WHO ARE YOU? Written by KEMKA S. IBEJI

While trying to undertake my first degree long essay, it took me many months to read through my mind to find out a worthy path to research and make findings to advance humanity. The first thing that hit me was confusion in a form of wonder as to where to start. Philosophy was an array of worlds and picking somewhere to start seemed like breaking a perfect sphere. But I needed to start somewhere anyway.

I read for months almost doubling my entire curriculum once more just as walking through roads one has once trudged across with a belief that it ought to be once in a lifetime. But fortunately I have to do this twice yet I was unsatisfied. The more I read, the more I got confused and enmeshed in the wonders. I wasn't disappointed with myself at any point but I wasn't sure a helper wasn't necessary. One thing you should have for certain is that I was already accustomed with wonders having been a Philosophy student for almost 5 years by this time.

It was Professor Godfrey O. Ozumba who scolded the hell out of me. He figured I was a perfectionist and took that chance to tell me the harsh truth. He said "perfection doesn't exist and you should know it". He continued "no matter what you write, it will go through vetting and corrections and if you go through it again by yourself, you will always find reason to want to make it better". This chased me quickly out of the reading table to the writing table. I had to start.

But guess what? On the writing table I began to read once more but this time I read something different. Yes, I was reading my mind. I could therefore find out that if there is anything to know, it was the SELF. Of course, it has always been the starting point for all great Thinkers though they do so very differently.

I saw a world where tribes make up, colours make up, beliefs make up, and many more. I began to ask myself "who am I and where I do I belong to in the gamut of human and extrahuman reality? Being an African called a Black man who has contributed almost every reasonable thing to humanity but is seen as nothing and if anything, everything 3rd class and near lowest animal.

I recalled the knowledge I got from the ending times of my study which I suspect ought to have come first. I brought to my mind the imports of African Philosophy that came to my knowledge at last when Prof. Innocent Onyewuenyi wrote on my heart that Africa is the origin of Greek Philosophy. In his book, "African Origin of Greek Philosophy", he was the first man to ever tell me why I am of the greatest ancestry as an African. I had read with tears the History of Philosophy by the German Philosopher, Frederick W. Hegel. In his Historical Materialism, Karl Marx or Marxism accused Hegel of standing reality on its head in Dialectical Materialism. Hege in Dialectical Materialism turned into narrating world history through the movement of geist or world spirit. All Hegel did in his Dialectical Materialism was enunciation of human history and it seemed to me that the lexicon of that work was rife in hate against blacks or rather Africa and Africans. Hegel ensured that he excluded Africa from the art of reasoning. He averred that Africans were incapable of the rational wherewithal to engage in the study of Philosophy. Where Hegel tried to mention Africa, he levelled them to animality with prowess only on sexuality. Of course, all humans share that quality with lower animals.

Not till I encountered Prof. Onyewuenyi and now other African Philosophers that I began to think I may, after all, be a human. That intellectual hate heart, Hegel, almost ruined my intellectual power with demoralisation and dehumanisation. It was African Philosophy that gave me the liberation and I dared to look again at myself to decipher if I can be permitted as human. It was this experience that informed my choice of topic for my Bachelor's degree research work. I decided to ask pertinent questions about the SELF.

So I delved into the inquisitions of identity of human person. I meticulously chose the topic "Personhood and the Question of Moral Responsibility". This took me from Philosophy and essentially Metaphysics to Linguistics, Mathematics and back to Logic. At every stage of my research I could figure the universal and irreducible tincture of human make up. What is human? Who am I? Who are you? This is a question of identity.

The work will be a relish to all those who will want to go into philosophical anthropology, ethics, logic, mathematics and ontology.

Few years after, I opined that it was incomplete to discover human person without his situation in the society having known, as popularised by my intellectual friend of the golden era of Western Philosophy, Aristotle, that man is a social animal. Yes, it won't be a system to locate human person without a society. This took me once more and a bit further into the study of identity. But at this point could, outline or bifurcate the two worlds in identity study viz; micro and macro identity. So while my Bachelor's Degree research pondered on micro identity which focused on the human person and its condiments, my Master's Degree Thesis went a step further into macro identity where the understanding of human person was possible in the society. So I preferred to tag them primary and secondary identity especially when the macro identity forayed into collective identity and began to ask how we moved from individual personality to collective personality. This is prodding into the reason-to-be of family, community, tribe, ethnicity, nation and countries. At this point my mind was cast back to the pontifications of another intellectual colleague of ancient Greek philosophy, Plato. So moving at my pace to this point in my intellectual journey, I inadvertently made a brief stop over at the doors of Plato and I once again could flip through the inscription on his Socio-Political Philosophy where he asserted that the society is man-writ-large.

Now it is noteworthy to inform you that the topic of that my thesis to acquire a Second Degree in Philosophy is "Identity in Multi-cultural Societies'. All I went out to discover was how people of diverse cultures, languages, traditions, worship systems or religion and more can form identity and become one people. The target here is finding and constructing a rocksolid pathway to world peace. So that my journey took off from knowing myself, yourself, our society and the world and from there procure the utensils to form a world which will come to see one another, not as inferior or superior but as people who share identity from the fulcrum of humanity in personhood.

Over the years, it took about ten years of my life to get through these works under review where I reconstructed the language, enriched the contents and expanded the horizons for better impact and yield to the world. Sadly, I lost both great works to computer damage since I had not backed them up. The worst, I also lost the original copies to theft. I had believed that someone borrowed them from me but I have asked all my suspects who denied having them. I am hoping to recover especially the upgrades from the damaged hard drive which I have refused to throw away. It feel like there is life in that computer hard drive.

In the main, life revolves around our identity ranging from our names, cultures, through whom we have come to believe and know ourselves as. And this is why I will always ask you this philosophical question;

Who are you?

This is the biggest question you can ask yourself and it is the simplest question the society will always ask you. This is why you will always read this rare admonition of great Thinkers; man know thyself!