Building an authentic African philosophy of education based on the African concept of personhood

This paper’s central task is to demonstrate how the African concept of personhood provides a suitable grounding for an authentic African philosophy of education. An authentic African philosophy of education is one in which there is a constant search for underlying principles for reflecting on the foundation, nature, and justification for the need and desirability of education in Africa. Scholars have drawn diverse implications from the African concept of personhood, especially in the areas of normative ethics, social and political, and legal philosophies. However, sufficient attention has not yet been paid to how the African conception of personhood could drive fruitful theoretical engagements with the foundations, nature, and justification of the African philosophy of education. This paper attempts to fill this gap. With the combination of critical literature review and philosophical methods of conceptual and logical analyses (and argumentation), the paper argues for the centrality of an African concept of personhood to the questions of the foundation, form (nature), and justification of an authentic African philosophy of education. The paper concludes that a personhood-based African philosophy of education provides a plausible framework within which these questions can be fruitfully engaged.


Introduction-three questions for philosophy of education
There have been concerted efforts by African philosophers to reflect on the continent's philosophy of education (Higgs, 2012;Horsthemke, 2017;Ramose, 2004;Waghid, 2004Waghid, , 2014;;Wiredu, 2004).One such effort- Wiredu's (2004) idea of the African philosophy of education (henceforth referred to as APE)-is inspired by what he takes the notion of an "educated person" to be in an African context.For him, it is impossible to reflect on APE without being first and foremost clear about what it means for an African person to be educated.Waghid (2004, p. 57) agrees with this, "because any philosophy of education needs to frame human action in a way that is commensurate with its underlying meanings".Working specifically within the Akan conceptual framework, Wiredu identifies three key qualities that distinguish educated people from their non-educated counterparts.For him, an educated person must possess: (i) basic knowledge of the cultural and natural environments, with more than mere mastery of some selected area of discourse; (ii) capacity for logical reasoning and refined articulation; (iii) a good degree of moral maturity (Wiredu, 2004, p. 17).While Wiredu's list of qualities of an educated person seems to align with the commonsense conception of education globally, the list indicates the significance of the concept of personhood in African thoughts about education.As it is argued in this paper, no serious discussion of philosophy of education could avoid the need for an appropriate concept of personhood.
Formulating an authentic philosophy of education for Africa has a lot to benefit from the nature of persons in Africa.In fact, an authentic APE cannot be extricated from the insights from the African metaphysics of personhood.One reason for this is that the concept of education only has meaning within the context of human relationships.Animals could be trained to behave in specific manners envisioned by their owners.However, regardless of the degree of response to training, it is not conventional to refer to an animal as educated or uneducated.As Woods and Barrow (2006, p. 22) rightly observe, "you can design or program a machine and train a monkey, but, strictly speaking, you can educate only a human, or, to be precise, a being with a capacity for a hypothesising language".This suggests that human beings remain at the centre of the activity called education.As Taiwo (2005, p. 244) argues, "One can hardly speak of the well-being of an entity unless one is apprised of what type of being it is and what will best conduce to its being the best of its type that it can be."Similarly, one can hardly talk about an authentic philosophy of education of a people if one is not highly knowledgeable about the kind of people in question.The central thesis of this paper is that an African concept of personhood plays, or should be made to play, a pivotal role in the conception of APE.
Every philosophy of education confronts three key questions1 : a. the question of its foundation, b. the question of its form (nature), and c. the question of justification.Any other issues regarding philosophy of education can be conveniently subsumed under these tripod missions.The first question focuses on the source(s), origin(s), or root(s) of such a philosophy.The legal principle that you cannot build something on nothing holds true for philosophy of education.Philosophy of education is an accumulated body of knowledge that is deeply enshrined within an intellectual mode of discourse.As it relates to Africa, the question of foundation focuses on whether APE has an authentic African origin or is rooted in an alien culture.This question becomes more relevant in the specific case of Africa owing to her historical experiences of slave trade and colonialism-two ugly pasts that continue to shape the African present and future discourses about education.
The second one is the question of form or nature.This asks, among many other things, what are the distinctive features of a philosophy of education?What are the internal configurations of the philosophy of education?A part of efforts to provide answers to this question should include the overall purpose that a specific philosophy of education aims to achieve.What relation should one philosophy of education have with other philosophies of education?How should one philosophy of education react to another?In reflecting on the question of nature, philosophers of education (as accountable citizens of their respective regions of the world) have the professional responsibility of taking an introspective perspective on what their society stands to gain through a particular form of education.For instance, Oladipo (1998, p. 24; see also Waghid, 2016) argues for an APE with the intellectual capacity to provide skills required for the eradication of the "various dimensions of the African predicament (that is, the amelioration of the human condition as a consequence of poverty, hunger, famine, unemployment, political oppression, civil wars, colonialism (imperialism), and economic exploitation)".The import of Oladipo's argument is that any philosophy of education must be committed to the situated or lived reality of a human community.In providing solutions to these problems, are African philosophers of education restricted in their approach to only African intellectual repertoire, or are they required to borrow from other intellectual traditions?Reflections on these questions are an integral part of a properly conceived philosophy of education.
The third question that philosophy of education strives to answer is that of justification.This is the question, why education in the first place?This question has a general as well as a particular version of being posed.In its former version, a philosopher of education wants to ask, why should education be preferred over and above ignorance?Why should an individual ever strive to be educated?How do you know that education is worthwhile?(Cuypers, 2012, p. 3).In its latter version, why investigate APE?Why should Africans (or any people for that matter) aspire to have their own philosophy of education?Why should an African mode of education take the unique form it takes?When these questions are asked, either for the general purpose of knowing why education is to be preferred to ignorance or the specific purpose of knowing why people pursue a particular mode of education, what is usually being sought is a rational explanation for treating education as sacrosanct and as a human value worthy of being sought.Such rational explanations help us to understand the human dispositions to educational activities and why the educational philosophy of one people may not be suitable for another.
What I attempt to do in this paper is to demonstrate that the three central questions of philosophy of education identified above can be adequately investigated against the background of the African metaphysical framework of human personhood.The paper argues for a personhoodbased APE, with the overall purpose being to prepare the ground for fruitful engagements of a more culturally sensitive and ontologically ingrained theory of APE.In achieving this objective, the paper starts with an examination of some of the proposals for APE.In the section that follows, the paper does a survey of an African concept of personhood, after which efforts are made to provide answers to the questions of foundation, form, and justification within the African perspective anchored on the metaphysics of personhood.Conclusions are drawn in the last section of the paper.

African philosophy of education
It is apt to start this section with a brief discussion of the question: What is the philosophy of education?What kind of activities are designated by the phrase "philosophy of education"?In searching for a quick and precise answer to this question, one may (as the case of philosophy itself has shown) be disappointed to discover that such a quick and precise definition of philosophy of education is very rare, if not impossible, to come by.This should not be taken to mean a scarcity of definitions or conceptions of either philosophy or education.There have been various attempts to define these very important concepts in various intellectual discourses.However, the problem has been that there is no way one tries to define them without encountering difficulties that would make the proposed definition somehow inadequate.With this backdrop, it is prudent not to merely seek a definition for either philosophy or education but to simply be content with what philosophers of education describe themselves as doing when they engage in philosophy of education.Although this will not amount to defining philosophy of education in a philosophically tidy way, it would motivate and propel the present discussion in the right direction towards achieving its central objective.
The paper adopts Siegel et al.'s (2018;Siegel, 2009, p. 3) definition of philosophy of education as "the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice".This definition appears less troublesome in the present context because it deliberately avoids controversies that usually accompany philosophical concepts.It states the obvious about philosophy of education, namely, that it is a branch of applied or practical philosophy and that it is concerned with philosophical issues that arise from education.Beyond this rather simplistic way of conceptually mapping its subject matter, all the disciplinary concerns of philosophy of education have attracted disagreements among their respective practitioners.Scholars are yet to come to terms with the nature, aims, and problems of education.Also, the fact that these foci of philosophy of education are engaged within the methodological precincts of philosophy makes them as controversial as philosophy itself.For Siegel (2009, p. 3), the aims of education present the most basic problem for the philosophy of education.This may be because different persons and peoples aim at different ends in pursuing educational goals.Given that an agreement is often difficult to reach where there is a multiplicity of possibilities, it may be problematic to find an overarching aim of education.
Problems in the philosophy of education are not intrinsically different from those encountered in mainstream philosophy.They are issues that various branches of philosophy have got to grapple with in their various complexities and disciplinary consciousnesses.It may thus be argued that there are no issues separating philosophy of education from those in mainstream philosophy.Issues in philosophy of education are philosophical issues with implications for theories and practices of education.Philosophers reflect on issues in philosophy of education alongside issues in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, philosophy of mind and language, social and political philosophy, etc. (Siegel, 2009, p. 4).To illustrate, for being concerned with the phenomenon of knowledge in its diverse complexities, philosophy of education is inextricably tied to epistemology, a branch of philosophy that (conceived in its broadest sense) is concerned with giving an account of knowledge.Also, there are issues in education that are straightforwardly metaphysical in nature.Whereas epistemology deals with the question of how genuine knowledge could be acquired, it leaves out the question of what this genuine knowledge really is or whether it really exists.This is an ontological issue that is central to metaphysical enquiries (Bigaj, 2012;Conee & Sider, 2014).Questions such as whether there is a right to education, whether it is government's responsibility to educate citizens, or whether government should meddle with the process of research, teaching, and learning are not disciplinarily distinguishable from general ethical problems.
Philosophically, there are no absolute ways of reacting to some (if not all) of the above problems.Education is so context-sensitive and situation-specific that it would be a grandstanding error to assume a universalist principle underlying the desire to be educated.Given the critical role that education plays in the survival of a people, its connection with the environment in terms of physical, spiritual, and cultural cannot be gainsaid.Hence, a discourse on the appropriate educational philosophy for a people cannot be taken out of the context of the people's worldview about themselves (i.e. about the kind of human beings they take themselves to be) and the socio-cultural realities that give meaning to their existence.As Abdi aptly notes: [E]ven in spaces where the normative semi-structure of traditional education (with all its socially binding but formally non-codified sanction-and-prohibition mechanisms), there would be so many tacitly agreedupon notations and practices that govern the way people learn, value knowledge, and use that knowledge for specific intentions and locations that are embedded within the political, social and cultural platforms of the places they inhabit.Abdi (2011, p. 83) This suggests that what we take to be a suitable form of education transcends merely crossing the borders of ignorance to an informed standpoint.It is neither knowing many things nor the ability to recall many established facts.On the contrary, it is the building of a rational capacity to deal with the vagaries of everyday life as they arise for a people within culturally delineated contexts of survival and fulfilment of humanness.
The foregoing can be situated within the cultural context of APE.Notwithstanding the propensity to deny APE in some quarters (Bodunrin, 1981;Hountondji, 1983;etc.),there have been concerted efforts by some brilliant African scholars to outline the structure of African thought as far as traditional education is concerned.For instance, against the unfounded claim that pre-colonial Africa was an intellectual nullity, Semali (1999) reveals that traditional African education had an effective knowledge and scientific repertoire that allowed it to effectively respond to the socio-political, agricultural, and medical needs of the community and its ecological literacy.One must agree with Semali because only such a high-level understanding of their environment and themselves could have sustained them for the long years of their solitary existence before Europe's disruptive invasion that scuttled this indigenous form of knowledge system.For Walter Rodney, APE is marked by: its close links with the social life, both in material and spiritual sense; its collective nature where it focuses on the whole of the person and the community; its many-sidedness; and its progressive development in conformity with the successive stages of the physical, emotional, and mental development of the child.There was no separation of education and the productive activities of people.Altogether, through many informal means, pre-colonial African education matched the realities of pre-colonial African society and produced well-rounded personalities to fit into that society.(Rodney, 1982, p. 239) The holistic picture of APE that Rodney paints above derives from the African lived experience, which furnishes them with cultural insights into what it means to be humans in a world populated by both physical and spiritual forces.With the African lived world characterised by organic interconnectedness of everything to everything, human survival and flourishing require a harmonious relationship with every aspect of such a world.In fact, according to Toure (cited in Taiwo, 2005), the humanity of human beings consists of this harmonious existence with others.It is, therefore, easy to see the point that "if one hopes to understand the experiences and conditions of African communities, then one firstly needs to practice a philosophy of education", which, as Waghid puts it, "is an activity of scientific inquiry which enables one to understand the situations of communities, albeit Africans' "lived experiences" (Waghid, 2004, p. 56).In agreement with this, I would like to stipulate the discipline of APE as a philosophical enquiry that seeks to gain insights into what it means to be African, with its unique place in the world, the peculiarity of its past and present experiences, and the goals towards which it propels itself in the context of contemporary global realities.
Let me now engage the issue of the ideal aim of education for Africa.There seems to be a convergence of opinions among some scholars (Gyekye, 1997;Waghid, 2004Waghid, , 2014;;Wiredu, 2004) that reasonableness serves as the main aim of APE.They agree that African education aims to enable the individual to be reasonable.Wiredu is led to this conclusion through his analysis of an educated person using the Akan linguistic framework.According to him, the identity markers of an educated person, within an Akan conceptual scheme, are the personal qualities of being refined, polished, lucid, and logical (Wiredu, 2004, p. 17;Waghid, 2004Waghid, , p. 57, 2014).An educated person has a good measure of knowledgeability in her natural and cultural environments, as well as some chosen area(s) of knowledge, a decent moral sense of right and wrong, and the willingness and tolerance to learn from others through clear and logical dialogic engagements.A similar point is made by Hountondji (2002), who emphasises the importance of subjecting every form of intellectual discourse to critical deliberations as a way of guarding against acceptance of dogmatic beliefs and unhealthy indoctrinations.Hountondji accuses what he calls "ethnophilosophy" of operating on a closed system, which does not promote the culture of rational enquiry.It is on this basis that Hountondji rejects ethnophilosophy (of education), which according to him does not reflect the open, discursive, and critical temperament of philosophy.
One challenge with reasonableness as the telos of education is that it is not clear what it means to be reasonable.Each of the advocates of reasonableness has given a set of qualities underlying a reasonable act.Gyekye (1997) defines reasonableness in terms of rationality and logic, i.e. an act is reasonable if it is rational and logical.However, Gyekye fails to explain further what these concepts are even though he affirms that they are culture dependent (1997, p. 29).The culture-dependent nature of rationality and logic is philosophically significant because it aligns with the particularist school of African philosophy, which insists that rationality and logic should not be taken out of the context of a people's culture.Against the universalist claim that concepts such as rationality and logic have a unified standard of measurement across all cultures in the world, the particularist contends that rationality and logic are specific to the unique epistemological structure of each cultural setting because what is logical (and thus rational) in one socio-cultural setting may be illogical in another.For example, what is rational in Western culture may be irrational in African culture.This is important because it tends to reveal the mistaken root of the Western anthropologists' characterisation of African rationality as questionable.Such is the case with Lévy-Bruhl (Lévy-Bruhl & Clare, 2018), who continues to suffer heavy criticisms for his infamous statement that Africans have pre-logical mentality.Thus, Gyekye's clarification does not only show that no culture is the sole custodian of rationality or logic, but it also shows the conceptual error in judging the rationality of other peoples, using one's own parameters.

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Wiredu has an expanded concept of reasonableness.For him, aside from the cognitive qualities of rationality and logic, a reasonable (i.e. an educated) person must possess the moral qualities of tolerance and a personal ability to differentiate between right and wrong.This implies that being reasonable is not a matter of being intellectually mature alone, it also encompasses moral maturity.If this is what being reasonable entails, how is it different from the normative sense of an African conception of personhood?Scholars have identified two concepts of person, one descriptive, the other normative (Gbadegesin, 1991;Gyekye, 1978Gyekye, , 1992;;Menkiti, 1984Menkiti, , 2004;;Molefe, 2018Molefe, , 2019aMolefe, , 2020aMolefe, , 2020b;;Wiredu, 2004).Descriptively, a person is an object in the world that has a specific physical configuration and behaves in certain ways.Hence, descriptively, all human beings are persons.Normatively, personhood is not inherent in human beings; it is acculturated.A human being may be a person in the descriptive sense but may not be a person in the normative sense (Wiredu, 2004).Within this explanatory system, this possibility is not a contradiction; Wiredu's analysis fails to properly delineate an educated person from a person in the normative sense.Can an educated person not be a person in the normative sense?Can there be an educated nonperson?Are all educated persons necessarily persons in the normative sense?Can a normative nonperson be reasonable?
Wiredu's introduction of moral maturity as an ingredient of reasonableness leads to some implausible implications.In my opinion, being reasonable does not necessarily imply being morally committed.Consider a situation where an educated person, in Wiredu's sense, at a point in life changes from being morally committed to being morally noncommitted.In this case, we say she has lost her personhood, but does she, at the same time, lose her educated status?Much as this cannot be answered in a positive, it shows that being morally mature is not a necessary component of being reasonable or educated.I would strongly agree with Wiredu if his requirement of moral maturity is defined in terms of the ability to differentiate between right and wrong.However, this ability does not entail a life of commitment to moral living.An educated person may know right from wrong, but this does not commit her to a life of avoiding wrong and doing right.
Another aim of APE is identified by Obafemi Awolowo.According to Awolowo, the aim of education is the attainment of what he refers to as a "regime of mental magnitude" (Awolowo, 1968).Awolowo believes that the sole essence of knowledge is to feed the human soul, because what organic food is to the body is what education is to the human soul.According to Taiwo (2005; see also Makinde, 1987, p. 8), this conviction largely informed Awolowo's free education policy that transformed the quality of persons in Southwestern Nigeria during the early years of independence.
For Awolowo, an educated person is one that has entered a regime of mental magnitude.Mental magnitude is "a philosophical doctrine that derives from a theory of mind and body, with the assertion that the mental is superior to the physical element of a person and should take control over the emotions, desires, and actions" (Makinde, 1987(Makinde, , p. 4, 2010)).In this regime, a person has not only transformed from the state of ignorance to enlightenment, but she has also conquered herself in terms of having tamed personal indulgence in undignified bodily passions characteristic of unlearnt minds.Awolowo describes the regime of mental magnitude as.
properly and eminently equipped with a considerable measure of intellectual comprehension and cognition, insight, and spiritual illumination.In this regime, we are free from (1) the negative emotions of anger, hate, fear, envy, jealousy, selfishness, or greed; (2) indulgence in the wrong types of food and drink and in ostentatious consumption; (3) excessive or immoral craving for sex.In short, in this regime, we conquer what Kant calls "the tyranny of the flesh" and become free.(Awolowo, 1968, p. 230) In Awolowo's opinion, education not only sets one free from the shackles of ignorance, but it also sets individuals free from their personal imperfections, such as negative emotions and destructive pleasures of the body.Hence, the proper function of education is to help human persons to attain both cognitive, psychical, and moral perfection through the elimination of ignorance from the mind, negative emotions from the soul, and immoral cravings from the body.These undesirable features of natural human beings constitute impediments to the flourishing of the soul, which, according to Awolowo's Christian-inflected theory of human nature, is the real person.Thus, an entry into the regime of mental magnitude is secured through a life of discipline.The body is disciplined through the cultivation of right eating and constant exercise; the mind through continuous reading and expansion of the intellect; and the soul is disciplined through love towards God and one's neighbours (Awolowo, 1968, p. 188).
The aim of education, as Awolowo sees it, pertains to the whole of a human person."It is to make it possible for man's physical organs as well as his instincts to function normally, positively, and harmoniously" (Awolowo, 1968, p. 215).Awolowo adopts Christian creationism, in which a human person is composed of three components, namely, body, mind, and soul (i.e. the divine breath).Education enables each of these components to function at its optimal capacity, culminating in productive individuals and a functional community.A person who possesses a sound mind in a sound body can become a good instrument of social, economic, political, and scientific changes, i.e. contribute his own quota to a nation's mental and physical developments through what he calls "gainful employment" and "integrated rural development" (Awolowo, 1981).The role of education cannot be overemphasised in a democratic setting, as both the leaders and the led need education to effectively play their roles.For leaders, adequate education enables them to serve with efficiency and integrity, while for the led, education empowers them to make the right political choice as far as democratic institutions are concerned.Hence, as opined by Makinde, "democracy in practice can tum out to be a disaster or a curse unless it conforms to the regime of mental magnitude where both citizens and their leaders have cultivated, through education or discipline of the mind, mental magnitude and spiritual depth" (Makinde, 1987, p. 9).
Awolowo's philosophy of education has attracted fierce criticism, especially on the ground of its impracticability for human beings.Makinde (1987, p. 10), argues that "Awolowo's doctrine of mental magnitude is an ideal that cannot be met by any mortal, short of an Angel who presides over a colony of holy spirits".I do not think that Awolowo's mental magnitude is as impracticable as Makinde thinks it is.The moral standard may be quite high and almost humanly impossible, but I think it remains an instrument of self-development and self-appraisal.Thus, it should not be taken as an impossible standard for being an educated person.Rather, it should be viewed as an ideal that an educated person aims to attain, regardless of whether she succeeds or not.Also, Awolowo's flirtation with religious absolute (such as what he calls the Universal Mind, from which the human soul originates) has been accused of taking his analysis of human nature out of the realm of reason (Nwanwene, 1969).This objection could be circumvented by agreeing to Mbiti's characterisation of African reality as essentially religious.If Mbiti's (Mbiti, 1970) religious universe hypothesis about Africans is correct, then there should be no problem justifying African human nature on the grounds of religion.
What I consider the greatest challenge of Awolowo's doctrine of mental magnitude is its foundation in a foreign religion.Awolowo's adoption of the Christian metaphysics of personhood (as found in the biblical creation story that provides a theoretical foundation for his theory of human nature) is a major disservice to indigenous APE.Although the Christian metaphysics of personhood bears similarities with some African theories of human nature, it does not completely reflect the African ontology of person.Whatever measure of success it could have recorded, Awolowo's philosophy of education is founded on an alien culture and is out of tune with the African ontological reality.It would be difficult to refer to the outcome of such a philosophy of education as authentically African, having its root in another metaphysical foundation.This paper hopes to correct this sort of anomaly by grounding an authentic APE in an African concept of personhood.However, there is a need to be clear on what this African concept of personhood entails, hence the following section.

African personhood discourse
The subject matter of African personhood is a popular one in African philosophical literature.In my opinion, this popularity is due to its interdisciplinary significance to African humanistic scholarship in general and to African philosophy specifically.Molefe (2020a) avers that the concept of African personhood is ambiguous.This ambiguity is explained in terms of the different meanings that the concept has wielded in the history of its treatment in the literature.Scholars have agreed that personhood has at least two conceptual colourations, namely, ontological (also metaphysical or descriptive or ordinary) and normative concepts of personhood2 (Gbadegesin, 1991(Gbadegesin, , 2003;;Gyekye, 1978Gyekye, , 1992;;Ikuenobe, 2006aIkuenobe, , 2006bIkuenobe, , 2016;;Makinde, 2010;Matolino, 2016;Oyowe, 2013Oyowe, , 2014)).
Ontologically speaking, all human beings are persons, and personhood is fixed by one's membership in the class of Homo sapiens.It is descriptive because it describes the fact of being human, especially in terms of its psychophysical configurations and behavioural dispositions to their physico-spiritual environments.I will illustrate the African ontological concept of a person with the Yoruba and Akan examples. 3The choice of the two ethnic groups is informed by the fact that their ontological conceptions of personhood are among the most popular in the literature and have received diverse attention in the history of personhood discourse.
Yoruba scholars (Abimbola, 1971;Gbadegesin, 1991Gbadegesin, , 1998;;Makinde, 2010) identify at least three constitutive elements in the eniyan (person in the Yoruba language), ara (body), emi (soul), and ori (metaphysical head).These components are intertwined in a way forming the reality of the person.Ara represents every physical feature that makes a person, both internal and external organs.Aside from being a mode of identification in the social context, ara serves as the shell that houses the other components of the person.It also serves the aesthetic aspect of persons, which, unsurprisingly is connected to its (ara) physicality.
Unlike ara, the other components of a person are nonphysical.Emi is a sufficiently controversial component of the person.However, it is agreed that emi is the active principle of life, the life-giving element put in place by the deity (Gbadegesin, 2003).Makinde (1984, p. 191) thinks that emi does perform this role thanks to eje (blood), since "a heart without the supply of blood is no heart, and blood without the heart as a pumping machine is useless".All agree that emi has its source in the breath of life that Olodumare gave an individual at creation.Thus, the giving of emi is the sole prerogative of Olodumare, who also recalls emi at death.Emi has its physical manifestation in eemi (breath) linked with the activities of the lung but is essentially different from it because, whereas emi is spiritual, eemi is physical.The existence of emi keeps the body alive and active.Ori, the most controversial of the three elements, is believed by the Yoruba to be the bearer of destiny (that is, the roadmap that a historical person must thread during her earthly existence).
Here I deliberately keep discussion on ori brief because I will return to it shortly.
Perhaps it could be argued that the Akan people of Ghana have an identical ontological concept of personhood.For the Akan people of Ghana, a person, which they call onipa, has three basic elements, namely, nipadua (body), okra (a life-giving entity), and sunsum (that which gives a person's personality its force) (Gyekye, 1978;Kaphagawani, 2005;Wiredu, 1987).Nipadua, like the Yoruba ara, comprises both the internal and external physical organs of the person.Wiredu and Gyekye disagree on the nature of both okra and sunsum.While Wiredu (1987) describes okra in quasi-material terms, Gyekye (1992) maintains that okra is a spiritual substance.On this basis, they disagree on whether okra should be interpreted as the soul or not, with the latter affirming and the former denying that okra is the soul.Regardless of the dispute between Wiredu and Gyekye on the nature of okra and sunsum, what is important for this enquiry is that for the Akan (like the Yoruba), the human person comprises two essential elements.For Wiredu, this relates to the physical and quasi-physical, while, for Gyekye, it applies to the physical and spiritual-or what Gbadegesin (2003) refers to as physico-material and mental-spiritual divides.Hence, it is safe to characterise the African ontological concept of personhood as a variant of dualism (Balogun & Oyelakin, 2022).
The normative concept of personhood, in contrast, does not analyse the meaning of personhood in terms of its constitutive elements.Unlike the ontological concept, the normative concept does not grant personhood status because of membership in the class of human beings.An individual may be a human being but not a person.This is because personhood is not given but is earned.In such a system, it is not contradictory to say that a person is not a person, if we take the first person to mean the fact of being a human being and the second to be the normative dimension of this fact.Personhood, in this context, is a moral achievement that the individual strives to attain and which may be lost if an individual fails to keep up with the moral requirements.Scholars have not agreed on what the moral requirements are that launched one into the realm of normative personhood.Metz (2010) understands these moral requirements in terms of living a genuinely human life.Others, such as Behrens (2013) and Gyekye (1992), have identified moral virtue and excellence as requirements for the attainment of personhood.There are also the requirements of self-realisation and moral perfectionism (Behrens, 2013;Metz, 2007).
The problem with some of the identified moral requirements for being a person is that it is not very clear what they really mean.Specifically, what does it mean for a human being to live a genuine life?What constitutes moral virtues and excellence?How are self-realisation and moral perfectionism to be understood?Consider the requirement of living a genuine life by Metz.Being genuine may be conceptualised in existentialist terms to mean personal authenticity, which is the capacity of a rational being to tailor her existence towards realising the goals she has set for herself.This will be counterproductive because it does not follow that all such goals are morally permissible within the social context.Also, there is a question of whether there is a generally acceptable manner of being genuine.The same problem arises for the requirement of self-realisation, which supposes that there is a standard called "self" towards which realisation all human actions should tend.
There are principally two ways of engaging this problem.The first is to take the universalist position-that there is a global standard for these requirements.One may then go ahead and construct what one thinks this could be.Some African philosophers have held this view (Bodunrin, 1981;Hountondji, 1983Hountondji, , 1989)).The challenge to such a response is that it undermines the cultural peculiarities of different social settings.This may naturally lead to the imposition of an allegedly superior cultural standard as being more genuine, virtuous, and so on than other allegedly inferior cultures.The second way is to take the cultural particularist position by situating the meaning of these terms (such as genuine and virtuous) within the cultural context.The cultural particularist argues that "theoretical frameworks are to be developed situationally and within culturally specific frames of reference, and that they may not reflect the social realities of other cultures" (Verhoef & Michel, 1997).In compliance with this cross-disciplinary agenda, some scholars have sought the meaning of these terms within culturebased African ethical frameworks.
The view that Africans operate a socio-ethical system called communalism is well known (Gyekye, 1992;Mbiti, 1970;Menkiti, 1984Menkiti, , 2004;;Metz, 2007;Molefe, 2019a;Venter, 2004).Communalism is the doctrine that communality (or the group) is the focus of activities of the individual member of the society (Gyekye, 2011).In a communalist system, the community takes precedence over the individual.The African context of communalism is an ethical as well as a social principle for evaluating personhood.On the one hand, as a social principle, African communalism underlies and describes the relational structure of a typical African society as a historical phenomenon.It is a descriptive term for the African social mode of existence, characterised by a close interconnectedness among members of the society in a lifestyle that is oriented towards others (Verhoef & Michel, 1997, p. 396).On the other hand, as an ethical principle, communalism provides an evaluative paradigm for morally judging human actions as either right or wrong.For the communalist, an action is right if it promotes the good of the community, while an action is wrong if otherwise.As Verhoef and Michel put it, "What is right is what connects people together; what separates people is wrong" (1997, p. 397).Thus, the telos of a moral act is the promotion of communion, harmony, cohesion, and community belongingness among persons in the community (Iroegbu & Echekwube, 2005;Masolo, 2010;Metz, 2020;Mokgoro, 1998;Nkondo, 2007).
Equipped with the above ethical framework, the cultural particularist defines personhood in terms of ability and commitment to the promotion of human welfare within the community.The moral requirements for personhood, namely, living a genuine life, moral excellence, moral perfectionism, self-realisation, etc., all get their meaning from the African communalist outlook.For example, to live a genuine life is to be committed to the good of one's community.There is no genuine life outside the good of the community.The proper purpose of morality, and ultimately of human life, is to build a stronger bonding with members of the community.The rightness or wrongness of an action depends on whether or not the action aligns with this purpose.Also, given that the individual does not have a life outside of the community, the purpose of the latter automatically becomes the purpose of the former.Hence, an individual realises herself (her real nature) by helping the community to attain its purpose of communality; it works against her own nature if she does otherwise.
Having differentiated between ontological and normative concepts of personhood in African scholarship, a pertinent question to pose is: When we talk about an African concept of personhood, which of these concepts are we referring to?It appears to me that a good theory of personhood must derive its normative concept from its ontological concept.So how can this be achieved in the case of the African concept of personhood?What is the relationship between African ontological and normative concepts of person?I earlier indicated, using the Akan and Yoruba ethnic groups, that a human person is composed of three elements: body, soul, and the principle (or bearer) of destiny.It is imperative to note the interconnection among these elements.While the soul activates the body and enables it to play its role in the social context, destiny is the purpose for which each person lives, and it determines how long the unity between body and soul will last-it is part of destiny to determine when each person dies.
African ethics is a variant of virtue ethics (Balogun, 2022) because it is a character-based moral system.As already noted, good characters are those that enable persons to realise themselves as communal beings.It should be noted, however, that character, being essentially about what people do or fail to do in the social context, cannot be realised without their bodies, notwithstanding how this comes about.Hence, one will be right to describe each person's body as the currency spent in the African moral market.Writing about the Yoruba, for instance, Hallen (2004, p. 301) argues that the knowledge of a people's moral character is obtained through observations of their bodily and verbal behaviours.This means that human bodies provide evidence for their moral status within the Yoruba moral epistemology.Also, the belief in human destiny makes the African conception of personhood necessarily communalistic.As Gbadegesin (2003, p. 228) notes (correctly in my opinion), the meaning or purpose embodied in an individual's destiny cannot be separated from the larger human community of which the person is a member.The individual's destiny is thus a subset of the communal destiny, so the fulfilment of this personal destiny requires that the individual aligns herself with the common goals of the community.

Deriving an authentic APE from an African concept of personhood
What then is APE, and how ought it treat the questions of foundation, nature, and justification of education?Within the holistic view of personhood that I have been outlining, education is tied to personhood perfectioning.It is a consistent walk towards the attainment of complete personhood status.The elders are often regarded as "more person" than youngsters because the former have spent more time on earth perfecting their personhood than the latter (Molefe, 2019a).This may be the origin of the African value of respect for elders.Hence, education does not happen to a person; it happens to a person.Two reasons could be advanced for this position.One, if education happens to the person, it will mean that it is a one-for-all phenomenon.However, this is not the case as Africans conceive education as a life-long process that starts from birth and ends at death.It is about the "totality of a person's experience in society, and continues throughout life and is not limited to time and place" (Wane, 2019; see also Bewaji, 2017, p. 733).Two, to conceive education as something that happens to an agent from outside is to concede the possibility of having a morally bankrupt educated person, which will be a contradiction in terms as far as Africans are concerned.In Africa, being educated and being morally bankrupt are mutually exclusive.Wiredu (2004) contends that while it is possible in Western culture to have a "highly educated fool", this is highly impossible within the African culture.

The question of foundation
The African concept of personhood provides a plausible foundation for APE.Perhaps this derives from the centrality of the concept of personhood to all aspects of African lives and the multi-tiered relationship between African indigenous education and African personhood.There is a sense in which African intellection is person-centred.This may imply that the African notion of personhood has implications for every aspect of an African person's life.Education and African personhood are Siamese twins not only because the term education is meaningful only in the context of persons but also because only those who have attained personhood are truly educated.This way, education does not consist in having learnt many things but in acting in the capacity of what has been learnt, thereby equipping one's personhood in anticipation of real or imagined factors that may militate against the sustenance of the community.Hence, APE is founded on the very nature of an African person as a communal being.
Being founded on the African concept of personhood commits APE to be community-oriented.The community is populated by human beings who are vulnerable to human and environmental excesses owing to the frailty of their bodies.One indisputable truth about human beings is that they are finite beings.APE must, therefore, be committed to a form of education that is considerate of human finitude and vulnerability.Education is cultivating the right attitude not only towards fellow human beings in the community but also towards the non-human components of the earth whose activities do have significant impacts on the community.The environment or nature provides support for and poses significant dangers to the life of the community.Therefore, any philosophy of education that makes the welfare of the human community its focal point must prioritise indigenous knowledge of the environment.It must be part of APE to explore to what extent the environment constitutes an ally and to what extent it is an enemy.The knowledge of flora and fauna must be sought, explored, and exploited for the benefit of the community (e.g. the knowledge of herbalism helps the community to live healthy lives, while the knowledge of the soil types and a good understanding of weather can lead to increase in food security for the community, etc.).
A person-centred philosophy of education must seek the welfare of the whole person: body, soul, destiny, and character (Wane, 2019).Such a philosophy must be interested in the health of the body because one would not be a complete person without good health.The demand for good health as a precondition for the fulfilment of holistic personhood requires that APE be fully interested in research about the physiological makeup of human persons.This will enable Africans to be more knowledgeable on how their bodies work, which will further empower them to protect themselves against sicknesses, diseases, and some deadly impacts of their immediate environments.Because the body needs appropriate food for energy, growth, and health, APE must invest in agricultural education that is aimed at catering for the culinary needs of the African person.Also, the spiritual need of Africans must be fully integrated into such philosophy.An African person is essentially a spiritual person.Africans affirm the primacy of spirit (Senghor, 1964), which means that any educational philosophy that conduces to this spiritual nature must invest in the spiritual development of the community.According to Wane (2019, p. 108), religion gives depth and strength to the values that education cultivates.It gives meaning to life and knowledge and helps children to understand why they do what they do.

The question of form (or nature)
I will discuss the question of the form or nature of APE in relation to its curricular development and pedagogical framework.According to Mizan (2022), "the term curriculum refers to the academic content and lessons taught in a school or educational institution or in a specific course or program".Curricula are designed with specific goals and expected consequences in mind.The design and goals of any curriculum, thus, reflect the educational philosophywhether intentionally or unintentionally-of the educators who developed it (Curriculum Definition, n.d.).For APE, the main goal of education is the development of complete personhood in terms of constitutive elements and moral perfection.Wane (2019, p. 108) correctly affirms that "the goal of traditional African thought in the area of education has always been to nurture the body, the mind, and the spirit".In the achievement of this central goal, the African educational curricula must be designed with the intent of safeguarding the community against factors that may undermine the perfect functioning of any of these elements in a person.Sufficient space must, therefore, be given to the learning of physical health education, besides investment in natural and biological sciences.An appropriate curriculum in subjects including physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, agricultural science, geography, geology, botany, and zoology will help Africans to achieve a good understanding of the principles underlying environmental natural/biological phenomena and how best to harness them to establish a good relationship between human communities and the natural environments.
APE must also be interested in the structure of life in the community.Language and other means of communication represent a vital part of life in the community.No human community can survive without the instrumentalities of language and communication.Hence, the teaching of indigenous African languages and other means through which Africans communicate their lived experiences must feature prominently as part of the general prerequisites for being educated in the African context.Language learning consists of the teaching of literature, which includes myths, legends, riddles, proverbs, and poetry (Wane, 2019, p. 109).An educated person must not only be capable of understanding messages coded in African proverbs and other verbal and nonverbal modes of communication but also of deploying the same in the engagement of important issues in the community.Making these oral traditions salient parts of APE must be encouraged for understanding African cultural beliefs and practices.The purpose of the exposure to oral literature is not to force them down the throats of Africans nor to bring about passive acceptance of their bidding.African oral traditions have often been accused of being authoritarian in their approach to providing answers to basic life issues (Bodunrin, 1981;Hountondji, 1983;Wiredu, 1980).However, to support these African oral traditions, APE must develop a critical attitude that can withstand ruthless criticism in light of what is reasonable, rational, logical, and of pragmatic relevance for contemporary Africa.
Language is not meant for the purpose of daily communication alone; it can also be a tool for analysing complex African concepts and expressions (Hallen & Sodipo, 1997;Kayange, 2014Kayange, , 2018Kayange, , 2019)).It bridges the gap between the past and present.Language also serves as a historical research methodology.For instance: It is quite interesting to note how oral narratives uncover past lineages, the migration of specific extended families and communities, inspirational tales, popular cultural belief systems, or knowledge of local fauna (wildlife), flora (vegetation), and ecology (environmentalism) that may be of consequence to educational relations.(Waghid et al., 2018, p. 13) Some African proverbs give information about historical events and persons, familiarising contemporary Africans with their past heroes and heroines in ways that are mutually beneficial to the community and the individual.African myths may stimulate intellectual curiosity and a questionasking spirit among young Africans.Besides its didactic intents that purport to imbue Africans with moral qualities (including honesty, hard work, resilience, community spirit, and unity), African oral literature (such as folk tales, proverbs, myths, riddles, rituals, taboos, and songs) also constitutes a non-personal agent of socialisation because it contains precepts for right living in the society.In contemporary times, humanistic and social scientific disciplines have demonstrated capacities to generate more knowledge about social and political modes of existence than the African oral literature has generated.However, rather than treating these oral knowledge forms as anachronistic and utterly irrelevant to contemporary African lives, an authentic APE has the task of engrafting them into the mainstream humanistic (including philosophy, religious studies, history, music, and aesthetics) and social scientific (such as political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, archaeology, and commerce) epistemologies through suitable disciplinary methodologies.
In addition to cultivating a knowledge-based culture that focuses on understanding the physiological, environmental, and socio-political dimensions of personhood, a suitable APE-inspired curriculum must lead to knowledge and skills required for facilitating infrastructural development within the human community and for the fabrication of tools and machines without which contemporary communities would be quite unlivable.Complete personhood is not realised when there are no appropriate housing facilities.Africans, like other peoples, need infrastructure, including tarred roads, electricity, the internet, railways, airports, seaports, and potable water.People in Africa also need clothes and footwear to cover their nakedness and protect themselves from the environment.Africans further need to protect their communities against internal and external aggressors.Beyond the knowledge such as soil type, sowing and harvesting seasons, and crops, Africa needs to build capacity in the fabrication of implements and machines for mechanised farming aimed at meeting up with its growing demand for food by the ever-enlarging human community.A philosophy of education founded on the principle of realising a complete African personhood must thus be committed to the development of curricular content that empowers Africans to build and fabricate technological gadgets according to the needs of the community.
What would then be the pedagogical approach to teaching and learning these various curricular contents in African learning spaces?Being a community-centred system of education, the pedagogy of personhood-based APE is necessarily communalistic.Education both derives from and ends in the community; therefore, its process of teaching and learning must be well grounded within the community values of reciprocity and harmonious living.African pedagogy is, by the very nature of APE-inspired curricula, participatory.Teaching and learning are not done in isolation of the communal mode of existence, nor are they one-directional concepts that privilege one group as teachers and denigrate the other as learners.According to Venter (2004, p. 157), "the relationship between teacher and student would be one of cooperation and harmony in an Afrocentric framework".
The iron-clad demarcation between teaching and learning in the Western pedagogical framework does not align with the African quest for a harmonious relationship among members of the community.Waghid et al., (2018Waghid et al., ( , 2021) ) place this Afrocentric pedagogical methodology within the context of ubuntu.The concept of ubuntu is a theoretical derivative of the African lifestyle of interdependence, reciprocity, and consensus.In its most canonical expression, ubuntu is the belief that a person is a person through another person (Molefe, 2019b;Venter, 2004).This is a perfect representation of the communalist understanding of the African conception of the person that I have been portraying.Concerning pedagogy in African learning spaces, Waghid et al., (2018Waghid et al., ( , 2021) ) opine that the notion of ubuntu plays out most forcefully in the concepts of co-teaching and co-learning in that it exterminates the dichotomy between teachers and students by putting them in the same boat of teachers and learners.Accordingly, "when we pursue pedagogical encounters in line with the practice of ubuntu, we consider ourselves-that is, teachers and students-as co-teachers and co-learners in such encounters" (Waghid et al., 2021, p. 19).The pedagogical principle of co-teaching and co-learning strips teachers of the status of absolute custodianship of knowledge and recognise the ability of learners to impart knowledge to their teachers, who, at that instance, become co-learners.
The mutuality that characterises the African pedagogical approach to education derives chiefly from the spirit of dialogue.Wiredu (2004) and Hountondji (2002) identify the willingness to engage in dialogue with others as a significant virtue of an educated person.Rejecting what could be termed the "African ethnophilosophy of education" on the ground of its static, uncritical, unreflective, and authoritarian tendencies, Hountondji (2002, p. 73) insists that a genuine APE cannot be achieved without the progressive structure of dialogue and argumentation.The purpose of dialogue in educational discourse is to enable all participants in the discussion to have the freedom to contribute their views, however unenlightened they may be.The spirit of dialogue is not conferred on an educated person after having undergone the process of education.On the contrary, the spirit is acculturated during the learning process, which develops into a democratic state of mind for the learner.The sense of belonging that comes with the awareness that one's opinions count in matters central to one's educational pursuits puts the learner on par with the teacher, thereby promoting the feeling that the former is a co-creator of knowledge with the latter.In all of this, the community remains at the centre, both in the sense whereby all knowledge sought revolves around the well-being of the community and in the sense that the knowledge is created within parameters set by the community.
The foregoing point is very important in considering the appropriate attitude of APE to non-African educational content.The history of contact with other people, resulting in the phenomenon of cultural intermingling between Africans and the rest of the world, has prevented isolationism from being an option for Africa.The spirit of dialogue that characterises the African pedagogical framework demands that APE interacts fruitfully with other cultures by obliging the audience to tell their side of the story.When this happens, there is a mutual understanding among the cultures involved that forms the basis of their relationship with one another.If Africa wants to be heard, she must allow others to be heard, too.Another reason for this nose-poking attitude towards other peoples' business is the fact that educational content developed elsewhere (including theories, laws, and scientific discoveries) may serve as tools for understanding and engaging African situations and experiences.In this way, the jobs of African researchers are made easier because they only build on established truths that have been discovered by others.

The question of justification
I have argued that the goal of APE is to develop practical frameworks for the attainment of complete personhood, with its attendant implications for the welfare of human communities.It has also been established that attaining complete personhood is achieved through developing and maintaining the right attitude towards the community.Hence, if education aims at developing complete personhood, and the achievement of this is conditional upon cultivating the right attitude towards the community, the justification for education will appear to be the cultivation of the right attitude towards the community.But what constitutes this right attitude towards the community?As the paper has shown, it is the attitude of care for the community; the attitude involves the realisation of the community's ideal self, which is being the best human community that it can be.This not only entails a community of persons in the best physical, mental, and spiritual states but also presupposes a community that is at peace with itself and its environment.
The health of the community remains the centrepiecethe highest motivative of an authentic APE.To achieve the status of the best human community possible, the community must develop the capacity to meet its challenges.This is the whole essence of any kind of education.Bewaji rightly notes that: What all education, culturing, instruction, and training in the family, groups, classrooms, and various social organisations and fora including religion, schools, and clubs-are about…is mainly preparing human beings, at various stages of life, to be able to cope with the challenges of existence and solving real and anticipated problems related to these challenges.Bewaji (2017, p. 732) May it be recalled that these challenges and problems are not uniform across the globe.Different people grapple with different existential confrontations, which are often distributed along geographical, cultural, and historical lines.To take geography, for instance, the existential challenges that a people established along a coastal line are surely expected to be different from those encountered by other people established in a desert.However, each of them must develop capacities for confronting their challenges based on the knowledge they possess of their environment and themselves.
Hence, owing to the peculiar nature of its historical and socio-political circumstances, APE has different priorities for philosophy of education elsewhere (Horsthemke, 2017).The history of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and several other impoverishing experiences has distinctly impacted Africa.This calls for a unique educational approach to addressing these experiences, especially given the wellknown fact that practical philosophical and educational priorities usually emerge from life experiences and from the ways these are socially articulated.To illustrate: Given, for example, the experience of "indigenous" Africans of physical and mental oppression, it stands to reason that African philosophy of education would have as priorities matters of transformation and redress in politics and education.If philosophical and educational concerns and priorities arise from different forms of social life, then those that have emerged from a social system in which a particular race or group has been subordinate to another must be suspect.In addition, given the (especially vicious) history of physical and psychological colonization, it is plausible that one of the philosophical/educational priorities will be to educate against development of a subordinate or inferior mindset, as well as against a victim and beggar mentality, despite the continuing economic crisis and low level of economic growth.(Horsthemke, 2017, p. 696) There is a litany of other challenges that Africans are daily confronted with that demand an intentional approach to educational philosophy.This way, the chief justification for an authentic African educational philosophy derives from its unique place in the world as reflected in its unique experience of history, environment, cultural outlooks, epistemologies, and ontologies, as well as its needs and expectations for the future.

Conclusion
This paper focused on three principal objectives.One, it did a review of APE, in which it was established that a connection exists between African education and the prospect of attaining complete personhood.The paper situated the notion of complete personhood within the framework of African communalism, which gives priority to the community over the individual.Two, the paper analysed African personhood discourse.It identified two African concepts of personhood in the literature (namely, the ontological and normative concepts) and argued for their reconciliation in order to convey the idea of complete personhood, which APE ideally aims at.Three, within the African personhoodbased conceptual framework, the paper attempted to provide answers to the questions of foundation, form (or nature), and justification of APE.Given that the prospect of a healthy community is conditional upon its being constituted by complete persons, an APE has the task of developing the capacity for raising generations of Africans with complete personhood status.
The practical implication of the view expressed in this article cannot be downplayed.The consciousness of the centrality of personhood in APE has the propensity of providing a much-needed direction for educational policies, curriculum and pedagogical designs, and research goals.It would curb the phenomenon of production of stale or irrelevant knowledge and thereby strengthen the connection between what is taught at schools and the needs of the community.The precarious condition of living in many African countries not only offers sufficient evidence for a dysfunctional philosophy of education, but it also suggests the need for an appropriate and authentically indigenous African concept of education with all its cultural minutiae and ontological peculiarities.This paper has argued that the relational concept of personhood within which African communalism is embedded provides a solid footing for such philosophy of education.But more importantly, the paper serves as an impetus for other contemporary African researchers to study more closely how the African concept of personhood could be profitably deployed in the development of an educational philosophy that is authentically African both in theory and in practice.
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