Henry Odera Oruka

Henry Odera Oruka was born on the first of June 1944 at Ugenya, in Nyanza, western Kenya, a Luo farmer's son. A science scholarship carried him to Uppsala in Sweden — meteorology, geography, geodesy — where philosophy claimed him instead; he took his master's at Wayne State in Detroit with a thesis on punishment, and his doctorate in 1970 — the accounts differ on where, the fuller scholarship saying Uppsala, on the philosophy of liberty.

He joined the University of Nairobi's Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies in October 1970 and led the long campaign to give philosophy its own house — becoming, in July 1980, founder-chairman of the Department of Philosophy. He had already founded the Philosophical Association of Kenya in 1973 and co-founded its journal, Thought and Practice.

His great work bore a tape recorder into the villages. The Sage Philosophy Project questioned, in their own tongues and with a dialectician's rigor, the men and women their communities called wise — Paul Mbuya Akoko the flagship among them, and Oruka's own father, Oruka Rang'inya; even Oginga Odinga sat for the questions. From that field he drew his four trends of African philosophy and the distinction between the folk sage and the philosophic sage, set down in Sage Philosophy (Brill, 1990) and Trends in Contemporary African Philosophy (1990), beside Punishment and Terrorism in Africa (1976) and Philosophy, Humanity and Ecology (1994). In July 1991 he brought the World Conference of Philosophy to Nairobi — two hundred and fifty scholars from five continents — and in 1993 Uppsala laid its honorary doctorate on him.

He was struck by a vehicle in Nairobi on the ninth of December 1995 and died at fifty-one — a sudden death some accounts call suspicious; the record states only what is known. Honored be Henry Odera Oruka, who proved the village had philosophers before the university had a name for them.