Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze assembled a corpus of writing in 1998 as a way of making a résumé for the challenges facing African philosophy in contemporary times. In another programmatic text, The African Renaissance, Okumu A J Washington relooks at some of the challenges facing the African continent and its people in the 21st century. A golden thread that runs through much contemporary African thought is the diagnosis of existential and cosmological challenges that are essential for 21st century renewal. This is the basic raison d’être of African philosophy.

Epistemologically we think here of themes such as the mind-body problem, and related themes in many other cosmologies. Many brilliant ideas are part of the output of African intellectuals of the post-liberation era. The corpus of Nkrumah as exemplifi ed in his ideas on ‘conscienscism’ or Amilcar Cabral's meditation on national liberation and culture are examples.

African philosophy should, however, embrace a wider cosmos. An African philosophy of science must articulate differences between metaphysical systems and science. This theme has been analysed by Supo Ogunbunmi discussing physics in Yoruba culture, and emerges in Kwasi Wiredu's concept of truth in Akan as well as in Robin Horton's discussion of the distinction between African thought and Western science. The African philosophy of science shows the greatest promise if it aims at developing the scientifi c aspects of contemporary metaphysical systems. Another challenge is that of deconstructing the challenge of ‘race’. Kwame Anthony Appiah has done so in many of his works.

Quo vadis, then, African philosophy? This question is linked to the state of contemporary episteme. Surprisingly, the American pragmatist and philosopher Richard Rorty questions the very existence of African philosophy, albeit tacitly, in his text, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

It would be engrossing to elaborate the notion and practice of ‘African philosophy’ itself. We do not view such a discourse in the magisterial sense of a Platonism or a neo-Aristotleanism. The role of philosophy is linked to modes of intellectual diagnosis and reflection of society's challenges and society's contemporary problems.