Welcome at the Professorship of African and Afrophone Philosophies

The Professorship of African and Afrophone Philosophies delivers teaching and research in the fields of African and Comparative Philosophy as well as in Afrophone Philosophies (philosophies in African languages).

Professor Alena Rettová leads a team of researchers working on African philosophy, funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant entitled “Philosophy and Genre: Creating a Textual Basis for African Philosophy” (PhiGe). The theoretical foundation of this project is an understanding of the critical role of genre in communicatingthe philosophical message. Rather than limiting the expression of philosophy to non-fictional prose, the project team suggest African philosophy needs to start from a rigorous and complex study of its texts and insist on a broad and inclusive definition of “text”. The project pioneers a multilingual approach to African philosophy based on comparative work with texts in multiple textual genres. The team members demonstrate these theoretical points on a range of case studies, including the essay in Ciluba and French, the novel in Swahili, Shona, Ciluba, Lingala, French, and English, digital texts such as blogs and genres used in social media, scenario planning narratives, Sufi poetry in Swahili and Wolof, and Alexis Kagame’s poetic work in Kinyarwanda and French, adapting the oral genres of dynastic, heroic and pastoral poetry.

The professorship administers the Centre of African Philosophy (CAΦ).