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Brief Lives
Henry Odera Oruka (1944-1995)
Robin Attfield looks at the life of a dedicated promoter of African philosophy.
The philosopher Henry Odera Oruka was born in 1944 at Ugenya in western Kenya. In his youth he became well acquainted with the customs and traditions of the Luo people. Having won a scholarship, he first encountered philosophy while studying for an undergraduate degree at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, under the supervision of Ingemar Hedenius. This experience proved crucial for his subsequent development.
Around the time of Oruka’s graduation, Hedenius was appointed to a Professorship at Wayne State University, Detroit, and arranged for Oruka to be awarded a post there as a graduate assistant. This allowed Oruka to study for a master’s degree, which was awarded in 1969. He wrote his thesis on punishment; after that he travelled back to Uppsala to study for his doctorate, on liberty. Then, being eager to foster philosophy in Kenya, which had recently become independent from Britain, he returned there. Soon he began teaching philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi, and in or around 1971 he founded the Philosophical Association of Kenya. The following year he was appointed to a permanent lectureship in that department, despite the opposition of Bishop Stephen Neill, Head of Department. Oruka was able to persuade the appointing committee that he had experience of teaching a much wider range of branches of philosophy than Bishop Neill had led them to credit. Given Oruka’s commitment to spreading philosophy in Africa, this appointment was central to the rest of his career, and he was still working in the same department at the time of his death late in 1995. Or rather, he was still working in the Philosophy Department, which, as a result of his advocacy, became a separate department from 1980.
I became Oruka’s colleague at the University of Nairobi for a term in 1975. By that time he was a well-established figure in the Department. He drew to my attention a paper presented at the World Congress of Philosophy of 1973, held in Bulgaria, in which the Australian philosopher Richard Routley argued for a new environmental ethic. Reading this led to my involvement in environmental philosophy. Subsequently, when Oruka had become a Professor, I participated in the World Conference of Philosophy he organised at Nairobi in 1991, and later in the World Futures Studies Conference he organised there in the summer of 1995, shortly before his death.
During the 1970s and 80s, Oruka led a number of field expeditions to interview traditional Kenyan sages (who included Oruka’s own father), to record their wisdom while it was still possible. These sages were, he argued, not mere expositors or defenders of traditional beliefs and practices, but frequently criticised established traditions in the manner of philosophers. Specifically, often the way they criticised established traditions reminded Oruka of the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, who adopted a comparably critical attitude to the traditions that they themselves had received. Oruka thus seized nearly the final opportunity to record this traditional variety of African philosophy, and defend it against those who considered Africans to lack philosophical traditions. These expeditions, then, were not a mere exercise in ethnography, but a contribution to practical philosophy in Africa. Oruka’s biographer, Gail Presbey, was among those who took part in the expeditions.
Oruka was also one of the founding members of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA). One of the earliest conferences of IDEA was held at Nairobi, alongside the World Conference that Oruka organised there in 1991.
Henry Odera Okura by Gail Campbell
Oruka had a talent for introducing philosophers to new fields, and to each other. Besides introducing me to environmental philosophy, Oruka encouraged Nigel Dower of Aberdeen (who later became IDEA’s second President) to contact the American philosopher David Crocker (who served as the first President of that Association), because he was aware of their similar scholarly interests. This led to a lifelong collaboration between the two.
Oruka also contributed to analytic philosophy, to applied philosophy in Africa, and to the international philosophical scene. His early work on punishment was strongly influenced by the views of his philosophical mentor Hedenius, and by the determinism to which Oruka adhered at that time. He argued that criminals are driven to infringe the law by their circumstances, and could not do otherwise. He concluded from this that punishment was an injustice and should be abolished. Initially these views were combined with his critique of the injustices of colonial rule, but he continued to hold them even during the early years of independence. By this stage, he had modified his views on punishment to advocate its use in defence of liberty against state terror – a terror which had already been exhibited by several independent African regimes, such as those of “three great sons of God, Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin of Uganda and Jean Bokassa of the Central African Republic” (Punishment and Terrorism in Africa, 1985, pp.110-11). He also supported punishment of such rulers “commensurate with the crimes or [other] acts committed by the oppressors during their days in power”(The Life and Thought of H. Odera Oruka: Pursuing Justice in Africa, Gail Presbey, 2023, pp.70-71).
By the time of the 1995 conference on global futures, his deterministic view of human actions had given way to an open-futures view. This recognised a range of possible futures, in some of which poverty could be superseded. This belief is reflected in the title of the conference volume, Futures Beyond Poverty (Ogutu, Malaska, and Kojola, eds., 1997). Also, his posthumously published book, Practical Philosophy (1997), was dedicated “to the futures – to the future African philosophers and all future thinkers and workers for human justice and a better environment.” As he explains in the preliminaries of the book, “Future is not one given unalterable fate. There are always many possible futures. And depending on our actions today we can encourage the chances of some and diminish the chances of others.” He adds that insofar as future catastrophes can be predicted, humanity has the moral obligation to do everything it can to prevent them. He did not claim that the relevant catastrophes were unavoidable, but rather that even if they were likely, and thus foreseeable, human action could in at least some cases prevent them. Therefore people have obligations to strive, singly or concertedly, to bring about a different, less catastrophic, less unjust, future.
This conference also resolved to set up an ecophilosophy unit based in Nairobi, of which Oruka was to be the head. I once received a letter from Oruka on the fledgeling unit’s headed letter-paper. But the plans had to be abandoned at the outset as a result of Oruka’s sudden (and, on some interpretations, suspicious) death in a road accident on 9th December 1995.
As for Oruka’s own environmental philosophy, he advocated the stance of ‘Parental Earth Ethics’, in which the planet and its living constituents are understood as mutually related like a family. The family metaphor was not meant to evoke some form of spiritual or moralised view of ideal relations, but to express a scientific understanding of the interdependence of different components of the biosphere regardless of human-made categories and boundaries. Nevertheless, like many metaphors, it warrants further clarification.
Oruka’s stance becomes clearer in a later paper, ‘Eco-philosophy: Environmental Ethics’ (reprinted in Practical Philosophy), where he explicitly steers a middle course between anthropocentrism on the one hand and holistic eco-philosophy (of which Deep Ecology would be an example) on the other. He represents both anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology as extremes. By contrast, Oruka defends the stance of Frederick Ferré, who distinguished between moral agents (human beings only) and moral patients – beings entitled to our moral care, which include non-human entities. Both the extremes involve ethical problems, whereas Ferré’s position facilitates a unitary and universal ethic in which nonhuman nature is a focus of human concern alongside humanity. While Oruka’s stance on the range of moral agents admits of some qualification (is it true that only humans can act morally?), his understanding of the range of moral patients is receiving ever greater support.
Oruka also frequently put forward an argument explaining why rich nations have obligations to supply aid to developing countries. Both Gail Presbey and I commend this argument as a strong one. It has been summarised this way:
“If the world community agrees that humans have a right to life, then implicit in that right is the right to physical security, health and subsistence… A government’s right to sovereignty cannot override the individual’s right to life. Therefore, rich countries cannot argue that they have an option as to whether they aid starving persons. Foreign aid is ethically obligatory and not just international charity… since the aid is not a favour in the first place but rather a duty”
(Sagacious Reasoning: Henry Odera Oruka in Memoriam, Anke Graness and Kai Kresse (eds), 1997, pp.47-60)
Oruka was twice married. One of the children of his second marriage, Peter Oruka Odera, currently teaches International Relations at the University of Nairobi. Oruka’s legacy also includes the continued thriving of the Nairobi Philosophy Department (now combined again with that of Religious Studies), as well as ongoing discussions about African sage philosophy and about how best to build and entrench both international justice and justice in Africa. Several conferences have been held about his thought, including his reflections on the future of the world and of Africa in particular. Meanwhile the journal Thought and Practice that he and the African Philosophical Association founded in 1974 continues to flourish. His interest in environmental philosophy is articulated in the newer journal Utafiti, published from Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. His journalism and participation in public affairs are studied by other African philosophers and fellow intellectuals, and with it his advocacy of the cause of liberty. This is crucial to a continent all too prone to authoritarianism, and to the preventable poverty that authoritarianism often entrenches.
Readers interested in the latest round of debates about sage philosophy can pursue their interest by reading Rethinking Sage Philosophy (Kai Kresse and Oriare Nyarwath, eds, 2022). The subtitle of the book is, appropriately, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on and beyond H. Odera Oruka. Henry Odera Oruka stares out at us engagingly from the front cover.
© Prof Robin Attfield 2025
Robin Attfield is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Cardiff University.