African Personhood Analysis

There are two philosophical conceptions of personhood in African thought: the descriptive metaphysical and the normative. A metaphysical account of personhood may seek to analyze the essential ontological make-up of a person, examining, for instance, whether he or she is essentially material or immaterial, or whether he or she has one or two essential natures. Analyses of the nature of the mind and body, and the relationship between them, are efforts to give metaphysical accounts of personhood. However, it is the normative and not the metaphysical idea of personhood that is germane to African communal traditions, as personhood is a status earned by meeting certain community standards, including the ability to take on prescribed responsibilities

The community is at the center of every thought, activity, or practice; it shapes one 's ways of life, attitudes, ways of seeing things, and methods of doing things. Many African ideas, beliefs, and values are grounded and made meaningful only in the context of their communalistic conceptual and normative schemes. Traditional African societies are founded on, and sustained by, the idea of communally shared beliefs, practices, and values. J. A. A. Ayoade underscores this by contrasting African thought with Western thought. He says: "One thing which is evident... in Western thought is that it is possible to ascribe a particular strand of thought to known individual philosophers. On the contrary this is not true of the African system of thought[,] which is totally communal in origin." Although the African communalistic conception of personhood is primarily normative, it is also dependent on a descriptive metaphysical view of personhood; one cannot satisfy the criteria of personhood if one does not have the descriptive metaphysical features of a

In the following discussion of Achebe 's Things Fall Apart, I want to temporarily move away from the understandable emphasis of readers and critics of the novel on the grand narrative of imperial domination and exploitation of the Igbo by the British colonial power which frames the novel. I want to read the novel from the perspective of those who more astutely perceive that a fuller understanding of the fictional Igbo world requires that we pay equal attention to how Achebe balances, in his narrative, that colonial point of view with several other levels of equally powerful discourses, quite obvious upon a deeper, more sophisticated reading of this book, as well as of Achebe 's other complex historical novels. Indeed, I want to draw attention to how things fell apart in Umuofia partly because the Umuofia people, due to the contingency of collective memory and the exigencies of present needs, largely forgot or ignored the principle of balance as enunciated above, a principle enshrined in their cultural morality and societal institutions by the founding fathers. But we must begin by giving Okonkwo his due. He rose in what he considered a heroic defense of his culture, sacrificing