The pioneering reference work devoted to the field — over 180 entries by more than 85 African scholars, the first of its kind anywhere, edited by Prof. Maduabuchi Dukor alongside the Harrington Centre and London Academic Publishing.
For decades the question was asked, and asked again, whether African philosophy existed at all. This dictionary is the long, patient answer — written from within the tradition it describes.
It began in 2021, within a UNESCO World Philosophy Day project, was refined over the years that followed through editorial work across the Harrington Centre and London Academic Publishing, and reached print in 2025: the first reference work to set down, entry by entry, a body of thought long transmitted but never before catalogued.
How it came to be
A cover story
The publication was marked on the cover of Brolly. Journal of Social Sciences — the Harrington Centre's peer-reviewed open-access journal — whose issue 5.3 carried both framing essays in full.
The Foreword by General Editor Maduabuchi Dukor situates the work within the Great Debate and the role of UNESCO; the Afterword by Prof. Madalin Onu — Executive Editor of the dictionary and Director of the Harrington Centre — reflects on the Cartesian ego against the collective "I", on Ubuntu, dialectics and African socialism.
Prof. Maduabuchi Dukor · General Editor
The General Editor situates the dictionary within the long discourse on African thought — the Great Debate, the role of UNESCO, the birth of the project after World Philosophy Day 2021, and the freedom of a people as inseparable from the freedom of its philosophy.
Prof. Madalin Onu · Executive Editor & Director, Harrington Centre
The Executive Editor reflects on existence and identity in African philosophy — the Cartesian ego against the collective "I", Ubuntu and dialectics, African socialism, Négritude, and the place of this thought in a multicultural, interconnected world.
The southern-African ethic of shared humanity, often rendered "I am because we are." Personhood is not a given of birth but an achievement realised in and through community.
See also communalism · personhood · Geist
Kwame Nkrumah's philosophy for the decolonised state — a synthesis of African, Islamic and Euro-Christian conscience directed toward the egalitarian society.
See also African socialism · Négritude · Ujamaa
The collective worldview embedded in a people's language, proverb and custom — and the long debate over whether it counts as philosophy proper.
See also the Great Debate · sage philosophy
Among the Igbo, the kola nut broken in welcome — a small rite that carries metaphysics, ethics and community in a single shared gesture.
See also communalism · ancestors · ritual
The literary-political affirmation of Black cultural value associated with Senghor and Césaire — pride reclaimed against the colonial gaze.
See also consciencism · African socialism
Dukor's own framework: a metaphysics in which the divine and the human, spirit and matter, are not opposed but held within one order of being.
See also vital force · supreme being
H. Odera Oruka's method of recording the reasoned thought of indigenous sages — evidence of critical reflection beyond the written tradition.
See also ethnophilosophy · the Great Debate
Julius Nyerere's Swahili principle of "familyhood" — an African socialism rooted in the extended family rather than in class struggle.
See also consciencism · communitarianism
To name a thing is to grant it a place in the order of knowledge. This dictionary names a philosophy.
— On the purpose of the work
The volume
More than five hundred entries and cross-references set in a single durable volume — issued by London Academic Publishing in hardcover, paperback and open eBook, and circulated across Nigeria through the Essence Library edition.
Refined and revised from 2022 onward, the manuscript found its press here. It was issued in hardcover, paperback and eBook, with the Foreword and Afterword freely readable in its journal Brolly.
london-ap.uk ↗
A NATCOM–UNESCO-recognised centre in Awka for the study and preservation of African philosophy. It supplied, among others, the network of contributors from which the dictionary grew, and issues the recognised Nigerian edition of the volume.
essencelibrary.org ↗
Begun within 2021 UNESCO World Philosophy Day, refined over the years that followed in partnership with Harrington Centre and London Academic Publishing, and brought to print in 2025.
Maduabuchi Frank Dukor is Professor of Philosophy at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, and one of the most prolific voices in contemporary African philosophy. He is the architect of Theistic Humanism and African Predicament Logic, frameworks that read African metaphysics on its own terms rather than through borrowed European categories.
For more than two decades, he has edited Essence: An International Journal of Concerned African Philosophers and convened the Essence Library — a NATCOM–UNESCO-recognised centre dedicated to the study and preservation of African philosophy. The dictionary is, in a sense, the outcome of that work: a single reference in which a widely dispersed tradition is assembled.
Alongside him, the volume was carried to print by Prof. Madalin Onu, Executive Editor and Director of Harrington Centre, whose Afterword reflects on existence and identity in African thought.
The editorial heart of the dictionary lies in Awka, south-eastern Nigeria — home to Nnamdi Azikiwe University, and to the markets, festivals and communities whose thought the book records.
Take it from here
Available now in hardcover, paperback and eBook from London Academic Publishing, with the framing essays freely readable in Brolly.