African philosophy has had to struggle with a question that most philosophical traditions do not face: whether it exists at all, and if so, what it is. This sounds odd. But it is a genuine and productive tension within the field.
The debate is sometimes called the debate between ethnophilosophy and critical philosophy. The ethnophilosophy position, associated with Tempels and developed by later thinkers, holds that African philosophy is found in the collective worldviews, proverbs, myths, and cosmological frameworks of African communities. Philosophy is embedded in culture, expressed in language and practice, not necessarily in written texts by named authors. On this view, Ubuntu and Bantu ontology are already philosophy, even though they were developed communally rather than by individual thinkers writing arguments.
The critical philosophy position, associated most sharply with Paulin Hountondji in African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1976), rejects this. Hountondji argues that calling collective cultural worldviews "philosophy" is actually a form of paternalism: it implies that Africans, unlike Europeans, do not have individual thinkers who argue, disagree, and develop positions, but only communal wisdom traditions. Real philosophy is critical, individual, and argumentative. Lumping all African thought together as a uniform tradition under the label "Bantu philosophy" is itself a racist move. African philosophy should be the work of individual African philosophers arguing with each other, not a reconstruction of communal worldviews.
This debate has not been fully resolved, and it is not purely academic. It touches on questions about what philosophy is for, whether Western models of individual argument should be the standard, and whether African thought can be both communally grounded and critically sophisticated.
Kwasi Wiredu's response is among the most sophisticated. He argues for what he calls conceptual decolonization: the project of African philosophy should not be to reproduce Western philosophy in African languages, nor to celebrate communal traditions uncritically, but to critically examine the conceptual frameworks African thinkers have inherited, separating what is genuinely valuable in the African tradition from what is residue of colonial influence, and what is genuinely universal from what is culturally specific.
Wiredu's own work on the Akan concept of truth is a model of this project. In Akan, the word for truth (nokore) literally means what is, and truth claims are understood as expressions of what the speaker sincerely believes, not as claims about mind-independent facts. This is a different epistemological starting point from Western correspondence theories of truth, and it has consequences for how knowledge, assertion, and disagreement work. Working it out philosophically, in dialogue with Western epistemology, is exactly the kind of cross-cultural philosophical work that conceptual decolonization calls for.