A key effort at developing the explanatory capacities of the Ifa system in relation to a field of knowledge that goes beyond its original cultural matrix is Henry Louis Gate’s Jrs The Signifying Monkey4 in which he correlates the figure of the Orisa or deity Eshu from the Ifa system and that of the Signifying Monkey from African-American folklore as correlative metaphorical expressions of hermeneutic principles relevant to the interpretation of African-American literature.

While Gate’s impressive work does demonstrates not only the conceptual and cognitive significance of aspects of the Ifa system in terms of a modern idiom represented by contemporary principles of hermeneutics, and further demonstrates the expansiveness possible to the cultural range of the system by relating it to African-American literature, we may argue that his work, to some degree, still constitutes an exercise that needs to be built upon in order to demonstrate the universal cultural potential of such systems.

The kind of study we propose would develop this significance, not simply in terms of studies that operate purely within the endogenous cultural matrices of these systems, even when these efforts relate these to those creators of discourse who relate their work explicitly to these artistic and conceptual formations. The perspective we advocate would study these systems as conceptual structures which can exist on their own as free standing conceptual apparatus, as it were, and which can be deployed in the study of relevant phenomena, from any cultural, spatial or temporal milieu, whether African, Western or Asian, traditional or modern5.


4 Henry Luis Gates Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism(Oxford; Oxford UP,1988)
5 Wiredu’s injunction to African philosophers to engage in the discipline of exploring questions of philosophical truth rather than remain fixated on questions about the existence of traditional African philosophy would seem to represent an effort in this direction. His analysis of the Akan concept of truth is an effort to explore the meaning value of one system but that effort remains within the ambit of intracultural study. Paulin Hountondji, “The Reasons for Scientific Dependence in Africa Today”Rsearch in African Literatures, vol.21, no.3, Fall 1990, pp.5-15, has analysed the limitation of address that seems to mark African scholarship and traces it to a problem inherent in the African’s mode of identification of the place of the African in the global structure of the development of knowledge. One philosopher who has located himself within the Western frame of reference from where he has explicated the foundations of philosophy as developed by the West as a paradigm for a global understanding of philosophical thought is Anthony Appiah in Thinking it Through: an Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (New York:Oxford University Press, 2003) but his work is limited in its failure to recognise adequately the problematic and controversial character of philosophical styles in different parts of the world. He does not engage, for example, with the premises that inform the ancient and well documented traditions of Asian philosophy, the epistemic formations and conceptions of philosophical purpose of which are often different from those of Western philosophy.