Three Encounters with Kwame Anthony Appiah

By K'eguro Macharia

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This week, we have a guest writer, my friend K’eguro Macharia, who has written several things for this Substack. I saw a tweet from K’eguro about Appiah and asked him to say more, mostly because Appiah’s New York Times column is so strange and bad. Now I get why, and so can you. Thanks K’eguro!

Three Encounters with Kwame Anthony Appiah

My favorite writing by Kwame Anthony Appiah is a short story published in a gay and lesbian anthology in the 1990s. I do not remember the title of the story. I do not remember the name of the anthology. I do not remember the plot of the story. The memory of the story has the same sweetness as tricking with a stranger in a public park. Quick. Necessary. Fun. Not entirely forgettable, because sweetness remains, but the details are unnecessary. No names needed. No names exchanged.

I remember Appiah’s name because I was hunting for queer Africans, evidence not that people “like me” existed—of course, we did; I was my own evidence. But that people “like me” had made lives and thrived away from the death sentences promised by AIDS and homophobia. Appiah’s name stuck in my mind. Not only had someone “like me”—I know the quotation marks are obnoxious, forgive them, for now—had survived; they had made a life in the academy. I forget, then, if I already wanted to be an academic. I only know that his name sparked something, the idea that a kind of life was possible.

I next encountered Appiah as the bridge between African philosophy and postcolonial studies, in his celebrated In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. 

Appiah’s first three books had been fairly standard philosophy, with exciting titles, including Assertions and Conditionals (1985) and For Truth in Semantics (1986). The kind of stuff that philosophers like. Maybe? I don’t know. I’m not a philosopher. Stuff that I would have ignored.

With In My Father’s House, Appiah moved more centrally into view as someone with things to say about Africa, philosophy, and postcolonialism.

African intellectuals were VERY excited by this move.

Nothing excites a certain African as much as a fellow African ascending to the heights of academic achievement in England—England is always first—or the United States. And, now, here was Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Cambridge University PhD, who had taught at Yale and was at Harvard. The African son had returned home. He had come with his degrees and prestige to sit at the table of knowledge and honor Africans.

It was not simply that Appiah had excellent academic credentials. He also had incredible biographical credentials. His mother, Enid Margaret Cripps, was the daughter of the Right Honourable Sir Stafford Cripps and Dame Isobel Cripps. Wikipedia claims that through his grandmother, Isobel Cripps, is a descendant of John Winthrop, and there’s some stuff about Boston Brahmins. (Given the caste violence Brahmins in India incarnate, the idea of the Boston Brahmins seems apposite, given land theft and genocide. But I digress.) His father, Joseph Emmanual Appiah, was a lawyer and Ghanain politician, friends with Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore. He was also a member of the Ashanti imperial aristocracy. In a very real sense, Kwame Anthony Appiah was English and African aristocracy. And here he was writing about African philosophy.

What an honor!

In My Father’s House opens with a scene of bucolic Africa. We do not get Appiah the aristocrat. We get Appiah doing something else: 

My first memories are of a place called "Mbrom," a small neighborhood in Kumasi, capital of Asante, as that kingdom turned from being part of the British Gold Coast colony to being a region of the Republic of Ghana. Our home was opposite my grandparent's house—where scores of her kinsfolk and dependents lived under the direction of my stepgrandmother, "Auntie Jane," who baked bread for hundreds of people from Mbrom and the surrounding areas—down the street from many cousins of various, usually obscure, degrees of affinity. Near the center of the second largest city in Ghana, behind our hibiscus hedge in the "garden city of West Africa," our life was essentially a village life, lived among a few hundred neighbors; out from that village we went to the other little villages that make up the city.

This emphasis on village life recurs when Appiah describes visiting his relatives in England.

But we also went from time to time to my mother's native country, to England, to stay with my grandmother in the rural West Country, returning the visits she had made to us. And the life there—perhaps this is only because it is also part of my earliest memories—seems, at least now, to have been mostly not too different. My grandmother lived next door to my aunt (my mother's sister ) and her family, in the village where my aunt was born, just as my father lived next to his father.

With the exception of children who experience injury and harm, most children experience their childhoods as ordinary. I do not mean that class distinctions are not apparent. In my Nairobi primary school, we distinguished between those students who wore the school sweater bought at the official shop, and those whose school sweaters were handknitted. No one was made fun of for wearing homemade sweaters—it wasn’t that important. But class distinctions were at play. I detour this way to say that I believe Appiah when he describes his childhood as ordinary, shuttling between village life in Ghana and village life in England.

But I also recognize this strategy: when a Cambridge-educated, aristocrat on both sides, professor of philosophy at Harvard describes a village upbringing, that feels very much like elite Hollywood actors who earn millions and millions insisting that they are very down to earth.

The philosophy people would say I am doing something ad hominem. Again, I make no claims to be a philosopher.

It would be foolish to claim that no one knew Kwame Anthony Appiah before In My Father’s House. Cambridge. Yale. Harvard. He was a name. Yet, it’s not untrue to say that no one knew Kwame Anthony Appiah. People knew Anthony Appiah, the author of Assertions and Conditionals.

In My Father’s House was what we might call an exercise in re-branding. From Anthony Appiah to Kwame Anthony Appiah. (Rebranding is common in African letters: Johnstone Kamau became Jomo Kenyatta and James Ngugi became Ngugi wa Thiong'o.) The rebranding also marked a shift in focus, from fairly conventional linguistic philosophy to timely postcolonial intervention, though I suspect some would quibble with that latter description.

In My Father’s House is a good book. Appiah muses on what it means to live across geohistories, what it means to be formed by them, and how to imagine ways of relating that refuse narrow identity categories. It refuses the “where are you really from?” violence that tries to fix Africans—and those perceived as out-of-place immigrants—elsewhere, to offer a broader sense of belonging and attachment. That’s about all I’ll say about it.

I read it, but it’s not a book I return to or think with very much.

My final encounter with Appiah—the last time I read him seriously—was when I was a graduate student attempting to think about concepts and practices that refused narrow and dangerous frames of identity. Narrow and dangerous—the genocides and ethnocides in Rwanda and Bosnia were in the air, as was the recent murder of Matthew Shepard. It was urgent then—and now— to describe and foster ways of being together that refused exclusionary and murderous identity policing.

The word cosmopolitan was in the air. To be fair, it's not a word that ever disappears, but it felt newly urgent. 9/11 had intensified threatening nationalisms across the U.S. In the small Midwestern town where I lived, flags fluttered everywhere, signs of belonging and paranoia. Cosmopolitanism offered a different language of belonging. One was not a citizen of one place, bound to narrow nationalisms; one was a citizen of the world.

This turn to global rather than national citizenship as a place from which to think and act was seductive. Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness was on my mind, as was Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah. I was trying to figure out how to square the importance of anticolonial nationalisms alongside the betrayals and injuries of post-independence nationalisms. I craved something other than the nation to think with and from.

It is in Cosmopolitanism that Appiah's background is fully activated, and unaccounted for. For it turns out that one can be cosmopolitan if one comes from aristocracy, teaches at elite institutions, and has a U.S. or English passport. Far from being a promise of post-national relation, the cosmopolitanism Appiah theorized had to ignore how class, race, and national origin determine your access to cosmopolitanism. To be fair, Appiah writes, “I’m a philosopher by trade, and philosophers rarely write really useful books.”

Toward the conclusion of Cosmopolitanism, Appiah outlines some general principles of cosmopolitan relation. He writes, “Each of us should do our fair share; but we cannot be required to do more.” Were I feeling generous, I would say this statement acknowledges that we work within our limitations, doing what we can within our mutual interdependencies.

But something about that statement irritates me, something about whose unacknowledged labor does the more that is required. There’s something miserly about it, something about how it refuses the unexpected obligations and pleasures that come with living with each other.

These days, Appiah is probably best known as The Ethicist, in a regular column for the New York Times. There, he offers a philosopher’s insight on varied moral quandaries. Recent quandaries include, “My Sister Did Me Wrong in Secret. Should I Tell Her I Know?”; “What Should I Do about a Friend’s Racist Figurines?”; “Can I Utter a Racial Slur in the Classroom?”; “How Much Help do I Owe My Debt-Ridden Dad?”; and “Should I Let My Brother Know He was Adopted?” From my brief skim of Appiah’s answers, they fall squarely within his cosmopolitan principle: “Each of us should do our fair share; but we cannot be required to do more.”

Thankfully, Appiah has already told us that “philosophers rarely write really useful books.” Perhaps that also extends to the advice he offers.

I could dwell on Appiah, but I need something else. So I end with one of my favorite quotations: “The Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”–Karl Marx