Fabien Eboussi Boulaga

Fabien Eboussi Boulaga was born on the seventeenth of January 1934 at Bafia, Cameroon. Schooled at the minor seminary of Akono, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1955, took his theology at Lyon-Fourvière, completed a doctorate in philosophy in France in 1968, and was ordained a priest in 1969.

His landmark came in 1977: La Crise du Muntu (Présence Africaine), a critique of ethnophilosophy begun in his essay Le Bantou problématique — the argument that Africa is not served by ready-made accounts of a "Bantu philosophy" recited on its behalf, and that the Muntu must think his own crisis for himself. It remains one of the reference points of African philosophy.

In 1980 he left the Jesuits and the priesthood — he later said the faith had left him years earlier — and the year after published Christianisme sans fétiche, on revelation without domination. He professed philosophy at the University of Yaoundé from the early 1970s and at the Catholic University of Central Africa from 1994, founded and directed the review Terroirs, and in the season of Africa's democratic openings wrote Les Conférences nationales en Afrique noire (1993), lending his voice to human rights and honest transition in Cameroon.

He died in Yaoundé on the thirteenth of October 2018, at eighty-four. Honored be Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, who demanded that Africa think for itself, and lived the demand.