Paulin Hountondji

Paulin Jidenu Hountondji was born on the eleventh of April 1942 at Abidjan, to Dahomean parents, and schooled in Dahomey through the Lycée Victor Ballot at Porto-Novo. Paris followed: the preparatory benches of Henri-IV, and in 1963 the École Normale Supérieure — reported the first African admitted there in philosophy. He took the agrégation in 1966, studied under Althusser and Derrida, and wrote his 1970 doctorate on Husserl's idea of science under Paul Ricoeur.

He taught at Besançon, then in the early 1970s at Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, before joining the National University of Benin at Cotonou by the mid-seventies. In 1976 came the book that named an era's argument: Sur la "philosophie africaine" — in English, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983) — the critique of ethnophilosophy that refused Tempels' and Kagame's recited "Bantu philosophy" and the unanimism behind it, insisting that African philosophy is what African philosophers do: argued, written, and answerable.

His later work turned the lens on knowledge itself — the extraversion of African science, research made to answer questions posed elsewhere — in Combats pour le sens (1997; The Struggle for Meaning, 2002) and the edited Endogenous Knowledge. He founded the Inter-African Council for Philosophy in 1973 with its review Consequence, served Benin's democratic transition as Minister of National Education and then of Culture and Communication before returning to the university in 1994, took a doctorat d'État at Dakar in 1996, received the Prince Claus Award in 1999, and served CODESRIA as vice-president. To the end he directed the African Centre for Advanced Studies at Porto-Novo.

He died at Cotonou on the second of February 2024, at eighty-one, mourned across the continent's letters as one of the founding fathers of modern African philosophy. Honored be Paulin Hountondji, who held Africa's thought to the highest standard because he knew it could meet it.