Abstract
The Counter-Enlightenment was an ideological movement that developed in Europe in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It challenged some of the assumptions of what is popularly described as the Enlightenment or Modern Age. The Enlightenment age lasted effectively from about the 1600s to the 1900s in Europe. It prioritized individualism, autonomy, freedom, and independence. It was the ideological inspiration behind capitalism in economics, and, liberal democracy in politics. But counter enlightenment thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1733-1803) reacted against the Enlightenment, holding that it came with huge moral deficits manifested in excessive materialism, consumerism, disdain for traditional values, and loss of ethnic and cultural affinities. For these counter-enlightenment thinkers, the pre-modern values of social cohesiveness, historicity, cultural purity and communitarianism were better to be desired than those that modernity promoted. Interestingly, we find such counter-enlightenment views in the song-poems of Ogutẹ Ọttan (1929-1999), a prominent Urhobo song-poet of the 20th century.This point is significant in view of the fact that Ogute's works were produced independently of those of the European thinkers, whose works he had no access to. In a world which continues to thrive on Eurocentric dispositions, expressed in form of high prejudice for any positive contribution from non-European societies, it is heartwarming to identify ideological profundity in the literary work of an 'obscure' 20th century poet/philosopher among the Urhobo-speaking people of Nigeria, West Africa. This paper, therefore, draws attention to the ideas of Ogutẹ Ọttan because they resonate with the thoughts of the most important counter-Enlightenment philosophers from Europe. It strengthens the argument,first, for the existence of philosophy in Africa, and second, for similarity in philosophic profundity in Africa as elsewhere in the world.
