Semantic Restitution and the Decolonization of Philosophy in Africa

Abstract

This paper interrogates a central aporia within the project of conceptual decolonization in African philosophy: how may indigenous conceptual resources be critically recovered without either subordinating them to inherited Western categories or reifying them as remnants of an allegedly pristine precolonial order? Táíwò's critique of authenticity-driven decolonization renders this problem especially acute by insisting that African intellectual agency consists not in custodianship of an uncontaminated past but in the capacity for appropriation, adaptation, transformation, and innovation. Methodologically, the paper reconceptualizes this tension through semantic restitution, understood as a critical-reconstructive procedure comprising genealogical retrieval, semantic mapping, contextual validation, philosophical elaboration, and contemporary rearticulation. Against readings that construe Wiredu's conceptual decolonization as merely negative, the paper demonstrates, with Wiredu and Futter, that its critical and reconstructive moments are internally complementary. The Akan discourse of nokware and nea ɛte saa further demonstrates that linguistic non-equivalence need not signify conceptual deficiency; rather, it can disclose alternative configurations of epistemic and normative relations, while Bedu-Addo's critique establishes the necessity of contextual and usage-sensitive reconstruction. The paper concludes that semantic restitution offers a non-essentialist mode of conceptual recovery that preserves African agency while enabling indigenous concepts to participate critically in contemporary and intercultural philosophy.