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P. Hountondji gained international fame after publishing Sur la « philosophie africaine ». Critique de l’ethnophilosophie in 1977 -translated African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. In this book, the author invited African philosophers to adopt a critical distance from the model established by Placide Tempels in Bantu Philosophy (1945). Later, Paulin Hountondji revisited the hasty definition he had given of ethnophilosophy, to better circumscribe an African philosophical literature that was something other than an extension of ethnological discourse. His position on the need for Africa to reclaim and revitalize the “endogenous knowledge” produced by the continent in a critical, forward-looking way also led him to make a distinction between the “naïve” essentialist generalities against which he wrote the articles gathered in African Philosophy and a rigorous approach, concerned with scientific validity, to uncovering what we call the “epistemologies of the South”. His criticism of ethnophilosophy as a “derivative of ethnological analysis” does not necessarily mean condemnation of what might be called an ethnophilosophical project, a stance he adopts in the light of Kagamé’s writings. The endlessly revisited concept of ethnophilosophy is hence an invitation to avoid a monolithic reading of Hountondji’s constantly evolving work and thought.