In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture

242 Pages·2011·5.28 MB·English

by  Kwame Anthony Appiah

In My Father's House

IN M Y FATHERS HOUS E
Africa in the Philosophy o f Culture
KWAME ANTHON Y APPIA H
New York Oxfor d OXFOR D UNIVERSITY PRES S
Oxford University Press
Oxford Ne w York Toront o
Delhi Bomba y Calcutt a Madra s Karach i
Kuala Lumpur Singapor e Hon g Kong Toky o
Nairobi Da r es Salaam Cap e Town
Melbourne Aucklan d Madri d
and associated companies in
Berlin Ibada n
Copyright © 1992 by Kwame Anthony Appiah
First published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc.,
T98 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1993
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Appiah, Anthony.
In my Father's house : Africa in the philosophy
of culture / Kwame Anthony Appiah.
p. cm. Include s bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-506851-3
1. Africa—Culture—Philosophy.
2. Africa—Intellectual life—20th century.
I. Title.
DT352.4.A66 199 2 960—dc20
91-23386
ISBN-13 978-0-19-506852-8
20 1 9 1 8 1 7 1 6 1 5 1 4 1 3 1 2
Printed in the United States of America
For
Gyamfi, Anthony, Per Kodjo,
Tomiwa, Lamide, Tobi, Mame Yaa,
Maggie, and Elizabeth
and in memory of my father
Joe Appiah, 1918-90
Abusua-dua ytntwa
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Preface
My first memories are of a place called "Mbrom," a small neighborhood in Kumasi,
capital of Asante, as that kingdom turned from being part of the British Gold Coast
colony to being a region of the Republic of Ghana. Our home was opposite my
grandparent's house—where scores of her kinsfolk and dependents lived under the
direction of my stepgrandmother, "Auntie Jane," who baked bread for hundreds of
people from Mbrom and the surrounding areas—down the street from many cousins
of various, usually obscure, degrees of affinity. Near the center of the second largest
city in Ghana, behind our hibiscus hedge in the "garden city of West Africa," our life
was essentially a village life, lived among a few hundred neighbors; out from that
village we went to the other little villages that make up the city.
We could go higher up the hill, to Asante New Town, to the palace of the Asante
king, Prempeh II, whose first wife, my great-aunt, always called me "Akroma-
Ampim" (the name of our most illustrious ancestor) or "Yao Antony" (the name of
the great-uncle and head of the family from whom I acquired my anglicized name,
"Anthony"). Or we could travel in another cultural direction to the campus of the
Kwame Nkruma h Universit y o f Scienc e an d Technology—know n alway s a s
"Tech"—where I went to primary school, and where many of my friends' parents
were professors.
Some worlds—the world of the law courts where my father went, dressed in his
dark European suits, carrying the white wig of the British barrister (which he wore
after independence as in the colonial period), a rose from the garden (my mother's
garden) always in his buttonhole; the world of parliament, where he went in the first
years I can remember, an opponent now of his old friend Nkrumah—some worlds we
knew of only because our parents spoke of them. Others—the world of the little
church, Saint George's, where we went to Sunday school with Baptists and Copts and
Catholics and Methodists and Anglicans, from other parts of the country, other parts
of the continent, other parts of the world—we knew inside and out, knew because
they were central to our friendships, our learning, our beliefs.
In our house, my mother was visited regularly by Muslim Hausa traders from
what we called (in a phrase that struck my childhood ear as wonderfully mysterious,
exotic in its splendid vagueness)' 'the North.'' These men knew she was interested in
seeing and, sometimes, in buying the brass weights the Asante had used for weighing
gold; goldweights they had collected from villages all over the region, where they
were being sold by people who had no use for them anymore, now that paper and coin
had replaced gold dust as currency. And as she collected them, she heard more and
more o f th e folklor e tha t wen t with them; th e proverb s tha t ever y figurativ e
goldweight elicited; the folktales, Ananseastm, that the proverbs evoked. My father
told us these Ananse stories, too, some of them picked up when he was a political
viii Preface
prisoner under Nkrumah (there was little else to do in prison but spin yarns). Between
his stories and the cultural messages that came with the goldweights, we gathered the
sort of sense of a cultural tradition that comes from growing up in it. For us it was not
Asante tradition but the webwork of our lives. We loved the stories—my sisters now
read the ones that my mother has published to my nephews in Gaborone and in Lagos;
my godchildren read them here in America—and we grew to love the goldweights and
the carvings that the traders brought.
And the family we grew into (an "extended" family, our English friends would
have said , thoug h w e woul d hav e though t o f thei r conception s o f famil y a s
"contracted") gave us an immense social space in which to grow.
But we also went from time to time to my mother's native country, to England, to
stay with my grandmother in the rural West Country, returning the visits she had
made to us. And the life there—perhaps this is only because it is also part of my
earliest memories—seems, at least now, to have been mostly not too different. My
grandmother lived next door to my aunt (my mother's sister) and her family, in the
village where my aunt was born, just as my father lived next to his father. And so, by
an odd cultural reversal, my father lived opposite and close to his patrilineal kin (in
matrilineal Asante), while my aunt and her children lived next to their matrilineal kin
(in patrilineal England). But it was my father's matriclan and my English grand-
father's matriclan—descendants of the eight sisters, of whom one was my great-
grandmother—that I came to know best over the years.
If my sisters and I were "children of two worlds," no one bothered to tell us this;
we lived in one world, in two ' 'extended'' families divided by several thousand miles
and an allegedly insuperable cultural distance that never, s o far as I can recall ,
puzzled or perplexed us much. As I grew older, and went to an English boarding
school, I learned that not everybody had family in Africa and in Europe; not everyone
had a Lebanese uncle, American and French and Kenyan and Thai cousins. And by
now, now that my sisters have married a Norweigan and a Nigerian and a Ghanaian,
now that I live in America, I am used to seeing the world as a network of points of
affinity.
This book is dedicated to nine children—a boy born in Botswana, of Norwegian
and Anglo-Ghanaian parents; his brothers, born in Norway and in Ghana; their four
cousins, three boys in Lagos, born of Nigerian and Anglo-Ghanaian parents, and a
girl in Ghana; and two girls, born in New Haven, Connecticut, o f an African-
American father and a "white" American mother. These children, my nephews and
my godchildren, range in appearance from the color and hair of my father's Asante
kinsmen to the Viking ancestors of my Norwegian brother-in-law; they have names
from Yorubaland, from Asante, from America, from Norway, from England. And
watching them playing together and speaking to each other in their various accents, I,
at least, feel a certain hope for the human future.
These children represent an eye to posterity, but this book is also dedicated to my
father, who died while \ was revising the final manuscript and became the closest of
my ancestors. Long before he fell ill, I had decided to name this book for him: it was
from him, after all, that I inherited the world and the problems with which this book is
concerned. From him I inherited Africa, in general; Ghana, in particular; Asante and
Prefacee ix
Kumasi, more particularly yet. His Christianity (his and my mother's) gave me both
the biblica l knowledg e tha t mean s tha t fo r m e th e phras e "i n m y father' s
house ..." must be completed "ther e are many mansions," and the biblical
understanding that, when Christ utters those words at the Last Supper, he means that
there is room enough for all in heaven; his Father's house. Even my father, who loved
Ghana as much as anyone, would, of course, have resisted the assimilation of Ghana
to heaven; though he might have been tempted to claim that the Kumasi of his youth
was as close to heaven as anywhere on earth. But he would not deny—no one who
knows these places could deny—that there is plenty of room in Africa, in Ghana, even
in Asante, for all sorts and conditions of men and women; that at each level, Africa is
various.
Two other crucial intellectual legacies from my father inform this book. One is his
Pan-Africanism. I n 1945 my father was with Nkrumah and Du Bois at the Pan-
African Congress in Manchester; in 1974 he was one of the very few from the 1945
congress (he himself met no other) who attended the congress, hosted by Julius
Nyerere, in Dar es Salaam. By then Du Bois and Nkrumah were gone: in 1972 my
father had flown to Guinee to negotiate the return of Nkrumah's body for a Ghanaian
state funeral; his office, in those days, in Christiansborg Castle in Accra, was a few
short steps from D u Bois's grave. My father was, I think, as complete a Pan-
Africanist as either of them; yet he also taught us, his children, to be as completely
untempted by racism as he was. And he was able, despite his antiracism—despite
what I am inclined to call his complete unracism, since racism was never a temptation
he had to resist—to find it natural, when he was a delegate from Ghana to the UN to
seek solidarity in Harlem, where he went to church most Sundays and made many
lifelong friends. M y father is my model for the possibility of a Pan-Africanism
without racism, both in Africa and in its diaspora—a concrete possibility whose
conceptual implications this book is partly intended to explore.
The second legacy is my father's multiple attachment to his identities: above all as
an Asante, as a Ghanaian, as an African, and as a Christian and a Methodist. I cannot
claim to participate fully in any of these identities as he did; given the history we do
not share, he would not have expected me to. But I have tried in this book, in many
places, to examine the meaning of one or another, and, by the end, all of these
identities, and to learn from his capacity to make use of these many identities without,
so far as I could tell, any significant conflict.
I could say more about my father's multiple presences in this book; but, in the
end, I would rather that the book should show what I have learned from him than that I
should catalog my debts at the start.
I say all this in part because in thinking about culture, which is the subject of this
book, one is bound to be formed—morally, aesthetically, politically, religiously—by
the range of lives one has known. Others will disagree with much that I have to say,
and it is right that those who disagree, as those who agree with me, should know, as
we say in America, "where I am coming from.'' This is especially important because
the book is about issues that are bound to be deeply personally important for anyone
with my history; for its theme is the question how we are to think about Africa's
contemporary culture s in the light both of the two mai n external determinant s