By Bruce Lloyd *
Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s The Ink of the Scholars is a slim but ambitious volume. In just over a hundred pages, Diagne invites us to rethink the place of philosophy in Africa—not as an imported tradition, nor as folklore misunderstood as philosophy, but as a field with its own dense and plural histories. Drawing inspiration from the adage that “the ink of the scholars is more precious than the blood of the martyrs,” Diagne defends the vitality of scholarship as Africa’s most precious inheritance and its most necessary tool for imagining the future.
Themes and Contributions
The book moves across four thematic landscapes: ontology, time and development, intellectual history, and political philosophy.
Ontology: Diagne probes how African religions and aesthetics shape ideas of being, drawing on Bantu concepts of “vital force” and the mediating role of language and translation.
Time: He emphasizes the importance of prospective thought—Africa must imagine futures, not simply remain trapped in colonial histories or discourses of underdevelopment.
Orality and the written word: Perhaps Diagne’s most forceful intervention is his reminder that Africa is not only an oral continent. The manuscript traditions of Timbuktu and beyond prove that Africa has always cultivated textual, critical, and systematic scholarship.
Political philosophy: Revisiting African socialisms and the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights, Diagne considers the stakes of communal values, justice, and democracy in an African key.
Throughout, Diagne balances the recovery of neglected archives with attention to contemporary problems. The book reads as both a philosophical essay and a manifesto for African intellectual sovereignty.
Strengths
Diagne’s greatest achievement lies in mediating between false dichotomies: oral vs. written, local vs. universal, African vs. Western. He refuses to treat “African philosophy” as a monolith, instead highlighting plurality—Islamic, Christian, indigenous, Francophone, Anglophone—and insists that Africa has always been a space of cross-cultural dialogue. The manuscript cultures of Timbuktu, for instance, stand as powerful rebuttals to colonial narratives of Africa as “without writing” or “without history.”
Equally striking is his concern with time. Philosophers often neglect futurity, but Diagne insists that Africa must cultivate its own prospective thinking, its own philosophy of development and hope. In an era dominated by crisis narratives, this forward-looking gesture is refreshing.
Weaknesses and Silences
But Diagne’s brevity is both virtue and vice. Many arguments are sketched rather than worked through in depth. His reflections on ontology and temporality, for instance, could benefit from more sustained conceptual analysis.
Moreover, the book sometimes shies away from the sharper critiques raised by decolonial theory. Thinkers like Achille Mbembe or Valentin-Yves Mudimbe interrogate how colonialism invented Africa as an object of knowledge; Diagne, by contrast, leans toward reconstructive recovery rather than radical deconstruction. This makes his tone less polemical, but it can also feel less attuned to the structural violence of racial capitalism and epistemicide.
Comparison with Other African Philosophers
Placed alongside his contemporaries, Diagne’s voice is distinctive:
Like Paulin Hountondji, he resists the reduction of philosophy to ethnographic folklore, but where Hountondji stresses methodological rigor, Diagne emphasizes archival recovery.
Unlike Kwasi Wiredu, who advocates for “conceptual decolonization” within indigenous languages, Diagne embraces a plurilingual cosmopolitanism that favors translation and dialogue.
Compared to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s programmatic return to indigenous languages, Diagne is less militant: he sees cross-fertilization rather than linguistic separation as Africa’s path forward.
Against Mbembe’s radical critique of “Black reason,” Diagne offers hermeneutic repair: not dismantling categories of modernity, but re-inscribing Africa’s intellectual presence within them.
This comparative lens highlights Diagne’s position: he is neither radical deconstructionist nor nostalgic traditionalist, but a mediator seeking pluralist synthesis.
Feminist and Indigenous Knowledge Critique
Yet one of the book’s more glaring blind spots is gender. By recovering manuscript traditions dominated by male scholars, Diagne risks reproducing an archive that already excludes women’s voices. Feminist philosophers such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí remind us that knowledge is always gendered, and that women’s intellectual roles—oral traditions, healing practices, ritual expertise—must be recognized, not merely sidelined as “non-philosophical.”
Similarly, indigenous epistemologies—embodied knowledges of land, ecology, and community practice—barely enter Diagne’s narrative. His focus on texts and manuscripts risks marginalizing forms of wisdom that resist textualization. Here, indigenous critiques push further: philosophy should not only be translated into French or English but should also be produced in Yoruba, Wolof, Shona, or Dagara, with their own conceptual grammars intact.
Conclusion: Ink and Blood Today
The Ink of the Scholars is a vital corrective to narratives of Africa as a continent without philosophy. Its call to value scholarship over violence, manuscripts over martyrdom, remains urgent in a time when war and fundamentalism continue to destroy archives and silence intellectuals.
But the book is also an unfinished project. It needs feminist recovery strategies, indigenous knowledge methodologies, and deeper decolonial engagement to fully realize its promise. Diagne gives us an invitation more than a conclusion: to read more widely, to translate more carefully, and to imagine African philosophy not as an appendage of Western canons, but as a rich, plural, and forward-looking field in its own right.
In that sense, the book is both a mirror and a provocation. It shows us what Africa has already been, and dares us to imagine what African philosophy might still become.
* Bruce Lloyd is a member of the Scientific Council of the Alternative Planetary Futures Institute (Ap-Fi). Book review was developed with help from ChatGPT.
