Where is the Philosophy from Timbuktu? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

It would help if you could say a bit more about what you think philosophy from Timbuktu is going to be, and why you are looking for it.

There are a couple of things I can suggest to you at the outset, however.

The first is that Timbuktu has been a site of Islamic learning and scholarship for much of its history, all the way back to 8th or 9th Century CE, attracting a number of ulema, Islamic intellectuals and scholars from all over the Islamic world, throughout much of its history. West African Islam has been relatively heterodox compared to some parts of the Middle East, attracting thinkers influenced by Sufism as well as Sunni traditions of legal and philosophical interpretation, and Timbuktu was one of several places within West Africa where thinkers of different dispositions or training met and debated one another.

"African philosophy", on the other hand, is a loose and complicated "holding category" that academic scholars and African intellectuals use to think about how to describe the formal philosophical beliefs and systems of various African societies, often with an eye to bringing those systems into conversation with formal Western-derived traditions that dominate much of academic philosophy. As most people with an interest in these ideas acknowledge, there's a serious danger in talking about "African philosophy" in that you can end up essentializing "Africa" as a single place or 'country' with a single set of philosophical beliefs. There's also a problem potentially in taking implicit or distributed ideas about the world, about ethics, about causality, etc. and systematizing them more than they actually were in the lived experience of the societies that held such beliefs in order to make them comparable to formal Western philosophical systems. Paulin Hountondji, Valentin Mudimbe, Kwasi Wiredu and other philosophers have written about these challenges while also arguing that there is nevertheless something that can be called "African philosophy" that has historical roots in a variety of African societies. Some Afrocentric thinkers like Cheikh Anta Diop go further and argue that there is in fact a single "African philosophy" that has its origins in ancient Egypt and which diffused across the continent from there (Diop, Martin Bernal and others also suggest that some of the content of this originally African body of philosophical thought was stolen or appropriated by classical Greek thinkers, etc.)

To some extent, Timbuktu is not where I'd start an investigation of African philosophy in this sense. It's a site where Africans philosophized, but did so within a broadly Islamic frame. Islam is not the opposite of "being African", mind you, but the intellectual community within Timbuktu was quite cosmopolitan and its formalizations were very strongly tied to specifically Islamic traditions of legal and philosophical thought.

Many scholars with an interest in "African philosophy" (but not Afrocentrist thinkers like Diop) identify a set of relatively widely distributed ideas about ethics, community, casuality, personhood, etc. that they see in various African societies as being distinctively "African". One example might be an understanding of illness or accident as having both naturalistic and spiritual causes, without insisting that there is some ontological contradiction between the two--that illness can be a result of social discord that mobilizes malevolent or dangerous spiritual power against the sick while also being the result of germs, parasites or a malfunctioning body.