Paulin Hountondji, a Benin philosopher whose criticism of colonial-era anthropology helped transform Africa’s intellectual life, died on February 2 at his home in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city. He was 81.

His death was confirmed by his son Hervé, who did not give a cause.

As a young philosophy professor on a continent breaking free of colonial control in the 1960s, Mr. Hountondji (pronounced HUN-ton-djee) rebelled against efforts to force African ways of thinking into the European worldview. He was steeped in European thought – he was the first African to be admitted as a philosophy student at France’s most prestigious school, the École Normale Superieure – and developed a critique of what he called “ethnophilosophy”, an invention of the Europeans.

His work has since shaped the study of philosophy in Africa. According to the African philosophers who followed Mr. Hountondji, it was a kind of second declaration of independence for Africa – this time an intellectual one. It is “very important and very liberating,” said Columbia University philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne in an interview.

In his introduction to the book “Paulin Hountondji: Leçons de Philosophy Africaine” by Bado Ndoye (published in 2022 but not yet translated into English), Mr. Diagne called him “the most influential figure in philosophy in Africa.”

A humble man who spent his career lecturing in African universities, primarily the National University of Benin, with brief forays into the turbulent politics of his small homeland on the coast of West Africa, Mr. Hountondji knew there was something in the efforts of Europeans, Africans explaining how to do it wasn’t true. They should think about their place in the universe.

He also knew that the emerging strongman rule of the 1960s, with its enforced groupthink, spelled trouble for the continent. He found the roots of this idea of ​​collective thought – mistakenly seen as a natural characteristic of Africans – in the “ethnophilosophy” which he so harshly criticized.

Armed with his work on the German phenomenologist Edmund HusserlIn his late 20s and early 30s, Mr. Hountondji studied “Bantu Philosophy,” a book by a Belgian missionary priest, Placide Templewho set the tone for African philosophy for almost 30 years.

When Father Tempels, a church rebel who lived for decades in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, published Bantu Philosophy in 1945, it was seen as groundbreaking by a first generation of pre-independence African intellectuals. It aims to restore the intellectual dignity of a continent that was considered “primitive” in the colonialist worldview.

Contrary to the European belief that Africans were incapable of abstract thinking, Father Tempels believed that they actually had a philosophy, a way of seeing themselves in the universe.

But in a series of essays beginning in 1969 and collected in the book “African Philosophy: Myth and Reality” (published in French in 1976 and in English in 1983), Mr. Hountondji set out to portray the Belgian priest’s work as nothing more than to dismantle ethnographic considerations that ultimately strengthened colonialism.

Whether or not one agreed with Father Tempels’ central thesis – that for the “Bantu” or Africans “being” means “power” – his entire approach was flawed, Mr Hountondji argued. Philosophy cannot come from a group, he wrote, but must be the responsibility of individual philosophers, an idea influenced by Mr. Hountondji’s knowledge of Husserl.

But that responsibility was missing from Father Tempels’ largely anonymous “Bantus” gang, he said.

In his memoir “Combats Pour le Sens: Un Itineraire Africain” (1997), published in English in 2002 as “The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture and Democracy in Africa,” Mr. Hountondji “rejected the construction as a norm for all Africans past, present and future, a way of thinking, a system of belief that can, at best, correspond to an already established phase of the intellectual journey of black peoples.”

Thus Mr. Hountondji wrote: “What was thus presented as ‘Bantu philosophy’ was not really the philosophy of the Bantu, but that of Tempels, and was solely the responsibility of the Belgian missionary who had become the analyst of that occasion.” Manners and Customs of the Bantu.”

These ideas acted like a bomb in African intellectual life. Mr Hountondji has been criticized for his elitism, his “Eurocentrism” and his rejection of African oral traditions. But this criticism was soon forgotten, and today his “critique of ethnophilosophy enjoys canonical status in contemporary African philosophy,” wrote Pascah Mungwini in his 2022 survey “African Philosophy.” He called it a “philosophical masterpiece.”

African thinkers had been liberated from ancient beliefs to which European thinkers such as Father Tempels and the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule had bound them.

“What the Belgian Franciscan offered was actually a system of collective thought that was supposedly a positive African trait,” Hountondji said said Radio France Internationale in an interview in 2022. “That is not the meaning of the word ‘philosophy’.”

Mr. Hountondji “wanted the purity of the idea,” Mr. Diagne said. “What had to be eliminated was the whole picturesqueness of ‘anthropology’.”

In the early 1970s, Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy at universities in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country then lived “under the boot of a general” Mobutu Sese Seko – The best of Mobutu Sese Sekowho “used traditional ‘philosophy’ to justify or conceal the worst excesses, the most atrocious human rights violations,” Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoirs.

Mr. Hountondji’s “rejection of the unanimist message” of General Mobutu in Zaire, as Mr. Diagne put it, reflected his rejection of the missionary Father Tempel, who, like the general, suggested that all Africans speak with one voice.

These reflections on autocracy and the coercive political support it entailed influenced Mr. Hountondji’s hesitant entry into public life in Benin, where he had suffered under the Marxist-Leninist dictatorship as a professor at the National University Gen. Mathieu Kérékou. What Mr. Hountondji called General KerekouBenin’s “regime of terror” ended after a national conference of Beninese citizens unexpectedly turned against him in 1990 at the general’s invitation.

Mr. Hountondji was invited to the conference and, to the dismay of the general’s subordinates, immediately focused on the central question: whether the assembly could decide the country’s future. Mr. Hountondji’s decision was the “only legitimate and possible solution,” wrote historian Richard Banegas in “La Démocratie au Pas de Caméléon” (2003), his political history of Benin.

Mr Hountondji’s side won and Benin became a democracy – for a time. Mr. Hountondji unexpectedly served as Minister of Education in the new government from 1990 to 1991 and Minister of Culture and Communications from 1991 to 1993.

He was unsuited to political life, his son Hervé said in an interview, because “joining a political party was out of the question for him.” Mr. Hountondji wrote in his memoirs that one day he reflected on “cynicism , the hypocrisy, the daily lies that make up everyday political life. He never did that.

He returned to teaching at the national university, now the Université d’Abomey-Calavi, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

Paulin Jidenu Hountondji was born on April 11, 1942 in Treichville, now part of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, to Paul Hountondji, a Methodist Church pastor, and Marguerite (Dovoedo) Hountondji.

He received his baccalauréat (the equivalent of a high school diploma) at the Lycée Victor-Ballot, a school that educated the country’s elite, in Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin. He then earned a degree in philosophy from the École Normale Superieure in Paris in 1967 and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Paris Paul Ricoeur1970 with a work on Husserl.

As a student in Paris in the early days of African independence, Mr. Hountondji wrote that he was disturbed by the willingness of other African students to cover up the crimes of one of the continent’s new heroes, the Guinean dictator Save Tourewho would drive much of his country into exile.

Mr. Hountondji taught philosophy at the National University of Zaire in 1971 and 1972 before returning to his native Benin. From 1998 until his death he was director of the African Center for Advanced Studies in Porto-Novo.

In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Flore, and his wife, Grâce (Darboux) Hountondji. Two former presidents of Benin spoke at his funeral in Cotonou on March 1.

In later years, Mr. Diagne said, Mr. Hountondji believed that his earlier skepticism about African oral traditions had gone too far in his radicalism.

Nevertheless, until the end he remained firmly convinced that Europeans should not think for Africans. “There is a colonialist view that says all Africans agree and have the same way of thinking,” Mr Hountondji told French radio in 2022. “The colonialist perspective is insensitive to the diversity of opinion in an oral civilization.”

Flore Nobime contributed reporting from Cotonou.