  So it is not surprising that he was so enthusiastic when, six years later, he discovered a book by Reverend Father Placide Tempels diving a clear exposition of Bantu Philosophy as resting upon such an ontology (Tempels 1945). Tempels was a Belgian Franciscan priest who went to the Congo as a missionary. He had the view that in order to be more efficient preaching the Gospel to the Bantu people he had first to understand the principles underlying their belief system, their customary law, their cultural habits, and so on. He explained that he came to realize that one could and should go beyond mere ethnographical description of those characteristics of the people’s lives and dig out a set of ontological principles on which they were founded. In other words that there existed a Bantu philosophy of being underlying their laws, behaviors, beliefs, politics, etc. The book, first written in Flemish then published in French in 1945 by Présence africaine under the title La philosophie bantoue, became quite an event: it was one of the very first times that an African people was associated with philosophy, an intellectual pursuit considered at least since Hegel to be the unique telos of Western civilization.