Kwame Gyekye

It was 1969, in Legon, at the University of Ghana.

A young philosopher began teaching there. His name was Kwame Gyekye. He would stay for forty years.

He had been born on November 10, 1939, in Ahanta, in the Western Region. The country was still called the Gold Coast.

As a child, he grew up in Akan traditions. He learned the proverbs. He listened to the stories passed down by word of mouth, the ones that say what a human being, a person, is.

He studied at Mfantsipim School, then at Legon: history, languages, philosophy. He spent time at Oxford. Then he went to Harvard, where he wrote a thesis on Graeco-Arabic philosophy.

Then he came home.

At Legon, he chaired the philosophy department. He brought African philosophies into the curriculum.

In 1987, he published with Cambridge University Press an essay on African philosophical thought, built on Akan ideas. In his writings he spoke of the okra, the soul that, for the Akan, comes from God.

For him, each person has worth in themselves. They do not receive it from others. They do not earn it.

He cited an Akan proverb:

A debate ran through African philosophy. Another philosopher, Ifeanyi Menkiti, held that community comes first. That duties to the group come before the rights of each person.

Kwame Gyekye did not agree. Not entirely.

Yes, he said, we are communal beings. But each person is also an autonomous individual, able to weigh the rules of their community.

He also debated Kwasi Wiredu, with whom he had co-edited a book, Person and Community, in 1992. For Wiredu, we become persons. For Gyekye, all human beings already are: it is not a rank to be reached.

In 1997, he published Tradition and Modernity with Oxford University Press. His thought has a name: "moderate communitarianism." Community matters. But it must protect the dignity and rights of each person.

He also taught in the United States, at Temple University in Philadelphia. He wrote the "African Ethics" entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

In 2009, he retired. In 2018, he received an award bearing the name of Kwame Nkrumah.

He died in Ghana on April 13, 2019, at 79.

His thought echoes Ubuntu, without being the same. It comes from West Africa, from the Akan language and its proverbs. It too says that we need one another, but that no one should vanish into the "we."

On April 22, 2024, five years after his death, the University of Ghana held a first lecture in his memory. People spoke of citizenship, of belonging and of shared responsibility.

It is to become an annual event.

At Legon, where he taught for forty years, his name still brings people together.