The Handbook of African Social Ethics (HASE) fills a gap in the study of Africa. There is currently no single companion or handbook on African Social Ethics. There are, however, companions and handbooks on African philosophy, which have limited entries on social ethics. There are one or two books (especially on religion) that come closest to the kind of transdisciplinary engagement in Africa’s ethics and society that HASE undertakes. But they are not texts on ethics or philosophy as they are often narrowly focused on religious examination of the issues facing the continent and on certain subjects that contain materials close to what the HASE provides.
The key benefits of HASE over such books or companions are (a) HASE pays special attention to issues pertaining to ethics more generally rather than aided by a religious lens; (b) HASE represents a broader scope of scholarship, attending to the more intersectional and interdisciplinary aspects of African ethos and the moral aspects of African society; (c) HASE includes a wider range of scholars (i.e. not only those in religious studies) who articulate the wide gamut of moral sources available within African cultural experiences and how societies appropriate them for ethical use; and (d) HASE makes allowances for alternative moral sources available right from precolonial time and in substitutive epistemologies, permitting an expansive (and additional) spectrum of previously unconsidered systems of knowledge.
Specifically, this handbook is designed with three basic audiences in mind. First, for mainstream academic African and Africana social ethicists and philosophers in Africa and the African Diaspora who are interested in the direction their discipline needs to take in the twenty-first century. Second, it is meant for the students of African social ethics who urgently need to know how to link academic discourses of ethics to the lived experiences of Africans and to the promotion of human flourishing on the continent. HASE is also meant for the general researchers in African history and development who are interested in the social-ethical dimensions of the debate on how Africa can truly harness its indigenous ethos and global civilizational patterns in order to make significant sociopolitical progress in the twenty-first century.
We are painfully aware that this Handbook is not as comprehensive as we wanted when we embarked on it many years ago. We wanted to generate many more chapters than what we have here, so we could cover almost all possible areas of African social ethics. We engaged the scholars to produce the relevant chapters, but as this kind of projects often goes, a number of our colleagues did not deliver their chapters even after extending the deadline for submission of chapters multiple times. Yet this Handbook provides excellent perspectives and insightful chapters on social ethics in Africa.
Indeed, it contains a robust collection of leading-edge discourses on African social ethics and ethical practices that speak to students, scholars, and educated citizens in the twenty-first century. It focuses on how social ethics as a stand-alone discipline or as a subdiscipline under philosophy hits the ground; that is, how the ethical thoughts of Africans are forged within the context of everyday life and how in turn ethical and philosophical thoughts inform day-to-day living. The goal is to offer bold, incisive, and fresh interpretations of the ethical life and thought in Africa in a style and presentation accessible to the average reader. Designed and published in the formats of print and e-book and as a perpetual online living reference work, The Handbook of African Social Ethics creates a cutting-edge moment for cumulating, updating, and extending studies of African social ethics beyond the present and into the future.
The typical handbook on ethics tells the story of ethics as theoretical debates, elucidations, or discursive practices. This Handbook tells the story of African ethics as a dynamic and open social reality that bears the marks of changes, ruptures, contradictions, and passages of time. This is to say that ethics is understood as a historical phenomenon, and it is best examined as a historical movement, the dynamics of ethos of a people, rather than as a theoretical construct. It is ethics as lived, experienced in everyday life, and not ethics as argued in academic tomes.
If we want to focus on ethics as lived, as experienced historical-social existence, how do we organize the discussions or contents of this Handbook? The short answer is that the organizational patterns of life should condition or determine the categories of discourses or entries in a handbook or companion on African social ethics. This is what we have exactly done in this Handbook.
Unfortunately, this is not the usual approach. The typical approach of handbooks of ethics is to divide their chapters or entries according to the subdisciplines in the field of ethics, regions, periods, intellectual developments, or key thinkers. HASE, however, takes a different approach: it is configured around the five major spheres of life—family, polity, economy, creativity, and dominion (religion). Our approach, centered on life, does not necessarily reject the regnant approach; it only offers a different organizational principle, which is robust enough to incorporate the categories of the regnant method. The concerns, advantages, and sensibilities of the regnant organizational form are embedded in our discourses and configured to yield their insights under the rubrics of the spheres of life. Each chapter approaches ethics as a process that unlocks the power of truth, justice, and harmony embodied in the forms of human sociality or exemplified in the five spheres of life.
Our effort to privilege spheres of life in a sense pays homage to the traditional African conception of ethics as ethos (social practices and discursive practices) that enhances life; promotes harmony between all spheres, dimensions, and forms of life; and encourages human flourishing. This Handbook seeks to demonstrate how Africans have been able to integrate the powers or forces of life that stand behind and stand with the five spheres of life to create viable civilizations. No civilization or large historical organization of social existence exists without the viable integrations of the forces, energies with their institutional patterns.
The contents of The Handbook of African Social Ethics are organized to pay a great deal of attention to the “spiritual and moral energies” behind human flourishing and civilizations in Africa. The five basic spheres of life (family, polity, economy, creativity, and dominion [religion]) are often correlated with five powers—five forms of spiritual energies that invite and even capture people’s loyalties (these powers or energies eros /familial piety, mars/violence, the muses/forces of creativity , mammon/economy , and dominion/worldview, comprehensive moral vision, religion).1 These powers not only enable people to move beyond the boundaries and capabilities left to them by their ancestors but also, sometimes, anchor them to antiquated practices, institutions, and beliefs.
“Humans are sexual, political, economic, cultural, and religious creatures. Each one of these dimensions of life involves a certain potentiality and needs an institutional matrix to house, guide and channel its energies.”2 They are organized into spheres of life. Eros relates to the family sphere, muses to the arts and mass media, mars (violence) to the political, mammon to economy, and religion to the whole society. Religion defines what is right, good, and fitting in the other spheres and in human relationship with God, gods, or spirits. These spiritual energies not only guide current practices, they are implicated in the human drive toward transcendence and the future.
The Handbook of African Social Ethics aspires to convey a critical sense of African ethics as a longing and practice of human flourishing, the fluid, delicate interactions between the moral and spiritual energies that claim the loyalties of Africans, and the various creative institutional matrices they have created to guide the five powers to engender greater possibilities of excellence (actualization of their potentialities) for better levels of human flourishing in everyday existence.
Overall, this Handbook presents the ethical practices, institutions, and thoughts in Africa as transdisciplinary subject matters that are critical in the interpretation and understanding of contemporary African societies. Thus, we hope that the readership of Handbook of Africa Social Ethics will not be confined to students of philosophy and social ethics alone but will include the wider readerships in the humanities and social sciences—and even beyond.
The implicit view of ethics in the chapters that constitute this book is expansive. Here, ethics points us to ends beyond the existing forms of human sociality. It insists that an existing order can find those ends beyond itself only when its agents rise beyond themselves. Thus, HASE offers analytical insights not for only Africans to engage their inherited moral systems and emergent ethos but also offers resources that can nudge some of them to resist existing orders that absolutize themselves and to forge and strain toward a new window of “else-where” and “else-when.”
This idea of window points us toward both what is present and what is absent in an extant order. In ethics we are trying to paint a portrait of our community and/or the subject of our focus. The p...