Contemporary African philosophy has long left behind the cleavage that pitted professional philosophers (that is, those who identified strongly with the disciplinary form it has historically taken in the North Atlantic world) against ethnophilosophers (that is, those who were keen to recuperate the worldviews of precolonial epistemes). This opposition has now been abandoned in favor of the conceptual analysis of key metaphysical, epistemic, or ethical terms that make up the linguistic worldviews of various communal or ethnic groups. Thus, for example, Kwasi Wiredu has analyzed conceptions of the person among the Akan; Dismas Masolo has engaged with Luo notions of time; and Sophie Oluwole has written on Yoruba accounts of rationality. The limning out of the conceptual contours of African languages constitutes a rapprochement of sorts between professional philosophy and ethnophilosophy. If conceptual analysis draws from one of the mainstays of analytic philosophy – namely, ordinary language philosophy –, an attentiveness to the semantic and lexical content of African languages and groups engages with knowledges that were previously thought to be of interest only to ethnophilosophers.

If these developments have come with undoubted gains, they have also wrought distinct losses. For one, conceptual analysis provides a thin account of social reality. What it fails to do is proffer a thick account of the social ontology – histories, structures, contexts, power/ideology, relationships, bodies, habitus – that constitutes and is turn constituted by language. Such a social ontology would have revealed the embeddedness of social groups in history and the entanglement of particular languages in larger webs of structure and meaning.

Conceptual ethno-analysis may thus be misleading in at least two ways. First, it provides a far more singular and absolutist account of meaning than is warranted by the always contested, shifting terrain within which language is used and deployed. The debate between Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye on the Akan concept of the “person” is strikingly revealing of this contestation. But second, conceptual ethno-analysis – insofar as it claims to proffer an account of how certain concepts are understood within particular ethnic groups – may reify these ethnic groups; that is, it may fail to account for their historical, entangled, and often radically protean figurations.

The upshot is that what is often hailed as a methodological maneuver to decolonize African knowledges may end up inventing a deeply reactionary vision of the African future.