They taught Sophie Oluwole Socrates, Plato and Kant. But as she moved deeper into philosophy, another question began to bother her: if these men could be remembered as great thinkers, where were the African philosophers?
It was not a question about whether Africans were intelligent. It was a question about who had been allowed to define what counted as philosophy.
For Oluwole, the problem became particularly striking when she encountered the Yoruba intellectual tradition surrounding Òrúnmìlà and Ifá. Here was a vast body of knowledge preserved through oral transmission, containing ideas about morality, knowledge, human conduct and existence. Yet because it had not arrived in the form of European philosophical books, it was often placed in categories such as religion, mythology or folklore.
Oluwole spent decades challenging that distinction.
Her eventual comparison of Socrates and Òrúnmìlà would become one of the most distinctive arguments in modern African philosophy. But to understand why she made it, it is necessary to go back to the classroom where she first encountered the problem.
The classroom where Africa seemed to disappear
EXPLORE NOW: Biographies & Cultural Icons of Nigeria
Sophie Bósèdé Olayemi Oluwole was born on 12 May 1935 in Igbara-Oke, in present-day Ondo State.
Her early life did not immediately point towards a career in philosophy. She trained as a teacher and spent time working in education before pursuing university studies. She eventually studied at the University of Lagos, where she became increasingly interested in philosophy.
She joined the university as an assistant lecturer in 1972 and later rose through the academic ranks. In 1984, she completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Ibadan, becoming the first woman in Nigeria to earn a doctorate in philosophy.
But the significance of her university years went beyond the degree she eventually received.
She encountered a philosophical curriculum heavily shaped by Western traditions.
Socrates was there.
Plato was there.
Aristotle was there.
European philosophers followed.
But African intellectual traditions were not occupying the same position.
For Oluwole, this absence became a philosophical problem in itself.
Africa had societies with elaborate systems of morality, political thought, ideas about human nature and explanations of existence. These ideas had been transmitted for generations through language, poetry, proverbs, stories, ritual knowledge and other forms of oral tradition.
So why did they so rarely appear in the history of philosophy?
The question stayed with her.
She tried to study African philosophy and encountered a problem
Oluwole did not simply wake up one day and decide to compare Socrates with Òrúnmìlà.
Her intellectual journey was much more complicated.
During her postgraduate studies, she wanted to investigate African philosophy. But the academic environment presented an obstacle: there was no suitable supervisor available for the kind of African philosophical research she wanted to undertake.
She therefore moved into other areas of philosophy.
Her doctoral work eventually focused on meta-ethics and the Golden Rule rather than the Yoruba philosophical project she had originally hoped to pursue.
The irony was difficult to miss.
The academic system had given her the philosophical tools to investigate arguments, concepts and ethical questions, but the African intellectual traditions that interested her were not always regarded as suitable material for philosophical research.
Oluwole did not abandon the question.
She waited.
She studied.
She taught.
And eventually, she returned to it on her own terms.
The philosophy hiding in oral tradition
One of Oluwole’s central arguments was that writing could not be the test for deciding whether a tradition contained philosophy.
That mattered enormously in the African context.
Many African societies preserved knowledge without relying primarily on written philosophical books. Knowledge could be memorised, performed, recited and transmitted through generations.
The Yoruba Ifá tradition provides a particularly important example.
Ifá contains an enormous corpus of verses known as Odù Ifá, transmitted and interpreted within the religious and intellectual tradition associated with Òrúnmìlà.
For Oluwole, the important question was not simply whether Ifá was a religion.
It obviously had a religious dimension.
The question was whether the intellectual material preserved within it could also be examined philosophically.
Her 1997 book, Philosophy and Oral Tradition, developed this argument. She challenged the assumption that oral traditions were incapable of producing philosophical reasoning simply because they lacked the conventional written format associated with Western philosophy.
That was a serious challenge to the way African philosophy had often been approached.
She was not asking scholars to accept every traditional story as historical fact.
She was asking them to read, analyse and interrogate African intellectual traditions rather than dismissing them before the analysis even began.
Why Socrates became important
Then came the comparison that would define much of her later reputation.
Socrates is one of the foundational figures in the history of Western philosophy.
Yet there is something unusual about Socrates.
He did not leave behind a philosophical book written by himself.
Much of what later generations know about him comes through other writers, especially Plato and Xenophon.
This presented Oluwole with an intellectually useful comparison.
Òrúnmìlà was also remembered through traditions transmitted by others rather than through a surviving book personally written by him.
Their historical and cultural circumstances were completely different. Socrates belonged to classical Athens; Òrúnmìlà belongs to Yoruba religious and intellectual traditions.
Oluwole was not claiming that the two men lived identical lives or produced identical philosophical systems.
Instead, she asked readers to examine why one could be comfortably placed inside the history of philosophy while the other was so often treated primarily as a religious or mythical figure.
Her answer was a challenge to the criteria themselves.
If written authorship was not necessary for Socrates to be regarded as a philosopher, then the absence of an original written text could not automatically disqualify an African intellectual tradition.
The book that made the comparison explicit
In 2014, Oluwole published Socrates and Òrúnmìlà: Two Patron Saints of Classical Philosophy.
Even the title was provocative.
But the argument behind it was more important than the title.
Oluwole compared the intellectual traditions surrounding the two figures and explored questions of wisdom, morality, knowledge and human conduct. She was interested in the similarities that made comparison possible, but the differences were equally important.
Socrates and Òrúnmìlà emerged from entirely different societies.
Their traditions developed through different languages, institutions and forms of transmission.
The comparison therefore was not an attempt to make Yoruba philosophy look respectable by declaring that it was secretly Greek.
It was almost the opposite.
Oluwole was questioning why Greek philosophy had become such a powerful reference point for defining philosophy everywhere else.
Her argument effectively asked: what if African intellectual traditions are judged according to standards that were never designed to recognise them?
The real issue was not Socrates
This is where Oluwole’s work becomes more interesting than the popular headline about “Socrates versus Òrúnmìlà.”
The real issue was not which man was wiser.
It was not a competition between Greece and Yorubaland.
It was not even an attempt to prove that African philosophy was “as good as” Western philosophy.
Oluwole was questioning the architecture of intellectual history.
For centuries, written texts have played an enormous role in determining what survives in the academic record. That makes sense in many respects. Written sources can be preserved, compared, translated and scrutinised.
But it also creates a problem.
What happens to societies whose intellectual traditions were preserved differently?
What happens when knowledge exists in the memory of specialists, in poetry, in proverbs, in stories, in ritual practice and in languages that were not traditionally used to produce philosophical books?
Does the absence of a book mean the absence of philosophy?
Oluwole’s answer was no.
But she also did not argue that everything preserved through oral tradition was automatically philosophy.
That distinction is important.
Her project was to bring oral traditions into philosophical examination.
She went closer to the tradition
Oluwole’s engagement with Yoruba thought was not simply a matter of reading English-language descriptions of African culture.
She sought deeper knowledge of Yoruba language and the Ifá tradition and engaged with practitioners of the tradition, including babaláwo.
That was important because Ifá is not simply a collection of stories that can be separated from the people who preserve and interpret them.
Its knowledge has historically been transmitted through specialised forms of learning.
Understanding what the verses mean therefore requires more than translating individual words.
It requires understanding the intellectual world in which they were produced and transmitted.
Oluwole’s attempt to take that world seriously was part of what made her work unusual.
She was a university philosopher studying a body of knowledge that had not been created within the university system.
She also asked difficult questions about women
Oluwole’s intellectual interests did not stop at African philosophy.
She also wrote about women and Yoruba traditional thought.
Her work examined the position of women within Yoruba society and considered how traditional ideas about gender could be understood in relation to contemporary debates.
This was particularly significant because women were often discussed in African history as subjects of political or social change rather than as intellectual producers themselves.
Oluwole occupied both positions.
She was the subject of a major story about women’s advancement in Nigerian academia, but she was also producing arguments about African knowledge, culture, gender and philosophy.
Her career therefore challenged more than one boundary.
But her argument was never as simple as “Africa had everything first”
There is a temptation when discussing African intellectual history to swing from one extreme to another.
One extreme dismisses African traditions because they do not resemble European philosophical traditions.
The other romanticises those traditions, treating every ancestral claim as unquestionable wisdom.
Oluwole’s work is more interesting than either position.
She wanted African intellectual traditions to be taken seriously enough to be analysed.
Analysis means questioning.
It means identifying arguments.
It means comparing ideas.
It means looking for contradictions.
It means distinguishing tradition from historical evidence.
And it means accepting that an African intellectual tradition does not become more valuable simply because it is old.
That is why the debate surrounding Oluwole’s work continued among African philosophers themselves. Some scholars questioned aspects of her understanding of oral tradition and whether oral material alone was sufficient to establish a philosophical tradition.
Those criticisms did not make her project irrelevant.
They demonstrated that she had moved the conversation to a more serious level.
The question was no longer whether African philosophy deserved to be discussed.
The question had become how it should be studied.
The woman who changed the question
Sophie Oluwole died on 23 December 2018.
By then, she had spent decades pushing African philosophy into conversations from which it had often been marginalised.
Her greatest contribution may not have been proving that Òrúnmìlà should replace Socrates.
That was never really the point.
Her contribution was forcing people to examine the assumptions behind the categories they used.
Why is one body of knowledge called philosophy while another is called mythology?
Why is one tradition treated as intellectual history while another is treated as folklore?
Why should writing be considered more intellectually respectable than carefully preserved oral knowledge?
And who decided these rules in the first place?
Those questions remain relevant long after Oluwole’s death.
Because the deeper lesson of her work is not that Africans should find African versions of European philosophers.
It is that African intellectual traditions deserve to be encountered on their own terms, examined critically and taken seriously enough to enter the wider history of human thought.
Sophie Oluwole did not erase the distance between Socrates and Òrúnmìlà.
She made that distance worth investigating.
And perhaps that is why her most important question was never really about Socrates at all.
It was about the countless ideas that may have existed, survived and shaped African societies without ever being given the name philosophy.
EXPLORE NOW: Military Era & Coups in Nigeria
Author’s note: Sophie Oluwole’s importance lies not simply in being Nigeria’s first woman to earn a PhD in philosophy, but in challenging scholars to reconsider how African intellectual traditions are recognised, preserved and judged.
References
Sophie B. Oluwole, Philosophy and Oral Tradition, ARK Publications, Lagos, 1997.
Sophie B. Oluwole, Socrates and Òrúnmìlà: Two Patron Saints of Classical Philosophy, ARK Publishers, Lagos, 2014.
Gail Presbey, “Sophie Olúwọlé’s Major Contributions to African Philosophy,” Hypatia, 2020.
A. K. Fayemi, “Oral Tradition in African Philosophical Discourse: A Critique of Sophie Oluwole’s Account,” Sophia: An African Journal of Philosophy, 2014.
London School of Economics, Hub for African Thought, “Sophie Oluwole.”
Louise Müller, “Sophie Olúwolé of Nigeria 1935–2018,” in Women Philosophers from Non-Western Traditions: The First Four Thousand Years.
