Alexis Kagame 1912 – 1981

Alexis Kagame was a Rwandan Catholic priest, philosopher, historian, and linguist and one of the principal pioneers of academic African philosophy. After studies at Astrida and Gregorian University in Rome, he produced La Philosophie Bantu-Rwandaise de l'Etre and the later La Philosophie Bantu Comparee, in which he reconstructed Bantu metaphysics from the structure of Bantu languages and the categories encoded in their grammar. A learned student of Aristotle and a careful interlocutor of Placide Tempels, he insisted that African philosophy can be reconstructed from the linguistic and cultural resources of African peoples themselves. His many epic poems in Kinyarwanda preserve a vast amount of Rwandan oral history.