Ifeanyi Menkiti

It was 1961. A young man from Nigeria arrived in the United States to study.

His name was Ifeanyi Menkiti. He had been born on August 24, 1940, in Onitsha, in a region once called Biafra.

He enrolled at Pomona College. He graduated in 1964.

Then he kept going. Columbia, in New York. New York University. Finally Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1974.

His dissertation was about collective responsibility.

In 1973, he joined Wellesley College, in the United States. He would teach there for decades.

He brought new courses with him. African philosophy. Medical ethics. Philosophy of law. Philosophy and literature.

Later, the college would write that no one had done more than he had to enrich its philosophy curriculum.

For Ifeanyi Menkiti was not only a philosopher. He was also a poet.

In 1971, he published a first collection, Affirmations. In 1978, a second, The Jubilation of Falling Bodies. That same year, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts gave him a poetry award. His poems were heard on American public radio.

To him, poetry and philosophy met. Poetry, he said, deals with the meaning of life, the meaning of meaning, just like philosophy.

In 1984, he published a short text. A dozen pages, in an introductory book on African philosophy. Its title: "Person and Community in African Traditional Thought."

That text would shape a generation of African social and political philosophy.

Menkiti held that Descartes's sentence, "I think, therefore I am," was only a partial truth.

He found it wiser to say:

He built on traditional African ideas of the person. And he drew a strong thought from them: being a person is not something you possess automatically. It is something you attain.

You become one through morally right actions. Among others.

So for him, being a person carried moral weight.

In Cambridge, in Harvard Square, there was a historic bookshop devoted to poetry: the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. Ifeanyi Menkiti became its owner. He is credited with rescuing it.

He published more collections, including Of Altair, the Bright Light. Altair, the bright light: the name of a star.

He died on June 17, 2019. He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Wellesley.

After his death, a reader of the Wellesley magazine wrote that he remembered his enlightenment, his integrity and his kindness.

His thought echoes Ubuntu, without being the same. It grows out of African traditions of the person, and it says, too, that we become human through others and with them.

A man from Onitsha, a star called Altair, a poetry bookshop in Harvard Square. And, between the three, a sentence that still travels: I am, because we are.