Kiniffo’s Cipher: African Philosophy, Epistemic Humility, and Endogenous Practices of Vodún

This article begins by reflecting on the vital force as an endogenous African philosophical category and proceeds to examine a case where the philosophy of vitalism was employed as part of the practice of a West African medical doctor, surgeon, and educator, Prof. Dr. Henry-Valère Kiniffo. This article next examines Kiniffo’s use of the vital force in making sense of the presence of mysterious foreign objects in patients’ bodies, which led to diminishing vitality and illness. It argues that Kiniffo’s lecture from Paulin Hountondji’s 1987 seminar in Benin can be read as an existential cipher for the unknown because it produces in human beings a consciousness of our limits as knowers and therefore raises the question of epistemic virtue. This article concludes that the “reading” of such a cipher offers a methodological imperative for decolonial scholarship, as the central argument of Kiniffo’s lecture is that in the end, existence without mystery is dehumanizing.