IT is surprising that if you visit any African university teaching philosophy, you find names of leading theoreticians of history as well as philosophy and African students are rarely exposed to their chicanery.
They still worship the likes of Immanuel Kant who argue there are four distinct varieties of the human species, each with a specific ‘natural disposition’ deriving from what he calls ‘stem genus’, supposedly a race of ‘white brunette’ ; now best approximated by ‘white’ Europeans, believed to have existed between 31st and 52nd parallels in the old world.
In the hierarchy of these varieties, the African is placed at the bottom as the least endowed.
Again such a regimentation of people is based not on scientific fact, yet Kant advances this lie with unabated ferocity.
Imagine such a popularised philosopher claiming that: “This fellow was quite black – a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” (Kant 1804, cited in ibid: 38).
The statement has no ‘truth value’.
Any rudimentary idea about the link between premise and proof will show the idea was far from advancing logic.
Clearly, the premise, which is that the fellow is black, does not justify the conclusion that what he was saying was stupid.
There is no link between skin pigmentation and the quality of mental elasticity. The link is therefore superimposed to cheat and to mislead; but one would really need to be perennially foolish not to see through the smokescreen.
And one wonders whether Africans belong to the category of imbeciles to remain susceptible to such manipulation.
Just listen to anther like-minded 20th Century philosopher, Georg Hegel (1956:93), who is also well-known by our children who do not know their mothers’ totems but call themselves educated because they have read Hegel.
This is how the academic beast describes us:
The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas – the category of universality.
In negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realisation of any substantial objective existence.
The negro, as already observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.
We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality – all that we call feeling – if we could rightly comprehend him; there is nothing with humanity to be found in this type of character.
The copious and circumstantial accounts of missionaries completely confirm this.
At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again for it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.
This de-historicisation of Africans is echoed by another 20th Century European scholar, Hugh Trevor-Roper.
In 1963, the Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford gave a series of lectures at Sussex University that were later published in a periodical and in a book.
These lectures argued ‘sub-Saharan Africa had no history’ (Trevor-Roper cited in Fuglestad: 152).
To him, the past of this part of the world was ‘clouded in darkness and darkness is not the subject of history’ (Ibid: 152).
It seems that his notion of history is essentially a form of purposive movement which, as he thought, Africa did not exhibit.
Such miscomprehension of African history can be understandable on the grounds that he is not African even though he is not under academic pressure as a professor to speak on what he does not know.
What is worse, however, is to proceed and say that prior to its contact with Europe; Africa consisted of only ‘the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque, but irrelevant corners of the globe’ (Ibid: 152).
Such arrogant dismissiveness of other people’s history emanates from a false sense of patronage.
Even if it were true that Africa did not demonstrate ‘purposive movement’, not all human societies were bound by such a notion of history.
In any case, Africa did show evidence of purposive movement.
His site of discussion is far from what history is, but whose view of history matters; a clear testimony of racist ethnocentricism!
From this discussion, it is clear that part of the enlightenment philosophy was instrumental in codifying and institutionalising both the scientific and popular European perceptions of the human race.
The works of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Trevor-Roper show how ‘reason’ and ‘civilisation’ were synonymised with ‘white’ people and how ‘unreason’ and ‘savagery’ have been conveniently located among the non-whites.
As I pointed out earlier, such theorisations were not arrived at by accident.
They were designed to create a desired mindset – a pliant and subservient one.
Admittedly, racism is hardly unique to the West and is not necessarily limited to the colonial situation, but it has historically been both an ally of and the inspiration to colonialism.
As shown by the ‘logic’ of Hume, Kant and their allies, racist thinking is circular and absurd: “We are powerful because we are right and we are right because we are powerful” (Shohat and Stam: 1994:19).
In reality, racial categories are not natural, but artificial constructs, not absolutes but relative products of historical processes of differentiation.
Africans need to wake up to these humiliating constructs of theorisation.
Shohat and Stam (1994) further argue racism is a systematic hierarchisation ‘anchored in material structures and embedded in historical configuration (s) of power’ (Ibid: 19).
In fact, it is a complex hierarchical system; a structured ensemble of social and institutional practices and discourses.
I hasten to emphasise that individuals do not have to express or practise it to be its beneficiaries.
For example, as it is, present-day whites, including those who claim to be liberals, whatever their attitudes to racism, are enjoying the comfort of its legacies or present practice.
Eric Williams (1994) punctures the myth of racism by exposing the duplicity of its application in the slave mode of production (slavery) in the Caribbean and the Americas.
He argues slavery was essentially an economic institution which had also been the basis of the Greek and Roman empire economies (Williams:1964:05).
Williams’ analysis puts paid to claims that slavery (and later colonisation) was driven by moral imperatives to bring civilisation to the ‘dark’ continent.
Williams demonstrates the fact that the first slaves were fellow whites (service convicts), followed by local Indians and later by Africans who were preferred because one negro ‘was valued worth four Indians’ and that they were deemed ‘a race robust for labour, instead of natives’, (ibid:12) makes the racial argument nonsensical.