The Ontological Anchor: Igwebuike and the Limits of Ontological Grounding in African Political Philosophy

Abstract

African political philosophy has been marked by what may be called the ontological turn: the conviction that political theory must be anchored in a prior account of reality, typically a relational or communal ontology. From Tempels’s vital force through Mbiti’s relational anthropology to Menkiti’s normative personhood, and most systematically in Kanu’s elaboration of Igwebuike as the modality of being and the foundation of an indigenous socio-political system, the assumption has been that politics must be grounded in ontology. This paper asks whether that assumption survives critical scrutiny. It takes Igwebuike, the Igbo principle that to be is to be with others, as its test case, and it identifies a dilemma at the heart of the ontological project. If Igwebuike is offered as a descriptive ontology, a report on how African reality is structured, then it cannot adjudicate between traditions, it cannot address religiously and ethnically plural societies, and it is vulnerable to the charge of ontological absolutism, the grounding of political authority in a metaphysical claim that is not itself open to political contestation. If it is offered as a normative principle, a standard for how political relationships ought to be arranged, then it loses the metaphysical thickness that made it distinctive and becomes a thinner claim articulated in Igbo idiom. The paper argues that the second horn is the defensible one, and it defends it against three objections: relativism, the decolonial charge that the African claim is abandoned, and the claim that a normative reading cannot motivate political action. It does not claim to have resolved the dilemma. It claims that choosing the second horn is defensible and that the choice requires abandoning the ambition to make Igwebuike the ontological anchor of African political philosophy. The paper concludes that the value of Igwebuike for political philosophy lies not in the ontology it supplies but in the standard of judgment it makes available, and that the debate should shift from the content of African ontology to the function of ontological claims in political argument.