport

Some adults are familiar with a certain scene played out across dinner tables or family summits. Consider a hypothetical domestic vignette: the extended family cheerfully pitches in to fund a young graduate's…

Andrey Zarinsh · Maria Evilkut16 min readW-20-N01
Article contents

Some adults are familiar with a certain scene played out across dinner tables or family summits. Consider a hypothetical domestic vignette: the extended family cheerfully pitches in to fund a young graduate's university degree, and now gently hints that their sacred duty is to take a job at the local plant and weed the family vegetable plot until retirement. "We poured our souls into you and made you into a human being!" a second cousin proudly declares while ladling another mountain of potato salad. "I am extraordinarily grateful, but I will choose my own career and city," the graduate cautiously parries. "Selfish ingrate! Without us, you’d still be in the sandbox poking dirt with a plastic shovel!" the chorus of indignant relatives bellows, settling the matter.

Sound familiar? This is hardly a scene reserved for distant, exotic locales; it is our own hypothetical thought experiment reflecting the eternal friction between solidarity and personal boundaries. Enthusiasts of facile simplifications love neat clichés: supposedly, the West is filled exclusively with cold individualists, while the East and South partake in a perpetual round-dance of solidarity where everyone rejoices in dissolving entirely into the local collective. In truth, African thinkers clash over this very dilemma with equal fervor. Their debates cut far deeper than the stereotypical fairy tales suggesting an entire continent lives like one giant communal flat.

1. A Continent Issues No Single Certificate: Ditch the Catch-All Label

The first thing worth abandoning is the temptation to bundle an entire continent of diverse cultures under a single cozy moniker. Whenever someone breathlessly asserts, "Traditional African wisdom tells us...", you can safely check whether they are trying to sell you a decorative souvenir mask or a questionable personal growth seminar. Thinkers from different regions argue themselves hoarse: from radical absorption into the collective to a calibrated balance of individual rights and freedoms.

In his well-known essay Person and Community in African Traditional Thought (pp. 171–172), philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti does indeed draw a stark contrast between an "African" communal approach and "Western" atomized individualism. Yet that remains his own theoretical construction—a deliberate polemical stance rather than a notarized profile covering every culture across the continent. A living idiom in a specific language is one matter; an academic's conceptual reconstruction is another; a sweeping global "us-versus-them" model is something else entirely. None of these automatically entails the others.

Consequently, the fashionable word Ubuntu will not serve here as a magic catch-all sticker for the totality of African thought. A resonant phrase celebrating mutual humanity looks splendid on inspirational posters, but it leaves the core questions unanswered: who specifically is included in this thunderous "we", who gets to speak unilaterally on behalf of the crowd, and what awaits the unfortunate soul who dares to swim against the current?

2. Menkiti and the "Career" of Becoming a Person: Why Personhood Isn't a Birth Coupon

Menkiti's position underscores that the normative moral ideal of personhood (that elusive notion of personhood) is not handed out automatically at birth; rather, it is gradually acquired through immersion in communal life, maturation, and the conscientious discharge of obligations pp. 171–173. The issue at stake is the attainment of ethical maturity within a community, not any claim that an infant lacks human nature. To support his argument, Menkiti draws upon John Mbiti's well-known idea concerning the fundamental reliance of the individual "I" upon the communal "we". Here, Mbiti's perspective is engaged strictly through Menkiti's own recounting, without presuming an exhaustive reading of Mbiti's wider corpus. The driving thrust of this concept is that status as a morally mature participant demands tangible deeds rather than mere physical presence on the planet.

Menkiti's underlying intuition is straightforward enough: hollow sermons about humanism ring empty without action. Take a hypothetical everyday example: two adults quote moral classics with equal eloquence over coffee, yet one takes night shifts caring for an ailing friend while the other coasts indefinitely on their family's generosity, genuinely convinced the universe owes applause to their exquisite inner depth. We all know whose character commands greater moral respect.

The trouble is that Menkiti's rigorous demands harbor a quiet danger. If this moral ideal is casually equated with human dignity, an alarming corollary creeps in: as if basic respect and personal safety were reserved only for those who meet their performance quotas as star communal workers. Turning inherent human dignity into a quarterly bonus for good conduct is a profoundly precarious venture. One may certainly censure someone's irresponsibility, but denying a person basic protections on the grounds that they "haven't pulled their weight for the collective" is a well-paved road toward the tyranny of the righteous.

3. "Not a Person" on Fridays: Linguistic Traps and the Moral Ideal

Menkiti even leans on English grammar as an illustrative point: noting that an infant is frequently referred to with the impersonal pronoun it, he infers that full social recognition arrives only later in life pp. 172–173. While a curious observation, the argument is fragile: the grammatical quirks of one specific tongue hardly demonstrate the social standing of an infant across the ocean.

Our own critical assessment indicates that it is crucial to keep distinct ideas clearly separated: "being answerable for a specific deed," "being a dependable collaborator," and "holding intrinsic value simply as a living human being." Shoving all three into the single word "person" only brews confusion. Imagine two hypothetical neighbors: one has lived in the building for thirty years and earned communal trust, while the other just moved in yesterday. With appropriate experience, one might entrust the longtime resident with the keys to the utility room or the task of collecting funds for a gate barrier. Yet the newcomer's lack of past track record gives nobody license to run a rotary hammer drill outside their door at midnight or compromise their basic safety. Earned moral standing is one thing; fundamental human dignity is entirely another.

In his entry on African Ethics (§4), Kwame Gyekye aptly highlights Akan and Yoruba idioms. When someone behaving maliciously is described by saying "he is not a person," the targeted idiom refers to their objectionable actions—it in no way strips them of their biological status as Homo sapiens. It is an ethical metaphor, a figure of speech, rather than a judicial decree revoking basic rights. Elevated moral standards are admirable, provided they do not morph into a gated admissions test whose failing applicants are struck off the roster of those entitled to care.

4. Gyekye's Balancing Act: Moderate Communitarianism

Kwame Gyekye sought a middle ground by advancing the framework of "moderate communitarianism." The publisher's abstract to his chapter Person and Community (pp. 35–76) sets out an ambitious goal: harmonizing community, individual rights, and obligations. (Note that only the publisher's abstract of that chapter is referenced directly here; a thorough dissection of the position is offered by Richard Ansah and Modestha Mensah in their critical paper, pp. 67–72).

Gyekye maintains that while society unquestionably shapes the individual, bestowing language and culture, the person is only partly constituted by it. The individual retains self-determination and autonomy; Gyekye links the recognition of this autonomy directly to the recognition of individual rights.

Returning to our hypothetical family saga: you did not invent the alphabet you speak, nor did you cook your own porridge as an infant. Yet the undeniable fact that your parents taught you how to hold a spoon does not make them permanent majority shareholders in your destiny.

At the same time, voluntarily assumed commitments do not vanish into thin air at the first proud declaration of "I am my own person!" If the family in our hypothetical scenario funded an education based on openly articulated, mutually agreed-upon terms of cooperation, invoking independence does not magically dissolve the pact. Nevertheless, real life is far messier than a notary's ledger: one must honestly evaluate the precise scope of the agreement, changed circumstances, and an individual's genuine capacity to fulfill what was promised—failing to carry out initial plans is not inherently synonymous with deceit. It is quite another story when strings attached materialize out of thin air right after graduation. Gratitude for assistance is genuine and vital, but support offered without prior terms cannot transform into an automatic obligation to follow someone else's script without question.

5. Just How Moderate Is This "Moderate" Compromise?

Labeling a stance "moderate" is easy enough; paper will tolerate any adjective. However, researchers Ansah and Mensah, in their 2018 paper, incisively argue that whenever push comes to shove and a genuine crisis erupts, Gyekye still awards decisive priority to the community. Consequently, what appears moderate might simply be radical communitarianism sporting a softer velvet trim. We should stress: this represents the reasoned critique of specific scholars in an academic dispute, not an absolute, immutable verdict on Gyekye’s entire philosophical structure.

Every model appears harmonious so long as the desires of the individual and the interests of the crowd happen to coincide. The true stress test occurs during irreconcilable friction. Consider a hypothetical office predicament: a startup faces a crunch deadline, and leadership insists everyone work overnight. The majority agrees in pursuit of prospective bonuses, but one worker heads home at 6:00 PM to attend to a seriously ill relative. The team instantly brands them a deserter sabotaging the shared mission.

At such junctures, it helps to pause and ask several clarifying questions to distinguish authentic solidarity from coercive pressure:

  • Who specifically shoulders the lion's share of the burden?

  • Who truly reaps the eventual reward and acclaim?

  • Were these commitments undertaken voluntarily by all parties involved?

  • Are there less punitive, alternative paths to resolve the crisis?

  • Does the party footing the bill hold any say in renegotiating the rules of engagement?

If an individual's rights are recognized only as long as they nod along agreeably with superiors or kin, those are not rights at all—they are merely a temporary pass to sit quietly.

6. Who Exactly Hides Behind the Mask of "We"?

In philosophical discourse, writers often invoke the word "community" as though it were a seamless monolith endowed with a singular mind. In practical reality, behind any abstract "we" sit flesh-and-blood individuals with concrete personal interests.

When a hypothetical family proclaims, "We sat down and decided which career you should pursue," it pays to clarify: does "we" mean a genuine council of all members, the quiet judgment of a grandfather, or the forceful preference of an overbearing aunt who pounds the table loudest? That distinction matters enormously.

A person simultaneously navigates multiple communities: family, workplace, neighborhood associations, a hobby group, or a professional union. Their demands regularly collide. Saying "the person belongs to the community" does not by itself resolve a concrete conflict, because it leaves unresolved whose claim takes precedence when a supervisor demands a Saturday shift while relatives expect attendance at an anniversary.

Internal dissent does not necessarily fracture a collective. On the contrary, if a group demands absolute unanimity and penalizes every dissenting opinion, one is dealing not with an oasis of human warmth, but with a control mechanism enforcing rigid mutual complicity. Before dissolving into the ecstasy of togetherness, it is prudent to ask: who holds real authority here, who distributes resources, and who is assigned the sole privilege of silently enduring the fallout?

7. Mutiny on Deck: Why Dissent Can Be an Act of Care

If a person is shaped by relationships and culture, voicing disagreement with the collective course does not equate to burning down bridges. At times, the person who pushes back is trying to safeguard the common enterprise; a raised voice alone does not establish that someone is acting out of care.

Take a hypothetical mutual-aid fund in an office. Everyone pays their dues, yet financial relief consistently flows only to the coordinator's personal favorites. One outspoken member stands up and demands a transparent audit. Others instantly murmur: "You are wrecking our close-knit circle! You only care about yourself!" Yet demanding equitable rules may well be an effort to save the fund from ruinous collapse; one's real motives require careful assessment rather than knee-jerk assumptions.

To be sure, this does not mean every rebel is inherently virtuous. People frequently cloak ordinary apathy, an unwillingness to honor debts, or basic discourtesy in grandiose slogans about personal liberty. Attempting to divine hidden psychological motives is futile—what matters is a cool-headed evaluation of the substance of the arguments themselves.

Above all sits the freedom to leave. If exiting a group invites total social ostracism or if an individual is trapped financially with nowhere to turn, grand talk of "voluntary community" becomes an empty farce.

8. Care Without Invoices: Supporting Those Who Cannot "Earn" Their Keep

The most revealing crash test for any normative model occurs when an individual—due to age, illness, or acute crisis—simply cannot churn out their customary quota of public utility. Let us state plainly: our considerations here constitute our own critical ethical assessment, not the reconstruction of an alleged "uniform historical answer" across African thought. If human significance is gauged strictly by the volume of tangible benefits returned to the group, we risk collapsing into grim bookkeeping where moral care is rationed via productivity coupons.

Genuine care differs from a marketplace transaction precisely because it does not demand an immediate, equivalent quid pro quo. A society can support a person simply because they are, redistributing burdens across generations and life stages. At the same time, the equation must realistically account for the resources of the caregivers themselves: a willingness to help is admirable, but it is not boundless, and the threat of emotional or financial depletion among those carrying the weight cannot be swept under the rug to preserve an idyllic communal image. An explicit promise, the practical capacity to execute it, and abstract expectations of reciprocity are distinct matters that must not be conflated.

The primary pitfall here is the temptation to convert assistance into an ownership stake in someone else's life. When helping another with everyday tasks, benefactors often face the paternalistic urge to decide on their behalf who they may see, what they should feel, and how they should spend their hours. Yet the inability to execute a specific physical or logistical task does not equate to an inability to make independent life choices. Care widens a person's possibilities; it does not silence their voice under the weight of an unpayable debt of gratitude. If ethical maturity places any demand upon a community, it is the capacity to uphold the vulnerable without demanding that they surrender the steering wheel of their own destiny to a board of collective guardians.

9. Practical Field Guide: Navigating the Weight of Communal Expectations

Untangling mutual grievances does not require defending a dissertation on African philosophy. Where relevant, one can start with four clarifying questions—offered without any guarantee of dissolving every conflict:

  • Whom am I specifically grateful to, and for what? (Identify concrete acts of help without rhetorical drama: who paid for tuition, who brought groceries during an illness).

  • What did I voluntarily promise? (Was there a clear, mutual agreement beforehand, or is an open-ended obligation being imposed retroactively?).

  • What are my actual resources right now? (Commitments made in stable times can become impossible during crises or poor health; sheer capacity and formal obligation are different realities).

  • Where does the firm boundary of my personal decision lie? (No past support entitles others to select your partner or dictate your vocation).

It is also worth observing whose voice is missing from the room; motives cannot simply be presumed. If a family gathers to chart a grandfather's fate while he is not even invited to the table, the issue is not "complex ethics"—it is basic disrespect. Meanwhile, avoid the urge to confront loved ones shouting: "You are behaving like radical communitarians according to Menkiti's typology!" Resist slapping academic labels on people. Ground the conversation calmly in the facts: explicit agreements, available stamina, boundaries, and the right to speak for oneself.

10. Remaining Yourself While Belonging to the Whole

The debate among these thinkers is no dead end; it shines a bright light on the core tension of human coexistence. Menkiti rightly observes that outside community we would not become who we are, and that moral maturity requires conscious effort. Gyekye defends personal autonomy within social life, while his critics examine whether that autonomy withstands genuine conflicts with communal demands.

A mature outlook rests upon two simple propositions that can be considered together:

"I am profoundly grateful to those who helped me grow and find my footing. But it in no way follows that anyone possesses the right to live my life for me."

Between these shores lies no permanent blueprint accompanied by lifelong guarantees. Belonging offers warmth and footing, yet it can occasionally demand blind acquiescence. Independence safeguards personal agency, yet it can slide into bitter isolation. No eloquent philosophical vocabulary will ever spare us the daily labor of navigating this balance through our own actions.

References