what does essay mean in africa

How to Write an Essay about Africa

Writing an essay about Africa is a task that invites exploration into a continent of unparalleled diversity, rich history, and contemporary significance. Africa, with its vast expanse and multifaceted cultures, has captivated the world’s imagination for centuries. However, crafting an essay about this complex and multifaceted continent requires a delicate approach, one that appreciates the diversity and nuances that define Africa.

Africa is not just a geographical entity but a tapestry of human experiences, traditions, and histories that continue to shape global discourse. When tackling the topic of how to write an essay about Africa, it’s essential to conduct thorough research, ensure cultural sensitivity, and having UKWritings writes essays for me to allow you to genuinely engage with this multifaceted subject. Understanding Africa is essential for comprehending our interconnected world, as this continent has played pivotal roles in both historical narratives and present-day challenges. By delving into this topic, you embark on a journey of enlightenment and a commitment to fostering global understanding.

The Context

Africa’s immense size is a striking characteristic that sets it apart. With an area of approximately 30 million square kilometers, it is the world’s second-largest continent, encompassing an array of landscapes, ecosystems, and climates. From the Sahara Desert in the north to the lush rainforests in the central region, and the picturesque savannahs of the Serengeti, the continent offers an astounding variety of natural environments.

The diversity of Africa extends far beyond geography. Its people are equally diverse, with over 2,000 distinct ethnic groups and thousands of languages spoken. The rich tapestry of cultures, traditions, and belief systems that exist across Africa is a testament to the enduring spirit of human ingenuity and adaptation.

Africa has played a profound role in global history, often as a crucible for the development of human civilization. It is the birthplace of Homo sapiens, making it a central chapter in the story of humanity’s evolution. Throughout history, Africa was home to illustrious empires like the Kingdom of Kush, Mali Empire, and the Great Zimbabwe. These civilizations contributed to art, science, and governance, leaving an indelible mark on world history.

When endeavoring to write an essay on the topic of Africa, meticulous research and cultural sensitivity are paramount for a successful composition, as emphasized in a recent UKWritings review . In contemporary times, Africa is a continent marked by both promise and challenges. It is a region of dynamic growth, with burgeoning economies, a youthful population, and vast resources. However, it also grapples with issues like political instability, poverty, and healthcare disparities. The geopolitical importance of Africa cannot be understated, with its influence extending to international diplomacy, trade, and global development.

Selecting a Topic

Choosing a specific aspect of Africa is the first crucial step in crafting an essay. Africa’s vastness and complexity make it essential to narrow down your focus. There are myriad aspects to explore, such as its history, culture, geography, politics, economics, or contemporary issues. Your choice should align with your interests and the purpose of your essay.

Narrowing down your focus involves identifying a specific angle or question within your chosen aspect. For example, if you decide to explore African culture, you could focus on a particular ethnic group’s traditions, the impact of globalization on African music, or the evolution of storytelling in African literature. The more precise your focus, the deeper your analysis can be.

Ensuring the topic is researchable and relevant means verifying the availability of credible sources and the importance of your chosen subject. It’s essential to access academic books, articles, and reliable online resources that will allow you to construct a well-informed essay. Moreover, your topic should be relevant not only to your interests but also to your audience, contributing to a broader conversation or understanding.

Researching Your Topic

Utilizing academic sources is paramount when writing an essay about Africa. Academic sources, such as peer-reviewed articles, scholarly books, and research papers, provide a solid foundation for your exploration. These sources are rigorously reviewed by experts in the field, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the information they contain. When researching, focus on reputable universities, research institutions, and academic databases to find these sources.

Books, articles, and academic journals are your go-to resources for in-depth information. Books often provide comprehensive coverage of specific topics related to Africa, offering historical context and in-depth analysis. Academic articles, found in journals, delve into specialized areas of study, presenting the latest research findings and academic discourse. When selecting articles, consider the journal’s reputation and the author’s qualifications.

Reliable online resources and databases can significantly enhance your research. Websites of established universities and organizations like the African Studies Association can be valuable sources of information. Online academic databases such as JSTOR, ProQuest, and Google Scholar provide access to a wide array of academic articles and publications. These digital platforms offer convenience and an extensive collection of materials for your essay.

Developing Your Thesis

Your thesis should present a well-defined argument or viewpoint about your chosen aspect of Africa. It acts as the compass that guides your essay’s direction. A strong thesis statement should be concise, specific, and arguable, providing a roadmap for your readers to follow and understand the purpose of your essay.

Your thesis is the nucleus of your essay, and the strength of your argument will determine the essay’s persuasiveness and impact. A compelling argument should be backed by evidence and logical reasoning. It should contribute to the ongoing discourse about Africa and offer insights or perspectives that enrich our understanding of the subject.

Identifying the main points to support your thesis is an essential step in crafting your essay. These main points will serve as the framework for your body paragraphs, ensuring that each paragraph aligns with and reinforces your thesis. Careful consideration should be given to the relevancy and depth of each point, as they collectively build a comprehensive argument in favor of your thesis.

Outlining Your Essay

The introduction serves as the gateway to your essay, enticing your readers and setting the stage for the discussion ahead. To engage your audience, consider using a hook – an intriguing fact, a compelling quote, or a thought-provoking question that relates to your topic. This hook should draw your readers into the narrative.

The thesis statement is the capstone of your introduction, clearly articulating your argument’s focus. It should be succinct, conveying the essence of your essay’s direction and what readers can expect from the following content.

Organizing main points and supporting evidence in your body paragraphs is crucial to maintain a logical flow and coherence in your essay. Each main point should be introduced at the beginning of a paragraph, and supporting evidence should follow to substantiate your claims. Ensure a smooth transition from one point to the next to maintain the essay’s overall cohesion.

Using topic sentences for each paragraph provides a clear and concise preview of what the paragraph will cover. These sentences act as signposts for your readers, helping them navigate your essay and understand the relationships between your points.

The conclusion of your essay serves to wrap up your argument, summarizing the key points you’ve discussed throughout the body. Revisit the thesis and the main points, reminding readers of your argument’s central elements.

Restating the thesis and its significance in your conclusion reinforces the core message of your essay. It should highlight the broader implications of your argument, emphasizing why your essay’s insights matter in the context of your chosen aspect of Africa.

Writing the Essay

The introduction of your essay is your opportunity to captivate your readers, drawing them into the narrative you’re about to unfold. To make your introduction captivating, consider a few approaches. Firstly, you can begin with a compelling anecdote related to your chosen aspect of Africa. This narrative approach instantly engages your audience, making them emotionally invested in your essay. For instance, if your essay is about the impact of climate change on African communities, you might start with a story of a family in a drought-stricken region. This personalizes the topic and humanizes the issue, making it relatable.

Alternatively, you can start with a thought-provoking question that sparks curiosity. For example, if your essay delves into African art, you might open with, “What is it about African art that has inspired artists and collectors worldwide for centuries?” This question invites readers to ponder and sets the stage for your exploration.

Ultimately, a captivating introduction should provide a clear sense of the essay’s direction without giving away too much. It should serve as a teaser, leaving readers eager to delve deeper into the essay to find answers and insights.

The tone of your essay is a critical element that should align with the purpose and subject matter. When writing an essay about Africa, consider whether the tone should be formal, academic, conversational, or a blend of these, depending on your target audience and the nature of the topic.

If your essay focuses on a historical analysis of Africa’s colonial past, a formal and academic tone is appropriate, emphasizing precision and scholarly rigor. However, if you’re writing about contemporary African music and its global influence, a more conversational tone can make the topic feel approachable and engaging.

Moreover, ensure that the tone remains consistent throughout your essay, from the introduction to the conclusion. Consistency in tone helps create a coherent and professional piece of writing.

The body of your essay is where you delve deep into your chosen aspect of Africa. To ensure coherence and structure in your paragraphs, follow a few key principles. Begin each paragraph with a clear topic sentence that outlines the central point of the paragraph. This topic sentence acts as a roadmap for the reader, providing a glimpse of what to expect.

Within each paragraph, use supporting evidence, examples, and analysis to substantiate your claims and arguments. Ensure that your paragraphs flow logically from one to the next, creating a seamless narrative. Use transitional phrases and words to guide your readers smoothly through your essay, reinforcing the connections between your ideas.

Remember to maintain a balance in paragraph length, as overly long or short paragraphs can disrupt the essay’s rhythm. A well-structured body is one that allows readers to follow your argument effortlessly, ensuring that your points build upon each other and lead to a compelling conclusion.

Properly citing your sources is a non-negotiable aspect of academic and research-based essays. Whether you’re quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing information from your research materials, cite your sources using the appropriate citation style, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, or another relevant format.

Accurate citations not only avoid plagiarism but also lend credibility to your essay by demonstrating that your arguments are supported by reputable sources. Keep a record of your sources as you conduct your research

Your conclusion is the part of the essay where you bring everything together and reinforce the central thesis and main points. Begin by summarizing the key arguments and insights you’ve presented throughout the essay. Remind your readers of the overarching theme that your essay has explored.

A successful conclusion should leave no doubt about the strength of your argument. It should demonstrate how the evidence and analysis you’ve presented support your thesis and provide a cohesive narrative that aligns with your essay’s purpose.

While your conclusion should summarize the main points, it should also go a step further by leaving your readers with a thought-provoking insight or a question to ponder. Invite your audience to reflect on the broader implications of your essay, encouraging them to consider how the knowledge you’ve shared relates to their own lives or the world at large.

For example, if your essay discussed the impact of sustainable agriculture practices in Africa, you might conclude by asking, “How can the lessons learned from Africa’s sustainable agriculture initiatives be applied globally to address food security challenges?” This encourages readers to think beyond the essay and consider the real-world significance of your findings.

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Africa: What Being African Means to allAfrica

Cape Town — In 1960, 17 countries gained independence from European colonisers, and to mark their liberation, several states began celebrating African Liberation Day. Now Africa Day is widely commemorated among the continent's 53 countries and beyond, but is sadly only a national holiday in a handful. Every day AllAfrica's team sees the stories that reveal the joy and sadness ... thanks to our own journalism and partner-publishers from across the continent. Sharing Africa with the world is our job, but our investment goes much further than that. Nairobi, Cape Town, Dakar, Addis, Abuja and Johannesburg - this is where most of us live.

I have never considered the question why am I proud to be African. But as I look around, I see the natural beauty of Africa is unmatched. The diversity, the food, the wildlife and the scenic mountains and oceans. We take pride in our culture. We take pride in who we are. We love to sing and dance and toyi-toyi when we get the chance. It doesn't matter where you are in Africa, you will feel a sense of belonging. Africa is one place that welcomes you no matter who you are. Lastly, we made the world believe there is a Wakanda in Africa.  Now you know why I love Africa. - Melody Chironda

My love for Africa is a result of myriad reasons primarily the vibrant African music, culture, arts and crafts, being born here not withstanding. Everywhere you go you can't miss to hear African music filling the airwaves - a testimony of how many adore the music. I can't get enough of it, even from the vast collection I stock. The arts and crafts, which is as a result of creativity of the locals features in our homes, decorates our hotels... all flows with a similar theme connecting our essence with the nature which they feature. African culture, where each is concerned with others to the point that you cannot pass a person without getting to know how they are doing, makes me proud of Africa. Long live the African Spirit. - Kimani Samuel

What do I love about being African? My skin. There isn't a colour on this good Earth that I can't wear the crap out of... Being of mixed heritage, I'm proud to specifically count myself among the descendants of the first people of Southern Africa, the Khoisan (indigenous foragers or pastoralists in the region). My favourite thing about being "mixed" is that people struggle to identify where I fit in; more so outside of South Africa. "You could be from anywhere!": I get that quite often. Yes, it's annoying, but I hope it makes people think about the stereotypes and the boxes we get placed in because we're from this continent. And it's just more confirmation that being African isn't just one thing. It's not just your accent, that particular shade of your skin, your style, your body, or your hair... it is in you. - Juanita Williams

To be proud of where I come from, knowing my heritage, having that foundation of my background. To be true to my own nature which is my history, my own beginning, to love and having respect for others around me regardless of their culture, beliefs, gender or skin colour. And best  of all to live in a continent rich in culture. - Luyanda Qeqe

Hello Africa Tell Me How You're Doing! It's Africa Day and its the first time I've ever really given thought to what makes me proud of being African or, for that matter, if I am indeed proud of being African. I think that for many years I haven't been proud when I looked at all the pain and suffering around the continent and the conflict that has torn nations apart. I think I felt bitter, disillusioned and disheartened that we were always looked down upon as a charity case. However since working in an environment where we focus on the continent, despite the wars and conflicts, and disease and famine, I've come to realise that there is still hope. For the continent as a whole, I've grown in hope that it will overcome hardship and strife, particularly with intra-trade agreements that can bring nations together - all 53 working together to grow and benefit each other for a change rather than rely on the West to throw a lifeline our way. I remember the saying, "Give a Man a fish and profits but a single dish, Teach him the art of rod and reel and he'll never lack a hearty meal". We need to grow our tourism - Africa for Africans - we need to make it feasible for all Africans to enjoy and appreciate the beauty that the continent has to offer. I am more hopeful that things will turn around in my country South Africa with our new president at the helm. I admit that I still grapple with the effects of the Apartheid past and its remnants. Sometimes I need to make a conscious decision that I will not be bitter or sad or be filled with rage or hate. It's a pretty hard thing to do when racial slurs, attitudes and verbal and sometimes physical clashes between different races are the order of the day, and when one feels that the government didn't do enough to make it better! What I would like to see is that Africans, particularly South Africans, love their neighbour - sometimes its pretty hard to do - but if we can love one another and respect one another, live with integrity and have a regard for human life we would be great. How do I feel as an African? Still not sure but I do know that we are overcomers and that we are fighters. I believe that things will turn around for the continent eventually and we will all be able live in peace and harmony with one another. - Esther Rose

I think Africa is the most beautiful continent to be born in. Despite the challenges we face our beautiful landscape makes for good living. Watching the beautiful sunrise and the most spectacular sunset is priceless. Our cultures are beautiful, especially our attire. To really experience this one could imagine an African cultural festival, the food, the dresses pulls millions of tourists from other parts of the world to the continent every year. To cap it all, the weather is very balanced - not too cold like in other parts of the world. Tourists come from all parts of the world and spends millions to experience what I experience everyday for free. I'm blessed ain't I? - Michael Tantoh

For me being African and living in Africa means I can be myself and not be apologetic about how I look. I am proud to live in a continent so diverse where different cultures, races, religions and languages are celebrated. I am proud that I can speak 4 African languages. I think as Africans we are very resilient. We come from a history of pain but we continue to prove to the world that we are not defined by our past. I love that we are vibrant and have so much humility, we believe in uplifting each other, My favourite saying is "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" which means that a person is a person through other people. I believe the spirit of Ubuntu lives only in Africa. Happy Africa Day! - Nontobeko Mlambo

Being African means being part of a shared history of struggle, like living in a tourist hot-spot but never going where the foreigners do because you can't afford it or don't have the means of travelling there. It's also about having a smartphone with more features than data or airtime. It's about having the same president as your grandparents and being able to badmouth your continent on your own terms, because Europeans already had a few hundred years of having things their way here. And lastly, come World Cup time, it's about wearing your African country's flag with pride... Unless they didn't qualify, in which case you declare yourself an honorary Nigerian, Egyptian, Senegalese, etc. - Andre van Wyk

Being born in a continent so rich in diversity has always made me proud. Everything here is diverse - the cultures, the races, the food, the languages... you name it. All the other other continents are beautiful but I can't imagine being born elsewhere really. Despite all its "darkness" Africa is beautiful. We've been labelled a dark continent by the colonisers because they want to take away our pride about this continent, yet they have for centuries been sneaking in to steal our precious minerals, people, animals, land and all the other beautiful things you can think of, because they think we are uncivilised and undeserving. The warmth of the people of Africa exceeds the warmth of people from elsewhere. It has been instilled in us to treat other people with dignity and kindness despite their size, their colour, their background. I can't imagine people from any other continent being warmer than the people from this continent. - Sethi Ncube

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For a long time, growing up, I thought I was "English". My mother's parents came out to South Africa in the 1930s, but family traditions remained stubbornly British. Then I went to visit that British family in my early 20s and discovered that I was not English at all. Everything was mysteriously quiet and hard to decode. So if I was not English, what was I? Implacably South African - direct and loud, warm and pragmatic. And if I am South African then I am also African even though it is much harder to figure out what that might mean. But I smell the rain and hear the doves in the trees and know that I am home. - Renee Moodie

Being African means to accept that you will be misunderstood by the rest of the world and that's fine. It's to know just the mention of the name Africa brings to most minds sickness, disease, poverty, slavery and colonialism. But knowing the story that the world is hearing and telling about Africa is not a story that represents me, I wake up everyday with the endless hope that I feel for the future because the African continent is buzzing with potential. - Jerry Chifamba

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• Understanding The Meaning Of Ubuntu...

Understanding the Meaning of Ubuntu: A Proudly South African Philosophy

Freelance Writer - instagram.com/andrewthompsonsa

South Africa is a country that carries massive collective trauma. The political system of institutionalised racism, called apartheid, was devastating for the majority of the population. Yet, in spite of the painful, oppressive system, many of those most deeply affected by it rose up and remained resolute and united – with some crediting one philosophical concept, that of ubuntu , as a guiding ideal.

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The presence of ubuntu is still widely referenced in South Africa , more than two decades after the end of apartheid. It’s a compact term from the Nguni languages of Zulu and Xhosa that carries a fairly broad English definition of “a quality that includes the essential human virtues of compassion and humanity”.

In modern South Africa, though, it’s often simplified further and used by politicians, public figures and the general public as a catch-all phase for the country’s moral ideals, spirit of togetherness, ability to work together towards a common goal or to refer to examples of collective humanity.

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first democratically elected president, in a preface to Richard Stengel’s Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage (2009), encapsulated the many interpretations by calling ubuntu an African concept that means “the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others”.

A concept from the mid-1800s

The history of ubuntu shows that it is not a new concept, though – it’s one that Christian Gade, who wrote about it in a paper published by Aarhus University, says dates as far back as 1846.

“The analysis shows that in written sources published prior to 1950, it appears that ubuntu is always defined as a human quality,” said Gade. “At different stages during the second half of the 1900s, some authors began to define ubuntu more broadly: definitions included ubuntu as African humanism, a philosophy, an ethic and as a worldview.”

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But as Gade points out, in spite of the ubuntu’s term history, it gained prominence more recently – primarily during transitions from white minority rule to black majority rule – in both South Africa, and neighbouring Zimbabwe .

“Of course, the search for African dignity in postcolonial Africa did not begin with the literature on ubuntu that was published during the periods of transition to black majority rule in Zimbabwe and South Africa,” said Gade.

Prior to these periods of political transition, Gade said, the search for African dignity was reflected in the thinking of many influential postcolonial African leaders – and has much to do with restoring dignity once the colonisers had moved on.

“Some of the narratives that were told to restore African dignity in the former colonies, which gained their independence in the late 1950s and 1960s, can be characterised as narratives of return,” said Gade, “since they contain the idea that a return to something African (for instance traditional African socialism or humanism) is necessary in order for society to prosper.”

An inappropriate term for modern South Africa

Much like the Danish philosophy of hygge, though, a lot is lost in the English translation, simplification and popularisation of the term. And this had lead some to criticise its use – especially in a modern South African context.

Thaddeus Metz, professor of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, said that the term and ideas associated with ubuntu are often “deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality” in present-day South Africa – for three broad reasons.

“One is that they are too vague; a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom; and a third is that they fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society,” Metz wrote in an article published in the African Human Rights Law Journal.

Popular radio host, author and political commentator Eusebius McKaiser was quoted in the African Human Rights Law Journal saying that the term has several interpretations, and in a legal context is largely undefinable. He called it “a terribly opaque notion not fit as a normative moral principle that can guide our actions, let alone be a transparent and substantive basis for legal adjudication”.

Ubuntu embodied by Desmond Tutu

In spite of its potential shortcomings and misuses, ubuntu is a term that has a demonstrated the ability to unite the country towards common good – with many choosing a definition that bests applies to their circumstances.

Brand South Africa , an organisation mandated to develop and articulate the country’s national brand and identity, and to manage the country’s reputation, regularly uses the term in its messaging.

In 2013, the government made the plea for South Africans to “live with ubuntu” – although as Brand South Africa points out, this has different meanings for different people. “Goodness Ncube, a shoe salesman in Killarney, Johannesburg , defines ubuntu as the ability to relate to each other. Tabitha Mahaka, a Zimbabwean expatriate, believes it is about feeling at home in a foreign country. And Ismail Bennet, a store manager, has not even heard of the term,” Brand South Africa reported on its website.

But if there is one South African who can be credited with popularising, and embodying, the philosophical concept of ubuntu to its fullest, it’s Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu fought vehemently against apartheid, but also chaired the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, under the principal of restorative justice.

As Metz points out, Tutu, who defined ubuntu as “I participate, I share”, drew on the principles of ubuntu to guide South Africa’s reconciliatory approach to apartheid-era crimes.

“As is well known, Tutu maintained that, by ubuntu, democratic South Africa was right to deal with apartheid-era political crimes by seeking reconciliation or restorative justice,” Metz wrote in an article for The Conversation .

Instead of emphasising the differences between people within South Africa, Tutu was famous for celebrating them.

“We are different so that we can know our need of one another, for no one is ultimately self-sufficient,” Tutu wrote in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999). “The completely self-sufficient person would be sub-human.”

For many in South Africa, it’s this approach that is the epitome of ubuntu.

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Binyavanga Wainaina Tells Us 'How To Write About Africa'

Editor's note: Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina died on Tuesday, May 22 after an illness. Perhaps his most acclaimed work was the satiric essay "How To Write About Africa," which we are reprinting.

Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, who died on Tuesday. "How To Write About Africa" is perhaps his most famous essay. "Whichever angle you take," he urged, tongue-in-cheek, "be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed." Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina, who died on Tuesday. "How To Write About Africa" is perhaps his most famous essay. "Whichever angle you take," he urged, tongue-in-cheek, "be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed."

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar,' 'Masai,' 'Zulu,' 'Zambezi,' 'Congo,' 'Nile,' 'Big,' 'Sky,' 'Shadow,' 'Drum,' 'Sun' or 'Bygone.' Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas,' 'Timeless,' 'Primordial' and 'Tribal.' Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan Writer And LGBTQ Activist, Dies At 48

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love — take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa's situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life — but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the 'real Africa,' and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people's property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa's most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or 'conservation area,' and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa's rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don't mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical — Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You'll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

"How to Write about Africa" by Binyavanga Wainaina. Copyright © 2005 by Binyavanga Wainaina, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

• Binyavanga Wainaina

A Short Analysis of Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ is a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), who was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties.

Because Wheatley stands at the beginning of a long tradition of African-American poetry, we thought we’d offer some words of analysis of one of her shortest poems. Before we analyse ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, though, here’s the text of the poem.

On Being Brought from Africa to America

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, ‘Their colour is a diabolic die.’ Remember, Christians , Negros , black as Cain , May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Background and summary

Wheatley had been taken from Africa (probably Senegal, though we cannot be sure) to America as a young girl, and sold into slavery. A Boston tailor named John Wheatley bought her and she became his family servant.

The young Phillis Wheatley was a bright and apt pupil, and was taught to read and write. She learned both English and Latin. Even at the young age of thirteen, she was writing religious verse. As Michael Schmidt notes in his wonderful The Lives Of The Poets , at the age of seventeen she had her first poem published: an elegy on the death of an evangelical minister.

Wheatley was fortunate to receive the education she did, when so many African slaves fared far worse, but she also clearly had a nature aptitude for writing.

She was freed shortly after the publication of her poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral , a volume which bore a preface signed by a number of influential American men, including John Hancock, famous signatory of the Declaration of Independence just three years later. Indeed, she even met George Washington, and wrote him a poem.

However, her book of poems was published in London, after she had travelled across the Atlantic to England, where she received patronage from a wealthy countess. She died back in Boston just over a decade later, probably in poverty.

In the short poem ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, Phillis Wheatley reminds her (white) readers that although she is black, everyone – regardless of skin colour – can be ‘refined’ and join the choirs of the godly.

Let’s take a closer look at ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, line by line:

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Wheatley casts her origins in Africa as non-Christian (‘Pagan’ is a capacious term which was historically used to refer to anyone or anything not strictly part of the Christian church), and – perhaps controversially to modern readers – she states that it was ‘mercy’ or kindness that brought her from Africa to America.

This is obviously difficult for us to countenance as modern readers, since Wheatley was forcibly taken and sold into slavery; and it is worth recalling that Wheatley’s poems were probably published, in part, because they weren’t critical of the slave trade, but upheld what was still mainstream view at the time.

Taught my benighted soul to understand

Wheatley casts her own soul as ‘benighted’ or dark, playing on the blackness of her skin but also the idea that the Western, Christian world is the ‘enlightened’ one. She is writing in the eighteenth century, the great century of the Enlightenment , after all.

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Contrasting with the reference to her Pagan land in the first line, Wheatley directly references God and Jesus Christ, the Saviour, in this line. She sees her new life as, in part, a deliverance into the hands of God, who will now save her soul.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

The word ‘sable’ is a heraldic word being ‘black’: a reference to Wheatley’s skin colour, of course. But here it is interesting how Wheatley turns the focus from her own views of herself and her origins to others’ views: specifically, Western Europeans, and Europeans in the New World, who viewed African people as ‘inferior’ to white Europeans.

‘Their colour is a diabolic die.’

The word ‘diabolic’ means ‘devilish’, or ‘of the Devil’, continuing the Christian theme. ‘Die’, of course, is ‘dye’, or colour.

Remember, Christians , Negros , black as Cain ,

Wheatley implores her Christian readers to remember that black Africans are said to be afflicted with the ‘mark of Cain’: after the slave trade was introduced in America, one justification white Europeans offered for enslaving their fellow human beings was that Africans had the ‘curse of Cain’, punishment handed down to Cain’s descendants in retribution for Cain’s murder of his brother Abel in the Book of Genesis.

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

But Wheatley concludes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ by declaring that Africans can be ‘refin’d’ and welcomed by God, joining the ‘angelic train’ of people who will join God in heaven.

‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ is written in iambic pentameter and, specifically, heroic couplets: rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, rhymed aabbccdd . We can see this metre and rhyme scheme from looking at the first two lines:

’Twas MER-cy BROUGHT me FROM my PA-gan LAND, Taught MY be-NIGHT-ed SOUL to UN-der-STAND

Heroic couplets were used, especially in the eighteenth century when Phillis Wheatley was writing, for verse which was serious and ‘weighty’: heroic couplets were so named because they were used in verse translations of classical epic poems by Homer and Virgil, i.e., the serious and grand works of great literature.

In using heroic couplets for ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, Wheatley was drawing upon this established English tradition, but also, by extension, lending a seriousness to her story – and her moral message – which she hoped her white English readers would heed.

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What Does It Mean To Be African?

Just the mention of the word Africa brings to mind sickness, disease, poverty, slavery…colonialism — that is if you happen not to have originated from the continent. In fact, for quite a long time now, Africa has not only suffered the ills of Western exploitation, but also bore the dreadful tag “the dark continent.”

South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki  remarked on what it means to be African at the adoption of the Republic of South Africa’s Constitution Bill:

“Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again. I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me….I am an African!”  (new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=6e53962f-7335-4d85-b2e1-d0dd25d24b31&cid=ba3dfc4d-5006-4226-95dc-475220dc6695'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "6e53962f-7335-4d85-b2e1-d0dd25d24b31" }).render("f8a124d9da8e4055be00ef8ae3fe554a"); }); RELATED STORIES Meet the 2 Black women poised to make U.S. Senate history this election Indianapolis: Uber driver admits to fatally shooting female passenger, officials say It’s baby no. 3! Here is how Cardi B describes her baby 'Gone, gone, gone, gone' - Tyreek Hill regrets his actions during traffic stop but still wants officer involved fired --> 1000) {--> -->

But is being African a matter of color or is it a matter of choice?

I remember posing this question to my History teacher in college. She was an expatriate from Canada who had come to Ghana on an exchange program. To what seemed to be a tough question, Ms. Brenda answered sharply, “I think it’s by choice. Despite the legal and historical attributes to being African, I must say that just as being a vegetarian or atheist remains a choice, so is being African.”

Ms. Brenda may have a point in her above statement, but I guess she may not have had it so easy if I had asked her what it meant to be African.

When I posed this question on social media, I received varied answers that I believe are worth sharing:  Tinashe Michael Tapera  tackled the question from two perspectives, where being African means  A). You were born on, or lived for a significant amount of time on the African continent, such that you identify with the subculture of the region(s) of Africa you lived in. B). You are a permanent resident of an African nation; this allows you to be African and live in the diaspora.

Aside from the argument of geography by Tinashe, the question of what it means to be African garnered a different answer from South African insurance broker  Xolani Segwatlhe . For him, being African is a matter of race.

“ Being African in simple terms means being a Black person though some may argue that we are more brown as opposed to being black.”

You may disagree with Xolani, but his viewpoint represents many Africans whose experience with Apartheid creates a stark contrast between the identities of Black and White.

My quest to find more answers brought me to Jean Barnard  who cleverly sums up his perception when he argues that to be African means:

“To accept that you will be misunderstood by the rest of the world and that’s OK To arrive at a local airport and feel like you have arrived home To spend 14 days in Europe (or anywhere) else and get homesick – but not experience this in any other African country. To identify with Africa’s history and struggle for freedom To recognize and value Africa’s contribution to the human race and culture To make a contribution (in any way you can) to making Africa a better place today than it was yesterday To know in your heart that, despite your time anywhere in the world, that Africa is where you belong To celebrate Africa’s victories (in any field) To accept Africa’s faults and do what you can to mitigate them.”

Be that as it may, being African may include maintaining African ideals. Former Burkina Faso President Thomas Sankara summarizes Africaness as,  “We must learn to live the African way. It’s the only way to live in freedom and with dignity.”

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When former president of the United States, Barack Obama, made a speech earlier this year in Johannesburg — at the 2018 Nelson Mandela annual lecture — he said that Mandela “understood the ties that bind the human spirit.” 

“There is a word in South Africa — Ubuntu — that describes his greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that can be invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us,” Obama said. 

Take Action: End Modern Slavery: Ask World Leaders to Ratify the Forced Labour Protocol

“Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu” or “I am, because you are” is how we describe the meaning of Ubuntu. It speaks to the fact that we are all connected and that one can only grow and progress through the growth and progression of others.

Ubuntu has since been used as a reminder for society on how we should be treating others. 

Speaking in South Africa for Nelson Mandela's 100th birthday, @BarackObama once again proved why he's a true Global Citizen 🙌🏾 pic.twitter.com/mvKn6WTAaE — Global Citizen (@GlblCtzn) July 21, 2018

Nelson Mandela once said : “A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects."

This example of the concept of Ubuntu shows the exact “oneness” Obama describes in his speech. As a society, looking after one another plays a major role in the success of humanity.

Mandela is the true definition of Ubuntu, as he used this concept to lead South Africa to a peaceful post-apartheid transition. He never had the intention of teaching our oppressors a lesson. Instead, he operated with compassion and integrity, showing us that for us to be a better South Africa, we cannot act out of vengeance or retaliation, but out of peace.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, also touched on the meaning of Ubuntu and how it defines us as a society. 

“We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world,” he said. “When you do well, it spreads out; it is for the whole of humanity." 

This is exactly what Ubuntu is about, it’s a reminder that no one is an island — every single thing that you do, good or bad, has an effect on your family, friends, and society. It also reminds us that we need think twice about the choices we want to make and the kind of impact they may have on others.

What exactly are we doing to live Ubuntu and make it a daily act in our lives? 

Gender inequality, poverty, and violence happens on a global scale and these atrocities are what tells us that we need to do more as a society to actively live and breathe Ubuntu and put it into action on a daily basis. 

Everyone in society needs to play a part, regardless of how small one may think it is. We all have a role to play and it’s of vital importance that our actions inspire others to want to be a part of a better and brighter future. 

Ubuntu is also about justice, and particularly, justice for all people. As much as we must look after each other, it is also just as important that we exercise fairness and equality for all people regardless of race, gender, or social status. 

So essentially, Ubuntu is about togetherness as well as a fight for the greater good. This is what Mandela was prepared to sacrifice his life for.

Ubuntu is the common thread and DNA that runs through the UN’s Global Goals, because without the spirit of Ubuntu within us, we cannot implement great change in our society. It’s imperative that we help all people, young and old, to achieve only the best for our future.

The Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100 is presented and hosted by The Motsepe Foundation, with major partners House of Mandela, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco, Nedbank, Vodacom, Coca Cola Africa, Big Concerts, BMGF Goalkeepers, Eldridge Industries, and associate partners HP and Microsoft.

Demand Equity

What Is the Spirit of Ubuntu? How Can We Have It in Our Lives?

Oct. 19, 2018

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What is apartheid?

When did apartheid start, how did apartheid end, what is the apartheid era in south african history.

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Apartheid ( Afrikaans : “apartness”) is the name of the policy that governed relations between the white minority and the nonwhite majority of South Africa during the 20th century. Although racial segregation had long been in practice there, the apartheid name was first used about 1948 to describe the racial segregation policies embraced by the white minority government. Apartheid dictated where South Africans, on the basis of their race, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, and whether they could vote. Events in the early 1990s marked the end of legislated apartheid, but the social and economic effects remained deeply entrenched.

Racial segregation had long existed in white minority-governed South Africa , but the practice was extended under the government led by the National Party (1948–94), and the party named its racial segregation policies apartheid ( Afrikaans : “apartness”). The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified South Africans as Bantu (black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white; an Asian (Indian and Pakistani) category was later added. Other apartheid acts dictated where South Africans, on the basis of their racial classification, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, whether they could vote, who they could associate with, and which segregated public facilities they could use.

Under the administration of the South African president F.W. de Klerk , legislation supporting apartheid was repealed in the early 1990s, and a new constitution—one that enfranchised blacks and other racial groups—was adopted in 1993. All-race national elections held in 1994 resulted in a black majority government led by prominent anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress party. Although these developments marked the end of legislated apartheid, the social and economic effects of apartheid remained deeply entrenched in South African society.

The apartheid era in South African history refers to the time that the National Party led the country’s white minority government, from 1948 to 1994. Apartheid ( Afrikaans : “apartness”) was the name that the party gave to its racial segregation policies, which built upon the country’s history of racial segregation between the ruling white minority and the nonwhite majority. During this time, apartheid policy determined where South Africans, on the basis of their race, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, whether they could vote, who they could associate with, and which segregated public facilities they could use.

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apartheid , policy that governed relations between South Africa ’s white minority and nonwhite majority for much of the latter half of the 20th century, sanctioning racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites. Although the legislation that formed the foundation of apartheid had been repealed by the early 1990s, the social and economic repercussions of the discriminatory policy persisted into the 21st century.

(Read Desmond Tutu’s Britannica entry on the apartheid commission.)

Racial segregation , sanctioned by law, was widely practiced in South Africa before 1948. But when the National Party , led by Daniel F. Malan , gained office that year, it extended the policy and gave it the name apartheid . The implementation of apartheid, often called “separate development” since the 1960s, was made possible through the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified all South Africans as either Bantu (all Black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white. A fourth category—Asian (Indian and Pakistani)—was later added. One of the other most significant acts in terms of forming the basis of the apartheid system was the Group Areas Act of 1950. It established residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses, or owning land in them—which led to thousands of Coloureds, Blacks, and Indians being removed from areas classified for white occupation. In practice, this act and two others in 1954 and 1955, which became known collectively as the Land Acts , completed a process that had begun with similar Land Acts adopted in 1913 and 1936: the end result was to set aside more than 80 percent of South Africa’s land for the white minority. To help enforce the segregation of the races and prevent Blacks from encroaching on white areas, the government strengthened the existing “pass” laws , which required nonwhites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas.

Other acts also led to physical separation of the races. Under the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, the government reestablished tribal organizations for Black Africans, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 8 (later expanded to 10 )African homelands, or Bantustans . The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 made every Black South African, irrespective of actual residence, a citizen of one of the Bantustans, which were organized on the basis of ethnic and linguistic groupings defined by white ethnographers. Blacks were stripped of their South African citizenship and thereby excluded from the South African body politic . The South African government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Four of the Bantustans— Transkei , Bophuthatswana , Venda , and Ciskei —were later granted independence as republics, though none was ever recognized by a foreign government, and the remaining Bantustans had varying degrees of self-government. Regardless of their independence or self-governing status, all the Bantustans remained dependent, both politically and economically, on South Africa. The dependence of the South African economy on nonwhite labour, though, made it difficult for the government to carry out this policy of separate development.

Separate educational standards were established for nonwhites. The Bantu Education Act (1953) provided for the creation of state-run schools, which Black children were required to attend, with the goal of training the children for the manual labour and menial jobs that the government deemed suitable for those of their race. The Extension of University Education Act (1959) largely prohibited established universities from accepting nonwhite students. The government created new ethnic university colleges—one each for Coloureds, Indians, and Zulus and one for Sotho , Tswana , and Venda students as well as a medical school for Blacks.

Other laws were also passed to legalize and institutionalize the apartheid system. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Amendment Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the government and empowered the government to detain anyone it thought might further “communist” aims. The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture , or to kill in the pursuit of official duties.

The policies dictating the physical and political separation of racial groups were referred to as “grand apartheid,” while the laws and regulations that segregated South Africans in daily activities were known as “petty apartheid”—for example, those that dictated which transportation, recreation, or dining options one could utilize based on race.

Read ‘What Does It Mean To Be African?’ by Afua Hirsch, from the new anthology New Daughters of Africa

The Johannesburg Review of Books

In celebration of Women’s Month, The JRB presents a series of excerpts from New Daughters of Africa .

Edited by Margaret Busby, New Daughters of Africa is an anthology of the work of more than 200 women writers of African descent. It follows on from Busby’s seminal 1992 book, Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present .

In the August issue of The JRB, enjoy Danielle Legros Georges’s poem ‘A Stateless Poem’, an excerpt from the much-anticipated English translation of Angolan-Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s debut novel That Hair , and this essay, by Afua Hirsch, ‘What Does it Mean to Be African?’

A writer, journalist and broadcaster, Afua Hirsch was born in Norway, to a British father and a mother from Ghana, and was raised in Wimbledon, London. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University before going on to take a graduate degree in Law. She worked in international development in Senegal, practised law as a barrister in London, and was West Africa correspondent, based in Accra, Ghana, for The Guardian newspaper, where she is now a columnist. She was the Social Affairs and Education Editor for Sky News from 2014 until 2017. She writes and makes documentaries around questions of race, identity and belonging—the subject of her 2018 book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging .

Read the essay:

What Does It Mean To Be African?

What does it mean to be African?

Some would define it, I think, as simply being someone who doesn’t feel the need to ask that question. Isn’t it a question only an outsider would ask? What kind of black person , I recalled being asked, in one of the lines in my book Brit(ish) that people seemed to find most entertaining, writes a book about being black?

I am a black person who writes a book about being black. I am an African who agonises over what it means to be African. I quote Kwame Nkrumah—who as president of Ghana led the first black African country to win independence—because he tells me what I want to hear: that I am African because I choose to be.

I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me.

I listen to Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah—the title means victorious in battle —and I listen to all the sages. Maya Angelou told me it was a question of knowing your past:

For Africa to me … is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Down the road from Wimbledon, the south-west London suburb where I grew up, the British–Trinidadian poet Roger Robinson said—writing in the heart of Britain’s black community—it was a question of mental integrity, and purpose:

People talk about toxic waste being dumped in Africa, but toxic waste has already been dumped in your minds. Some of you don’t know how you came to be in Brixton. Hell, some of you don’t know you’re African. (Roger Robinson, The Butterfly Hotel , Peepal Tree Press, 2013, p. 17)

But maybe the words that haunt me most come from an earlier time. This exchange between expatriate American author Richard Wright and JB Danquah—one of the architects of Ghana’s independence over decades of activism in the early twentieth century—is etched into my memory. They met during Wright’s visit in 1953 to the then Gold Coast and Wright recounts in his book Black Power that Danquah starts by asking:

‘How long have you been in Africa?’… ‘About two months,’ I said. ‘Stay longer and you’ll feel your race,’ he told me. ‘What?’ ‘You’ll feel it,’ he assured me. ‘It’ll all come back to you.’ ‘What’ll come back?’ ‘The knowledge of your race.’ He was explicit. I liked the man, but not as a Negro or African; I liked his directness, his willingness to be open. Yet, I knew that I’d never feel an identification with Africans on a ‘racial’ basis. ‘I doubt that,’ I said softly. (Wright, Black Power , 1954, pp 218–19)

What does it mean to ‘feel’ African?

That’s not the same as what it means to ‘feel Africa’. Tourists do that every day—exposing their senses to the immersive bath of sound, smell and energy, and finding it thrilling. I just love Africa, it’s SO colourful! The people are SO friendly! The bustle has SO much energy! The food is so spicy! …

Everything my parents had to do required hard work: buying a house, raising money for school fees, creating the kind of home environment in which they thought—rightly—my sister and I would be able to experience joyful childhoods and emerge as functional, accomplished adults. My mother worked hard at everything, except sustaining an African identity, which seemed to require no effort at all. She has spent most of her life in a place that—as is the way of Britain—performs whiteness without knowing that whiteness is what it is. The leafy London suburb where I grew up is not multicultural like the rest of this great city of cultures, languages, cuisines and slangs; it is chronically preserved in a detached house, fruit-tree-populated lawn kind of Englishness, so attractive it has been commodified—in the guise of lawn tennis, and inflated property prices—and exported around the world. But my mother has navigated this locality, as is the way of her generation, surviving, without fussing or even vocalising the intensity of the experience, journeying silently to the nearest black place for hair products or fufu flour, fulfilling the functions of the eldest child in an Akan family, nursing herself on light soup when sick.

I don’t think it occurred to either her or my father—who is British, and white—that Africanness was something that would be relevant to me. And so preserving for my generation a connection with our African heritage was not part of my parents’ deliberate thinking. They were both secure in their own identities, which were cultural and national rather than racial. Identity was not the primary struggle of their lives—there were plenty of material things to worry about—and ours would take care of themselves.

But identities take on different strains when planted in new soil. It didn’t occur to my parents that a mixed-heritage child, labelled casually as ‘black’ by the loaded gaze of a white society, would crave substantial, positive messages about the source of her blackness. They did not know what it was like to be born and raised in a place where your identity is defined as a minority—by a sense of otherness and difference. They didn’t foresee that beneath the blackness with which I was labelled, I—the second- generation, mixed-heritage, British girl—would feel my race. I was African. At least, that was my dream.

What did it mean to be African? Is it to bear a name?

Africans from the diaspora, reversing in the wake of the slave vessels by returning to the continent of their blackness, often find, when they land on African soil, that the first thing to do is to take a name. Some take on mine, if they were born on a Friday, as is the Akan way. Ghanaians often think, when I introduce myself by name, that I am African–American or Caribbean and have latterly chosen a new label for a newly African identity. My name is Afua , I say. Oh! Are you sure? they reply. You know what that name means? They school me. It’s a lesson that causes me to wince. British people massacre my name. Ghanaians simply don’t believe it is mine.

Is being African to live in Africa?

I thought it was. And I returned to the idea, like a creature bound by homing, that to heal one’s identity was to journey to the place from which it springs. So one day, in my early thirties, bundling my then six-month-old daughter against the London snow, I packed up and moved to Ghana. My daughter would know this land first- hand, I decided, not as a narrative filtered through the British gaze, the still stale mess of a hopeless continent, ahistorical and doomed. She would, unlike me, understand the Ghanaian seasons and festivals, the pattern of a week where the emptied streets pour into churches on Sunday, where offices hum to the clash of local prints on Friday, where cryptic hand movements indicate the destination of a tro-tro bus, and where the fading of the light and the rising spice of kelewele frying fall with the rhythmic certainty of sunset. Maybe this would make her African, and—whatever happens to me—I will have given her that gift.

Is being African learning to speak?

Language gives structure to our thoughts, a fact not lost on the architects of the European imperial project of breaking the African spirit and disbanding the historic and cultural continuity of the peoples they overran. When I read of the short story by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o ‘The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright’, published in an unprecedented forty-seven African languages—a much needed attack on what Ngũgĩ describes as the problem of ‘intellectual production in Africa [being] done in European languages’—I applauded. Then realised that I, of course, would be reading it in English. And if the route to casting off the colonial legacy is embracing our African languages, where does that leave those of us—like me—who can’t speak any? Learning to speak—and hence think—in a different way, may be the project of my whole lifetime.

My understanding of what it is to be African has been a process of elimination. I have been named in Twi , I have eaten light soup. I have worn kente and ankara, I have lived and worked across the African continent, I have studied languages, I have observed and repeated gestures, and intonations, rituals and gaits. I have done these things and they have shaped me. But if there is a tipping point at which the conditioning of this colonial power that raised me slips over into the African conditioning that I want to shape me, I don’t know where it is.

The problem with the cultural delineations of what it means to be African is the temptation to fall into the trap created by the white gaze in which people like me have been immersed for most of our lives. Can we really escape the imperially stained nostalgia for the perceived Africa of the past—that loaded longing for a primordial world—that classic symptom of true outsider-ness? It is so tempting a tonic for those like me, who wish to connect with the Africa of their parents’ memories, preserved as an antidote to an immigrant life in a hostile host nation, and who feel sentimental about the communal flow of life in the village where we have never actually lived. Our cousins who do live in the village are not romanticising ideas of ‘Africa’. They are rooted in communities, regions and nations where the hustle is king—finding the power to charge their phones, struggling through school lessons taught by barely literate teachers, or trying to import Chinese fridges. They are urgently inventing the new.

No one is waiting, breath bated, for us to define what it means to be African. Yet still we continue to search for a reason to ask the question, for hope that an answer exists. And for a sense of purpose. ‘Africa,’ said John Henrik Clark, the Pan-African historian, ‘is our centre of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.’ Being African is to believe it. At least that’s what being African means to me.

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One thought on “Read ‘What Does It Mean To Be African?’ by Afua Hirsch, from the new anthology New Daughters of Africa”

Afua is solely focussed on what she perceives to be the positive, affirmative aspects of being African; but there are darker sides. Consider the below below..

Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, but it accelerated in the sixteenth century, when the transatlantic trade began and demand for slaves increased.

Under slavery, Igbo society was divided into three main categories: diala, ohu, and osu. The diala were the freeborn, and enjoyed full status as members of the human race. The ohu were taken as captives from distant communities or else enslaved in payment of debts or as punishment for crimes; the diala kept them as domestic servants, sold them to white merchants, and occasionally sacrificed them in religious ceremonies or buried them alive at their masters’ funerals.

(A popular Igbo proverb goes, “A slave who looks on while a fellow-slave is tied up and thrown into the grave should realize that it could also be his turn someday.”)

The osu were slaves owned by traditional deities. A diala who wanted a blessing, such as a male child, or who was trying to avoid tribulation, such as a poor harvest or an epidemic, could give a slave or a family member to a shrine as an offering; a criminal could also seek refuge from punishment by offering himself to a deity. This person then became osu, and lived near the shrine, tending to its grounds and rarely mingling with the larger community. “He was a person dedicated to a god, a thing set apart—a taboo forever, and his children after him,” Chinua Achebe wrote of the osu, in “Things Fall Apart.” (The ume, a fourth caste, was comprised of the slaves who were dedicated to the most vicious deities.) In the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery in the West inadvertently led to a glut of slaves in the Igbo markets, causing the number of ohu and osu to skyrocket. “Those families which were really rich competed with one another in the number of slaves each killed for its dead or used to placate the gods,” Adiele Afigbo, an Igbo historian, wrote in “The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950.”

The British formally abolished slavery in Nigeria in the early twentieth century, and finally eradicated it in the late nineteen-forties, but the descendants of slaves—who are also called ohu and osu—retained the stigma of their ancestors. They are often forbidden from speaking during community meetings and are not allowed to intermarry with the freeborn. In Oguta, they can’t take traditional titles, such as Ogbuagu, which is conferred upon the most accomplished men, and they can’t join the Oriri Nzere, an important social organization.

Westerners trying to understand the Igbo system often reach for its similarities with the oppression of black Americans. This analogy is helpful but imperfect.

Igbo discrimination is not based on race, and there are no visual markers to differentiate slave descendants from freeborn. Instead, it trades on cultural beliefs about lineage and spirituality.

The ohu were originally brought to their towns from distant villages. Community ties are very important in Igbo culture, and so, while the descendants of, say, American immigrants are encouraged to assimilate, the ohu have never lost their outsider status. With the osu, the diala originally believed that mixing with a deity’s slaves would earn them divine punishment. (In its spiritual aspect, the plight of the osu is similar to that of dalits in India or of burakumin in Japan, whose ancestors are believed to have done “polluting” work as butchers or tanners, and who are therefore thought to be impure.)

With Christianization, the conscious aspect of this belief dissipated, but not without leaving traces. “The fear people have is: before long, our children and children’s children will be bastardized,” Okoro Ijoma, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, told me. “It is about keeping their lineage pure.”

Perhaps the most important difference is that, though abolition in the West was preceded by centuries of activism that slowly (and imperfectly) changed popular attitudes, abolition in southeastern Nigeria was accomplished by colonial fiat—and only after the British no longer had an economic stake in the trade.

It therefore seemed to many diala to be as arbitrary and self-serving as when the British pushed the Igbo, in the nineteenth century, to abandon subsistence farming in favor of cultivating cash crops, such as palm oil. The institution of slavery ended, but the underlying prejudices remained. In 1956, the legislature in southeastern Nigeria passed a statute outlawing the caste system, which then simply went underground.

“Legal proscriptions are not enough to abolish certain primordial customs,” Anthony Obinna, a Catholic archbishop who advocates for the end of the system, told me. “You need more grassroots engagement.”

No data exist on the number of slave descendants in southeastern Nigeria today; it is rarely studied, and the stigma often compels people to keep silent about their status. (Ugo Nwokeji, a professor at Berkeley who studies the issue, estimates that five to ten per cent of Igbos, which would mean millions of people in Nigeria, are osu, and likely an equivalent number are ohu.)

Recently, slave descendants have begun agitating for equality, staging protests and pressuring politicians. In 2017, the governor of Enugu State spoke out against the discrimination, saying that it violated the country’s constitution. In Oguta, ohu have distributed pamphlets and sued diala family members who tried to block them from receiving what they considered to be their inheritances, including access to communal farm land.

Two years ago, when an elderly ohuman was snubbed for a seat on the village council, the ohu held a parallel ceremony to install him in the position. The ceremony was invaded by diala, who caused a brawl that the police had to break up. “Their population is much higher than ours,” Okororie said. “That is our only handicap.”

Now perhaps read VS Naipul’s book – The Masque of Africa.

Africa is not, and never has been some idyllic interpretation of Ubuntu, and romanticising it as such is every bit as corrosive as Afua’s obsession with “whiteness”.

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Why We Celebrate Youth Day on 16 June

Jun 1, 2021 | History and Politics

First published: June 2018. Updated 01 June 2021.

On June 16 each year, South Africans celebrate Youth Day . Youth Day commemorates the Soweto Uprising , which took place on 16 June 1976, where thousands of students were ambushed by the apartheid regime.

On Youth Day, South Africans pay tribute to the lives of these students and recognises the role of the youth in the liberation of South Africa from the apartheid regime.

The Bantu Education Act and the Soweto Uprising

Let’s rewind a little further to January of 1954, when the Bantu Education Act came into effect, making it compulsory for black children to attend government schools and learn specific subjects in English and Afrikaans. Prior to this, most black children only had access to schools run by missions that were understaffed and poorly attended.   

The Bantu Education system wasn’t much better. It featured separate Black schools and universities, poor facilities, overcrowded classrooms and inadequately trained teachers, resulting in a lack of quality education for black children. T he Bantu Education Policy was designed to ‘train’ Africans for their role in the new apartheid society. This African role was one of the worker, labourer and servant only.

In January of 1976, the government mandated that all school subjects be taught in Afrikaans. The Afrikaner -dominated government recognised only English and Afrikaans as official languages, and all indigenous languages were banned. 

The decision caused an uproar amongst parents, teachers and students, so on the morning of June 16 1976, 16-year-old Antoinette Sithole and an estimated 20,000 students from Soweto and the surrounding secondary and high schools, planned to peacefully protest Afrikaans as the primary teaching language in schools.

If you want a well-rounded picture of what happened during the Soweto Uprising, why not take a half-day Soweto tour ?

The protest was planned by the Soweto Students Representative (SSRC), with support from the wider Black Consciousness Movement. Teachers and parents joined the march after the SSRC emphasised peaceful action. Little did they know this student protest would go on to become one of the most tragic, yet pivotal, protests in all of South Africa’s history.  

The students began the march to Orlando Stadium, only to find out that police had barricaded the road along their intended route. The leader of the SSRC asked the crowd not to provoke the police, and the march continued on another route. The students sang and waved placards with slogans such as, “Down with Afrikaans” and “Viva Azania “. 

The police responded to the protest by firing teargas and later live ammunition on demonstrating students. The police began to shoot at the protesters and in the confusion and chaos, Sithole’s 13-year-old brother, Hector Pieterson was fatally shot.

Photojournalist, the late Sam Nzima , was covering the protest for The World, a Johannesburg newspaper when he captured the iconic image of Pieterson’s lifeless body being carried through the streets with Sithole crying hysterically by his side. The photograph was published across the globe and Pieterson came to symbolise the uprising, giving the world a shocking glimpse into the sheer brutality of apartheid.

At least 176 Black students, many of them children, including Hector Pieterson, lost their lives on 16 June 1976.

The uprising resulted in a widespread revolt that spread across the country and carried on until the following year. The aftermath of June 16, 1976, had severe consequences for the Apartheid government. Pictures of the police firing on peacefully demonstrating students led to an international uproar against South Africa and its Apartheid system.  

The students’ brave efforts resulted in international pressure and sanctions against the South African government to make changes to its educational policies.

Read more about the history of Youth Day and the Soweto Uprising

If you’re interested in learning more about the history of Youth Day and the Soweto Uprising in 1976, here are a few book recommendations:

• The Soweto Uprising (Ohio Short Histories of Africa) by Noor Nieftagodien.
• The Road to Soweto: Resistance and the Uprising of 16 June 1976 by Julian Brown.
• The Soweto Uprisings: Counter Memories of June 1976 by Sifiso Ndlovu
• Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa before and beyond Soweto ’76 by Ann Heffernan

When did Youth Day become a holiday?

In 1995 , the newly-elected democratic government declared that June 16 would be Youth Day – to serve as a reminder of the progress our country has made regarding equality and equal opportunity for all youth and to honor the youth who lost their lives during the Soweto Uprising. It is now a National Holiday in South Africa.

Soweto has come a long way since the uprising of 1976. The name Soweto is an abbreviation for South Western Townships . The township itself was built around the informal settlements of the first mine workers who came to the area during the gold rush of the late-1800s.

It has become popular with travellers from around the world who come to visit Vilakazi Street , which is one of the stops on the Johannesburg Political and Historical Tour . This famous street was home to two Nobel peace prize winners; Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the late former president Nelson Mandela.

Not far from here is the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum , which you can visit on the Soweto and Apartheid Museum Tour . It was established in the early 1990s and commemorates the role of the students who took part in the protest march of 1976 and the people who died in the aftermath, fighting for freedom, democracy and peace.

How is Youth Day celebrated in South Africa

Last year in June 2020, we celebrated Youth Day in South Africa against the backdrop of yet another uprising driven by young people. The Black Lives Matter Movement had a resurgence after the killing of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, earlier in 2020 during the heat of the Coronavirus pandemic. The response to Floyd’s murder caused a significant amount of protests and uprisings all around the world, calling an end to discrimination, systemic racism and police brutality.

In South Africa, we can celebrate Youth Day by commemorating and honouring those who spoke out and took action against the oppressive Apartheid system. We also honour the lives lost in the face of brutalist political systems and all forms of oppression – then and now. Youth Day is used by schools, colleges, and university students in South Africa to hold discussions on educational issues.

Due to COVID-19, there are currently no big events that celebrate Youth Day,  but what we can do is educate ourselves and learn from the events that took place on June 16.

Apart from educating themselves, many South Africans also spend Youth Day helping underprivileged children in schools or orphanages across the country – either by donating their time or resources to aid in their education. 

As visitors to South Africa, you can celebrate Youth Day by visiting Soweto and Vilakazi Street .

Visit Soweto and Vilakazi Street

Due to its rich political history, Soweto has become a popular destination for tourists and travellers looking to learn more about South Africa’s Apartheid past. 

Vilakazi Street in Soweto is famous for being home to two Nobel peace prize winners; Archbishop Desmond Tutu and late president Nelson Mandela. Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s house is not open for viewing, however, Mandela House has become a museum for the public. 

The Nelson Mandela National Museum  or Mandela House was the house where Nelson Mandela lived from 1946 to 1962. Mandela donated the house, and it was declared a National Heritage Site in 1999. 

Another popular activity to celebrate Youth Day is the  June 16 Trail . This walkway takes guests along the exact route that the students marched on in 1976, during the Soweto Uprising. The trail ends at the  Hector Pieterson memorial  where travellers can see the infamous image of Hector Pieterson being carried out of the crossfire after he was shot by the police. 

Here are our top Johannesburg and Soweto tours so that you can start brainstorming for your trip to South Africa. 

Here is a list of Johannesburg tours that have stops in Soweto and Vilakazi Street:

• The Johannesburg Political and Historical Tour . With this tour not only will you be able to experience the highlights of Soweto and Vilakazi Street, but you will also visit other prominent sites in Johannesburg such as  Liliesleaf Farm and Museum  (which was a safe-house for anti-Apartheid leaders and activists). 
• Soweto and Apartheid Museum Tour . This tour guides guests through the township of Soweto as well as a visit to the  Apartheid Museum  where travellers can learn about the history of the Apartheid regime through moving displays and exhibitions. 
• Footsteps of Mandela . This comprehensive tour takes travellers along the journey of Nelson Mandela’s life. The 13-day tour through South Africa begins in Johannesburg and travels through KwaZulu-Natal, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. It includes an inside look into Madiba’s life from his birth in the Eastern Cape through to his rise as a leader of the African National Congress, up until he was elected as president in 1994.

If you’re interested in visiting Soweto and Vilakazi Street, speak to one of our travel planners about booking a tour in South Africa.  Book a 30-minute complimentary call  with the African Travel Canvas founder to discuss your post-COVID travel plans. 

We hope that you enjoyed reading this post. If you have any questions or comments, please share them below.

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17 Comments

This is so inspirational but can you guys make it easier for my kids

how i can took a participant in youth day 2022 at Portugal. I am from India . Please guide me. Thanks

Hi Moes, Please mail [email protected] and one of our booking managers will assist you! Thanks!

Can you please assist me I want to organize an event for June 16 2020 in rusternbug I don’t know were to start

Hi Elizabeth, sure, please mail [email protected] and one of our booking team will be able to assist you! Thank you!

Can I aske what is cultural heritage

Myself i need the samathing…

What a thought provoking, in-depth, heart wrenching, informative piece of history that should never be forgotten…

I like this group and how different people give different opinions

I realize that I thought life now was cruel but in actual fact it was worse for people back in apartheid . I show no pity ,but great sadness to those who lost their loved ones in the past . They are true hero’s brave hearts these are the people who should be admired cause without them we will not be where are today I’m proud to be South African I’m proud to call SA my country ,we’ve come this far why not push further. I Lila Norris am humbly greatful to those who suffered so we can live greater lives today.

I am writing a piece and was inspired by this article, very informative.

Thank you so much Isaac. Please feel free to share the article with us, we’d love to read it!

What you did on youth day?

I love youth day! It’s a day to celebrate the progress that our young people have made and to look forward to the future.

Thank you for sharing this important piece of history. It’s so crucial that we remember and honor the sacrifices of the youth who fought for their rights and freedoms. The Soweto Uprising of 1976 was a pivotal moment in South African history, and it’s impact is still felt today. #YouthDay #SowetoUprising #RememberTheStruggle

Thank you for your comment, and yes, we 100% agree!

What a powerful reminder of the importance of youth activism and resistance. The Soweto Uprising of 1976 is a testament to the courage and determination of young people in the face of oppression. It’s amazing to think about how much has been accomplished since then, but also important to acknowledge the ongoing struggles for justice and equality. Thank you for sharing this piece and further highlighting the significance of Youth Day.

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• Youth Day 2021: Commemorating what happened on 16 June | 1-grid - […] Day commemorates the 16 June youth uprisings that began in Soweto back in 1976. Thousands of South African youths…
• Mqeku Picnic Site: an ideal spot for family outings - […] Youth Day and Father’s Day both coming up in the next fortnight – families may be looking for interesting…
• Open Letter: Dear Amazon, why do you need to build on sacred land? – Yours *TrulyJuly* - […] South Africa’s Youth Day, which celebrates the role of the youth in the liberation of South Africa from the…
• Why We Celebrate Youth Day on 16 June | Soweto Uprising of … – Poster – 4 - […] Link: https://africantravelcanvas.com/experiences/history-and-politics/hector-pieterson-and-the-soweto-upr… […]
• South African Youth Day, 16 juni 2021 – Eye For Others | Touch People, Touch Hearts - […] https://africantravelcanvas.com/experiences/history-and-politics/hector-pieterson-and-the-soweto-upr… […]

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Descriptive Essay: I Am African

In 1996, when Nelson Mandela was president and Thabo Mbeki vice-president, Mbeki made a speech in Cape Town to honour the passing of the Constitution of South Africa. That speech was entitled, “I am an African” and the depth and poetic cadence showed he is a gifted public orator,but it was his ability to touch and awaken what is the tender part of the psyche of South Africans that brought tears to our eyes.

That speech took us further than our own borders because it reminded us that our history and our daily struggles are not that different from the rest of Africa. Our sorrows, joys, shortcomings and achievements go hand-hand with the rest of our African brothers and sisters. We have to continue the struggle for equality, fairness and opportunity in all areas of our own country so our immediate neighbours could also benefit and extend those benefits further afield until Africa thrived. The soaring speech encouraged us but never said it would be easy.

It is hard to define what makes anyone African because the continent is overflowing with diversity. Is it because you are born in Africa? Is it because you have citizenship of an African country? Is it because you own property in Africa? Is it because you have African ancestry or roots? You could satisfy one, all or none of those questions. I say I am African because my future is here. I see the beauty, potential and wealth but I also see the corruption, greed and poverty.

It is believed that most of Africa’s natural wealth has still to be discovered. Right now, the continent is harvesting only a fraction of woods, petroleum, bauxite, uranium, iron, diamonds, tropical fruits, cocoa beans, copper, silver, iron, oil and cobalt. This already represents enormous wealth and there is no reason for Africans to continue living in poverty. If you want to call yourself African then speak against poverty and find out where the wealth is going.

There are still areas of conflict due to the resistance of democracy by one side or ethnic and/or religious divisions like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. I am African so it is my duty to spread tolerance by respecting other Africans I interact with.

It is easy to love Africa because of the open spaces, big sky and natural wonders but no matter where you go, or what problems there are, you will always find Africans who are friendly, generous and helpful. Many are poor and some are wealthy and I see them every day.

Living in South Africa is seeing people from North Africa all the way down south. I am South African but I am constantly reminded that I am African because I meet Africans of every description in my own neighbourhood and city. Many have fled war and the terrible crimes of war and have nothing but their willingness to work alongside South Africans for a better future. It is them and my fellow countrymen who bring Mbeki’s speech to life and remind me that I am an African, this is my place in the world and these are my people, from the largest country of Algeria to the tiniest of Seychelles.

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Africana Philosophy

“Africana philosophy” is the name for an emergent and still developing field of ideas and idea-spaces, intellectual endeavors, discourses, and discursive networks within and beyond academic philosophy that was recognized as such by national and international organizations of professional philosophers, including the American Philosophical Association, starting in the 1980s. Thus, the name does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system, method, or tradition. Rather, Africana philosophy is a third-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bring organizing oversight to various efforts of philosophizing —that is, activities of reflective, critical thinking and articulation and aesthetic expression—engaged in by persons and peoples African and of African descent who were and are indigenous residents of continental Africa and residents of the many African Diasporas worldwide. In all cases the point of much of the philosophizings has been to confer meaningful orderings on individual and shared living and on natural and social worlds while resolving recurrent, emergent, and radically disruptive challenges to existence so as to survive, endure, and flourish across successive generations.

The emergent third-order work defining the field has been focused on identifying for research and teaching, and for further refinements and new developments of, instances of philosophical articulations and expressions regarding what has been, and is, of thoughtful, aesthetic significance to persons African and of African descent. This work has produced educative catalogings and critical surveys of particular ideas and idea-spaces; intellectual and aesthetic expressive agendas, practices, and traditions; and networks of individuals, organizations, and institutions serving philosophizing in African and African-descended life-worlds.

1. The Concept of Africana Philosophy

2. philosophizings born of struggles: conditions of emergence of africana philosophy, 3. africana philosophy: continental africa, 4. african philosophy: contributions, 5. africana philosophy: the african diaspora, 6. african american philosophizings born of struggles, 7. 1600–1860, 8. 1860–1915, 9. 1915–2000, 10. 1950–present: professional philosophers of african descent, 11. publishing and professional africana philosophy, 12. africana philosophy: contributions, 13. future developments, african philosophy, african american philosophy, afro-caribbean philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

There are significant challenges to the viability of the concept Africana philosophy as well as to an effort to map out an encyclopedic overview of the extended and still expanding range of endeavors covered by the term. Foremost are the challenges to ordering through a single concept the geographical, historical, socio-political, and cultural differences and complexities that have defined and continue to define the realities of life of the many persons and peoples identified as “African” and “of African descent” in many locales throughout the world. Yet, the viability of the concept is grounded on several centuries of continuous, linked, complicated histories during which Black peoples of Africa, and their descendants, have been regarded as and engaged with, and more or less have come to regard themselves, as “African” peoples, as persons and peoples “of African descent.” The long histories of this regarding, by others and by themselves, have thus conditioned substantively the history-makings, the socio-political lives, the culture-makings and culture-mediations, intellectual productions and philosophizings included, of persons and peoples African and of African descent.

On these socially constructive historical groundings rest several key heuristic presumptions that are central to Africana philosophy as a metaphilosophical concept for organizing intellectual praxes. First, the presumption that there are sufficient distinguishing anthropological, historical, and other commonalities and similarities that are shared, more or less, by the many bio-cultural groupings of human beings who have been identified, and who subsequently generally have come to identify themselves, as, in part, “African” or “of African descent” to warrant ordering under a general heading particular instances of philosophically articulate thought expressed by persons in these groupings and shared with and debated by others within and beyond the groupings. These identifications are consequences of the imposition on the peoples of the continent named “Africa” of an attempted homogenizing racializing ontology by peoples of nation-states on another continent that was named “Europe” in an aspiration for geo-political and anthropological unification. Many “Europeans” came to believe that beneath their many formidable differences there was a foundational commonality through shared raciality and other constitutive virtues that was definitive of their anthropological and historical superiority as harbingers of a theologically and philosophically sanctioned destiny to achieve global predominance. It was out of this toxic mix of convictions and aspirations that particular Europeans set about constructing racialized, rank-ordered philosophical anthropologies through which they construed a continent of diverse peoples as a single “race” of “Africans” or “Negroes.” The outcomes of the histories of these inventive forgings through complex, centuries-long struggles against European imperialist impositions and the adaptive endurances of colonization and dispersing enslavements by persons and peoples African and African-descendant provide the warrant for the presumption of commonalities embraced by the concept Africana philosophy when considering the philosophizings of people African and African-descended subsequent to their encounters with impositions of imperialism by people(s) of Europe and European Diasporas.

This first presumption is tempered by a second: namely, that the bio-cultural groupings of peoples African and of African descent are not homogeneous, racially or otherwise, neither individually nor collectively, but are constituted by differences and dissimilarities as well as by similarities and commonalities. All the more so as consequences of the various groups having created differing life-worlds in differing geographical, political, and historical locations prior to and as a consequence of impositions and disruptions of their lives fostered by Europeans and others on one hand; and, on the other, while living interactions and cultural exchanges with other peoples, European and European-descended peoples included, which have given rise to differences in individual and group genomes, histories, cultures, interests, and aspirations. Furthermore, identified shared similarities and commonalities are understood to be contingent , thus neither necessary nor inherent and fixed and thus the same for all persons African or of African descent. This presumption rules out any ahistorical, a priori claims regarding supposedly definitive “natural” characteristics of “the” thought of African and African-descended peoples assumed as non-contingently widely and generally shared across extended historical times and geo-cultural spaces. Africana philosophy as an ordering concept, then, is neither the promise of, nor an aspiration for, a unifying philosophy already shared, or to be shared, by all properly thoughtful persons African and/or of African descent. Judgments regarding the always-contingent distinguishing features of philosophizing thought and expression by persons African and of African descent, and of the extent to which such features are shared—to what degree, under what circumstances, to what ends—are to be achieved by way of combined efforts of philosophical anthropology, sociology of knowledge, and intellectual histories: that is, by way of historically and socio-culturally situated comparative studies of instances of philosophizing.

A third presumption: Africana philosophy should not be regarded as normatively prescriptive for philosophers identified as African or of African descent, as setting requirements for what their philosophizing must have been, or must be, about and to what ends because of their racial/ethnic identities. Such identities neither confer nor require particular philosophical commitments or obligations. Substantive differences among African and African-descended thinkers have been, and must continue to be, acknowledged and taken into account in the ordering of the field and setting agendas for Africana philosophy. There have been, are, and will likely continue to be persons African and of African descent for whom their identities as such are of no import for their philosophizing.

Of particular importance, work in Africana philosophy is also conditioned by the presumption that contributors need not be persons African or of African descent. This presumption rests on the understanding that the conditioning circumstances, motivations, modes, agendas, and importance of the philosophically articulate thought and aesthetic expressions of persons African and of African descent can be identified, understood, researched, taught, commented on, and taken up with respectful competence by persons neither African nor of African descent. By virtue of their competencies such persons may be identified appropriately as, for example, “Africanists” or “Afro-Caribbeanists” or “African Americanists.”

Finally, the extent to which these heuristic presumptions are cogent and effective in guiding work in Africana philosophy is a matter that is to be continuously explored and tested in the agora of disciplined, ethical scholarship and thus confirmed or disconfirmed, to whatever extent appropriate, in accord with proper methods of critical review properly deployed.

The metaphilosophical efforts to map out and order a complex discursive field of articulations and practices as Africana philosophy are, indeed, emergent disciplinary ventures of the late twentieth century. However, many of the instances of thoughtful articulation and aesthetic expressiveness that are being identified and explored as instances of philosophizing were neither produced nor guided by norms and agendas of the discipline of academic philosophy as institutionalized for centuries in various countries of Western European and North America. The same is true for the needs, motivations, objectives, and many of the principal intellectual resources that motivated and oriented those instances of articulation and creative expression and the formation of the networks of idea-spaces and discursive communities that nurtured them. For African and African-descended peoples were of little or no philosophical or anthropological significance to those who have been the designators, historians, practitioners, and mediators of the discipline’s institutionalized canons of issues, figures, agendas, conceptual and methodological traditions, problem-sets, texts or text-analogs, organizations, and institutions. The pre-Modern histories of African and African-descended peoples; the centuries-long colonized, enslaved, and otherwise utterly dehumanizing unfreedom of Black peoples throughout the continents of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean; the rapacious unjust exploitation of their bodies, lands, resources, and life-opportunities—all of these went mostly without explicit comment in the discipline of Philosophy, not even as a focus of protest, notwithstanding all of the vaunted concern within the discipline for conceptions of freedom , justice , equality , human nature , and human well-being generally. Even as European and European-descended philosophes of the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries fashion decidedly new philosophical anthropologies, socio-political philosophies, and philosophies of histories into complex Enlightenments to ground and guide quests to realize the global instantiations of Modernities in which reason-guided freedom and justice would be foundational to the spread of the racialized, capitalist civilizational projects of Eurocentrism (Amin 1989), there was almost total silence about the intended and unintended consequences for peoples African and of African descent—except for claims that colonization and enslavement would bring them much needed “civilizing.”

Evolving academic, and subsequently professionalized, Philosophy thus aided and abetted, and was a substantial institutionalized beneficiary of, these projects well into the twentieth century when the various forms and movements of resistance of African and African-descended peoples to dehumanization were made more challenging while animated by motivating declarations of their claims to their humanity and their rights to freedom, justice, and full citizenship. By the middle of the twentieth century, throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas these movements had won major victories of liberation from the oppressive regimes of Eurocentric racial apartheid and exploitation. The movements were also contributing to progressive transformations of these regimes that helped to open them to substantive measures of real freedom and justice not only for persons and peoples African and of African descent, but for other persons and peoples of color and, even, for women of European descent.

These historic movements and developments provided contemporary pioneers of Africana philosophy rich, exemplary ideas, idea-spaces, agendas, and social networks on which to draw for motivations, missions, and other resources to forge intellectual agendas and strategies and social networks needed for philosophizing in the interests of people African and of African descent. Hence, the twentieth-century emergence of Africana philosophy as an international field of and for discursive intellectual and expressive aesthetic work with a distinctive mission: to gather up and explore critically thoughtful articulations and aesthetic expressions by and about persons and peoples African and of African descent as instances of philosophizing; and to fashion revised or new articulations and artful expressions in keeping with, and as aids to, quests for freedom, justice, and human dignity by and for these persons and peoples.

Examples of such mission-driven creative intellectual and expressive work in service to the liberation and redemption of Black peoples were already at hand in several other disciplines: in history and sociology, music and literature, art and dance, religion and theology. Moreover, outside of academic disciplines, many among several generations of fiercely independent, extraordinarily formally and informally educated (and in some instances self-taught) socially, politically, and aesthetically engaged female and male black intellectuals and artists, who devoted much of their lives to service as uplifters of Black peoples, had pursued their often very highly productive, and certainly very influential, intellectual and expressive work without ongoing affiliations with institutions of higher education, and without the assistance of sources of support for articulation and expression, that were dominated and controlled by Europeans and people of European descent. This independence was crucial to the production of their seminal reflections, articulations, and artistic creations and expressions. Many of them helped to found and were affiliated with and supported by religious and educational institutions, character-building women’s and men’s clubs and literary societies; international missionary ventures; benevolent and political organizations; publishing and commercial enterprises; and with local, regional, and international anti-colonial and liberatory organizations founded and operated by and devoted to the uplift, freedom, and well-being of African and African-descended peoples. As inspiring role models, much of their work became resource-reservoirs for new generations of women and men determined to continue the quests for liberation and justice for Black peoples. A matter of significant influence was that many of these important figures had become internationalists in understanding the similarities and commonalities of the plights suffered by African and African-descended peoples due to the shared agendas for racialized oppression and exploitation forged and fostered by White peoples of various nation-states. Consequently, more than a few of the new generations of twentieth-century African and African-descended fighters for freedom and justice cultivated internationalist, “Pan African” (Geiss 1974) understandings of and aspirations for what would be needed in the way of intellectual resources and strategies to assist with claiming and realizing the full humanity of and just freedom for African and African-descended peoples.

Many of the contemporary disciplinary pioneers of the philosophizings that are now being gathered under the umbrella of Africana philosophy, though participants in institutionalized, professional philosophy, have also been intellectual and spiritual members of the new generations of freedom fighters or otherwise substantially influenced by them. Thus, many have drawn their motivations, aspirations, and resources for philosophical work from beyond the canonized motivations and traditions of thought institutionalized in the discipline. Energized and emboldened by the legacies of the role models and liberatory movements, they have taken on the work of challenging the discipline in order to create room within its intellectual and organizational structures and processes wherein they could pursue agendas of giving consideration to matters of philosophical import to persons and peoples African and of African descent, and of particular import to themselves as persons African and of African descent engaged in philosophizing formally and professionally.

Among the challenges was the need, first, to reconsider long-prevailing defining assumptions regarding the nature of properly “philosophical” thought: namely, that such thought is characterized by a loving quest for wisdom pursued by persons who have the most highly cultivated forms of disciplined thought, and whose lives are materially conditioned such that they have the leisure to devote substantial amounts of their time and energy to reflective thought and to working out their thinking for articulate, systematic expression in writing .

It became apparent to many—though by no means to all—of the contemporary pioneers of Africana philosophy within academic philosophy that this image of the ideal philosopher was not appropriate for respectfully identifying or characterizing many of the philosophically thoughtful and expressive persons African and of African descent, those, especially, who lived several centuries ago. Certainly, throughout the centuries of radically disruptive and dehumanizing encounters between peoples African and of African descent and peoples of Europe and of the Euro-Americas, and others, the philosophizing efforts of Black people have, indeed, been “born of struggle,” as the philosopher Leonard Harris has so aptly noted. The experiences, thus the philosophizing, of many of these persons—and of generations of millions who were their contemporaries, millions more who came before them, and millions more who came after them—were conditioned profoundly by racialized and gendered exploitative settler-colonialism in their homelands; for others by racialized and gendered capture, relocation, enslavement, and oppression in The New World thousands of miles from their or their ancestors’ homelands; and in all such cases by racialized and gendered imperialist encroachments on the very core of their being by which they were forced to become and to be colonized “natives” and slaves, ontologically as well as socio-economically. Survival and endurance of such conditions by those who managed to do so required coordinated efforts of recovery and retention, or the recreation, of the integrity of personhood and peoplehood, even of basic humaneness, thus required thoughtful ontological and political work of the most fundamental significance. So, too, crucial intellectual efforts of the kinds designated moral, ethical, epistemological, social, religious, theological, and aesthetic.

Thus, survival and endurance of conditions of racialized and gendered colonization, enslavement, and oppression—not conditions of leisured freedom— compelled more than a few African and African-descended persons to philosophize. Almost daily, even on what seemed the most mundane of occasions, oppressed Black people were compelled to consider the most fundamental existential questions: Continue life during what would turn out to be centuries-long colonization and enslavement, of brutal, brutalizing and humiliating gendered and racialized oppression? Or, seek “freedom” in death? Suffer despair until mad? Or, find resources for continued living through surreptitiously nurtured appreciations of the sacred and beautiful, of irony and tragic comedy, while cultivating hope and patience aided by discoveries and creations of beauty and humaneness in the midst of the physical and soul-distorting psychological brutalities of enforced impoverishments of conditions that were not in any way “mundane” living? Die at one’s own initiation? Or, capitulate to dehumanization? Or, struggle to find and sustain faith and hope for a better life, on earth as well as in the afterlife, through creativity and beauty in speech, dance, and song while at work and rest; in thought and artistry; in finding and making truth and right; in seeking and doing justice; in forging and sustaining relations of family and community when such relations were largely prohibited; in rendering life sacred?

For centuries, persons African and of African descent, for themselves as well as for their associates and successors, have had to ponder the most fundamental questions of existence as a direct consequence of their life-constraining, life-distorting encounters with various self-racializing and other-racializing peoples of Europe, the Euro-Americas, and elsewhere. And in choosing to live and endure, peoples African and of African descent have had to forge, test out with their lives, and then refine and further live out explicit strategies by which to avoid being broken by brutality and humiliation and succumbing to fear, despair, or the soul-devouring obsession with vengeance. They have had to share with their associates, and those succeeding them, their creative and sustaining legacies for infusing life with spirit-lifting artfulness and their articulated ponderings and strategies for surviving, living, and enduring with hope despite the circumstances. They have had to philosophize, and to share their philosophizings, in order to forge the cross-generational bonds of respectful, extended-family, community-sustaining love and mutuality without which neither survival nor endurance would have been possible.

Indeed, endurance of gendered and racialized colonization, enslavement, and oppression that would be continued for centuries required very compelling, sustaining, persuasive beliefs and nurtured investments in finding and creating soul-nurturing art and experience-verified praxis-guiding thoughtfulness. These beliefs and aesthetic considerations had to be articulated and communicated for sharing, sometimes surreptitiously, in order that persons and peoples endure. And enduring required that the brutalities and humiliations had to be countered that were directed, first and foremost, at the defining core of their very being —that is, at their foundational notions of themselves as persons and as distinctive, racialized peoples—so as to bring about their cross-generational living of social death (Patterson 1982). This particular persons did, throughout Africa and African Diasporas, and without either the guidance or sanction of academic Philosophy and the discipline’s most canonical practitioners even as some among the latter subjected African and African-descended peoples to their ontological racism.

It has been instances of such compelled, articulated thoughtfulness that contemporary proponents of Africana philosophy have brought into the discipline of academic Philosophy as the initial historic instances of philosophizing constituting the new field. The identification and careful exploration of and commentary on the forms and efficacies of this growing collection of works of thoughtful articulation and aesthetic expression are now principal forms of endeavor in Africana philosophy. The creation and expression of new articulations and expressions of thoughtfulness by persons African and of African descent, and by other philosophers not African or of African descent, on these works as well as on old, continuing, or emergent issues pertinent to Africans and people of African descent make for other forms of endeavor in Africana philosophy.

These efforts of recovery, exploration, commentary, and critique constitute an ongoing project-of-projects with several agendas. A first agenda involves, as just noted, the identification and recovery of instances and legacies of the ‘philosophizings born of struggles’. Another very important agenda is the identification and recovery of philosophizings that were engaged in long before the centuries-long struggles with peoples of Europe began. A third agenda is to learn from the philosophizings the lessons of the considerations that governed or substantially conditioned the organization and living of life in the various circumstances in which peoples of Africa forged their evolutionary adaptations. Another agenda: to understand and appreciate fully those philosophizings that nurtured endurance in the face of brutalizing assaults on peoples’ being in order to learn from the life-affirming, very passionate intellectual and emotional endeavors of those among severely abused peoples who have been, and continue to be, those who work at gathering themselves, their peoples, and even those who have abused them into humane integrity, individually and collectively. It is to learn how and why it was and is that from among peoples abused and degraded for centuries in conditions of continuous terrorism there have been steady successions of persons who have spared substantial portions of the emotional and intellectual energies they managed to preserve and cultivate, along with nurtured senses of their sacred humanity, to devote to quests for freedom and justice, hardly ever to quests for vengeance.

Yet another agenda is to compare the philosophizings of persons African and of African descent intra-racially and inter-racially, as it were—that is, to seek out the similarities and differences in the various instances and modes of thought and expression of persons situated in similar and different times and places in order to learn more about the forms and agendas of human species-being as manifested in philosophizing. An important consequence of pursuing this agenda should be significant contributions to inventories of thoughtfulness and aesthetic expression in the storehouses of human civilizations, contributions to the enlargement and enrichment of canons of Philosophy, and contributions to revisions of histories and of historiography in the discipline.

Still another agenda is to make of Africana philosophy a collection of resources that inspire philosophizing, now and in the future, and that guide such philosophizings by the best lessons found in the collection, among them lessons in how to gain and sustain integrity of body and soul, of person, of womanhood and manhood, of childhood and young-adulthood, of family and community, of “racial” and cultural being, of belief in the sacred sanctity of truth, of justice, and of freedom through the exercise of faith and hope-sustaining, pragmatically focused reasoning and creative aesthetic expression in cross-generational conditions of dehumanizing brutality. Among the lessons to be relearned: how not to abuse persons and peoples; how not to rationalize abuse; how not to live massive lies and contradictions and lives of hypocrisy.

What follows are brief surveys of several historically contextualized developments of philosophizing now being explored as instances of the philosophizing constitutive of the field of “Africana philosophy.” The survey is not meant to be exhaustive, but one that provides examples and solicits additional contributions in order to make the account more comprehensive and accurate.

The various peoples on the continent that came to be called “Africa” had constructed a variety of more or less complex societies of varying scale and scope many generations before fifteenth century encounters with acquisitive explorers and adventurers from the varying configurations of polities, regions, cities, and states that have been identified as Europe and from elsewhere. Several of these ancient societies—the kingdoms of Mali and Ghana and the royal dynasties of Kemet (Ancient Egypt), for example—had evolved complex social strata that included persons of accomplished learning. Some of these persons were stationed in institutions devoted to the production and distribution of knowledge and creative expression and to the preservation of that knowledge and expression in written and artistic works stored in libraries and other repositories and, in the case of works of art, incorporated into the ontologically-structured routines of daily life. Others, in social orders in which advanced knowledge was produced and mediated via oral literatures and traditions, were selected and trained to be griots : that is, persons with rigorously structured memories who thus became the living repositories, guardians, and mediators of a people’s and/or a political community’s genealogies and intellectual legacies, their keepers of wisdom. And in order to preserve shared, adaptive life across generations in all of the various social orders, it was socially necessary to construct and maintain interpretive orderings of natural and social realities, as well of creatively imagined origins and genealogies and constructed histories, by which to meaningfully order individual and shared life.

The production of these interpretive and expressive orderings, the working out of the norms by which to structure, justify, and legitimate the interpretations so as to order personal and social life, were, indeed, “philosophical” endeavors: labors devoted to the production of successful, time-tested, enduring thought-praxis and aesthetic strategies by which to resolve emergent and recurrent challenges to transgenerational survival and flourishing. These were experience-conditioned thoughtful means by which to provide knowledge to guide the ordering of meaningful individual and shared life transmitted across generations past, present, and future. Such efforts are as old as the peoples now routinely referred to as “Africans.” And the efforts were not destroyed by the holocausts of imperialist colonization and domination, nor by racialized enslavement and apartheid-oppression, fostered by Europeans and others. Still, the philosophizing efforts were disrupted and distorted to various degrees in many instances, were creatively adaptive in many others.

For example, during twentieth century anti-colonial and decolonizing struggles to regain freedom from the domination and authoritative jurisdiction of white racial supremacy over the lives, lands, and resources of African peoples, the disruptions and distortions would compel reinvigorated and determined adaptive creativity on the part of African peoples who endeavored to recover and repair old, and/or to invent new, agendas and strategies for living in keeping with their will to endure. There is a long history of efforts by scholars African and of African descent to reclaim Egypt from the intellectual annexation to Europe that was urged by Hegel in his The Philosophy of History . It is still the case that many people throughout Europe and the United States regard Egypt as being in “the Middle East” rather than as constituting the northern portion of the African continent. This costly mis-education of popular imaginations persists, as well, in historical accounts of various areas of thought (though increasingly less so in historiography related to Africa). The systematic production of ignorance and distorted, unethical “knowledge” about the peoples of Continental Africa persists in academic Philosophy, especially in the training of new professionals; in the writing of canonical histories of the discipline; and in the construction of disciplinary curricula though progressive change has begun. Few in academic Philosophy not engaged in the work of Africana philosophy are likely to know of a long tradition of scholarship contesting the claims of the Greco-Roman “origins” of Philosophy, an example of which is the controversial work by George G.M. James, Stolen Legacy (James 1954), in which he argues, as the title declares, that Greek thinkers “stole” Egyptian intellectual legacies that have since been attributed erroneously to Greek thinkers as their creations.

A provocative and controversial argument, indeed. Still, widespread disciplinary ignorance regarding the histories of ancient peoples and civilizations other than those stipulated as being ancestors of European White peoples is a direct and continuing consequence of racism in the formation, organization, and practices of communities of discourse and scholarship and the development of racially segregated idea-spaces, intellectual traditions and networks, and scholarly organizations throughout Europe and North America. For example, few academic philosophers and workers in other disciplines who are neither African nor of African descent are likely to know of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, an international organization of scholars and intellectuals African and of African descent who are determined to “rescue and rehabilitate” the histories, intellectual traditions, and wisdom philosophies of Ancient Africa. Thus, few academic philosophers are likely to know of the scholarship of various persons in the Association such as Maulana Karenga (1986) and Jacob H. Carruthers (1984). Both scholars have contributed additional research and scholarship to studies devoted to reclaiming Egyptian thought-traditions as African traditions of thought. These scholars’ efforts and works are paradigmatic examples of the determined production and mediation of new knowledge of African and African-descended peoples by African and African-descended, and other, scholars who have deliberately worked independently of the mainstream organizations of academic professionals in Philosophy and other disciplines.

With little to no evidence in much of the canonical literature and curricula of academic Philosophy that Western philosophers have focused attention on questions of historical relations between Egyptian and Greco-Roman thinkers, or on African thinkers and traditions of thought, a number of the pioneers of Africana philosophy have turned to independent, often controversial figures and scholarly projects outside of academic, professional Philosophy for their inspiration and for intellectual resources and strategies in taking on the challenges of creating intellectual spaces in academic Philosophy for “matters African.” A major resource and intellectual mentor continue to be works by and the person of Cheikh Anta Diop, the intellectually daring and pioneering Senegalese scholar who, in The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality , published in the early 1970s, argued for the reality of the African origin of human civilization. Diop had begun the challenging work of reclaiming African heritages decades earlier by arguing in a dissertation submitted for the Ph.D. at the University of Paris that ancient Egyptian civilization was a black African civilization. His explorations in support of his claims have enormous implications for revisions to histories of the origins of Western Philosophy. Similarly, Martin Bernal’s loudly and heatedly contested multi-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is by far the most widely read, and intensely debated, work in this vein to which many have turned. However, Bernal’s work, which acknowledges a long line of African and African-descended scholars who are his precursors, Diop included, has raised hardly a ripple in academic Philosophy. The discipline has thus long been overdue for a spirited and disciplined critical reconsideration of the possibilities and realities of informing Greco-Roman and African Egyptian contributions to the histories of emergence and development of philosophical thought that has been canonized as foundational to the genealogy of Western Philosophy. Africana philosophy has been forged as a novel context of provocations for such critical reconsiderations.

Meanwhile, for several decades academic philosophers in Africa, and elsewhere, have been involved in intense debates and discussions that have prompted reconstructions of disciplinary enterprises of Philosophy (departments in educational institutions as well as national and international organizations of professional philosophers). The initial focal question at the center of the debates and discussions was whether or not there were proper instances of Philosophy in traditional (i.e., pre-Modern) Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular. The publication in 1945 of Placide Tempels’ La Philosophie Bantoue triggered much of the debate.

The historical context in which the debates and discussions emerged and in which they were waged was conditioned thoroughly by European colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples rationalized through rank-ordering racial characterizations. This rationalizing work was aided significantly by the intellectual efforts of canonical European philosophers. David Hume, in a footnote in his “Of National Characters,” philosophized about the “natural inferiority” of Negroes to White people (Hume 1742) and was supported by Immanuel Kant (1764), who elaborated his own theory of inferior and superior racial types in his writings on anthropology (Kant 1798). Since successive generations of European and Euro-American White people had been educated into widely-shared common senses of their racial superiority to inferior Africans by such supposedly philosophically well-reasoned, science-verified, and theologically sanctioned teachings, the claim that there were Africans capable of producing thought of the caliber of Philosophy was regarded by most of them as utterly preposterous.

At the core of the controversy was the pressing question whether African persons were fully and sufficiently human and capable intellectually in comparison to the model human par excellence: the man of Europe, the White Man, the avatar for all White people and for humanity proper, whose defining characteristics were capacities for reasoning and articulate speech ( logos ). Consequently, the claim of Bantu Philosophy made by Placide Tempels, a Belgium priest engaged in missionary work in the then-called Belgian Congo, that Bantu Africans (related ethnic groups identified by the dominant language group, Bantu, spoken by the related groups) had an indigenous philosophy was a serious challenge to the racialized philosophical ontology-cum-anthropology that undergirded colonial domination and exploitation. However, Tempels tempered the unsettling implications of his claim by also claiming that Bantu Africans did not have conscious knowledge of their philosophy. Rather, he claimed, it was he who was able, using the tools at his disposal by virtue of his training in Philosophy, to engage in a hermeneutic of the practices and language of the Bantu and extract the constitutive epistemology and axiology structuring the operative, behavior-guiding philosophy at work in their linguistic practices and normative actions.

Nonetheless, the impact of Bantu Philosophy was substantial. Of particular consequence, the debates it prompted helped to direct the attention of researchers and scholars in several disciplines (anthropology, ethnology, history, religion, philosophy) to the identification and exploration of the articulate systems of thought of various groups of “traditional” Africans. A number of European scholars and researchers who had spent years studying and living among various African peoples were pleased to find confirmed in Tempels’ book their own positive assessments of Africans’ thought-systems, social organization, and artistic creativity. Others, however, disagreed and challenged Tempels’ claims, in a particular case criticizing him for mistaking an “impetus for” philosophy in the language and behavior of Bantu-speaking Africans as evidence of a developed capacity for articulating a proper Philosophy. This critic concluded that Bantu-Africans had not yet fulfilled the conceptual conditions for “taking off” into philosophizing properly (Crahay 1965). Other scholars engaged in comparative explorations of thought-systems of various African peoples countered the criticism by providing accounts of a number of such systems that gave clear evidence of their very capable and developed rationality (Forde 1954; Fortes 1965).

The subsequent decades of debates (mid 1940 through the 1980s) regarding the possibility of African philosophy and disclosures of the long-developed rationality and humanity of African peoples were significant consequences for intellectual agendas and practices of revolutionary developments in political arenas manifested in anti-colonial struggles throughout the African continent, and in efforts to construct new political, economic, social, and cultural orders after the successes of those struggles. A significant number among new generations of African intellectuals—many of them educated in institutions in Africa, many of which were administered by persons of European descent; and more than a few of them educated further in the most elite institutions of the colonizing “Mother Country”—became radicalized in their opposition to racialized colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples and resources. A number of these engaged intellectuals regarded Tempels and similarly oriented European and Euro-American thinkers as allies in their struggles against the dehumanizing rationalizations that supported European colonialism. Some regarded Bantu Philosophy as a defense, even a vindication, of Africans as rational human beings quite capable of managing their own lives and therefore capable of independence from colonial rule. Others, however, thought Tempels’ claims, and similar offerings by others, were misguided and misleading candidates for proper instances of philosophical thought by Africans. For these dissenters such candidates were really more ethnological studies of African peoples than philosophical articulations by them, and that their proponents were more misguided in seeming to attribute unconscious, unwritten, and widely shared putative philosophical systems to all of the persons in the particular groups under discussion. These dissenters disparaged such accounts as “ethno-philosophy.”

African and African-descended intellectuals involved in and otherwise supporting anti-colonial liberation struggles and post-colonial efforts to rehabilitate and further development new African nation-states found in these raging debates intellectual weapons with which to reclaim, reconstruct, and redefine the histories, personhood, peoplehood, needs, and future possibilities of African peoples. Life under exploitative, dehumanizing colonialism compelled intellectual and artistic engagements with prevailing conditions and spurred the nurturing of imaginative visions of possibilities of liberation and of how liberation might be achieved; whether and how modes and agendas of life before the holocausts might be recovered, restored, or adapted to new circumstances as thinkers and practitioners of the religious and theological, creative and expressive artists of literature, music, sculpture, dance, and painting all grappled with the profound existential challenges of the loss of personal and communal integrity through the violent imposition of the conflicts of Tradition and Modernity and the need for liberation and freedom. Twentieth-century struggles on the African continent have thus had significant consequences for, and impacts on, creative intellectual and expressive work in and with regard to continental Africa, and the African Diaspora generally, in giving rise to widespread, prolific, and in many cases especially important articulations of social, political, ethical, and expressive aesthetic thought and feeling. These articulations and expressions have become important object-lessons as well as inspiring resources of agendas and critiques drawn on to forge distinctive disciplinary enterprises of academic Philosophy. They have become, as well, the focus of informative critical thought for a number of philosophers focusing on “matters African.”

For example, the Tempels-inspired debates over the possibilities for and nature of philosophizing by persons African became focused, for a time, on discussions of the nature and anthropological distributions of modes of rationality unique to philosophizing, discussions that quickly prompted intense debates about the universality or relativity of “reason,” whether there were cultural (or racial or ethnic) differences in the nature or the exercise of reasoning, by persons African in particular historical and cultural contexts in particular. Positions taken in these and other focal debates were developed from the resources of a variety of traditions and schools of academic Philosophy and other disciplines, including analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutical, and existential philosophizings, various modes of social and political philosophy, and Afrocentrism.

Today there are a significant and still growing number of formally trained African philosophers throughout the world who draw on and contribute to the discipline and profession of Philosophy. Explicit developments of discursive formations, within and beyond the discipline, that are distinguished as being “African” have been unfolding through efforts by persons African, African-descended, and not of African descent to identify, reconstruct, and create traditions and repositories of literate African thought and artistic expression—oral, written, and in iconic forms of art—as forms of philosophizing. An important development has been the taking on for serious consideration the expressed articulate thought of particular persons past and present who were and are without formal training or degrees, in academic Philosophy especially, but who have engaged in and articulated more or less systematic reflections on various aspects of life, and the inclusion of instances and traditions of such expressed articulate thought in revised and new canons of African philosophical thought. An important leading example of efforts along these lines has been the groundbreaking work of deceased Kenyan philosopher H. Odera Oruka on the philosophical thought of traditional African sages. Engaging in actual field work in Kenya, Oruka interviewed and conversed with several locally recognized and respected sages and amassed a substantial body of transcribed, critically edited, and now published texts that are the focus of critical studies as well as motivations for more refined work of the same kind in numerous places on the African continent. Other philosophers, a number of them from other countries and not of African descent, have taken up Oruka’s lead and continue to explore the articulate thought of indigenous sages while incorporating the sages’ articulations into their research, scholarship, and course-offerings. “Sage philosophy” has thus become a subfield of energetic work in Africana philosophy in continental Africa (Oruka 1990b).

The Tempels-inspired debates over whether African or African-descended peoples have philosophies or can philosophize have been resolved—or are no longer taken seriously—and given way to explorations of other concerns. Both the anti-colonial struggles and the challenges of sustaining post-colonial successes and resolving setbacks and failures have prompted much academic philosophizing. The evidence is the development of programs of study leading to advanced and terminal degrees in Philosophy with strong emphasis, in a number of instances, on African philosophy in a significant number of institutions of higher education in several countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Peoples Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Republic of Benin, Senegal, South Africa); the appearance of a variety of journals and other published (and unpublished) philosophical writings and other modes of articulate expression (literary works, especially); the development of national organizations (in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and elsewhere) and international organizations (the Inter-African Council of Philosophy and the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association, the latter with headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, with members from throughout North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, Europe, and elsewhere) of professional philosophers and other knowledge-workers; and the organization of national, regional, and international conferences devoted to explorations of topics and issues explicitly characterized as philosophical.

The continuing maturation of these developments is evident in the emergence of different philosophical orientations, agendas, and foci that have, in turn, prompted several thinkers to endeavor to develop critical, metaphilosophical overviews of developing schools or trends that account for their emergence and implications, their similarities and differences. H. Odera Oruka (1990a) provided one such overview and distinguished what he termed four “currents” in African philosophy. One of these, already mentioned, he joined others in labeling and characterizing as ethno-philosophy : that is, second-order works that purport to identify and engage in an exegesis of the philosophical schemes and significances of articulated thoughts and expressions, acts, and modes of behavior shared by and thus characteristic of particular African ethnic groups. Another current, previously mentioned as having been initiated by Oruka, he termed philosophic sagacity to distinguish what he regarded as the rigorous and critically reflective thought of independent-minded indigenous thinkers who were not formally educated in modern schools. Nationalist-ideological philosophy for Oruka was constituted by the articulations of persons actively engaged in political life, especially those who led or otherwise contributed substantially to struggles for African independence and sought to articulate conceptions by which to create new, liberatory social and political orders. His designation for a fourth current, professional philosophy , was reserved for work by academically trained professional teachers and scholars of academic Philosophy and their students.

Other nuanced characterizations and examinations of trends in philosophizing on the African continent have been developed. O. Nkombe and Alphonse J. Smet (1978) identified an ideological trend, quite similar in characterization to Oruka’s “nationalist-ideological current,” that includes several very rich lines of articulate socio-political thought devoted to reconstructing the political and cultural situations of African peoples that were consequences of European imperialism, enslavement, and colonization: African personality; Pan-Africanism; Négritude; African humanism; African socialism; scientific socialism; Consciencism; and African “authenticity.” A second trend, the traditionalist , includes efforts that are quite similar to Oruka’s sage philosophy in that the efforts are focused on identifying philosophizing practices by traditional Africa thinkers, exploring the philosophical aspects of manifestations of these practices, and examining just how these practices resulted in the development of repositories of wisdom and esoteric knowledge. Nkombe and Smet identified a third trend: the intellectual orientations and practices of critical thinkers characterized by these thinkers’ critiques of the projects of persons grouped in the ideological and traditionalist trends structuring their critiques by norms and strategies drawn from familiar Left-critical (Marxist), Liberal Democratic, and creative appropriations of other traditions of European thought. Thinkers in the critical group applied the label “ethno-philosophy” to a number of the instances of thought in the traditionalist trend to set apart the latter modes of thought, as previously noted, as more akin to ethnology than proper philosophizing. Finally, Nkombe and Smet labeled a fourth grouping the synthetic trend, one characterized by the use of philosophical hermeneutics to explore issues and to examine new problems emerging in African contexts.

Still other scholars have attributed somewhat different characterizations to these and other traditions or modes of philosophizing in Africa and, importantly, identified newer developments. An example of the latter is the pathsetting metaphilosophical and anthologizing work of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, the deceased philosopher from Nigeria who pioneered bringing into several idea-spaces and discursive communities of academic Philosophy in the United States and Africa the interdisciplinary writings of contemporary scholars and artists from across Africa, African Diasporas, and other countries all of whom are significant contributors to postcolonial philosophizings. These are critical explorations of the challenges and opportunities facing Africans and people of African descent in various national and transnational situations defined by configurations of conditions after colonialism in which political liberation has not ended the suffering of African peoples, resolved long-running problems of individual and social identity, or settled questions regarding the most appropriate relations of individuals to communities; of appropriate roles and responsibilities of women and men and their relations to one another; of justice and equity after centuries of injustice and dehumanization; or of the most appropriate terms on which to order social and political life (Eze 1997).

The heuristic value of the concept of postcolonial is not to be underappreciated, for the various instances in which the successes of defeating the classical, directly administered colonial ventures in Africa of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been compromised by situations of indirect rule, or neocolonialism, effected through economic control of the new African nation-states by Western European and U.S. American transnational capitalist enterprises and multinational organizations and agencies supposedly providing advice and aid. These compromises must be fully appreciated in order to understand the prospects for full national independence and self-determination in the areas of economic, political, social, and cultural life generally. Of decisive issue is on what terms, via which strategies, African countries will contend with emergent challenges, some of which are of magnitudes and character neither encountered nor imaginable by “traditional” African thinkers, or, even, by contemporary thinkers. Foremost are the challenges from the scourge of HIV AIDS, which is proving to have as much impact demographically, thus in other areas of life, as were depletions of populations during the centuries of export enslavement though with consequential differential impacts on age groups. Likewise challenging are questions of the priority and efficacy of armed struggle and the terms of engagement in light of recent and ongoing histories of such ventures on the African continent, too many of which involve conscripting children into armies as armed warriors. Still other challenges: the terms and practices of political governance, at the level of the state especially, as many African nations struggle against collapse or debilitating dysfunction due to corruption, crippling economic exploitation, massive underdevelopment of human capital—of females especially—scarcities of food and other vital resources, and due to campaigns of genocide as ethnic affirmations coupled with ethnic denunciations ‘go imperial’.

Scholarly efforts to develop informative and critical metaphilosophical overviews of African philosophical trends, currents, and schools of thought, in part to forge new conceptions through which to take up these and other pressing challenges, are confirmation of the rich diversity of formal philosophizing by academic philosophers and other intellectuals and artists that emerged on the African continent during recent decades, and of the continuing maturation of their efforts. A significant number of these intellectual workers, philosophers among them, have cultivated international relationships with other scholars and artists and their organizations; and some of them have spent several years in, or even relocated to, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, and other countries for both formal education and to work in institutions of higher education. In the process of doing so many have also developed the professional relations, practices, and levels of accomplishment and recognition that have led to the publication of works that are continuing to attract wider critical attention in various discursive communities and are being added to course and seminar readings. These movements, relocations, cultivations of transnational relationships, and expansion of the literature of published works have enriched the development of new idea-spaces, the circulation of ideas, the formation of new discursive communities, and thereby contributed substantially to the development of Africana philosophy. There are now histories of African philosophy and major collections of writings in the subfield by professional African, African-descended, and other philosophers published by major, transnational publishing firms covering a still-expanding list of subject-matters organized, in many instances, by themes long established in academic Philosophy: historical studies; issues of methodology, logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics; philosophy of religion; political and social philosophy (Hallen 2009; Kwame 1995; Mosley 1995; Wiredu 2004). In several noteworthy instances, these philosophizings are conducted by way of deliberate explorations of articulations of the settled thought structuring the life-worlds of particular ethnic groups. Such explorations are being conducted in increasing numbers and, in the process, are rehabilitating and giving new meaning and heuristic direction to the once disparaged notion of “ethno-philosophy” by establishing the legitimacy and resourcefulness of culturally and ethnologically contextualized studies of articulated thought. As well, such studies will prove important for comparative studies of philosophizing (Bell 2002). Hopefully, these efforts will motivate similar studies in other parts of the world, contribute to comparative studies that will enhance our understandings of philosophizing globally, and curtail practices of making false generalizations in some modes of philosophical discourse, as, for example, characterizing the thought-endeavors of canonical Greek and European thinkers as being “universal” in their defining features or salience while being silent about the racial/ethnic, cultural, and gendered characteristics of the endeavors on the pretext that such matters are of no consequence for the thinkers’ “philosophy.”

As an ongoing project-of-projects, it would be unwise to attempt a comprehensive and definitive catalog and assessment of the thematic foci across the full range of articulations and discussions still being gathered and explored under the heading of “African philosophy” even as new discussions are emerging. Still, a number of developments are worth noting.

Several canonical subfields of academic philosophical discourses stand to be enriched by the inclusion of explorations of subject-matters within African contexts. As already noted, historical accounts of “Philosophy,” in the so-called “West” especially, are being reconsidered in light of critical explorations of more recently disclosed relations between and among peoples and places in Africa and “the West” or Europe—among Greece, Rome, and Egypt definitely—and in light of further explorations of the impact of such relations on even canonical thinkers in Europe. In general, the discussion of “ the origin of philosophy” in Ancient Greece must be replaced by comparative explorations of the emergence of philosophizing in various settings around planet earth, including pre-colonial North Africa, Ethiopia (home of Zera Yacob and Walda Heyat, two seventeenth century philosophers (Sumner 1976–78)), and places on the continent in which Arabic was a principal language.

As well, new questions should be posed and explored, among these the following: How are canonical figures and subject-matters of the European Enlightenments to be understood in light of the extensive involvements of European nation-states—and of canonical figures—in colonial imperialism and the enslavement of African peoples? How did the centuries-long institutionalization of enslavement affect the philosophizing of various European thinkers with regard to notions of freedom , the person , the citizen , justice , of manhood and womanhood? What was the impact on canonical European thinkers of the presence among them of the articulated thought and the persons of such figures as Anton Wilhelm Amo ( c . 1703–1758), a native of Ghana who, at age three, was transported to the Netherlands to be educated and baptized in keeping with colonial Dutch efforts to Christianize Africans? Amo settled in Germany and became a highly educated and influential teacher-philosopher. As more research and scholarship on such figures are completed, understandings of eighteenth century intellectual communities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe will have to be revised; so, too, notions of the meanings and influences of notions of race and their impacts on intellectual productions as well as on social life.

Work in Africana philosophy in general, and African philosophy in particular, compels comparative studies. No longer can it be presumed, certainly not taken for granted, that many canonical notions, even so-called “perennial” or “universal” issues, have the salience or global significance these issues have long been assumed to have. Conceptions of personhood in several indigenous African schemes of thought (of Akan and Yoruba peoples, for example) invite comparisons and rethinking of notions of personhood long sanctioned in some legacies of Western European and North American philosophizing. For example, Kwasi Wiredu (1987) of Ghana has argued persuasively that in the indigenous conceptual-ontological schemes of the Akan it would not be possible, in the normal course of matters, to generate the “mind-body problem” so central to the philosophizing of René Descartes. Explorations of matters of logic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics in Akan and other schemes of thought will illuminate the extent to which Western European and North American inventories of philosophical “problems” will have to be revised. Likewise for explorations in the areas of religion, aesthetics, politics, and the meaning of social life.

While there are near daunting challenges being faced by African peoples and other citizens of the continent’s nation-states that compel problem-solving philosophizing for enhanced living, there are, too, example-lessons of such engaged philosophizing that warrant close and appreciative study. One such example is the transformation under way in South Africa from the White Racial Supremacy of racial apartheid to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy. A crucial factor conditioning the transformation has been the soul-wrenching work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which sponsored public hearings during which victims of the evils of apartheid, and perpetrators of the evils, disclosed the truths of their suffering and of their dehumanizing aggression, respectively. Grounding premises of the TRC project were that disclosures of the truths of suffering and of abuse were necessary in order to achieve restorative justice, not just compensatory or retributive justice; and that restorative justice is in keeping with philosophical notions such as ubuntu —love, generosity, forgiveness—that are foundational to communal life at its best, thus are essential to the rehabilitative healing that must be lived through in forging new persons for a new and democratic South Africa (Bell 2002, Chapter 5, “African Moral Philosophy II: Truth and Reconciliation,” pp. 85–107). Here, then, a case-study in the articulation and testing out of a new conception of justice, of ethics more generally, in an African context, a case-study that should already be substantively instructive. Such comparative work in academic Philosophy that engages seriously and respectfully philosophical articulations of African and African-descendant thinking has only just begun…

The centuries of enslaving-relocations of millions of African peoples to the New Worlds of colonies- cum -nation-states created by European and Euro-American settler-colonists beginning in the sixteenth century, and the subsequent centuries-long continuations of descendants of these African peoples in, and migrations of others to, these locales, occasioned the formation of new peoples of African descent in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere. Individuals and groupings of these peoples developed and perpetuated shared creative responses to the impositions of various forms of systematized racialized oppression and class exploitation motivated and rationalized by notions of White Racial Supremacy, and further complicated by considerations of sexuality and gender. In the New Worlds, as had become the case in Africa after the colonizing and enslaving incursions of acquisitive peoples from Europe and the Arabian peninsula, the recurrent and decisive foci of life in the racialized crucibles were the struggles to endure while resolving mind- and soul-rending tensions that threatened and otherwise conditioned self- and community-formation and living.

There were several major sources of these tensions. One, the traumas of the radical dislocations experienced by the millions of persons kidnapped and purchased into relocation to enslavement through terrifying transport across thousands of miles of ocean during which many thousands died. Another, the soul and psyche-taxing ambiguities and ambivalences of being compelled to become and be, in important senses, both New World “African” and “American,” “Canadian,” “Brazilian,” “Puerto Rican,” “Trinidadian,” “Haitian,” “Jamaican,” “French,” “British,” etc., while, as slaves, being denied full access to the resources of the prevailing meanings and practical realizations of the defining identities of the most highly valued anthropological categorizations and social positions in the socio-political orders of the new states and locales as well as to the material resources crucial for realizing lives of well-being and denied full retention of and access to the self-and community-defining resources of their natal cultures.

How the various African-descendant persons and communities resolved these tensions conditioned the formation of new identities, life-agendas, and praxes for living. Fundamental were the recurrent and varied quests to survive and endure . With whatever success there followed other fundamental recurrent and varied endeavors. Among the most compelling were quests to define and secure freedom , quests that were profoundly affected by the absence of any recourse to protections of law and by severe limitations imposed on Black peoples’ participation in what has come to be called “the public sphere.” Participation in this sphere with protection of laws—for example, to articulate one’s case for impartial and fair recognition and respect as a human being, particularly as a woman or man of a despised race—was hardly ever allowed in slave-holding polities, and very infrequently even in locales where slavery had been abolished as invidious discrimination against persons of African descent continued. When speaking out or otherwise expressing oneself on one’s or one’s people’s behalf was prohibited or strenuously circumscribed and could be punished by beatings, imprisonment, or death with no legal protection, the tensions were indeed wretched.

The variety of reasons for and means of coping in such circumstances, and the variety of conceptions of life to be lived and of freedom to be achieved in the various New World locales, were approached differently by activist thinkers of African descent, conditioned by adaptive continuations—more or less—of some Old World African cultural agendas and practices. The efforts gave rise to developments of different traditions of thought guiding the formation and pursuit of what would become, over time, a variety of agendas, foci, objectives, and strategies of intellectual and practical engagement. It is these variegated, historically conditioned, socially grounded, imperatives-driven thought and praxis complexes, immersed in and growing out of concerns and struggles for survival, endurance, and human dignity in freedom, that are being recovered and studied as the earliest instances of philosophizing by diasporic persons of African descent and form the bases of the unfolding of several subfields of Africana philosophy.

The United States of America is one of several New World diasporic contexts of focus for these recovery and study efforts that are being conducted under the heading of “African American philosophy.” What follows is a historically contextualized discussion of several instances of the emergence of philosophizings born of struggles . However, it would be an ethical travesty and a case of epistemological presentist imperialism to require that thoughtful, critically reflective articulations by African Americans considered as instances of philosophizing worthy of the critical attention of professional philosophers first meet rigorous, formal standards for “right reasoning” settled on by professionals in the discipline during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. For the contexts in which folks of African descent were compelled to reflect on and reason about their first-order lived experiences were substantially conditioned by the agendas and social logics of projects of White Racial Supremacy and constitutive invidious anthropologies of raciality, ethnicity, and gender, not agendas governed by the academic logics of abstract formal reasoning. The pressing exigencies of daily, cross-generation life under racialized enslavement and oppression were what compelled reflective thoughtfulness, not leisured, abstractive speculation. Again, what has to be witnessed and appreciated across the historical and hermeneutical distances of centuries of history and life-world experiences structured by contemporary personal and social freedoms are the natures of the lived experiences and situations of those whose articulations, whose philosophizings, are considered as having been born of struggles .

Much psychic energy had to be expended by New World African and African-descended peoples contending with the institutionalization of their enslavement and oppression otherwise that was racialized, thereby naturalized, and thoroughly sanctioned and justified by every enterprise of deliberate, normative thought and aesthetic expression—law, science, theology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, and secular “common sense.” (For a historical account of African-American life in the United States see Franklin and Moss, Jr. 2000.) In each case a primary resource was the foundational metaphysical and ontological “unit idea” of a hierarchical Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1964) on which each race was believed to have a fixed and determining place. Accordingly, as living property it was encumbered on enslaved Africans and their descendants to live so as to make good on the investments in their purchase and maintenance by engaging in productive labor, without compensation, and to endure and reproduce as ontological slaves in order to sustain and justify the institution of their imprisonment. According to this supposedly divinely sanctioned philosophical anthropology, African and African-descended children, women, and men were defined as constituting a category of being to which none of the normative moral and ethical notions and principles governing civilized life applied. Pressed into an ethically null category, they were compelled to live lives of social death stripped of defining webs of ennobling meaning constituted by narratives of previous histories, renewing presents, and imagined and anticipated futures of flourishing, cross-generational continuation.

On the whole, they did not succumb to the requirement to become socially dead, certainly not completely, though many thousands did. Always there were those who cultivated strengths of body, mind, soul, and spirit and exerted these in defense of the preservation of senses of themselves and of their peoples, of their “race,” as having worth beyond the definitions and valuations set on them by rationalizations of institutionalized enslavement and oppression. Always there were those who, in the cracks, crevices, and severely limited spaces of slave life and constricted freedom, preserved and shared fading memories of lives of beauty and integrity before the holocaust; who found, created, and renewed nurturings of imaginings of better life to come through music-making, dancing, and creative expression in the artful fashioning and use of items of material culture, and in the communal and personal relations, secular and spiritual, that the slaves formed, sustained, and passed on.

Nurtured by these efforts, they resisted the imposition of ontological death and nurtured others in resisting. They reflected on their existence and the conditions thereof; conceived of and put into practice ways to endure without succumbing, ways to struggle against enslavement and the curtailment otherwise of their lives and aspirations; and conceived and acted on ways to escape. They studied carefully their enslavers and oppressors and assessed the moral significance of all aspects of the lives enslavers and oppressors led and determined how they, though enslaved and despised, must live differently so as not to follow their oppressors and enslavers on paths to moral depravity. They conceived of other matters, including the terms and conditions of freedom and justice; of better terms and conditions of existence and of personal and social identities; of how to resist and endure while creating things of beauty; how to love in spite of their situations; conceived of their very nature as living beings …

These considerations took various forms within and across the centuries. More than a few African and African-descendant persons would engage in concerted intellectual and practical actions directed against the enterprise of enslavement in all of its forms. Their considerations and articulations can be found in various repositories of philosophizings: in the lyrics and rhythmic structures and timings of various genres of music-making; in newspaper writings and pamphlets; in poetry and other modes of creative writing; in letters; in slave narratives and autobiographies; in the legacies and documentary histories of institutions, those of Black churches and church denominations especially; in those of women’s and men’s service organizations; in the documentary histories of conventions and convention movements; etc. For from the earliest instances of the enslavement of Africans in the colonies in the 1600s and continuing through the 1800–1865 Civil War between forces of the Union of North and East and forces of the Confederacy of the South, militant agitation for the abolition of slavery was a prominent endeavor among persons of color both “free” and enslaved, as were efforts to achieve greater respect and freedom for Black women from male domination and oppression and from sexual exploitation as well as from racism. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), a young, lettered house-slave in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote poems “on various subjects, religious and moral,” in one of which she expounded on the significance of “Being Brought from Africa to America” and extolled Christians to remember that though Negroes be “black as Cain,” they, too, can be “refin’d and join th’ angelic train” (Wheatley [1773] 1997). Aside from Wheatley’s highly polished and thoughtfully probing poetry, the fact that she had penned the verses prompted such disbelief that her master, and a prominent group of White men of the city, including the governor and lieutenant governor of the state, felt compelled to write letters to the publisher and the reading public to attest that Wheatley had mastered the English language and was, indeed, the author of the verses. Lettered articulation, in high verse no less, was a significant counter to claims of Negro inferiority, hence the need for legitimation of Wheatley’s writings by White persons of significant standing in order for those writings to enter a race- and gender-constricted literary public sphere.

Wheatley was the first in what would become a long and continuing line of enslaved persons of African descent in the United States who took up creative and other genres of writing as a means for engaging in resisting oppression and for reclaiming and exercising their humanity through thoughtful articulation. Slaves’ narrations of the stories of their lives and of the conditions of enslavement and of their aspirations and quests for freedom, constitute an extraordinarily rich body of literature to be studied for philosophizings born of struggles . Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) is but one example of such narratives. Consider carefully Equiano’s recounting having to wrestle with and reclaim his sense of self, even his name, after having been stolen into slavery as a child, transported to the New World, and being renamed “Gustavus Vassa.” A profound and consequential instance of existential philosophizing, Equiano’s Narrative , one that discloses the significance of a compelled struggle to reclaim and exercise a person’s right, and power, of identification of self and social being…

For a Negro, slave or free, to indulge in the articulation of critical reflections on the nature of their being and the conditions of their life was a bold contradiction of prevailing characterizations of African peoples and their descendants in the racialized ontologies of White Racial Supremacy, and a dangerous threat to the enterprise. David Walker (1785–1830) exemplified the threat. He sent shockwaves of fear across the slaveholding South, especially, with the publication and wide distribution of his Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829) in which he advocated forcefully that Coloured people rise up in armed struggle against their oppressors. Moreover, in articulating his provocative appeal in a written document, Walker employed with great skill and impact a strategic use of rhetoric to gain leverage in the public sphere: while ostensibly directing the Appeal to an audience of “Coloured Citizens” almost none of whom were regarded as citizens and very few of whom, among those enslaved certainly, could read and, if they could, would have been prohibited from getting their hands and minds on such an appeal, in truth was also directed at White slaveowners and oppressors. This strategy would become a staple in the arsenal of discursive strategies Black folks would use to engage in the work of articulating their considerations and advocating for life-enhancing changes.

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), a passionate and indefatigable opponent of enslavement, the institution of slavery, and of the subordination of women (“What Are the Colored People Doing for Themselves?” 1848; “Prejudice Not Natural,” 1849; “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” 1854), would use the strategy with superbly nuanced skill. An especially brilliant thinker and prolific writer, he was also brilliant in his oppositional eristic engagements over the constitutional, biblical, and ethnological justifications of Negro inferiority and enslavement and over a wide range of other subjects, including the compelling need for appropriate education (directed at preparing the formerly enslaved for productive, economically self-sustaining labor), good character, and political equality. Douglass was an astute critical thinker and speech-maker, and was a foremost thinker with regard to such matters as the constitutionality of slavery, of the meanings of freedom and justice , and of the implications of both for enslaved, free, and freed Negroes (Douglass 1845). Maria Stewart (1803–1879), likewise committed to freedom and justice for Black people, was a pioneering feminist in speaking out publicly (“Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” 1831) and thus took advantage of cracks in the public sphere to advance the cause for abolition and the liberation of women (Stewart 1831). Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree, 1797–1883) was a legendary unlettered but unnervingly bodacious itinerant intellectual provocateur who agitated for ending enslavement and the subordination of women (“Woman’s Rights,” 1851). On one celebrated occasion, Truth walked uninvited into a Women’s Rights Convention of assembled White people, sat down on the edge of the speakers’ stage until she simply had to be recognized, and then delivered her now famous “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” speech (Truth 1851).

If slavery were abolished, what did the vocal Negro advocates think would be the most appropriate modes and ends of life for Negro men and women?

For some it would or should involve assimilation , that is, processes by which one racial and/or ethnic group is absorbed by another, for some physically as well as socio-culturally, with one group relinquishing its own racial and/or ethnic cultural distinctiveness to take on the defining life-world character and practices of another. For early African American assimilationists this would have meant accepting as appropriate and sufficient goals for African American life the country’s pronounced cultural, social, political, and economic ideals—though generally without endorsements of the superiority of the White race—as proof of their humaneness and of their having “risen” from a condition of “savagery” to having become “civilized,” particularly by having become Christianized.

However, particular care must be taken in characterizing an engaged thinker’s commitments and aspirations as “assimilationist.” While appropriate and useful in some instances, in others the label is often misused or misplaced, for various thinkers were quite nuanced in articulating their positions on various matters: for example, in advocating assimilation of prevailing economic ideas, principles, and practices while advocating social, cultural, and political independence for Black people. Douglass, one of the most well-known of African American cultural and political assimilationists, is an instructive example. He was not an advocate of the assimilation of the Negro race into the White race; rather, he preferred, at the extreme, the assimilation of all distinct races into a single, blended race, so to speak, so that there would no longer be distinct races in which aspirations for super-ordination and subordination could be invested. Similar views on cultural and economic assimilation were articulated by T. Thomas Fortune (1856–1928), the journalist and advocate of Black unionizing and political independence (“Political Independence of the Negro,” 1884), and by the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1881), who at one point was convinced that “ This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race ” (“The Past and the Present Condition and the Destiny of the Colored Race,” (1848; 1996, p. 200), emphasis in the original).

On the other hand, there were Negro women and men of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of enslavement for whom the prospect of assimilating with White people in any fashion or on any terms was to be firmly rejected. Such sentiments were especially prominent during the decades leading up to the Civil War as conditions became even more constraining for supposedly free-born and freedpersons with the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law that stripped away any legal protection for escaped and former slaves who made it to free states by declaring it legal for any White person to apprehend any Negro who could not document their free status and return the person to enslavement. Garnet, responding to the circumstances the law created, is representative of those Black folks who became advocates of the emigration of Negro people to Africa. He was the founder of the African Civilization Society, an organization that promoted emigration of American Negroes to Africa in keeping with a more positive agenda than was the case with the American Colonization Society, which was organized by White people to foster the relocation of troublesome abolitionist free Negro people to Liberia, the colony founded with federal support by White Americans intent on preserving the institution of slavery and White Racial Supremacy.

Emigrationist considerations and projects thus became prominent ventures during this period, advocated with persuasive force by other very able activist thinkers, among them Edward Blyden (1832–1912), James T. Holly (1829–1911), and Martin Delany (1812–1883). Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) was an especially well-reasoned critique of notions of citizen prevailing in the United States and a detailing of conditions affecting Colored people, including, in his estimation, their overreliance on “moral theorizing” and not enough on pragmatic political reasoning informed by comparative studies of the histories of oppression of other “nations” within nation-states dominated by an antagonistic national (i.e., racial) group (Delany 1852; 2004). Based on his analysis, Delany was convinced that people of color could not enjoy lives as full citizens with full respect and rights in the United States. Hence, he reasoned, people of color should leave the country for South America—though later he would advocate emigrating to Africa—to establish their own independent nation-state. (However, when the Civil War erupted, Delany was persuaded by Frederick Douglass, his former colleague in publishing The North Star newspaper, to join other Black men in forming a regiment to aid the Union forces in defeating the Confederate Army and the South’s agenda for the continuation of the enslavement and oppression of Black people.)

It is important to note, however, that emigrationists were often motivated not only by desires to escape the various modes and intensities of disrespect for their racial being and humanity by relocating to Africa, in particular, but also in order to fulfill aspirations to engage in missionary work among native peoples on that continent in order to “raise” them from “savagery” to “civilization” through education and Christianization. Edward Blyden, for example, spent a large portion of his life engaged in educational and missionary work in Liberia. James T. Holly, who advocated emigration to, and himself subsequently settled in, Haiti and authored a lengthy work devoted to “defending the inherent capabilities of the Negro race, for self-government and civilized progress” ( A Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and Civilized Progress , 1857), was a clergyman. So, too, was the indomitable Queen’s College of Cambridge University-educated Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), who devoted twenty years of his life to educational and missionary work in Liberia and Sierra Leone followed by years of pastoral work in the United States. Crummell (“The Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa,” 1860; “The Race Problem in America,” 1888) was a formidable and very articulate thinker, author, speechmaker, and organizer with commanding presence. He was a principal founder of the American Negro Academy (1897–1924), a gathering of astute minds and engaged Negro men devoted to analyzing the conditions of life of Negroes in the United States, to determining how best to protect them from the continuing ravages of centuries of enslavement, and to determining how best to develop the race to achieve political and social equality and economic justice.

Worthy of critical exploration in the case of these figures: the extent to which, and on what terms, each of them embraced (assimilated) prevailing European and Euro-American conceptions of civilization and the processes and conditions, states of character in particular, by which a person or people could be said to be “civilized.” It is apparent in their writings and the logic of their missionary work, in other lands as well as within the United States, that neither figure accepted the long-prevailing arguments that the Negro race was inherently and ineradicably inferior. To the contrary, close scrutiny of their articulations will reveal that each was convinced that the civilizational inferiority of continental Africans, and of the ignorant, brutally constrained Negroes of deficient character in the United States, was due to conditions of deprivation fostered by the enslavement and racism perpetrated by White people. At the core of the missionary work of these men, and of many of their female and male contemporaries and successors, including persons who worked at “uplifting” enslaved and freedpersons in the United States, was a principled and dedicated commitment to well-reasoned and forcefully articulated belief in the God-given humanity and inherent worth of persons of the Negro race, and fervent and equally dedicated belief in the ameliorative and progressive benefits of education and racial independence. And each of these seminal figures took himself or herself as a living example of the actualization of the potentiality for substantial, qualitative development and advancement by Negroes, contrary to the characterizations of the race by those who rationalized and otherwise sought to justify enslavement and constrictions of the range of possibilities for Negro development. The articulations of a significant number of such persons have been preserved in the vast body of writings contending with enslavement, with aspirations and quests for freedom and justice, with what a constitutionally democratic and multiracial United States of America ought to be in order to include Coloured people as full citizens and fully respected human beings. Theirs are, indeed, philosophizings born of struggles .

Beyond question, one of the particularly acute axial periods of history for people of African descent in the United States of America was that of the half-decade of civil war (1860–1865) continued through ensuing years of Reconstruction-struggles between White proponents of a culture of aspiring aristocratic genteel racial supremacy and a political economy devoted to developing industrial and finance capitalism in the North and East of the country who also wanted to preserve the federated union of states, and White proponents of a regional civilization devoted to a decidedly pronounced and violently aristocratic Southern hegemonic White Racial Supremacy based on a political economy of agrarian capitalism supported by enslaved Negro labor, proponents who forged a Confederacy out of states that seceded from the Union in order to preserve their distinctive civilizational project. For a great many Black people, the hope was that the Union forces would prevail in the war, the institution of slavery would be abolished, and they would be freed and free to enjoy lives of full citizenship. More than a few devoted themselves, in various ways, to aiding the Union efforts, some even as fighting soldiers. Frederick Douglass played a major role in persuading President Abraham Lincoln to allow Negro men to join the Union army as fighting soldiers and in persuading many men to join. With President Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freeing the slaves in the Confederate states and Union victory in the Civil War two years later, the day of Jubilation! for Black people and other opponents of the institution of slavery appeared to be at hand.

And so it seemed. There followed a brief, euphoric period of statutory freedom during which Black people held elective and appointive offices in many states that had been part of the Confederacy and otherwise made initial significant gains in other areas of life. However, a post-war (1877) so-called compromise between Republican economic and political forces in the North and East and those of Democrats in the South settled a disputed presidential election (a contest Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden) and allowed a South not completely vanquished by the lost war to regain power in its region in exchange for Republican hegemony in the federal government.

Violent terrorism and brutal repression of Negroes followed immediately, in the South especially, which spawned two decades (mid 1860s-1880s) of post-Reconstruction struggles by newly-emancipated Black people to survive conditions in which they had been set adrift by many former allies in the North and East and were being pressed back into near-slavery by forces in the South. A Great Migration ensued as hundreds of thousands of Negroes left the South for hoped-for better opportunities without racial violence in the East, North, Southwest, and West of the United States, in some cases in response to persuasive articulations by various spokespersons (Edward W. Blyden, James T. Holly, and Alexander Crummell, among others) who renewed calls for various programs of emigration or what some scholars have termed separatist Black Nationalism : migrations within and out of the country to sites on which all-Black communities and towns would be formed (away from the United States in Africa; within the country in Kansas and Oklahoma, for example).

Migrations within the United States were by far the most significant of the relocations. And the movements greatly accelerated over the decades as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the U.S. American economy was undergoing transformation into an industrial giant and international power as a consequence of meeting the needs of production to support the country’s participation in the First World War and other developments. In the North, Northeast, and West of the country this industrialization created historic demands for workers and, subsequently, historic opportunities for work. Meanwhile, in the South rapidly increasing mechanization in agriculture and subsequent decreasing reliance on the labor of nearly-enslaved, hyper-exploited Negro tenant farmers and workers, and increasing industrialization in the region, left the greater majority of Black people in dire straits. These developments, combined with hopes for life unrestricted by racial segregation enforced by brutal violence, by lynchings especially, exerted additional pull-and-push forces that prompted hundreds of thousands to join in the migrations to the country’s industrial centers.

In settling in the new locales, the migrants and their subsequent generations began to undergo what, with hindsight, became a historic and wrenching transformation of what had been, for the most part, a brutally oppressed, illiterate, yet resolute agrarian peasantry into an ethno-racial urban working class, and the transformation of a significant few of them into a modern middle class. With the transformations came vexing challenges and opportunities. Among the most compelling needs were for forms of life appropriate to the new urban circumstances—as well as for those who remained in the rebuilding South—that would sustain the person and a people and promote flourishing life in conditions of intense competition with other ethno-racial class groups, and high risks of social disintegration and failure as invidious racism, unchecked by federal restraints, became ever more intense and widespread. There were, then, compelling needs for social and cultural as well as economic support as nuclear and extended family units were disrupted in being stretched across long miles of migration and crucial forms of communal and organizational support that helped to sustain life in the South were in very short supply in the new urban centers. Once again, in the context of demanding needs to be met in the struggle to survive and endure, particularly thoughtful and articulate Black persons took up the challenges of conceiving what was best to be done for the well-being of the race, and how best to achieve well-being.

African American women were especially prominent in endeavoring to attend thoughtfully and pragmatically to the well-being of the race, but also in endeavoring to make good for Black women on the promises of Emancipation for social, political, and economic freedom. An exemplary figure in this regard is Anna Julia Cooper (1859?-1964), who graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and, at age sixty-five, completed a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805 (Cooper 1925). A career educator before earning her doctorate, Cooper was a pioneering feminist who set out a provocative view of what she regarded as the superior capacity of women to lead the reformation of the human race in her book A Voice from South (1892). Poet, journalist, novelist, and essayist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) weighed in with a forceful argument that the “spiritual aid” that women can provide is crucial for moral development and the social advancement of the human race (“Woman’s Political Future,” 1893). Memphis, Tennessee-born and Oberlin College-educated Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) lived a stellar life of articulate leadership in uplift and advocacy organizations devoted to the development and well-being of Colored women (Colored Women’s League, the National Association of Colored Women), commitments articulated in “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898, published 1904) and other writings. Fluent in several languages, Terrell forged relations with Negro and other women in several countries who worked for reforms on behalf of women. And particular note must be taken of the audacious, pistol-totting Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), an investigative journalist and newspaperwoman who took it upon herself, as an anti-lynching crusader, to investigate cases of lynching across the country to document the facts of each case, which she published in 1895 as The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States with an introductory letter from Frederick Douglass, with whom she collaborated in many endeavors. During an especially violent and trying period, courageous, thoughtful, and articulate activist Black women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell, and others initiated what would become a long and varied tradition of feminist philosophizing and work by women of African descent devoted to the enhancing development of Negro persons, families, organizations, and communities.

Few of these thoughtful feminists, it should be noted, were energetic advocates of Nationalist emigration during this turbulent period. Perhaps because many Nationalist agendas and articulations were soon eclipsed (though by no means completely silenced) during the years of 1880–1915 that came to be largely dominated by the persuasive ameliorative leadership of Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), an educator and strategic power-broker who focused his considerable efforts on uplifting a Black southern peasantry into educated literacy for economic self-reliance and on the nation-wide organization of Negro businesses for the pursuit of predominance in certain sectors of the economy. After delivering a poignant and crafty invited “Atlanta Exposition Address” to resounding praise during an 1895 international industrial exposition, Washington, already well on his way as a leader recognized as such by Negro people, was elevated by certain powerful and influential White people to the vaunted position as their leader and spokesman for “the Negro” to whom they would turn to broker matters in race relations. The key to this positioning was the reaction of many White people, concerned about post-war transformations under way in race relations, to the following declaration in Washington’s Exposition address: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress” (Washington 1895; 1992, p. 358). Concentrating on the first part of his statement, anxious White people interpreted his public endorsement of the “purely social” separation of the races as an endorsement by Washington of the hegemony of White people in all areas.

It was not. In fact, Washington was explicit in the address in declaring that it was “important and right that all privileges of the law be ours…” He went further in articulating a vision of “that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law” (Washington 1895; 1992, p. 359). Hearing, apparently, what they wanted to hear, not the fullness of what Washington wanted them to hear, anxious White people of power and influence certified him a ‘good and safe’ Negro and promptly made him their go-to Negro designated by them as “ the Leader of the Negro people.” Washington accommodated them, in service to his own ego as well as in service to the benefit of the Negro race (by his own reasoning, of course). He was brilliantly skillful in executing a nuanced, pragmatic strategy of wearing a mask of seeming accommodation to White hegemony as he promoted Negro empowerment and self-sufficiency through education that stressed disciplined comportment, thrift, industrial and agricultural work, and ownership of property (and while clandestinely supporting securing political equality for Negroes). As an enlarged figure who brokered the largesse and influence of White people flowing to Negroes throughout the nation, and as the founding administrative and educational leader of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama that continues to provide education to persons of African descent, Booker T. Washington’s philosophizings, political engagements, and practical endeavors would have widespread, profound, and lasting impact.

Washington was challenged, publicly and on several fronts, by, among other thinker-activist Black persons, the astute and irrepressible thinker-scholar (and more) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) whose philosophical stances and strategies for transforming the conditions of existence for Black people were substantially different from Washington’s seeming public accommodation to White social hegemony. In the view of some, Washington might be better described as a social separatist and economic and political conservative committed to Black economic independence made even stronger by the predominance of Negroes in some sectors of the national economy resulting in the dependence of White folks on the productivity of Black folks. To this end, for Washington and similar conservative accommodationists, the economic and political hegemony of White people was to be finessed by strategies of seeming acceptance by Black people that masked surreptitious opposition as Colored people pursued economic self-reliance, full political citizenship, and eventual social acceptance that was to be “earned” by forming and exercising good character and responsibility through education for, and the practice of, honest, socially productive, and economically rewarding work.

Du Bois, however, argued for immediate recognition of and respect for Negro people with full civil and political rights (though he supported qualifications for exercising the franchise for all voters), social equality, and economic justice. He became an outspoken critic of Washington’s leadership (“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” 1903) having become impatient with the latter’s accommodating gradualism and the spirit-sapping impact he (Du Bois) thought this was having on those Black folks who were ready, even overdue, for full equality and respect (Du Bois 1903; 1992). In contrast to Washington, Du Bois might best be described as a cultural nationalist advocating pluralist integration : pursuit of a racially integrated socially and politically democratic socio-political order—and, later in his long life, a democratic socialist economic order—in which diverse racial and ethnic groups cultivate and share, and benefit mutually from sharing, the products of their cultural distinctiveness to the extent that doing so does not threaten the integration and justness of the social whole.

The two men were from profoundly different backgrounds. Washington had been born into slavery, but with the aid of education and character development at Hampton Institute he was able to advance to national and international prominence as an educator and figure of unprecedented influence, which he recounted in his widely read and inspiring autobiography Up From Slavery (Washington 1901; 1963). Du Bois, on the other hand, never had living experience with slavery, nor, even, with much in the way of invidious racial discrimination before entering college in the South. With undergraduate degrees from Fisk University and Harvard University, studies at the University of Berlin, and a Ph.D. in History from Harvard, Du Bois was one of a very few exceptionally highly educated persons in the United States. Drawing on his learning and with arrogant confidence in his education-enhanced, penetrating, creative, and critical intellect, varied, frequent, and penetrating scholarly and creative explorations of the history, conditions, and future prospects of the Negro and other oppressed races, as well as of Western Civilization, became his passionate and committed life’s work.

Du Bois far outstripped Washington in the range of his (Du Bois’s) concerns, the depths of his explorations, and the extent of his seminal involvements in and contributions to international organizations and movements pressing for independence for colonized African and other peoples, his contributions to a number of the international Pan-African Conferences (1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945) and Movement being but one example. And of particular note, Du Bois studied philosophy with William James and others while a student at Harvard, and, for a moment, considered pursuing a career in the discipline. Though he chose otherwise, his vast and rich articulations are frequently philosophically novel and astute and thus all the more engaging for researchers, scholars, teachers, artists, and millions of readers in various educated publics. His The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, has been a seminal text for generations of African Americans, and others, who were coming of age intellectually. Many were aided, especially, by his poignant characterization and exploration of the vexing tensions of the experience of “double consciousness”—of the “twoness” of being both Negro and American—and by his promising exploration of how best to work at resolving the tension by ‘merging’ the two selves into one ‘truer’ self.

From Du Bois, then, a philosophy of the soul, if you will, motivated by the compelling needs of a racialized people subjected to ontological as well as social, political, economic, and cultural degradation. In particular, during the turbulent decades of the orchestrated failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction, when real possibilities for racial and economic democracy were being killed at birth by the proponents and guardians of capitalism and White Racial Supremacy, Du Bois initially worked out his affirmative cultural nationalist position on the raciality of the Negro, and of other races, in “The Conservation of Races” (1897; 1992). This was an effort at conceptionalization to which Du Bois would return and rework several times, even near the end of his extraordinarily long and productive life, as in “Whither Now and Why” (1960; 1973). Throughout his life Du Bois remained convinced that people of African descent should articulate and appropriate a racial identity based on shared history and culture and continue to invest in their historical legacies and cultural creativity while holding open to all, “on the principle of universal brotherhood,” the organizations, institutions, and cultural riches in and through which the life-worlds of Negro peoples are forged, sustained, and shared.

Booker T. Washington died in 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois nearly half a century later (…on the evening before the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom as hundred of thousands of Negroes and other supporters converged on the nation’s capital to press for full civil and economic rights). The deaths of both brought to a close their long reigns of Black male leadership prominence, and predominance, in various arenas. Still, they were far from being the only leaders of their people. For as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, Black women were again substantial contributors to the intellectual explorations, organizational work, and local, national, and international movements seeking freedom and enhanced existence for African and African-descendant peoples. They were, as well, influential on Black male leadership. In 1897, for example, Du Bois accepted an invitation from Alexander Crummell to become a member of the American Negro Academy to share in the critical work of developing understandings of the deteriorating situation of Black people in the nation, made worse by widespread racially-motivated violence, in order to develop and implement strategies to protect and advance the race. (Du Bois offered his proposal in “The Conservation of Races,” the second Occasional Paper delivered to the group.) Due largely to Crummell’s objections, Black women were not initially allowed to become members of the Academy. However, while Crummell was a substantial influence on Du Bois, he (Du Bois) was also influenced by Ana Julia Cooper who advised his thinking on a number of matters regarding which he conversed with his male colleagues in the Academy. Other women—Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Jane Adams—also exerted critical influence on Du Bois through their ideas, their organizational work, and their personal relations with him.

These and other thoughtful, articulate, and engaged Black women did not allow themselves to be limited to subordinate roles of influence on male leaders. Rather, as was true for many of their foresisters, they had important matters of concern about which they thought seriously, discussed in their women’s clubs and other organizations, wrote and spoke, and worked with determination to effect progressive transformations in the lives of women and their families as well as for the racial group and the society as a whole. From the especially violent and trying decades of Reconstruction on into the early decades of the twentieth century, women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell, and others contributed substantially to what has become a long and varied tradition of woman-focused philosophizing and artistic expression by women of African descent in the United States.

Continuing the tradition, Elise Johnson McDougald, for example, wrote of “The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation” (1924–25; 1995); Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) of “The Negro Woman and the Ballot” (1927; 1995); Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander of “Negro Women in Our Economic Life” (1930; 1995); and Florence “Flo” Kennedy produced “A Comparative Study: Accentuating the Similarities of the Societal Position of Women and Negroes” (1946; 1995). Working through, and often leading, local, regional, national, and international secular and church-related women’s clubs and organizations, these and other Negro women gave defining shape to legacies of feminist and womanist engagement and leadership that are now being reclaimed and studied for inspiration and guidance. And the efforts and contributions of several of these women would be joined to those of later generations who would become major contributors, in thought and in other ways, to developments that would unfold as history-making movements devoted to cultural expressiveness, gaining more in the way of civil and economic rights, to gaining power, Black Power !, and to gaining more freedom, rights, and respect for women of all ethno-racial groups and socio-economic classes.

The historical context for the subsequent and more recent developments and movements was set by transformative dislocations and reconfigurations that intensified competitions within and among ethno-racial groups and socio-economic classes that affected significantly relations between White and Black races, in particular, as the country went through unprecedented industrial and economic growth and increasing predominance in the Western hemisphere as a consequence of the Great Depression (1929 through the late 1930s and into the early 1940s) and attendant disruptions, recovery from which was spurred significantly by involvements in the Second World War (1939–1945) and the Korean War (1950–1953). There followed several decades of economic expansion and rising prosperity for urban, industrial workers among whom were large numbers of Black workers, descendants of earlier migrants to the urban centers, who benefitted from the industrial intensifications and thus expanded significantly the growing modern, educated, increasingly economically viable, church-going, community-sustaining, psychologically secure and increasingly self-confident aspiring Black working and middle classes that were determined to provide successive generations with greater freedom, respect, and economic security bolstered by high expectations for even greater successes and achievements. Spread across both classes were the tens of thousands of Black men who returned to civilian life from the country’s recently racially integrated Armed Forces after serving at home and overseas to help “make the world save for democracy.” A great many of these veterans, supported by Negro women and men who kept the home-front while enduring the difficulties of wartime sacrifices as they worked the nation’s fields and factories though still denied the fullness of citizenship, were unwilling to acquiesce to the subordination to racial apartheid and invidious racial discrimination required by the doctrines and programs of White Racial Supremacy that still held sway.

This context became the nurturing soil in which various forms of Black Nationalism flowered once again as the influence of Washington’s philosophy and strategies declined. Caribbean-born immigrant Marcus Garvey (“Race Assimilation,” 1922; 1992; “The True Solution of the Negro Problem,” 1922; 1992; “An Appeal to the Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself,” 1923; 1992), proponent of a militant Black Nationalist philosophy of independence and self-reliance for Black peoples world-wide, and of the emigration of people of African descent from the U.S. and elsewhere “back to Africa,” rose to prominence from his base in New York City as the most successful mass organizer of Black people in the history of the U.S. with the founding and internationalization of his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) (Garvey 1925; 1986; Martin 1986). Garvey’s organizational and socio-political movement, fueled by his “Philosophy and Opinions” carried by his organization’s newspapers and other publications with international reach, along with the eruption of the Harlem Renaissance, likewise in New York, an eruption of literary and artistic productions motivated by very thoughtful and passionate affirmations of African ancestry and of the positive, creative importance of the cultural and aesthetic significance of African American life, were two of the most significant emigrationist and cultural nationalist developments of the period. Both were articulated through and otherwise spawned new, profoundly influential modes of creative, reflective thought and expression.

The Harlem Renaissance was an extraordinary eruption of heightened, critical, and creative self-conscious affirmative racial identification by thoughtful Negroes bent on expressing their affirmations of their raciality through all of the creative arts and modalities of articulation, a development unprecedented in the history of the presence of peoples of African descent in the United States (Huggins 2007). The cultural significance of the productions and articulations; of the engagements, practices, and creations of the bold and talented participant-contributors; of the organizations, institutions, and publications they created and endeavored to sustain (some successfully, many others not) devoted to culture creation, refinement, preservation, and mediation— all continue to have substantial influences even today, most especially in terms of the novel ideas and idea-spaces and discursive communities that were created and articulated through the bodies of literature and works of art, music, and dance that are still being mined productively by contemporary artists and scholars. The producers and carriers of the Renaissance were natives of the whole of the African Diaspora, across the Atlantic World especially, as well as from across the African continent, and they drew on the cultural and historical legacies of both (and on those from other parts of the world) for inspiration and content for their philosophizing artistic creativity in defining and giving expression to The New Negro.

Alain Leroy Locke (1886–1954), the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy, from Harvard (having already earned a degree from Oxford and having studied philosophy at the University of Berlin), and the first to be named a Rhodes Scholar, was one of the significant intellectual and facilitating midwives to the production and publication of much creative work during the Renaissance (as was Du Bois). As the guest editor for a special March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic devoted to explorations of race and the New York of people of African descent, Locke, titling the issue Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro , brought together for the issue writings of fiction and poetry; articles on music, drama, the Negro’s past, “Negro Pioneers,” “The New Scene,” “The Negro and the American Tradition”; and much else by a racially mixed large group of authors with expertise in a wide variety of fields. Among these: Du Bois (“The Negro Mind Reaches Out”); Elise Johnson McDougald (“The Task of Negro Womanhood”); pioneering Africanist anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (“The Negro’s Americanism”); sociologist E. Franklin Frazier (“Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class”); the young poet and creative writer Countée Cullen (“Heritage”); Howard University-based educator and scholar Kelly Miller (“Howard: The National Negro University”); poetess Gwendolyn B. Bennett and creative writer Langston Hughes writing on music; poems by Angelina Grimke; and a large number of others. After the great success of the special issue, Locke edited and published an anthology, The New Negro , that included revised versions of most of the material from the Survey Graphic special issue, but with much new material and artwork by Winold Reiss, a very accomplished artist from Bavaria (Locke 1925).

In the judgment of many scholars of the Renaissance, The New Negro became, in the words of one, “virtually the central text of the Harlem Renaissance.” The title was taken from the collection’s lead essay, “The New Negro,” which was written by Locke. In the essay Locke endeavored to characterize the “New” Negro, the circumstances of the emergence of this character-type, the nature of its shared pride-of-race character, its psychology and mission and relation to the Negro masses, and the consequences of the emergence of the New Negro for race relations in the United States and for developments in Africa and the African Diaspora for which this new group-figure would serve as the avant garde . The anthology, then, is a gateway to an important selection of articulations by figures who were seminal contributors to, as well as beneficiaries of, the Harlem Renaissance, and to the vast and still growing multidisciplinary body of works that explore various aspects, figures, contributions, and consequences of the Renaissance. And Locke’s lead essay is a poignant gateway into his career of philosophizing as well as an adept example of an attempt to simultaneously characterize and give agenda-setting character and guidance to an extraordinary praxis-guiding artistic and intellectual revolution the focal points of which were determined efforts of racial-group self-affirmation and self-determination, beginning with the radical ontological work of redefining and revaluing on progressive terms the meaning of the Negro , then setting the tasks by which the New Negro—the “thinking Negro,” as Locke characterized the group in his essay—would lead through decidedly Negro Africanist-inspired, philosophically-minded cultural creativity and articulate expressions of philosophizings born of struggles…

And lead they did, as a number of the persons, organizations, and institutions participating in and contributing to the Renaissance, the Garvey and other movements, and others in the social classes that were inspired by and fed them all became prominent figures in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement of the 1950s-mid 1960s during which “civil rights” and “integration” were major objectives of struggle. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund (which became formally independent from the NAACP in 1957), and the National Urban League were but three of several organizations that would lead the continuing, but substantially reenergized, organizationally strengthened, and philosophically prepared and focused struggles to secure legally sanctioned and guaranteed democratic freedom, social and political equality, economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes in the United States of America. Publications and statements from these and other organizations; member correspondences; legal briefs and papers from court cases; the creative and scholarly works from members and descendants of the Renaissance, Garvey, and other movements; Black newspapers of the period—all are rich repositories of the philosophizings fueling and guiding the new phase of struggle.

Studies of these philosophizings are likely to reveal that while there definitely were persons and organizations advocating radical, even revolutionary, transformations of the political economy and social orders of the United States, overwhelmingly the pursuit of desegregation and racial integration as important manifestations of the achievement of democratic freedom, social and political equality, economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes using moderate but progressive strategies of legal and civil-disobedience struggles were dominant means and agendas of social and political effort exerted by people of African descent in the United States over the last half-century and more. These commitments were manifested most profoundly in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement.

“The Movement,” as it was experienced and known by many of those intimately involved, proved to be a phenomenally historic, personally and socially transformative, national movement with profound international ramifications in Africa—South Africa especially—and other countries. Initially, the attack on racial apartheid in the quest for racial integration was pursued through legal challenges to de jure racial segregation. A major victory was achieved with the unanimous 1954 rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education I and II that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, thereby overturning the Court’s 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson decision that declared that government-sanctioned racial segregation was constitutional as long as “separate but equal” resources and facilities were provided. The team of engaged and creative Black (and White) legal warriors from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and other thinker-scholars (historians, sociologists, social psychologists) were successful in persuading the Justices on the Court that the invidious discrimination suffered by Black folks within the schemes of White-dominated racial segregation was manifested not only in decidedly unequal resources and facilities, but, through “inferior” education in Negro schools, in debilitating damage to the psychic souls and self-concepts of Negroes, the children especially, which severely impaired their capacity to develop into and be the kind of persons who could meet the full responsibilities and enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. In short, the legal team forged a legal strategy that rested on the construction and successful articulation of a sophisticated philosophical anthropology, aided by empirical psychological, sociological, and historical studies, in support of an argument regarding the vital linkage between the integrity of personhood and democratic citizenship, thus between the enabling of democratic citizenry and the education of the person free of resource-impoverishment and the distortions of the soul that were consequences of hierarchic, invidious racial discrimination that was being imposed on Negro children in racially segregated schools. The Court was persuaded...

However, this historic victory through persuasive philosophizing was initially stymied by recalcitrant, segregationist local governments and an overwhelming majority of White citizens in the Confederate South and by much foot-dragging by local governments and White citizens in other regions of the country. White opponents of racial integration who were determined to preserve segregation and White Supremacy unleashed yet another wave of violent terrorism. Nonetheless, the advocates of desegregation and integration were determined to secure full rights and human dignity for Negro Americans. A new philosophy and strategy of struggle was adopted that, through the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, had proven successful in defeating Great Britain as the colonial power dominating India: non-violent direct action in the pursuit of justice grounded in an explicit philosophical commitment to the sanctity of human life, including love for opponents, and to the redeeming and restorative powers, personally and socially, of principled commitment to engagement in nonviolent struggle.

Gandhi’s philosophy, the history and intricacies of the movement he led in India, and his leadership were studied closely by a young Negro missionary to India from the United States, James Morris Lawson, Jr., who, due to his commitments to nonviolence, had already been imprisoned for refusing induction into the military during the Korean War. Noting from news accounts that reached him in India that the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement in the United States was gathering force, Lawson returned to the country determined to find ways to become involved and contribute. While studying theology at Oberlin College in preparation for a career as a minister in service to the Movement for social justice, he was introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to Oberlin to deliver a speech. Lawson was persuaded by King that he (Lawson) should “not wait, come now” to the South to aid the Movement by, among other things, providing instruction in the philosophy of nonviolence. Lawson transferred to the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and was soon deeply engaged in providing intellectual and spiritual guidance and inspiration to the educational, psychological, philosophical, and practical preparation of legions of mostly young college students in the city who were committed to engaging in nonviolent struggle to end the indignities suffered by Black people as a consequence of de jure White Supremacy and racial segregation. The campaign they waged, led by Fisk University co-ed Diane Nash and with the support of increasing numbers of Nashville’s Black citizens, White college students, and that of more than a few very principled and dedicated anti-segregation White citizens, was eventually successful in bringing about the formal desegregation of the city’s public facilities and commercial establishments. Many of the Nashville Movement’s leaders and stalwart participants, Lawson included, would become major contributors to the national Movement while other student-participants helped to bring about further historic transformations in the city and elsewhere in the South, through their courageous participation in the Freedom Rides, especially. (A critical, full-length biography and philosophical study of James M. Lawson, Jr. and his philosophical commitments and engagements have yet to be undertaken and completed…)

A philosophy of nonviolence grounded in Christian love motivated and guided determined Black people, and allied White and other people, in achieving unprecedented progressive transformations of centuries-hardened, intellectually well-supported social, political, and, to notable extents, economic life in a United States of America ordered since its founding by philosophies of White Racial Supremacy and Black racial inferiority and subordination. Martin Luther King, Jr. (“Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” 1961; “The Ethical Demands for Integration,” 1963) has become the signature figure among several of the leaders of this Movement, marked distinctively by his profoundly thoughtful Christian theological and philosophical commitments to nonviolence as the grounding for personal and shared social life as well as for engaging in struggles for freedom and justice (Washington, J.M. 1986). However, the groundwork for the Movement he would be called to lead had been laid and further developed by many other organizationally-supported Negro women and men of articulate thought and disciplined action from labor and other constituencies: among these A. Philip Randolph (who served as a founding organizer and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council, and vice president of the AFL-CIO) and Bayard Rustin (a veteran of struggles for civil and other rights for Negroes and workers of all colors), who were the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during which King delivered the speech (“I Have a Dream...”) in which he invoked a vision for America that became his hallmark and a guiding theme of the Movement.

Certainly, Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most prolific and profoundly influential, even historic, figures of African descent whose articulations continue to compel widespread, intensive study as especially rich instances of religious, moral, theological, and socio-political philosophizing. Still, King’s articulations, as well as the sacrificial life he lived and gave in leadership service, firmly and uncompromisingly grounded in especially thoughtful commitments to Gandhi-inspired nonviolence (“Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” 1957; “The Power of Nonviolence,” 1958) and Jesus-inspired agape love (“Love, Law, and Civil Disobediance,” 1961; “A Gift of Love,” 1966) await full and widespread appreciation as the truly phenomenal gifts of inspiration, commitment, and guidance to a social movement that they were. They were gifts that, infused in and channeled by the Movement, changed the legal and social structures, the culture of race relations, and thereby the history of the United States. These gifts also inspired others in their struggles for similar changes elsewhere in the world. The consequences of the Movement that embodied these gifts confirmed, once again, that the combination of love and nonviolent struggle could, indeed, succeed. And, as has been the case throughout the history of the presence of persons of African descent in this country, these particular philosophical gifts were neither forged and developed in, nor mediated to others from, the contexts of academic Philosophy, but were, indeed, philosophizings born of struggles , gifts that changed a country for the better that, it is feared, has yet to recognize and embrace fully the confirmed lessons the gifts embody…

Overwhelmingly, the pursuit of desegregation and racial integration as goals of movements for democratic freedom, social and political equality, economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes has been a dominant item on the agendas of social and political philosophies motivating and guiding struggles exerted by people of African descent in the United States over the last half-century and more, manifested most profoundly in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement. However, the Movement’s integrationist agenda, moral-persuasionist strategies, commitment to nonviolence, and explicit commitment to a theologically and religiously grounded notion of love for the Movement’s opponents was strongly challenged by other organizational forces (mid-1960s to the early 1970s), especially by “Young Turks” in the Movement’s Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an influential number of whom were inspired by the revolutionary philosophies conveyed in the speeches, writings, and organizational activities of Malcolm X and the anti-colonial engagements and writings of Frantz Fanon as well as by major figures in decolonizing liberation movements in Africa and elsewhere that were being waged through armed struggle. These Young Turks, and others in a variety of decidedly Left-Nationalist organizations and proto-movements who were inspired by various notions of revolutionary transformation, initiated yet another resurgence of Black Nationalist aspirations and movements that came to be referred to collectively as the Black Power Movement. The period was also complicated by competitive conflicts with a cacophony of persons and organizations espousing commitments to anti-Nationalist multi-racial, multi-ethnic socialist and communist agendas.

This was a period of unprecedented tumult, complicated by violent rebellions by Black people in urban centers across the country, and by the nation’s involvement in a gone-badly-wrong and increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam that was highlighted all the more by national and international movements against the War led principally by young, college-age people, many of whom had come of age politically through their involvements in or educative witnessing of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Of particular note, a significant number of young White women who had been intimately involved in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Anti-War Movements had become increasingly poignantly aware of the disrespect for, misuse, and underutilization of women by many men in the Movements and became radicalized into forging a movement to address their concerns, which was subsequently characterized as the Second Wave Feminist Movement.

All of these developments were fueled by and fostered intense intellectual adventures, some of which were also fertilized by practical engagements of various kinds. The Black Power Movement, in particular, overlapped with and both fueled and was fueled by philosophizings and engagements that were definitive of more expansive and consequential Black Consciousness and Black Arts Movements that, as had the Harlem Renaissance of several decades earlier, spurred an intensive and extensive renaissance of aggressively radical and expressive creativity in the arts that was centered, once again, on reclaiming for self-definition and self-determination the ontological being of persons and peoples of African descent, with influences, in many instances, from various Leftist ventures, nationalist and internationalist as well as socialist and communist. This was an unstable and volatile mixture that cried out for a clarifying philosophy to provide guidance through the thicket of ideological possibilities and the agendas for personal and communal identity-formation and life-praxes that each proffered with greater or less coherence and veracity.

More than a few spokesmen and spokeswomen came forward to philosophize on behalf of their group’s or organization’s (or their own) vision for ‘what was to be done’ to insure liberation for Black people, people of African descent. (“Liberation” was the watchword for the new agenda; “Negro” and “Colored” were denigrated and cast aside, no longer acceptable as terms of racial identification). Politics—and all aspects and dimensions of individual and social life were explicitly politicized—became defined by and focused through the lenses of the substantive symbolics of racialized and enculturated Blackness , even as the intellectual warriors waging the conceptual and other battles on behalf of Blackness struggled to find adequate terms and strategies with which to forge satisfactory and effective articulations of the passionately sought and urgently needed new identities as articulations of long standing identities and life-agendas were discredited and thus rendered inadequate for a significant and influential few. For still a great many other “Negro?”, “Black?”, “Colored?”, “African- American?”, “African-descended?”, and “American?” persons there was more than a bit of psychic turmoil and tension, no less of consternation and confusion. And hardly any of these persons, nor even many of the most ardent warriors calling for and/or purveying new notions and definitions of “Black consciousness” and “Black” agendas for individual and shared lives, knew of and had recourse to Alain Locke’s sober and sobering well-reasoned “The New Negro,” nor the rich resources that had been created by the producers and carriers of the Harlem Renaissance. And so the intensified ontologizing philosophizing proceeded at near breakneck speed driven largely by a generation of young adults few of whom had, nor would accept, much in the way of intellectual or practical guidance from the experienced and wise of previous generations for whom many of the young and arrogant had too little respect…

The reason, Harold Cruse, a wise and very experienced elder of Left and Nationalist organizations and struggles and a formidable thinker in his own right, was careful to point out, was due to a severe and consequential disruption of the passing-on of experience-tested and verified knowledge from one generation to another by the ravages of the witch-hunting and persecuting of any and all accused of being a Communist or Communist sympathizer during the crusading campaign led by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Many lives and careers were destroyed as a result of McCarthy’s campaign, and many persons and organizations with Leftist commitments were either destroyed or driven underground, or otherwise left severely tainted and thus made an “untouchable” bereft of employment, even for one-time friends and close associates. (W.E.B. Du Bois was one who suffered this fate, which is largely why he made the momentous decision to renounce his citizenship and leave the United States for residence in Ghana, where he died…) The radical Young Turks, then, not short of courage or passion, set out on a mission all but impoverished, in many cases, of much needed historical and intellectual capital, thus were sometimes poorly armed for the battles they sought to wage. Still, the trans-generational disruption that Cruse pointed out was not complete. There were those who filled the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of the new Black renaissance who would be of significant influence and guidance, and would serve some in the new movements as personal as well as intellectual mentors and role models: Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin, among several others.

There would be much philosophizing born of struggles by the new generation. Much credit has to be given to those who had the wherewithal of discipline and fortitude, and good fortune, to survive and leave legacies of accomplishment that continue to enrich Black folks, and others. The Black Arts Movement, for example, had profound impacts through the productions and articulations that gave new directions and meanings to artistic creativity, to the agendas guiding creativity and expression and the mission of service to various audiences. A manifesto, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” by Hoyt Fuller (1923–1981; Fuller 1994) and his work as editor of the journal Negro Digest , which later was renamed Black World and was followed by First World when the publisher of the latter was pressured to discontinue publication of a journal serving Black radicals, were path-setting ventures during a period much in need of clear paths. Likewise “The Black Aesthetic” by the essayist and theorist Addison Gayle, Jr. (1932–1991), his introduction to an anthology that he edited and published bearing the same title (Gayle, Jr. 1972). A collection of writings on theory, drama, music, and fiction by many of the leading artistic minds in the new Black generation, The Black Aesthetic has come to be regarded by scholars as “the theoretical bible of the Black Arts Movement” and thus did for the makers of this Movement what Locke’s The New Negro had done for the makers of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Fuller and Gayle would play roles similar to Locke’s in serving as midwives to the creative and critically-minded development of a sizable portion of a generation of seriously radicalized Black thinkers-artists.

The new activist thinkers-artists of the 1960s—Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, Larry Neal, Mari Evans, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Maulana Karenga, for example—were as productive, formidable, and widely influential as were the New Negroes of the 1920s and 1930s, even more so as they exploited the advantages of access to the enabling resources of the media of radio, television, and recordings in addition to print media, and to the human resources that became available through lecture-circuits on college and university campuses. Many of these Black warriors of the intellect and arts took up positions, some settling into them for the long term, on the faculties of colleges and universities and helped to development the guiding philosophies and wage the political battles that ushered in new programs in Black and African Studies. In so doing they magnified the forcefulness and range of their intellectual and artistic powers and contributions, and helped to alter cultural and intellectual scenes in the United States and the African Disapora…

Until quite recently, there were very few person of African descent who were professionals in the discipline of Philosophy. As already noted, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of a very few to study Philosophy formally while a student at Harvard but decided against pursuing it professionally. Alain Leroy Locke was one of the first persons of African descent in America to earn a doctoral degree in Philosophy (Harvard University, 1918). A few more followed decades later (1950s), among them Broadus N. Butler, Max Wilson, Berkeley Eddins, and, still later, Joyce Mitchell Cook, the first African American female to earn a Ph. D. in Philosophy. These were some of the pioneering persons of African descent in the United States who entered the profession of academic Philosophy with the certification of a terminal degree in the discipline.

More recently (late 1960s through the 1970s) successive generations of persons of African descent have entered the profession as cohorts of new generations of young Black women and men entered the academy with the expansion of opportunities for higher education that came as a result of the successes of the desegregation-integration and Civil Rights Movements. More than a few of these persons were influenced by the Black Power, Black Consciousness, and Black Arts Movements, as well, and in some cases by independence and decolonization movements on the African continent and in the African Diaspora in the Caribbean. The emergence of and pursuit of distinctive agendas within academic Philosophy to articulate and study philosophizings by persons African and of African descent were initiated by several of the new entrants, agendas that grew out of and were motivated by these movements. Thus, the new entrants were determined to contribute as educators, sometimes as engaged intellectuals involved in movement organizations, by identifying and contributing to, or by helping to forge anew, philosophical traditions, literatures, and practices intended, in many instances, to be distinctive of the thought- and life-agendas of Black peoples. Here, then, the wellspring of concerns and aspirations that gave rise to calls for, and efforts to set out, “Black” philosophy, then “Afro-American,” and later “African American” philosophy, precursive efforts leading to what is now the more or less settled name , but still developing concept , of Africana philosophy.

Formal, professional recognition and sanctioning of these efforts, which had been pursued, with significant impact, through presentations of papers on and discussions of various topics in sessions during annual meetings of divisions of the American Philosophical Association (APA) and other organizations of professional philosophers and other organizations of teacher-scholars such as the Radical Philosophers Association (RPA) and the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), were achieved when, in 1987, the APA recognized the efforts as having established a legitimate sub-field of Philosophy and made “Africana philosophy” an officially listed specialty in the discipline. Across the years, the APA’s Committee on Blacks in Philosophy has been instrumental in organizing a number of these important sessions, though, of no less importance, many such sessions were hosted by other sympathetic and supportive committees of the APA as well as by other organizations of professional philosophers that held meetings concurrent with those of divisions of the Association. Thus, the recognition and sanction have come, to significant degrees, as results of long efforts led by philosophers Robert C. Williams (deceased), William Jones, Howard McGary, Jr., and La Verne Shelton, among others, each of whom gave years of service as chairpersons of the APA’s Committee on Blacks in Philosophy. Each also contributed early articulations that initiated the work of forging the sub-field.

Also of special importance to this long development towards recognition and legitimation, and to the production of much of the early writings, presentations, and critical networking collegiality that have been foundational to the development of Africana philosophy, were a series of conferences devoted to explorations of “Black Philosophy” or of “Philosophy and the Black Experience” that were held during the 1970s, most of them organized and hosted at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HCBUs: notably, Tuskegee University, Morgan State University, and Howard University) though important gatherings were also held at the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle ( ca 1970, another thirty years later), Haverford College (an international gathering in the summer of 1982 of African and African American philosophers and teacher-scholars from other disciplines), and, more recently, at the University of Memphis. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference, which has been hosted annually for fifteen years primarily through the indefatigable efforts of J. Everet Green and Leonard Harris, and the Alain Locke Conference organized and hosted biannually by the Department of Philosophy of Howard University (Washington, DC).

The development and institutionalization of African American philosophy, of Africana philosophy more generally, with recognition by the American Philosophical Association—though not by all, or even most, departments of Philosophy in academic institutions—have also been facilitated by the noteworthy success of many of the pioneers in securing and retaining positions in academic departments (of Philosophy, of Philosophy and Religion, of Philosophy and other disciplines) in various institutions of higher education across the country. A substantial few of these persons have earned tenure and promotions, several to the rank of Professor, while several have even been appointed to endowed professorships. Consequently, a slowly increasing number of philosophers who are African or of African descent now hold positions in departments and programs that serve graduate and professional students. Of importance, then, have been the growing number of lectures and seminars in colleges and universities across the country given and directed by philosophers of African descent in response to invitations, and as part of regular curricular offerings, respectively, of departments of Philosophy, often with the cooperation and co-sponsorship of other departments and programs. These invited presentations and regularized curricular offerings reconfirm and strengthen the intellectual legitimacy of much work in Africana philosophy while doing much the same for the invited and teaching philosophers.

One especially significant consequence of these important developments is that several of these persons now have built legacies of teaching and scholarship that span decades with significant influences on generations of students. Practitioners of Africana philosophy are even producing new generations of practitioners. And practitioners of all generations are contributing to the literature of articulate expression of what is now a substantial and growing body of works supporting teaching, research, and scholarship in Africana philosophy while, in the process of doing so, also initiating, and otherwise contributing to, substantial changes to discursive agendas. Certainly, the example beyond debate continues to be critical explorations of race and of “racism,” matters that have distorted the basic institutions, virtually all considerations and practices, and all lives across the entirety of the history of the United States of America, and that of much of the world. However, it was not until philosophers of African descent focused their philosophizing on critical engagements with the racial conditionings of the profession and of life generally that discussions, teaching, and scholarship within professional Philosophy were opened to and conditioned by new critical discursive agendas affecting numerous subfields within the discipline and the organization of the profession, evident in the surge of writings by philosophers African and of African descent published in mainstream journals and by mainstream publishers.

Race Matters by Cornel West (1994) became the national and international best-seller that propelled West into prominence as an academic philosopher and preacher-become-public intellectual who contributed to reinvigorated public critiques of racism with professionally attuned philosophical acumen. Yet, his earlier publication Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982) had even greater impacts on discourses within the academic disciplines of Philosophy, Theology, and Religion/Religious Studies, in particular. Of especially notable influence were his genealogy of racism and his sketching out of four distinctive traditions of responsive thought generated by Black thinkers. West’s genealogical critique drew on several canonical figures (Nietzsche, Michel Foucault) and was thus emblematic of his expansive learnedness and creative ingenuity in drawing on canonical figures to redirect critical thought back upon the social orders and history-making practices of those subjecting folks of African descent, and others, to dehumanization.

Others contributing to and shaping such critiques include Howard McGary, whose Race and Social Justice (1999) brought together a number of seminal essays in which he explored moral and political questions regarding race and racism in a new and distinctive (and distinctively embodied) voice among practitioners of Analytic Philosophy, a voice concerned with social justice, with issues of equity and inclusion especially, while drawing on and highlighting lived experiences of African Americans conditioned unjustly and immorally. For McGary, philosophical work was no longer to be confined to analysis restricted to ‘getting the terms right’. Rather, having lived experiences of invidious racial discrimination and impediments to accessing and exploiting conditions of possibility by which Black persons might forge individual and group-shared flourishing lives, across generations, McGary has remained committed to disciplined, well-argued clarifications and revisions of key notions by which to pursue and secure social justice, most especially for those “least well off”: the Black underclass .

Continuing such efforts, in a different register, with substantial and innovative contributions is Paul Taylor (who studied with McGary at Rutgers University). His Race: A Philosophical Introduction stands out as an especially clearly-articulated, nuanced, clarifying navigation of many of the complexities of conceptualizations of race firmly situated in reconstructions of historical practices guided by political and other agendas. Yet, it is Taylor’s Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics that is especially noteworthy. It is, perhaps, the first-in-decades book-length “assembling” (Taylor’s own characterization of his effort) of a deliberately philosophical theory of Black aesthetics: that is, a critical theoretical exploration of the roles expressive practices and objects play when taken up by Black folks in the creation and maintenance of their lifeworlds. (The philosopher Alain Leroy Locke, midwife to the New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissance, preceded Taylor by half-a-century in taking seriously Black expressive life, as did W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and numerous others.) Taylor’s efforts are doubly innovative in his endeavor to bridge two discursive communities heretofore not in communication: professional philosophers, and others, concerned with aesthetics who have had little to no concern with aesthetics in Black life; Black artists and critics fully immersed in the productions of and engagements with expressive practices and objects in Black life with little to no engagements with resources drawn from academic, professional Philosophy. As did Alain Locke, Taylor aims to contribute to a new generation of articulate thinkers who are focusing their critical acumen on the expressivity and performativity in productions of self, and of self in relations with others, of those who have been racialized as Black .

But, how have folks African and of African descent been figured in the expressive practices and products, and in the theorizings of such aesthetic ventures, produced, in both cases, by folks not Black? Robert Gooding-Williams is but one of several philosophers of African descent who probes these questions in his Look, A Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (2006), a collection of essays connected, he notes, by his persistent effort to explore whether it is possible to interpret race in ways that would be in keeping with what is required in political and cultural life if the United States as a polity were to become actually structured by democratic principles and practices while adult citizens fully acknowledge the history and continuing legacies of White racial supremacy that have structured the polity from its inception. In the chapter on “Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire,” for example, Gooding-Williams rehearses accounts of aesthetic experiences by the canonic figures Kant (re: “aesthetic judgment”) and Nietzsche (re: embodied sensibilities) in preparation for a critical reading and assessment of the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s aesthetic reading of how the dancer Fred Astaire is rendered in a particular movie in which he stars ( The Band Wagon ) as the focal character who is able/enabled to reclaim himself (i.e., make a “comeback”) as a star dancer. What Gooding-Williams lifts up is Cavell’s failure to see that the Astaire-character is enabled by a Black male character who, in shining Astaire’s shoes, transfers to Astaire and his feet a restoration of rhythmic capabilities by way of the rhythms the Black shoeshine-man articulates while brushing the Astaire-character’s shoes and polishing them with his shine-rag. All of which presumes something (on the part of the film-maker; so, too, Cavell, though differently...) about the embodiment of enabling aesthetic capabilities of particular kinds in the being of the Black character representative of the culturally-inflected raciality of Black people.

There are centuries-long, quite rich traditions of thought articulated, and political praxis engaged in, by Black folks for whom it is the case that the constitutive racially of Black folks is such that it sets the terms not only of identity, but, as well, of the ethical imperatives of intra- and interracial mutualities, that is, of various modes and instances of solidarity. And, as well, for compelling pragmatic reasons: to contend with, ultimately to overcome, invidious racial discrimination and oppression. No small matters for persons and peoples suffering racialized dehumanization and exploitation thus in need of shared motivating and guiding notions of how to gain and sustain freedom and justice. Many concerned to forge freedom in just conditions have sought morally compelling guiding understandings in shared raciality, in being, by particular understandings of raciality, a distinctive people, a distinctive nation of Black people. Hence, traditions of “Black Nationalism,” waxing and waning across the centuries, resurgent more recently in various forms (music and art; “Afrocentric” thought) and locales in the United States, in particular. Tommie Shelby, who became a certified professional philosopher after the resurgent Black nationalisms of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, while deeply committed to philosophical engagements with and out of contexts of lived experiences of Black folks in which much of his life has been conditioned, has, in his We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity , endeavored to work out a philosophically clarified and justified account of the terms and agenda of solidarity as a basis for organized and coordinated struggles for justice. The account is intended to be both motivating and welcoming of the solidaristic cooperation of persons Black and non-Black without needing to resort to what he reasons to be the philosophically indefensible racial essentialism of various construals of Black nationalism. Yet, the account is intended to be in keeping with important conceptual and normative groundings of Black political cultural life that are, as well, compatible with a notion of political liberalism worked out by John Rawls. With Shelby’s efforts, too, there is the hard work of extending decidedly prominent mainstream philosophical thought (that of of Rawls in this particular case) to a creatively critical engagement with unjust limiting conditions on the lives of Black folks in conjunction with efforts of philosophical reconstruction and defense of principles of Black solidarity that embrace a notion of Blackness suitable for emancipatory work.

Leonard Harris has been a pioneer of published works on African American philosophy and continues to be a major contributor in many ways, not least as an editor of collections that have made widely available important texts that otherwise would not have gotten the attention of researchers and scholars concerned with the philosophizings of Black folks. Of particular note, his edited collection The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond (Harris 1989) provides ready access to philosophical essays from among Locke’s more than three hundred published and unpublished essays and book reviews. And his Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917 (Harris 1983) was for many years the only widely available, somewhat historically organized collection of writings by African American professional philosophers and other philosophizing Black scholars. (An important earlier collection is Percy E. Johnston’s Afro-American Philosophers . (Johnston 1970)) More recently new collections devoted to African American Philosophy have been organized and published by Tommy L. Lott (Lott 2002); by Lott and John P. Pittman (Lott and Pittman 2003); and by James A. Montmarquet and William H. Hardy (Montmarquet and Hardy 2000).

This publishing is an important part of the story of Africana philosophy, and helps to make and legitimate the case that persons African and of African-descent, on the African continent and in the African Diaspora in the Americas and elsewhere, are creators and custodians of Africana philosophy. A number of publishers have recognized and accepted these developments and, after substantial, long-standing resistance and outright refusal by many to recognize historic writings by persons of African descent and contemporary scholarship by philosophers African and of African descent as proper instances of philosophical work, have made a priority of adding works of Africana philosophy to their lists of published works.

Of particular publishing significance is the continuing, regular appearance of issues of Philosophia Africana: Analysis of Philosophy and Issues in Africa and the Black Diaspora , a journal for which Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze of DePaul University was founding editor until his unexpected death in 2007. Philosophia Africana remains the only scholarly journal in the United States that is devoted to Africana philosophy, though increasingly other philosophy journals are accepting and publishing writings that fall within the subfield. None, however, have been as generous as Philosophical Forum , which, under the editorial directorship of Max Wartofsky (deceased), devoted two entire special issues to explorations of philosophical matters of particular concern to Black philosophers. Noteworthy, too, has been the continuing midwifing of New York-based publisher and scholar Alfred Prettyman, who has devoted time, energy, and other resources to nurturing The Society for the Study of Africana philosophy (originally the New York Society for the Study of Black Philosophy), an organization of philosophers and other engaged thinkers of African descent, and persons not of African descent, who come together in his home to present and discuss ideas and works on the way to publication or recently published. For a brief period Prettyman was editor and publisher of the now dormant The Journal of the New York Society for the Study of Black Philosophy.

The professional recognition and legitimation of Africana philosophy generally, of African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy as sub-foci of the field; the notable success enjoyed by a slowly increasing number of persons African and of African descent in being hired, retained, and promoted by departments and programs in institutions of higher education; more publishing opportunities; a continuing vigorous schedule of regular conferences and conference sessions devoted to explorations of matters pertinent to the field—all of these continue to be crucial to building and enhancing the literature-base of the field and to facilitating teaching, research, scholarship, and other collegial engagements and practices that are essential to forming and sustaining nurturing discursive communities devoted to engaging philosophizing productive of Africana philosophy. And the enterprise is being enriched by the participation and contributions of an increasing number of persons, students and professionals, who are neither African nor of African descent.

Substantial progress has thus been made in mitigating some of the impediments that had long hampered recognition of and attending to the philosophizing efforts of persons African and of African descent. Nonetheless, still more mitigating work remains. There is the need, for example, to bring to consideration for better appreciation the writings of several generations of especially thoughtful and insightful Black essayists and novelists, poets and musicians, artists and dancers, preachers and theologians, and other public-speaking Black intellectuals who, through their means of expression, have philosophized about the conditions and prospects of Black folks and, in many cases, have helped to sustain the will and determination to endure the assaults on the humanity, on the being , of persons and peoples African and of African descent. In this regard, too little attention has been given, for example, to the philosophical writer-novelist Charles Johnson who, before he became a distinguished novelist, was a graduate student in Philosophy. The articulated thought of many other Black writers, some of them novelists, also compel close, appreciative readings by philosophers for what these articulations disclose of the writers coming to terms thoughtfully and creatively with the exigencies of existence for Black folks as the writers imagined or re-imagined them in the locales and historical moments of their writerly creations. Likewise in many sermons, speeches, letters, songs, and dances created and expressed, creatively very often, by thoughtful Black persons. Of necessity , then, Africana philosophy must be an even more intensive and extensive interdisciplinary enterprise.

A principal impediment to the recognition and appreciation of the philosophizings of Black folks have been the thorough investments in Eurocentrism and White Racial Supremacy that have grounded and structured so much of the historiography within the discipline of Philosophy for so very many decades. Resolving these misconstruals of the discipline’s history will require substantial revisions, ones inclusive of the philosophizings of persons of many excluded groupings. In so doing, careful work must be done to reclaim for wider distribution and careful study as many as possible of the earliest articulations—many of which were never published—that helped pave the way to the development of African American philosophy, of Africana philosophy more generally, as fields of discourse (Kuklick 2001; Kuklick 2008).

With hindsight, an especially crippling factor in the development of Africana philosophy within academic Philosophy in the United States (throughout the African continent and the African Diaspora, in fact) has been that far too little of the attention of the pioneers, and of present practitioners, has been devoted to issues that are of significance to women African and of African descent even though, as has been indicated through the narration of the history of philosophizing born of struggles , the contributions of Black women have been significant though seldom with the prominence of attention they should have had outside of women’s circles. As was shown, in the New Worlds in which African peoples were being re-made/were remaking themselves into new persons and peoples of African descent, numerous Black women across the generations were challenged to think hard and long about the assaults on their communities, their families, their very bodies and souls. Here, then, a compelling need to foster and support the philosophizing efforts of Black women who direct our attention to the lives and philosophizing of Black women, historically and contemporarily. Noteworthy in this regard are the groundbreaking, inspiring efforts of philosopher Kathryn Gines in founding the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. The Collegium is bringing together women from across the country in conferences devoted to recovering and recognizing the contributions of pioneering women philosophers of African descent while exploring present issues and forging agendas of further work to be done.

The possible futures of developments in Africana philosophy in African and the African Diaspora are open. The initial work of making the case for and legitimacy of African American, African, and Africana philosophy and its subfields has been accomplished with significant success even without universal acceptance and respect. That is to be expected, for no intellectual movement or disciplinary sub-field ever wins acceptance by all. Still, there is more to be done by way of consolidating the gains while forging new developments as minds are turned to challenging issues, many of them novel. To note, for two decades much of the effort of practitioners of Africana philosophy has been devoted to explorations of race , a foundational and pervasive complex of forceful factors shaping virtually all aspects and dimensions of life in the formation of Modernity in Europe and the Americas, and in every instance in which Europeans encroached on the lands and lives of peoples around the globe. Achieving justice without racism in polities bequeathed by Modernity is hardly finished business. So, the need to rethink race will be with us for a while yet.

However, the need will be generated by resolutions of old difficulties and challenges. Success will bring new challenges. Among these, settling such questions as whether there can and should be norms, practices, and agendas that are definitive of philosophizing identified as instances of “Africana” philosophy. If so, then on what terms, and to what ends, are the requisite agendas, norms, and practices to be set to serve the best interests of African and African-descended peoples, without injustice to non-Black peoples, and thereby provide those philosophizing with normative guidance while conforming to norms that ensure propriety and truthfulness in discursive practices on conditions of warrant that are open to and can be confirmed by persons who are neither African nor African-descended? Should such concerns continue to be appropriate conditioners of philosophical effort? The praxes and supportive discursive communities constitutive of Africana philosophy will have to meet certain institutionalized rules governing scholarly practices even as those of us committed to the development of the enterprise contribute to critiques and refinements of these institutionalized rules while devising and proposing others.

The work constituting Africana philosophy, on the African continent and throughout the African Diaspora, has helped to change the agendas and rules of discourse and praxis in Philosophy and other disciplines and discursive communities in contemporary academic institutions and organizations. The enterprise has been a significant contributor to the emergent recognition of the need to give greater respectful attention to raciality and ethnicity (as well as to gender, sexual orientation, and other constitutive aspects of our personal and social identities) as conditioners of philosophical praxis without thereby invalidating reconstructed notions of proper reasoning. As well, practitioners of Africana philosophy have aided the development of much wider and deeper recognition and acknowledgment of inadequacies in basic notions and agendas in the legacies of Western Philosophy thereby helping to open us all to challenging new needs and possibilities for further revising philosophical traditions and practices. The expansion of academic Philosophy to include Africana philosophy is indicative of efforts to achieve greater intellectual democracy in multi-ethnic, multi-racial societies. These developments should be continued, aided by philosophizing persons who are neither African nor of African descent, nor, even, professional academic philosophers, and continued as part of a larger, ongoing effort to appreciate and learn from the many life-enriching creations of all peoples as contributions to the treasure-houses of human civilization.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• African Philosophical Bibliography : An extensive bibliography, according to the Introduction , of “philosophical Literature on Black Africa” that includes “Philosophy books, articles or texts written by Africans, including Afro-Americans of the Diaspora, as well as all philosophical works published on Africa or edited in Africa, whatever the origins and nationalities of the authors” (Hountondji, Paulin J. (ed), Bilan de recherche philosophique africaine. Répertoire alphabétique / Philosophical Research in Africa. A Bibliographic Survey. 1ère partie/Part l: 1900–1985, Cotonou, Conseil Interafricain de Philosophie / Inter-African Council for Philosophy., 1987, pp.VIII-XI, X-XV).
• Conference on The Role of Africana Philosophy in 21st Century Struggles : at Texas A&M, in 2016..
• Caribbean Philosophical Association .
• African Resource , hosted by the Africa Knowledge Project.
• Africana Philosophy , section at PhilPapers.org devoted to African/Africana Philosophy.

-->African Philosophy: Africana aesthetics --> | African Philosophy: ethics | -->African Philosophy: ethnophilosophy --> | -->African Philosophy: meta-philosophy --> | -->African Philosophy: philosophy of religion --> | African Philosophy: sage philosophy | -->Afro-Caribbean Philosophy --> | -->Akan Philosophy: ethics and political philosophy --> | Akan Philosophy: of the person | double consciousness | Douglass, Frederick | Locke, Alain LeRoy | Négritude | -->race: and Black identity --> | reparations, Black | -->Yoruba Philosophy: epistemology --> | -->Yoruba Philosophy: ethics and aesthetics -->

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Africa: human geography.

Africa is sometimes nicknamed the "Mother Continent" as it's the oldest inhabited continent on Earth.

Geology, Geography, Human Geography, Physical Geography, Social Studies, World History

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Africa, the second-largest continent , is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean. It is divided in half almost equally by the Equator . The continent includes the islands of Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Comoros. Africa’s physical geography , environment and resources , and human geography can be considered separately. The origin of the name “Africa” is greatly disputed by scholars . Most believe it stems from words used by the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans. Important words include the Egyptian word Afru-ika , meaning “Motherland”; the Greek word aphrike , meaning “without cold”; and the Latin word aprica , meaning “sunny.” Today, Africa is home to more countries than any other continent in the world. These countries are: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea and the island countries of Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Comoros. Cultural Geography Historic Cultures The African continent has a unique place in human history. Widely believed to be the “cradle of humankind,” Africa is the only continent with fossil evidence of human beings ( Homo sapiens ) and their ancestors through each key stage of their evolution . These include the Australopithecines, our earliest ancestors; Homo habilis , our tool-making ancestors; and Homo erectus , a more robust and advanced relative to Homo habilis that was able to walk upright. These ancestors were the first to develop stone tools, to move out of trees and walk upright, and, most importantly, to explore and migrate . While fossils of Australopithecines and Homo habilis have only been found in Africa, examples of Homo erectus have been found in the Far East, and their tools have been excavated throughout Asia and Europe. This evidence supports the idea that the species of Homo erectus that originated in Africa was the first to successfully migrate and populate the rest of the world. This human movement, or migration, plays a key role in the cultural landscape of Africa. Geographers are especially interested in migration as it relates to the way goods, services, social and cultural practices, and knowledge are spread throughout the world. Two other migration patterns, the Bantu Migration and the African slave trade , help define the cultural geography of the continent. The Bantu Migration was a massive migration of people across Africa about 2,000 years ago. The Bantu Migration is the most important human migration to have occurred since the first human ancestors left Africa more than a million years ago. Lasting for 1,500 years, the Bantu Migration involved the movement of people whose language belonged to the Kongo-Niger language group. The common Kongo-Niger word for human being is bantu . The Bantu Migration was a southeastern movement. Historians do not agree on why Bantu-speaking people moved away from their homes in West Africa’s Niger Delta Basin. They first moved southeast, through the rain forests of Central Africa. Eventually, they migrated to the savannas of the southeastern and southwestern parts of the continent, including what is today Angola and Zambia. The Bantu Migration had an enormous impact on Africa’s economic , cultural, and political practices. Bantu migrants introduced many new skills into the communities they interacted with, including sophisticated farming and industry . These skills included growing crops and forging tools and weapons from metal. These skills allowed Africans to cultivate new areas of land that had a wide variety of physical and climatic features. Many hunter-gatherer communities were assimilated , or adopted, into the more technologically advanced Bantu culture. In turn, Bantu people adopted skills from the communities they encountered, including animal husbandry , or raising animals for food. This exchange of skills and ideas greatly advanced Africa’s cultural landscape, especially in the eastern, central, and southern regions of the continent. Today, most of the population living in these regions is descended from Bantu migrants or from mixed Bantu- indigenous origins. The third massive human migration in Africa was the African slave trade. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, more than 15 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to be sold as slaves in North and South America. Millions of slaves were also transported within the continent, usually from Central Africa and Madagascar to North Africa and the European colony of South Africa. Millions of Africans died in the slave trade. Most slaves were taken from the isolated interior of the continent. They were sold in the urban areas on the West African coast. Thousands died in the brutal process of their capture, and thousands more died on the forced migration to trading centers. Even more lost their lives on the treacherous voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. The impacts of slavery on Africa are widespread and diverse . Computerized calculations have projected that if there had been no slave trade, the population of Africa would have been 50 million instead of 25 million in 1850. Evidence also suggests that the slave trade contributed to the long-term colonization and exploitation of Africa. Communities and infrastructure were so damaged by the slave trade that they could not be rebuilt and strengthened before the arrival of European colonizers in the 19th century.

While Africans suffered greatly during the slave trade, their influence on the rest of the world expanded. Slave populations in North and South America made tremendous economic , political, and cultural contributions to the societies that enslaved them. The standard of living in North and South America—built on agriculture, industry , communication , and transportation —would be much lower if it weren’t for the hard, forced labor of African slaves. Furthermore, many of the Western Hemisphere’s cultural practices, especially in music, food, and religion , are a hybrid of African and local customs. Contemporary Cultures Contemporary Africa is incredibly diverse , incorporating hundreds of native languages and indigenous groups. The majority of these groups blend traditional customs and beliefs with modern societal practices and conveniences. Three groups that demonstrate this are the Maasai, Tuareg, and Bambuti. Maasai peoples are the original settlers of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. The Maasai are nomadic pasturalists . Nomadic pastoralists are people who continually move in order to find fresh grasslands or pastures for their livestock . The Maasai migrate throughout East Africa and survive off the meat, blood, and milk of their cattle. The Maasai are famous for their striking red robes and rich traditional culture. Young Maasai men between the ages of 15 and 30 are known as moran , or “warriors.” Moran live in isolation in unpopulated wilderness areas, called “the bush.” During their time as moran, young Maasai men learn tribal customs and develop strength, courage, and endurance. Even though some remain nomadic, many Maasai have begun to integrate themselves into the societies of Kenya and Tanzania. Modern ranching and wheat cultivation are becoming common. Maasai also support more tribal control of water resources . Women are pressuring the tribe for greater civil rights, as the Maasai is one of the most male-dominated societies in the world. The Tuareg are a pastoralist society in North and West Africa. The harsh climate of the Sahara and the Sahel has influenced Tuareg culture for centuries. Traditional Tuareg clothing serves historical and environmental purposes. Head wraps called cheches protect the Tuareg from the Saharan sun and help conserve body fluids by limiting sweat. Tuareg men also cover their face with the cheche as a formality when meeting someone for the first time. Conversation can only become informal when the more powerful man uncovers his mouth and chin. Light, sturdy gowns called bubus allow for cool airflow while deflecting heat and sand. Tuaregs are often called the “blue men of the Sahara” for the blue-colored bubus they wear in the presence of women, strangers, and in-laws . The Tuareg have updated these traditional garments, bringing in modern color combinations and pairing them with custom sandals and silver jewelry they make by hand. These updated styles are perhaps best seen during the annual Festival in the Desert. This three-day event, held in the middle of the Sahara, includes singing competitions, concerts, camel races, and beauty contests. The festival has rapidly expanded from a local event to an international destination supported by tourism . The Bambuti is a collective name for four populations native to Central Africa—the Sua, Aka, Efe, and Mbuti. The Bambuti live primarily in the Congo Basin and Ituri Forest. Sometimes, these groups are called “pygmies,” although the term is often considered offensive. Pygmy is a term used to describe various ethnic groups whose average height is unusually low, below 1.5 meters (5 feet). The Bambuti are believed to have one of the oldest existing bloodlines in the world. Ancient Egyptian records show that the Bambuti have been living in the same area for 4,500 years. Geneticists are interested in the Bambuti for this reason. Many researchers conclude that their ancestors were likely one of the first modern humans to migrate out of Africa. Bambuti groups are spearheading human rights campaigns aimed at increasing their participation in local and international politics . The Mbuti, for instance, are pressuring the government to include them in the peace process of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mbuti leaders argue that their people were killed, forced into slavery, and even eaten during the Congo Civil War, which officially ended in 2003. Mbuti leaders have appeared at the United Nations to gather and present testimony on human rights abuses during and after the war. Their efforts led to the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces in the Ituri Forest. Political Geography Africa’s history and development have been shaped by its political geography. Political geography is the internal and external relationships between various governments, citizens, and territories. Historic Issues The great kingdoms of West Africa developed between the 9th and 16th centuries. The Kingdom of Ghana (Ghana Empire ) became a powerful empire through its gold trade, which reached the rest of Africa and parts of Europe. Ghanaian kings controlled gold-mining operations and implemented a system of taxation that solidified their control of the region for about 400 years. The Kingdom of Mali (Mali Empire ) expanded the Kingdom of Ghana’s trade operations to include trade in salt and copper. The Kingdom of Mali’s great wealth contributed to the creation of learning centers where Muslim scholars from around the world came to study. These centers greatly added to Africa’s cultural and academic enrichment. The Kingdom of Songhai (Songhai Empire ) combined the powerful forces of Islam , commercial trade, and scholarship . Songhai kings expanded trade routes , set up a new system of laws, expanded the military , and encouraged scholarship to unify and stabilize their empire . Their economic and social power was anchored by the Islamic faith.

Colonization dramatically changed Africa. From the 1880s to the 1900s, almost all of Africa was exploited and colonized, a period known as the “Scramble for Africa.” European powers saw Africa as a source of raw materials and a market for manufactured goods. Important European colonizers included Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy. The legacy of colonialism haunts Africa today. Colonialism forced environmental , political, social, and religious change to Africa. Natural resources , including diamonds and gold, were over- exploited . European business owners benefitted from trade in these natural resources , while Africans labored in poor conditions without adequate pay. European powers drew new political borders that divided established governments and cultural groups. These new boundaries also forced different cultural groups to live together. This restructuring process brought out cultural tensions, causing deep ethnic conflict that continues today. In Africa, Islam and Christianity grew with colonialism. Christianity was spread through the work of European missionaries, while Islam consolidated its power in certain undisturbed regions and urban centers. World War II (1939-1945) empowered Africans to confront colonial rule. Africans were inspired by their service in the Allies ’ forces and by the Allies ’ commitment to the rights of self- government . Africans’ belief in the possibility of independence was further supported by the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian independence leader who began his career in South Africa, said: “I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for the freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India, and for that matter Africa, are exploited by Great Britain.” By 1966, all but six African countries were independent nation-states. Funding from the Soviet Union and independent African states was integral to the success of Africa’s independence movements. Regions in Africa continue to fight for their political independence . Western Sahara, for instance, has been under Moroccan control since 1979. The United Nations is currently sponsoring talks between Morocco and a Western Sahara rebel group called the Polisario Front, which supports independence . Contemporary Issues Managing inter-ethnic conflict continues to be an important factor in maintaining national, regional, and continent -wide security . One of the chief areas of conflict is the struggle between sedentary and nomadic groups over control of resources and land. The conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, for example, is between nomadic and sedentary communities who are fighting over water and grazing rights for livestock . The conflict also involves religious, cultural, and economic tensions. In 2003, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), groups from Darfur, attacked government targets in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum. The SLA and JEM were from different religious and cultural backgrounds than the government of Sudan. The Darfurians were mostly Christians, while the Sudanese government is mostly Muslim . Darfurians are mostly “black” Africans, meaning their cultural identity is from a region south of the Sahara. The Sudanese government is dominated by Arabs , people from North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The SLA and JEM were mostly farmers. They claimed their land and grazing rights were consistently being trespassed by nomadic Arab groups. The Sudanese government responded violently to the attacks by the SLA and JEM. Many international organizations believe the government had a direct relationship with the Arab Janjaweed. The Janjaweed are militias , or independent armed groups. The Janjaweed routinely stole from, kidnapped, killed, and raped Darfurians to force them off their land. The United Nations says up to 300,000 people have died as a result of war, hunger, and disease. More than 2.7 million people have fled their homes to live in insecure and impoverished camps. The international community’s response to this conflict has been extensive. Thousands of African Union-United Nation peacekeepers remain in the region. Other groups have organized peace talks between government officials and JEM, culminating in a 2009 peace deal signed in Qatar. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against humanity . As a result of ethnic conflicts like the one in Darfur, Africa has more internally displaced people (IDPs) than any other continent . IDPs are people who are forced to flee their home but who, unlike a refugee , remain within their country’s borders. In 2009, there were an estimated 11.6 million IDPs in Africa, representing more than 40 percent of the world’s total IDP population. Regional and international political bodies have taken important steps in resolving the causes and effects of internal displacement. In October 2009, the African Union adopted the Kampala Convention, recognized as the first agreement in the world to protect the rights of IDPs. Future Issues Africa’s most pressing issues can be framed through the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). All 192 members of the United Nations and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to meet the goals by 2015. These goals are: 1) eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; 2) achieve universal primary education; 3) promote gender equality and empower women; 4) reduce child mortality rates; 5) improve maternal health; 6) combat HIV / AIDS , malaria , and other diseases; 7) ensure environmental sustainability; 8) develop a global partnership for development. These issues disproportionately affect Africa. Because of this, the international community has focused its attention on the continent . Many parts of Africa are affected by hunger and extreme poverty . In 2009, 22 of 24 nations identified as having “Low Human Development” on the U.N.’s Human Development Index were located in Sub-Saharan Africa. In many nations, gross domestic product per person is less than $200 per year, with the vast majority of the population living on less than $1 per day. Africa’s committee for the Millennium Development Goals focuses on three key issues: increasing agricultural productivity, building infrastructure , and creating nutrition and school feeding programs. Key goals include doubling food yields by 2012, halving the proportion of people without access to adequate water supply and sanitation , and providing universal access to critical nutrition . Scholars , scientists, and politicians believe climate change will negatively affect the economic and social well-being of Africa more than any other continent . Rising temperatures have caused precipitation patterns to change, crops to reach the upper limits of heat tolerance, pastoral farmers to spend more time in search of water supplies, and malaria and other diseases to spread throughout the continent . International organizations and agreements, such as the Copenhagen Accord, have guaranteed funding for measures to combat or reduce the effects of climate change in Africa. Many African politicians and scholars , however, are critical of this funding . They say it addresses the effects of climate change after they occur, rather than creating programs to prevent global warming , the current period of climate change . African leaders also criticize developed countries for not making more of an internal commitment to reducing carbon emissions . Developed countries, not Africa, are the world’s largest producers of carbon emissions . What is certain is that Africa will need foreign assistance in order to successfully combat climate change . Leaders within Africa and outside it will need to seek greater international cooperation for this to become a reality.

Population Density 41.9 people per square kilometer (109 per square mile), as of 2020

Highest Point Kilimanjaro, Tanzania (5,895 meters/19,340 feet)

Most Renewable Energy Capacity South Africa (6,065 megawatts), as of 2019

Largest Urban Area Cairo, Egypt (15.6 million people)

Largest Watershed Congo River (4 million square kilometers/1.55 million square miles)

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African Nationalism

Introduction .

Nationalism refers to an ideology, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation. It emphasises the collective of a specific nation. As an ideology, nationalism holds that 'the people' in the doctrine of popular sovereignty is the nation.  Nationalism ultimately is based on supporting one’s own nation.  African nationalism is a political movement for the unification of Africa (Pan-Africanism) and for national self-determination. 

African nationalism attempted to transform the identity of Africans. Rather than seeing themselves as Zulu, Xhoasa, Sotho, etc, nationalist leaders wanted Africans to view themselves as South Africans. After World War I nationalists fostered moves for self-determination.

As a general definition, African nationalism in South Africa can be seen, broadly, as all political actions and ideological elements to improve the status, the rights and position of Africans in the emerging society imposed by white intrusion and conquest.  African nationalism, in South Africa, also embraces the concept of a Pan Africanism.  It is a modern phenomenon which tries to build a nation within a specific geographic area.

The ideal for South Africa among members of the African nationalist movement was a multiracial, democratic society””i.e., the broadest and most inclusive kind of nationalism - with equality and equity; there would be an end to discrimination, inequality and barriers based upon colour or race.  It sought to unite all the indigenous groups in the fight for freedom and against racism and discrimination which has evolved over time to the changing conditions into an inclusive South Africanism.  Its most important strand evolved into the nationalism of the African National Congress which meant the building of a non-racist, non-sexist, democratic society.

The tensions between this and narrow African exclusive nationalism, based on race, is an issue that is still being grappled with by different schools of thought. In South Africa, African nationalism and white Afrikaner nationalism was developed and evolved over time.  It had to deal with the fact that it was faced with a heterogeneous and a racially divided society.  The initial thrust embodied in the formation of the ANC was to unite all the indigenous peoples to fight for their freedom.

Feature: Garveyism The majority of the political activists of the 1920s - including members of the ICU, the Communist Party and the African National Congress (ANC) - were influenced to varying degrees by the teachings of Marcus Garvey, a West Indian who had moved to the United States during the First World War. Preaching the unity of all blacks, he claimed that liberty would come about only through the return of all Afro-Americans to their ancestral homes - and to this end he had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914... read more

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What does it mean to be African now?

• Published March 2, 2023

Being African can mean many different things, as the continent of Africa is home to a diverse population with a wide variety of cultures, languages and experiences.

Being African is to share the continent’s history, victories, challenges, landscapes and vibrancies. In terms of cultural identity, being an African often encompasses a strong sense of community and collectivism, as well as a connection to traditional customs and practices.

When an African steps up and steps out in the world showcasing their creative genius, we as a community applaud their efforts and cheer them on. Award-winning whisky brand, Johnnie Walker powered by Trace Africa, presented the Keep Walking Africa Top 30 list earlier in 2022. Together, they’ve taken strides to honour cultural shapeshifters in Africa who are boldly striding with a big purpose in music, arts, fashion, media and film. The Top 30, have all inadvertently paved the way for Africa so it seemed fitting to ask them, ‘what does it truly mean to be an African now?’ Let’s find out… The African continent leaves footprints on our identities as Ivorian journalist turned fashion designer, Lafalaise Dionn expresses, “A native of Man, a town in the Northwestern region of Ce d’Ivoire, I am proudly part of the Dan/Yacouba people. I got the chance to become imbued with the Dan culture thanks to my close relationship with my grandma; I was always following her around and even got my name, Lafalaise, from her. Lafalaise, meaning “the cliff,” is a reference to her love for the mountains, where she would spend time fishing while telling me countless stories of my fore-mothers.”

It didn’t stop there for Lafalaise as she has incorporated much of Africa’s jewels into her creative endeavours. “Cowries are my material of choice because they are tied to my story. This all started years ago with me developing an interest in African spirituality. I had this desire to search for what this spirituality meant to me because I didn’t feel connected or attached to other religions. [With the Cowries necklaces] I am wearing my heritage with pride whether you like it or not. I am proud to be African.”

Another creative that incorporates his African roots into his artistic endeavours is Ethiopian digital artist, Fanuel Leul. He explains, “I see Afrofuturism as the imaginative depiction of Africa’s future through the eyes of Africans. I’ve always been fascinated by the fantastic imagination of a utopian future, and afrofuturistic art allowed me to express this fascination. I believe most African artists feel the same way.” Much of Fanuel’s works portrays the history and culture-infused Dire Dawa city where he spent most of his later years.

Within his works, Fanuel, aims to amplify African culture on a global scale. He goes on to explain that, “[The narrative of Africa] works in any medium, and I can tell my story as a young African through [digital art]. I can now fully claim my culture, contribute to it, and ensure that other Af.rican creatives break through the ceiling and continue the work that I and other African creators are currently doing.”

Linking into Fanuel’s insight, any medium can truly ex.press Africa and what it means to be African. For Kenyan filmmaker, Jenny Muigai, her chosen medium is film. As an experienced freelance writer with a demonstrated history of working in the media production industry, Jenny has been a part of several works that link to Kenyan history. Another filmmaker on the same trajectory is Kang Quintus. Kang is a Cameroonian filmmaker, writer and actor who is recognised in the film industry for his visionary and creative genius, helping to steer an energised new African cinematic aesthetic and narrative. His films carry a strong sense of connection and themes that almost every African citizen can relate to.

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Here’s what Africa Day means to young African activists

The date 25 May 1963 is a momentous occasion in Africa’s history, as it marks the establishment of the Organization of African Unity, which is today known as the African Union. The purpose of this intergovernmental organisation is to foster stronger unity and solidarity among African nations and their citizens. Ever since, on 25 May, Africa Day has been widely celebrated, especially within the continent, as a symbol of Africa’s identity and collective strength.

As we honour Africa Day, and consider the significance of this wonderful continent, we want to highlight what this day means to some of our fellow African Youth Ambassadors in Brussels, and dive into the theme of this year’s celebration.

Keep reading to find out.

What theme is the African Union celebrating this year?

In this year’s celebration of Africa Day, the African Union has chosen “ Acceleration of AfCFTA implementation ” as it’s 2023 theme. The AfCFTA, which stands for the African Continental Free Trade Area , is a trade agreement that aims to create a single market for goods and services across Africa, benefiting almost 1.3 billion people and deepening economic integration across the continent.

The African Union focused on this theme for Africa Day as this agreement presents significant opportunities for African countries. With 54 African countries having signed the agreement, the AfCFTA is set to be the world’s largest free trade area, with a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion . In addition to stimulating growth and enhancing economic inclusion, the AfCFTA is projected to lift 30 million Africans out of extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.

As climate change is having a growing impact on Africa, the AfCFTA is also developing climate-friendly approaches to realise less energy-intensive economic growt h while keeping greenhouse gas emissions low, especially counting on its renewable energy sources. Indeed, a greater intra- and inter-regional power interdependency could reduce even further the dependence on traditional fossil fuels.

What does Africa Day mean to African Youth Activists?

Given the significance of Africa Day and the importance of this year’s theme, we asked a few of our fellow Youth Ambassadors in Brussels who are from Africa what this means to them. Here’s what they had to say.

“If I have to summarize in one sentence, I would say that Africa Day is for me a day to remember all of our achievements as Africans and as world citizens, but also to remember everything that we still have to do.” – Henriette Dushime

“I think Africa Day is important because it helps break stereotypes tainted on the African continent. There’s not only one side to Africa as sold by the media, there’s also another side full of happiness, togetherness, community, rich cultures, the landscape, entrepreneurial youths, music, art, minerals, innovation, strength, and resilience amidst the struggles. It’s a day to shine a light on the continent’s achievements, diversity, potential, and struggles.” – Winnie Nalubowa

“In the past, we celebrated with cultural dances showcasing the rich cultural heritage and the unexploited resources that make the African continent an irresistible site for investors, tourists, and researchers. We equally celebrated through debates that questioned the impact of the African Union in the health sector, education, and much more.” – Cynthia Akum Bih

“As I became aware of the significance of African Day celebrations, I actively participated in them, eagerly joining my fellow Africans in showcasing our vibrant culture. The gatherings served as a platform to exhibit our traditional dances, share our rich heritage through food, and present our unique customs to a global audience. These celebrations were vital because they shed light on Africa’s diverse cultures, educating others who were unfamiliar with our traditions. Through these events, we aimed to bridge the gap of understanding and appreciation for Africa’s culture, which is often misunderstood or overlooked by many around the world.” – Salwa Hassan Mohamed Ahmed

Africa Day serves as a reminder of Africa’s accomplishments, challenges, and enormous potential. It is a day to honour Africa’s rich cultural heritage, unity, and collective strength. Africa Day celebrates the diversity, resilience, and possibilities of the African continent, from unleashing economic potential through initiatives like the AfCFTA, to driving global climate change solutions and challenging stereotypes.

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What is Heritage Day and why its Important in South Africa

Heritage Day is an important South African public holiday which is celebrated on the 24 th of September each year. It is a day on which all South Africans are encouraged to celebrate their culture and the diversity of their beliefs and traditions, in the wider context of a nation that belongs to all its people. As the self-proclaimed ‘Rainbow Nation’, boasting a vibrant cultural diversity, eleven official languages, a rich and intricate history and a variety of traditions, Heritage Day is recognized and celebrated in many different ways in South Africa.

History of Heritage Day

Photo credit: Retlaw Snellac Photography (Flickr)

While many South Africans are aware of Heritage Day, how many know the history behind it, the true reason we celebrate this momentous holiday, and its connection to various cultures and traditions?

Heritage Day was initially known as ‘Shaka Day’ or ‘Shaka’s Day’, a day dedicated to commemorating the legendary King Shaka Zulu on the presumed date of his death in 1828. Shaka Zulu played an important role in uniting different Zulu clans into one cohesive Zulu nation in Kwa-Zulu Natal. To this day, thousands of people gather at the King Shaka Memorial on the 24 th  of September each year to pay tribute to the great Zulu King.

Photo credit: Jay Calvin (Flickr) | Shaka kaSenzangakhona (1780s -1828) Bronze Statue – ‘Long March to Freedom’ Monument

When the bill presented to the new post-Apartheid Parliament of South Africa in 1996 omitted Shaka Day from the proposed Public Holidays Bill, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a South African political party with a large Zulu membership, strongly objected to the bill. Eventually, a compromise was reached between the Parliament and the ANC (African National Congress), and it was decided that a national holiday would be created where South Africans of all cultures and creeds could come together and celebrate their diverse cultural heritage – Giving rise to Heritage Day!

“When our first democratically-elected government decided to make Heritage Day one of our national days, we did so because we knew that our rich and varied cultural heritage has a profound power to help build our new nation.”

– Late former President Nelson Mandela in an address marking Heritage Day in 1996

In recent years, Heritage Day has further evolved and become synonymous with National Braai Day. Some call it Shisa Nyama or Ukosa, while others call it a braai. Regardless of what term you use, the intention remains the same – Gathering around a fire, enjoying good food, good company and celebrating your culture and heritage with friends, family, and the ones you love.

Why is Heritage Day Important in South Africa

South Africa ranks among the 10 most culturally diverse countries in the world. A county’s relative diversity is determined based on several factors and high-level considerations, including: Level of ethnic diversity; Number of immigrants; Number of spoken languages; Number of religious beliefs; Number of political parties; Level of religious freedom; LGBT rights and freedom; and Level of personal liberty. Each of these categories are further divided into sub-categories, to ultimately determine the level of cultural diversity in any given country.

In addition to being one of the most culturally diverse countries, the population of South Africa is one of the most complex and diverse in the world. It is because of this intricate and vast diversity that Heritage Day is so important in South Africa and should be celebrated by all its people. National Heritage Day is dedicated to recognizing the cultural wealth of our nation in its entirety. By acknowledging, embracing, and celebrating our various cultures, traditions, and heritage against the background of our unique diversity, we build pride in ourselves, our fellow South Africans, and our nation as we remember the difficulties and hardships of the past, share in the victories of the present, and raise hope for the future.

One of the most important aspects of Heritage Day is the fact that it exposes us as South Africans to different people, cultures, traditions, beliefs, and religions we may never have been exposed to or encountered otherwise. It encourages us to step outside of our own ‘cultural bubble’, and urges us to learn, grow, explore, and experience the vibrant and diverse range of cultures that exists within our glorious rainbow nation. And, in turn, allow us to understand, appreciate, recognize, and respect each culture and everything it embodies.

At the end of the day, we are ALL South Africans, and our ability to grow and learn from each other is not only endless, but a gift. This will further allow us to grow as individuals and contribute to a more unified South Africa.

Heritage Day therefore provides a great opportunity for all South Africans to put their differences in politics, perspectives, and opinions aside, to unite and come together in a single shared purpose and objective – To celebrate South Africa’s profound history and heritage TOGETHER AS ONE NATION!

Living Heritage

Another important aspect of South Africa’s heritage that should not be forgotten is living heritage. In essence, living heritage is the foundation of all communities and an essential source of identity and continuity. The various aspects of living heritage include: Cultural tradition; rituals; oral history; popular memory; performance; indigenous knowledge systems; techniques and skills; and the holistic approach to nature, society, and social relationships. In South Africa, the term ‘living heritage’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘intangible cultural heritage’.

Why is living heritage important and what role does it play? Living heritage plays a vital role in promoting cultural diversity, reconciliation, social cohesion, economic development, and peace. In every South African community, there are living human treasures who possess a high degree of knowledge, skills and history pertaining to different aspects of diverse living heritage. It is important for South Africans to reclaim, restore and preserve these various aspects of living heritage in order to promote and accelerate its use in addressing the various challenges communities are facing today.

South African Cultures

South Africa is the Rainbow Nation, a title that captures the country’s cultural and ethnic diversity. As mentioned, the population of South Africa is one of the most complex and diverse in the world.

South Africa’s black population is divided into four major ethnic groups; namely Nguni (Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Swazi), Sotho, Shangaan-Tsonga, and Venda. There are numerous subgroups within these main ethnic groups of which the Zulu and Xhosa (two subgroups of the Nguni group) are the largest.

The majority of South Africa’s white population (about 60%) is of Afrikaans descent, with many of the remaining 40% being of British or European descent. South Africa’s coloured population have a mixed lineage, which often comprises the indigenous Khoisan genes combined with African slaves that were brought here from all over the continent, and white settlers.

Languages in South Africa

South Africa has eleven official languages:

• English (9.6%)
• Afrikaans (13.5%)
• Ndebele (2.1%)
• Sepedi (9.1%)
• Xhosa (16%)
• Venda (2.4%)
• Tswana (8%)
• Southern Sotho (7.6%)
• Zulu (22.7%)
• Swazi or SiSwati (2.5%)
• Tsonga (4.5%)

In addition to its eleven official languages, many other languages from all over the world are frequently spoken in South Africa, some of which include:  Portuguese, Greek, Italian, French, Chinese etc.

Heritage Day is one of the most important National Holidays in South Africa. It is vital to both the nation as a whole and its people that it continues to be recognized, commemorated, and celebrated.

Despite the many differences that exist amongst the various South African cultures, South Africa’s strong sense of unity around longstanding traditions has always remained integral. When needed, our rainbow nation always comes together as a force to be reckoned with.

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Home » DA to file court papers opposing BELA Bill

DA to file court papers opposing BELA Bill

Despite being part of the GNU, the DA is still opposed to the BELA Bill and has confirmed that it will challenge the matter in court.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) has instructed its lawyers to prepare court papers challenging the process leading to the adoption of the Basic Education Laws Amendment  (BELA) Bill, as well as its substance, on constitutional grounds.

Despite opposition, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Bill into law at the Union Buildings in Tshwane on Friday, 13 September.

DA PREPARES TO CHALLENGE BELA BILL IN COURT

The DA has always been opposed to the BELA Bill and labelled it as an attack on mother-tongue education.

The party also said signing the Bill into law threatens the Government of National Unity (GNU). However the party will not exit the GNU.

Basic Education minister Siviwe Gwarube who is a DA member boycotted the signing ceremony citing concerns about the constitutionality of the language policies and the compulsory admission of learners to Grade R. 

“Parliament must be allowed to fix what is currently wrong with the Bill so that millions of learners across the country can access and receive quality education for a better South Africa,” the former DA chief whip in Parliament said. 

[WATCH] President Cyril Ramaphosa signs the BELA Bill into law. #BELABill @TheSAnews pic.twitter.com/gfM05ZBKXQ — The Protagonist (@ncwane_nokwanda) September 13, 2024

PRESIDENT TO CONSULT ON ‘CONTROVERSIAL’ CLAUSES

During the signing ceremony, Ramaphosa acknowledged the complaints from fellow GNU members.

He said he has engaged with them and will consult on clauses 4 and 5 of the Bill which are a concern.

“In the spirit of cooperation and meaningful engagement, I have decided to delay the implementation date for clauses 4 and 5 of the Bill by three months.

“This will give the parties time to deliberate on these issues and make proposals on how the different views may be accommodated. Should the parties not be able to agree on an approach, then we will proceed with the implementation of these parts of the Bill,” Ramaphosa said.

Here are the clauses (4 and 5) that president Cyril Ramaphosa will consult on. Those who are opposed to the BELA Bill have raised concerns about the clauses which speak to language and admission policies. #BELABill @TheSAnews pic.twitter.com/FkYACi4W72 — The Protagonist (@ncwane_nokwanda) September 13, 2024

DA leader John Steenhuisen said this means that if there is no agreement, the ANC will proceed with implementing the clauses that empower provincial departments to over-ride school governing bodies on the issue of the language policy of schools.

“The DA rejects this threat by the President. We regard his approach as contrary to the spirit of the Statement of Intent that formed the foundation of the GNU, which requires the participating parties to reach “sufficient consensus” on divisive issues,” he said.

FREEDOM FRONT PLUS WELCOMES CONSULTATION

Freedom Front Plus leader Pieter Groenewald also welcomed the consultation window that Ramaphosa will open.

Gornewald said the law was hastily steamrollered through the parliamentary process just before the general elections, and the fact that electronic education systems are not addressed at all makes it obsolete from the outset.

“The law will cause needless uncertainty and disputes about clearly established rights and responsibilities relating to Basic Education. In addition, the recognition of the right to home-schooling is undermined by bureaucratic requirements.

“During the upcoming talks, the FF Plus will do everything in its power to restrict the implementation of the objectionable parts of the law,” he emphasised.

DO YOU THINK THE BELA BILL WILL BE TAKEN BACK TO PARLIAMENT TO BE AMENDED?

Let us know by clicking on the comment tab below this article or by emailing  [email protected]  or sending a WhatsApp to  060 011 021 1 . You can also follow  @TheSAnews on X  and  The South African on Facebook  for the latest news.

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