Philosophical counselling as transcreation: Towards an African hermeneutic and conversational approach

The role of translation in philosophical counselling has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged, despite the importance it might play in multilingual contexts such as South Africa. In these contexts, translation becomes fundamentally philosophical. Concepts and ideas are firstly formulated in one language and translated into another, situated within a philosophical framework. However, this presents a unique challenge: philosophical counsellors are not necessarily translators. To mitigate this potential problem, I argue that philosophical counselling is best conceptualised as incorporating the practice of transcreation – a process of co-creating and co-cultivating meaning through a radical re-interpretative engagement. I turn to two African philosophical traditions to illustrate but also ground this process of transcreation, namely, Tsenay Serequeberhan’s hermeneutic philosophy and Jonathan Chimakonam’s conversational philosophy. Serequeberhan’s notion of a sifting and sieving or a cultural filtration and fertilisation of a living past demonstrates that philosophical inheritance is not passive reception but active reinterpretation, listening, and responding to contemporary needs. Similarly, Chimakonam’s method of conversationalism emphasises how knowledge must be “forged” through dynamic and radically reciprocal conversations grounded in a conversational dialect. With the help of these perspectives, I argue that philosophical counselling embraces a similar process of transcreation, shifting its focus to a radical reciprocity and cross-pollination of co-creatively cultivating different ways of thinking.