What is African Communitarianism? Against Consensus as a regulative ideal 1 Michael Onyebuchi Eze Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Goethestr. 31 Essen, 45128 Germany Email: imaginarydomain@gmail.com Abstract In this essay, an attempt is made to re-present African Communitarianism as a discursive formation between the individual and community. It is a view which eschews the dominant position of many Africanist scholars on the pri- macy of the community over the individual in the ‘individual-community’ debate in contemporary Africanist discourse. The relationship between the individual and community is dialogical for the identity of the individual and the community is dependent on this constitutive formation. The individual is not prior to the community and neither is the community prior to the individ- ual. Contemporaneity explains this dialogic relationship and to argue other- wise threatens the individual’s subjectivity to a vanishing point, or simply, to deny the individual a presence. On this trajectory, the politics of common good within the African value system can neither be described nor repre- sented through consensus or unanimity but through a realist perspectivism or a worldview not held in abstraction from living traditions, cultures, and values that characterize the people(s) of sub-Saharan Africa. Introduction A key element in the discussion on African Communitarianism has been the debate over the status of individual and community. Many Africanist writers have projected a peculiar understanding of African Communitarianism which advances a priority of the community over the individual. In this essay, while I do not debunk the role of com- munities in facilitating the good of the individual, the community in my view, is not prior to the individual and the latter does not pre-exist the community. The individual and the community are not radically opposed in the sense of priority but engaged in a contemporaneous formation. Key in understanding such contemporaneity is a discus- sion on the politics of common good which many Africanist writers have equated with consensus. Consensus in my view, does not give an adequate account of the praxis of common good in African Communitarianism. Consensus absorbs multiple viewpoints through a totalitarian uniformity. It is, to use Lyotard’s (1984:63) term, a form of ‘ter- rorism’. I shall propose another alternative to consensus, namely, realist perspectivism. 1 This essay was facilitated within the context of the Humanism Project: ‘Humanism in the Era of Glob- alization’ sponsored by Mercator Foundation, Germany.