“Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.”
— (Adorno, Negative Dialectics)

Early post-colonial African philosophy was a missed opportunity. Though the vigorous debates that roiled the field were ostensibly over the existence of “African philosophy,” it was the modifier “African” that drew the most concentrated venom. Whatever the beliefs of various participants to the debates, it was often taken for granted that [North Atlantic] “philosophy” was itself known and settled. But what if African philosophers had refused to grant North Atlantic philosophy its claim to self-definition, self-knowledge, self-transcendence, and self-fulfillment? What if, instead of stampeding to answer the question, “What is African philosophy?”, African philosophers had instead responded: “No, what is philosophy?”

This issue may be pressed with just as much justice to contemporary African philosophers. Latter-day African philosophers are fond of expressing their impatience with the early post-independence debates on the existence of African philosophy. For many of these philosophers, African philosophers should just get on with doing “real” philosophy rather than dilate on its existence. According to this way of thinking, “real philosophy” is self-evident. As with their teachers, then, second-generation African philosophers have largely engaged philosophy on North Atlantic terms. But what if the task of post-colonial African philosophy had been to take the existence of philosophy as such as an open question? What if meta-philosophy were not seen as a fruitless, unproductive distraction but instead was an opening, an invitation, to a searching critique of philosophy’s conditions of possibility?