An Indigenous Yoruba - African Philosophical Argument Against Capital Punishment

Abstract

The paper notes that whereas the issue of capital punishment is very old and not alien to any human society, and whereas there is an abundance of literature on Western philosophy of punishment, very little philosophical work on punishment from the African perspective can be cited. By way of filling a part of the lacuna in the literature, the paper examines the Yoruba culture for its perspectives on the death penalty. The paper finds in the Ifa Literary Corpus, though implicit, a strong philosophical argument against capital punishment. The argument, explicated and analyzed, turns out to be an introduction of a skeptical epistemological consideration into the debate over capital punishment in a unique way that raises some other jurisprudential issues relating to judicial administration. The paper concludes that although there may, as would be expected, be other positions on the issue of death penalty in Yoruba culture, the particular argument examined validly makes its point for the abolition of capital punishment, especially when situated in the context of Yoruba social ethic, which is essentially communal and humanistic. The enabling cultural context of the Ifa argument against capital punishment was extended beyond its immediate Yoruba sociocultural context to the pan-African humanistic social ethic conceptualized in Bantu languages of Southern Africa as ‘Ubuntu’, thereby giving the argument a contemporary universal relevance and applicability.