L5, Leclant El Imperio de Kush

Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance in
Africa
Author(s): Bethwell A. Ogot
Source: African Studies Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Apr., 2009), pp. 1-22
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Rereading the History and
Historiography of Epistemic
Domination and Resistance in Africa
Bethwell A. Ogot
Editors' note: This article originally was presented as the Bashorun M. K. O.

Abiola Lecture at the African Studies Association's 51st Annual Meeting,
November 15, 2008, Chicago.
The process of narrating and interpreting the African past has long been an
intellectual struggle against European assumptions and prejudices about
the nature of time and history in Africa. As the historian David William
Cohen states, "The major issue in the reconstruction of the African past
is the question of how far voices exterior to Africa shape the presentation
of Africa's past and present" (1985:198). Many historians, especially those
without any background or training in African historiography, have as
sumed, incorrectly, that prior to European contact with Africa, indigenous
"traditions" were ancient, permanent, and reproduced from generation to
generation without change. This is the false image of cultural isolation and
temporal stagnation that has been assiduously disseminated in many parts
of the world.
Little or no attention was paid to indigenous African views of the past
or to the role Africans played in the shaping of global developments, pro
African Studies Review, Volume 52, Number 1 (April 2009), pp. 1-22
Bethwell A. Ogot is chancellor of Moi University and a professor emeritus at Masono
University, Kenya, where he also founded and directed the Institute of Research
and Postgraduate Studies and held the UNESCO Chair in Higher Education in
Africa. He has taught at Makerere University, the University of Nairobi (where he
founded and directed the Institute for Development Studies and the Institute of
African Studies), and Kenyatta University. He was president of the International
Scientific Committee for the preparation of UNESCO's General History of Africa
and is also a member of the International Commission for UNESCO's History
of Humanity. His latest works include History as Destiny and History as Knowledge
(Anyange Press, 2005) and the History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples in Eastern Africa
(Anyange Press, 2009).
2 African Studies Review
cesses, and structures. Explanation in this type of historiography?exoge

nous rather than endogenous?consisted of locating the external (rather
than internal) causes for African events, and thus denied Africans their own
historical agency. It is therefore imperative that those who teach and study
Africa today learn to problematize the issue of representation in order to
locate and unpack the economic, political, personal, or other motivations
that might underlie any particular image of Africa. In other words, how
have African history and culture been represented in writing? And on what
authority do authors represent a whole continent and its identities?
In his seminal books The Invention of Africa (1988) and The Idea of Africa
(1994), the eminent Congolese scholar and philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe ar
gued that since Greek times Africa has "been represented in Western schol
arships by 'fantasies' and 'constructs'" (1994:xv). What Mudimbe is arguing
here is not that the continent called "Africa" is somehow detached from
the globe or that it is a "geographic fiction," but rather that our knowledge
of Africa has been constructed and disseminated through (mostly nega
tive) images and theories by Europeans. This constitutes "epistemic dom
ination." For this reason, Mudimbe concludes, representations of Africa
generally tell us far less about those who are being represented than they
do about the preoccupations and prejudices of those engaged in the act of
representing.
Representation is an issue that lies at the heart of a current debate in
African studies regarding the cultural composition of Africa itself. On one
side of the debate are those who argue that there is indeed such a thing as
an "African" identity whose deep essence transcends the surface differences
that distinguish one African culture from another. On the other side are
those who argue that culturally the peoples of Africa have far less in com
mon than is usually assumed. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony
Appiah is among those who have argued that there is no cultural unity
in Africa, and that Africanist discourse has inaccurately grouped together
vastly divergent cultures. "Whatever Africans share," he writes, "we do not
have a common traditional culture, common languages, a common reli
gious or conceptual vocabulary.... We do not even belong to a common
race" (1992:26). Strong words, to which we shall later return.
Images of Africa have often been used by Western writers to establish
"opposites" and "others" whose actuality is always subject to the continuous
interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from "us." One of
the debates over the differences and similarities between European and
other modes of thought is the so-called rationality debate that began af
ter the publication of E. E. Evans-Prichard's Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic
among the Azande (1937). This work had a profound impact on both the
cross-cultural study of modes of thought and the philosophy of science and
rationality, and led many scholars to reflect critically upon some of the most
important issues in the history of anthropology.
Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 3
The rationality debate raises two epistemological questions: (1) How

do we understand and represent the modes of thought and action of soci
eties and cultures other than our own? and (2) How can one understand
other cultures in their own terms but?since Evans-Prichard had to under
take this task from a Western base line?in a European language? This lat
ter problem also entailed mapping non-Western ideas and practices onto
Western categories of understanding, and the question of how to modify
those categories to allow for the evolution of anthropology as a comparative
science. Evans-Prichard concluded that societies can have multiple ratio
nalities, and that even in England people did not always think scientifically.
He thus warned us not to characterize societies in terms of a single mode of
thought.
Despite his apparent cultural relativism, however, Evans-Pritchard was
unequivocal that scientific explanations of the West are superior, for ex
ample, to those of the Azande, who do not formulate hypotheses and test
them against an empirical reality. In the 1960s the rationality debate took
a more vigorous form, particularly as expressed in Robert Horton's paper
"African Traditional Thought and Western Science" (1970). Horton ar
gued that there are patterns and essences to be found among the modes
of thought of different populations, that a multitude of different societies
can share a common way of thinking, and that groups of societies can be
compared to other groups of societies. Only from this point of view, he said,
is it possible to juxtapose Africa to the West. Since the publication of this
paper there has been a protracted debate on the definition and nature of
rationality and the characteristics not only of African traditional thought,
but also of traditional thought in general. The debate has attracted scholars
from fields as diverse as sociology, anthropology, philosophy, philosophy of
science, and literature.1
But as was later to emerge, both the ideological expression of African
nationalism, and its specific effect upon the current debate on the ques
tion of African philosophy or thought systems, derived from a preexisting
European discourse, dating back to the Enlightenment, concerning non
Western peoples in general and Africans in particular. The ideological and
philosophical issues that this discourse presented to us in Africa arose ini
tially as a European preoccupation?the attempt of the European mind to
understand itself through the mirror of other races and cultures, and its
perception of the humanity of non-Western peoples as a justification for
their domination. The ideological significance of Europe's contemplation
of a world in which it was master by reason of its collective mind emerged
most clearly from Hegel's philosophy of history, which, when all is said and
done, is nothing but a celebration of the European spirit. The way in which
Africa features in Hegel's speculations further underlines this direction of
his philosophy, for by excluding Africa totally from the historical process
through which the human spirit fulfills itself, Hegel places Africa at the op
posite pole to Europe. In his The Philosophy of History, edited from notes for
courses of lectures delivered in the 1820s, Fredrick Hegel writes:
Africa proper as far as History goes back, has remained for all purposes of
connection with the rest of the World?shut up; it is the Gold-land com
pressed within itself?the land of childhood, which lying beyond the days
of self-conscious history, is enveloped in dark mantle of Night? The ne
gro ... exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.
We may lay aside all thought of reverence and morality?all that we call
feeling?if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmoni
ous with humanity to be found in this type of character.... Africa... is no
historical part of the World; it has no movement for development to ex
hibit. Historical movements in it?that is in its northern part?belong to
the Asiatic or European World_What we properly understand by Africa,
is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of
mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the thresh
old of the World's History.... The History of the World travels from East
to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning."
(1966 [1837]: 91, 93, 99, 103)
Hegel's philosophy of history remains the most exalted statement of

European self-affirmation in opposition to other races, the most elaborate
rationalization of European ethnocentrism. It provided a powerful phil
osophical base for the chorus of denigration of the non-white races that
accompanied and buoyed up the European colonial adventure through
out the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. It allowed the Brit
ish historian Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper to state, without any shame, that all
meaningful change in the world, and in Africa, was identified with Western
experience, and that African cultures produced only historical stasis, or,
in his insulting words, "unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in pic
turesque but irrelevant corners of the globe" (quoted in Fage 1981). This
was the kind of epistemic domination that pioneer African historians, who
conceived of their enterprise as an idea of anticolonial autonomy, decided
to resist in the 1950s and 1960s?a resistance, as we shall later discuss, that
Africans in the diaspora had earlier pioneered. It was then left to the new
discipline of anthropology to sustain the main domination theme under
the guise of science; it was no accident that the development of anthropol
ogy as a discipline devoted to the study of non-Western people took place
during the period of greatest European colonial expansion. The theoreti
cal grounding of the new discipline in the Social Darwinism of Herbert
Spencer also attests to the ethnocentric emphasis that Hegel's philosophy
of history had imparted to the European mind in its consideration of itself
and the world upon which it gazed.
The chief priest of this ethnocentricism in anthropology was Lucien
Levy-Bruhl, who devoted his entire life and career to the demonstration of
the radical disparity between the nature and quality of mind of the Europe
an and what he called "primitive mentality," which he attributed essentially

to non-Western peoples and cultures. Hence his opposition between two
forms of mental operations that defined not simply two types of society and
culture, but two types of humans: on the one hand, Western societies that
had emerged from the Mediterranean civilization within which rationalist
philosophy and positive science had developed; and on the other hand,
"primitive" societies ruled by a mentality to which the Western mode of
thought was not merely foreign but also inaccessible. He proposed the term
"pre-logical" to describe this "primitive mentality."
For Levy-Bruhl, the collective representations and value systems of so
called primitive societies have little or no intellectual content or character,
for the mentality from which they proceed relies on a mystical form of par
ticipation for its experience of objective phenomena and its attitude to the
universe. At their highest level the mental functions of individuals within
these societies are regulated by the mythical archetypes proposed by these
representations, in which concepts have no place, since concepts are the
fruits of philosophical reflection, in which primitive man does not indulge.
The primitive mentality is thus of a wholly different character from that of
the European; it stands, indeed, as its negative image:
The two mentalities which are face to face are so foreign to each other, so
divergent in their habits, so different in their means of expression! The
European employs abstractions almost without thinking, and the simple
logical operations have been rendered so easy for him by his language that
they cost him no effort. With the primitives, thought and language are of
character almost exclusively concrete_In a word, our mentality is above
all 'conceptual', the other barely so. (Levy-Bruhl 1923)
It is obvious that the whole purport of Levy-Bruhl's characterization of

primitive mentality was to establish rationality as a prerogative of Western
civilization and as a defining quality of the white man that set him above
the rest of humanity. His enterprise consisted in working out in the realm
of epistemology, and to its furthest limits, the antithesis between Western
and non-Western man that is inherent in Hegel's philosophy of history.
More generally, his contribution to anthropology and to European ideas
was posited on an explicit hierarchy of values for which the West served as
an absolute reference. The notion acquired so tenacious a hold upon the
European consciousness that it formed a major plank in the system of colo
nial ideology and thus represented an outstanding issue with which African
thought was later to contend. Furthermore, Hegel's The Philosophy of History
and Levy-Bruhl's Primitive Mentality soon became essential readings in West
ern, and even African, universities! Even today, they continue to influence
the rationality debate in a most perverse manner.
In the period between the two World Wars, however, the discipline of
anthropology underwent a major transformation in method and in spirit
that came to reverse its ideological thrust with regard to the colonial situa
tion. Anthropology now provided both inspiration and ideas for a challenge
to the colonial ideology with which it had been bound up. It now offered
a new and positive evaluation of non-Western cultures, with far-reaching
effects. The assumption of the cultural superiority of Europe began to give
way to a new attitude toward non-Western forms of cultural expression.
Also, the idea of Western culture as universal norm began to be abandoned
by those anthropologists whose direct experience of other cultures during
fieldwork had impressed them with the range of possibilities of human ad
aptation to the natural environment and of human potential for cultural
creation. From this revelation emerged the concepts of cultural pluralism
and cultural relativity that soon became a marked feature of anthropology
in the interwar period and finally came to dominate it after the Second
World War. The relativists argued that in general there are no absolute or
universal truths: all moral appraisal and assessments should only be made
relative to the social norms of the groups involved. The champion of this
new position was the American culturalist school of anthropology led by
Melville Herskovits (see Herskovits 1944).
Of particular interest for the development of African thought in its
confrontation with the colonial ideology were the contributions of French
anthropologists, led by Marcel Griaule, who presented a Dogon worldview
whose symbolic and conceptual organization revealed an evident architec
ture. In 1931 Griaule, together with eight colleagues affiliated with the Mu
seum of Man in Paris, set out on a twenty-one-month expedition, known as
the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, which crossed the continent of Africa from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The aim of the mission was to collect and
record local knowledge and material culture. It was in the course of this
extensive expedition that Griaule first came into contact with the Dogon
people who today live in the Republic of Mali. He subsequently returned to
the Dogon region on many occasions to study their culture.
Sometime in the late 1940s Griaule was introduced to an elderly sage
named Ogotommeli who had lost his sight many years earlier in a hunting
accident. In a long series of interviews, Ogotommeli recounted the elabo
rate creation myth of the Dogon universe. Written in the form of a series
of object lessons, Griaule published Conversations with Ogotommeli m 1948 as
an attempt to present to the outside world a unified Dogon cosmology and
complete philosophical system. In the preface to his book Griaule wrote:
"These people live by a cosmology, a metaphysics, and a religion which put
them on a par with the peoples of antiquity, and which Christian theology
might indeed study with profit."
However, from the point of view of its ideological impact and of its
immediate relevance to the debate on African social thought, the most im
portant work to emerge from the new orientation in anthropology was pro
duced by a Belgian missionary, Placide Tempels. It is true that his work, Ban
tu Philosophy, published in French in 1945, remained within the stream of
European discourse upon the non-Western world, and that it was conceived
as part of a strategy for the spiritual conquest of Africa. Nevertheless, Bantu
Philosophy, despite its paternalistic tone, registered a decisive break with the
ethnocentric emphasis of classical anthropology by attributing a developed
philosophical system to an African people, the Baluba of present-day Con
go. Tempels insisted particularly on the need for a recognition of the ra
tionality of so-called primitive man and claimed for the Baluba an elevated
system of thought which, though peculiar to them, deserved to be honored
by the term "philosophy." More fundamentally, Bantu Philosophy provided
a conceptual framework and reference for all future attempts to formulate
the constitutive elements of a distinctive African mode of thought?to con
struct an original African philosophical system.
Later, however, a reaction set in among a significant section of the
younger generation of African philosophers against what they would call
"ethnophilosophy," one manifestation of which was the idea of n?gritude
developed in the French-speaking parts of Africa. The central issue in the
debate over the relevance of n?gritude to the postcolonial situation had
to do with identity: Is there an authentically African identity, and can it be
reconciled with technological progress? Leopold Senghor, the most promi
nent Francophone African intellectual of his generation, became the pri
mary spokesman for n?gritude, which he promoted as a form of negative
consciousness that could liberate black people from the mental prison of
European stereotypes. Throughout his writings he defended n?gritude as
a mode of being that offers Africans the only viable basis for defining their
collective identity, asserting that this mode of being is inscribed in tradition
al cultural practices that reveal an African aptitude for intuitively grasping
the inner reality, or essence, of things. This kind of perception, in his view,
is linked with an intense emotivity, a mystical unified image of the world,
a highly developed sense of rhythm, a propensity for analogical reasoning,
and a capacity to appreciate asymmetrical parallelisms.
By 1960 there was considerable opposition to Senghor's brand of n?
gritude. Marxists objected that differences between Africans and Europe
ans reflected economic conditions, not racial characteristics. Others com
plained that Senghor's identification with French colonial policies and his
allegiance to French literary culture prevented him from empathizing with
the real concerns of most Africans. Those involved in the anticolonialist
struggle faulted Senghor for failing to support the cause of political inde
pendence.
At the same time, n?gritude was largely rejected by English-speaking
African intellectuals. Ezekiel Mphahlele, in The African Image (1962), char
acterized n?gritude as a reverse racism that could be misused to keep Af
ricans in their places. According to him, the cultural traits idealized by n?
gritude writers could simply be taken for granted, and their preoccupation
with the past was an overcompensation for the void experienced by highly
educated individuals who had become alienated from their own people.
Wole Soyinka, in Myth, Literature and the African World (1980), regarded n?
gritude as the intellectual luxury of a small Francophone elite; remarking
that an African has as little need to proclaim its n?gritude as a tiger has to
announce its "tigritude," he coined a slogan that has repeatedly been used
to ridicule the movement.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, socially engaged writers in Franco
phone Africa were attacking n?gritude as an irrational concept that divert
ed attention from the economic causes of poverty and oppression. They
argued that national identity was not an essence to be discovered in the
cultural practices of the past but a potential that could be realized only by
working in the material world of the present to bring about a socially just
society in the future. For them, the way toward truth was not a mystical ex
perience of an absolute but a rational probing of concrete reality.
It is important in this connection to mention the work of Cheikh Anta
Diop, who, unlike Senghor, with his metaphysical conception about Afri
cans, attempted to define African identity in strictly sociological and mate
rialist terms and in proper historical depth. Diop's first work, Nations N?gres
et Culture (1955), has attained the status of a classic in black intellectual
circles. The primary objective of the book is to demonstrate the African
origin of ancient Egyptian civilization and thus the importance of Africa to
the culture of classical Greece and the formation of Western civilization.2
In his subsequent works Diop extended his theory to demonstrate the con
tinuity between ancient Egyptian civilization and the traditional cultures of
contemporary Africa, especially in terms of the affinity between Egyptian
social organization and cosmology and those of black Africa. His histori
cal approach to the question of African identity acts as a counterweight to
the evolutionist view of classical anthropology, which contrives to place the
white race and Western civilization at the apex of human development,
as well as representing an epistemological rupture with the unilateral and
ethnocentric conceptions of Hegel and other Western scholars.
Later writers have concentrated less on the problem of defining the
African identity than on problems related to the postcolonial situation.
The social and political realities of independent Africa have modified the
climate of African opinion to such an extent that the ideological confron
tation with imperialism has lost much of its earlier force and significance.
The ideological cleavages that have developed on the continent since in
dependence reflect a concern with new social problems consequent upon
the formal end of colonial rule and the creation of a new internal order.
This concern now exerts a far greater pressure upon African minds than
the question of identity. The writings of Frantz Fanon, especially his most
famous work, The Wretched of the Earth, helped greatly in securing a clear
ideological base for this new orientation and in imparting a radical spirit
to it. For him the struggle against colonialism had meaning not simply as a
means for attaining political independence, but also as a process through
which colonized people would remake their humanity, diminished and
distorted by the experience of domination. Decolonization, he wrote, "is

quite simply the replacing of certain 'species' of men by another 'species'
of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total complete and ab
solute substitution" (1967:27). Part of his revolutionary spirit was a critique
of Senghor's theory of n?gritude, both the idea of a collective personality of
the race as objectified in traditional culture and also the implications of this
idea in the postcolonial context. African culture, he asserts, will take con
crete shape not around songs, poems, or folklore, but around the struggle
of the people. Cultural expression for Fanon thus refers not to a predeter
mined model offered by the past but to a reality that lies in the future as a
perpetual creation: for him culture is not a state but a becoming.
In a short span of time, Frantz Fanon proved to be a committed social
philosopher whose ideas on racism, colonialism, African revolution, and
neocolonialism had a profound impact not only in Africa, but also in other
countries in the South. He was able to acquire the status of a latter-day
prophet, since many of his prophesies concerning the "Second Liberation"
in Africa were fulfilled. His influence was particularly evident in the writ
ing of some of the younger African professional philosophers, including
Marcien Towa at the University of Yaounde in the Cameroon, and Paulin
Hountondji in Mali. Towa argued that no cultural development of any im
portance will be possible in Africa until Africans have built up a material
strength capable of guaranteeing their sovereignty and powers of decision,
not only in the political and economic field, but also in the cultural. Towa
therefore calls for a renunciation of the self as constituted by the African
past and an opening out to new perspectives of thought and action. He
proceeds, however, to advocate the adoption of Western thought, especially
in the fields of science and technology, as the only intellectual tradition
capable of leading to the transformation of Africa. Contemporary Africans,
he claims, can turn the secret of European hegemony to their own use by
destroying traditional idols and assimilating the spirit of Europe, the secret
of its power and its victory over Africa. Total intellectual surrender!
In his African Philosophy: Myth and Reality (1983), Hountondji criticizes
Western writings about African systems of thought.4 He particularly takes
issue with the works of Tempels and Griaule, because these authors pre
sented African "philosophy" as an unarticulated intellectual system about
which African peoples themselves are uncritical and largely unaware. He
also condemns the Western perspective, which assumes that critical knowl
edge about Africa can only come from outside?where the Western ob
server somehow "sees" more than indigenous Africans can possibly see
themselves. An authentic and meaningful African philosophy, according to
Hountondji, must spring from African intellectual discourse and must not
simply refine and build upon Western models of Africa. But where, then,
is this new philosophy to be found? His answer is that it is "yet to come."
For him, the "so-called" traditional African thought with its oral forms of
expression and transmission may constitute wisdom, but it lacks the power
of sustained critical reflection that real philosophy demands.

Towa and Hountondji thus represent those contemporary African in
tellectuals who have failed to find truth in their own societies and within
themselves and are wandering over foreign lands in search of it. They are
in effect intellectual escapees who prefer to live physically or mentally as
exiles in foreign lands with established social and civil lives, and who believe
in the impossibility of finding any meaningful life in their homelands. For
them salvation is an external phenomenon.
In this context, it is important that we reread Mudimbe's The Inven
tion of Africa (1988), which forms part of the growing critical literature on
the epistemological claims underlying the image of "otherness" in West
ern scholarship. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with
knowledge: determining what we know and how we know it and identifying
the conditions that must be met for something to count as knowledge. Mu
dimbe's work is a general survey of how Western construction of "primitive"
and "savage" images of Africa, particularly in historical and anthropologi
cal studies, has influenced the rise of alienated discourse and self-identity
among Africans themselves. Modern African intellectual history has partici
pated in a consistent escape from the harshly negated African past. In the
humanities and social sciences in general, and in philosophy and religion
in particular, African intellectuals continue to define their world on the
basis of Western epistemological standards.
Mudimbe's book is also an excellent intellectual description of the his
torical dilemmas faced daily by many educated African "elites" in regard
to how best to adapt the "usable past" to the construction of their pres
ent. Haunted by their history, Mudimbe argues, African "elites" are con
stantly eager to abandon their past in order to adopt what is "modern"
and "civilized"?and therefore, foreign and Western. Every day?in legal
suits, political rhetoric, and in economic and social planning and policy
making?the battle against the past is fought and the past, frequently called
the "traditional" in the constructed discourse, is suppressed. In short, the
contemporary African intellectual in the humanities and social sciences is
torn between two intellectual directions, not quite knowing how to strike a
balance between the two or how to draw knowledge from all sources in ways
that will improve and enrichment African values and "traditions."
But Mudimbe does not show clearly how the "usable past" should be uti
lized by "experts" to construct an "authentic" African episteme. He conceives
of philosophy as primarily a form of discourse, a system of making repre
sentations and explanations of history. What is important in philosophy for
Mudimbe are the epistemological values on which the representation of
history, as well as its claims to usefulness and relevance, are based. Philoso
phy, in other words, is the means through which "the world" is constructed
and structured, and in this sense no philosophical system can validly judge
others. Hence to Mudimbe the notion of the superiority of Western phi
losophy over African modes of thought is part of a wider Western ideologi
cal plot rather than a fact, part of a more complex discourse invented and
maintained by Europe as an aspect of the epistemological order through
which it has affirmed itself in opposition to "others." For Mudimbe, there
fore, the most important questions in the debate on African philosophy are
those about the epistemological groundings that define African rationality.
Doesn't Africa have its own order of knowledge, or episteme, on the basis
of which it can define its rules and parameters of rational discourse apart
from the epistemological locus in the West? Unfortunately, Mudimbe him
self provides no satisfactory answer to this fundamental question. Further
more, in raising the question itself he relies heavily on the work of French
scholars. So how does one reach the African epistemological locus without
recourse to established Western methods?
This question is regarded as a nonissue by Kwame Anthony Appiah in
his book In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). The
title refers, of course, to Christ's words at the Last Supper, when he said
that "in my Father's house there are many mansions?meaning that there
is room enough for all in heaven. In Appiah's case, however, his "father's
house" is Africa, which has many houses, many cultures, many identities.
The theme of this iconoclastic book is a question: "How are we to think
about Africa's contemporary cultures in the light both of the two main ex
ternal determinants of her recent cultural history?European and Afro
New World conceptions of Africa?and of her own endogenous cultural
traditions?" (1992:ix-x). He claims that many African (and African Ameri
can) intellectuals have failed to find a negotiable middle way between en
dogenous "tradition" and exogenous "Western" ideas, and that without
such a successful negotiation ideological decolonization is bound to fail.
For a long time, Appiah asserts, Africa's intellectuals have been engaged in
a conversation with one another and with Europeans and Americans about
what it means to be African; these debates, he says, are really about African
identity.
In In My Father's House Appiah offers us what he regards as a ground
breaking?as well as ground-clearing?analysis of absurdities and damag
ing presuppositions that have clouded our discussions of race, Africa, and
nationalism since the nineteenth century. He first explores the role of ra
cial ideology in the development of pan-Africanisn, focusing particularly
on the ideas of the African American intellectuals?with Alexander Crum
mell and W.E.B. Du Bois as his archetypes?who initiated pan-Africanist
discourse. In examining their works, he argues that the idea of the Negro,
and of an African race, is an unavoidable element in the discourse, and
that these racialist notions are grounded in bad biological?and worse,
bad ethical?ideas inherited from the increasingly racialized thought of
nineteenth-century Europe and America. He contends that Crummell and
Du Bois accepted a conventional notion of racial nationalism based on a ro
mantic European definition of the Negro. He adds that the very invention
of Africa as something more than a geographical entity was an outgrowth
of European racialism, and that the notion of pan-Africanism, founded on

the notion of the African, was based, in turn, not on any genuine cultural
commonality but on the very European concept of the Negro, who was in
vented by the "whites" in order to dominate them. Hence "Africa," and the
notion of the African, are both inventions of the "whites." Thus, Appiah says,
Du Bois and Crummell began with an "ennobling lie" that may have satisfied
the hearts yearning for black unity but ignored all we have learned from
genetics. "Whatever Africans share," he says, "we do not have a common tra
ditional culture, common language, a common religious or conceptual vo
cabulary. ... We do not even belong to a common race? I think it is clear
enough that a biologically rooted conception of race is both dangerous in
practice and misleading in theory; African unity, African identity, need se
curer foundations than race" (1992:23). In any case, Appiah informs those
who believe in racial differences that "we are already contaminated by each
other" in a complex, interdependent human world that is ill-served, finally,
by the effort of engaging in "the manufacture of otherness" (1992:24). In
short, intellectually and biologically we are all hybrids.
There are several problems with Appiah's point of view, starting with
the fact that Africa and the notion of the African were not invented by the
Europeans. The continent existed long before the European invasion, and
it was known by different African names. Similarly, the idea of pan-Afri
canism, for Du Bois and others, was not simply a racial matter, as Appiah
contends, any more than Du Bois was simply a "Negro." As C. L. R.James
has pointed out,
It is more than a misjudgment to think of W.E.B. Du Bois as a great leader

of Negroes or as some type of spiritual African expatriate. To do so is not
only to subject him to racialist connotation; it is to circumscribe and to
limit the achievements of one of the greatest American citizens of his time.
For that is what Du Bois was, an American scholar and public man who
could have done the work he did only as an American with the opportuni
ties and needs and world-wide scope that only America could give him."
(1965 [1903] :vii)
As a citizen of Western civilization, Du Bois struggled for many years and

succeeded in making the world aware that Africa and Africans had to be
freed from the thralldom that Western hegemony had imposed on them.
But he did all this as an American.
It also in inaccurate to say that Du Bois engaged in "the manufacture of
otherness." As a student of sociology, philosophy, and economics, he knew
better than to engage in a biologically rooted conception of race. In 1911,
for example, he took part in the First World Races Congress in London,
where they discussed, "in the light of science and the modern conscience,
the general relations subsisting between the people of the West and those
of the East, between so-called white and so called colored peoples" (James
1965 [1903]:xi-xii). The Congress placed great faith in scientific inter

change as an adequate method of social progress. Discussion topics in
cluded the meaning of the concept of race; political, economic, social, and
religious conditions in the colonial territories; miscegenation; interracial
conflicts; and the roles of Jews and black people in the world. Writing about
this in retrospect, fifty years later, Du Bois said:
I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this
century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that at the back of the
problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and
implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing
to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease
of the majority of their fellow men; that to maintain this privilege men
have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous,
and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race. (1965
[1903]:xi-xii)
It was therefore his consciousness of race, not as a biological concept,

but as a cultural notion, that widened his vision and deepened his sensitiv
ity, and he devoted his life to righting the injustices against the so-called
colored people of the world, including Africans.
At the end of World War I Du Bois organized a Pan-African Congress in
Paris to coincide with the peace talks and with the objective of pressuring
the peacemakers to internationalize the former German colonies in Africa
in a way that would best serve the needs of growing African nationalism.
The Congress resolutions demanded safeguards against economic exploita
tion and cultural subjection and called for increased self-rule for the whole
of Africa. The Second and Third Congresses organized by Du Bois were
held in London in 1921 and 1923, respectively; and the Fourth was held in
New York in 1927. The Fifth, presided over by Du Bois, was organized by
George Padmore, Ras T. Makonnen from Guyana, Peter Abrahams from
South Africa, Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya, and Kwameh Nkrumah from
Ghana, and held in Manchester in October 1945. This Congress differed
from the others, which had been composed largely of members of the pro
fessions and intelligentsia. As Nkrumah later wrote: "For the first time there
was a strong worker and student participation, and most of the over two
hundred delegates who attended came from Africa. They represented re
awakening African political consciousness, and it was no surprise when the
Congress adopted socialism as its political philosophy" (1973:42). The Fifth
Congress urged Africans and peoples of African descent to organize into
political parties, trade unions, and co-operatives to campaign for political
and economic independence. This was the new pan-Africanism, an African
initiative inspired by the vision and ideals of Du Bois, that launched the
political movement that ended in the achievement of independence by the
Gold Coast under the leadership of Nkrumah in 1957.
In December 1962, Nkrumah organized the first Africanist Confer

ence in Accra. I was one of the scholars invited to the conference. Nkru
mah urged all the scholars present to embark immediately on planning
a comprehensive program of research into all aspects of Africa's history,
culture, thought, and human and material resources. Africans must know
themselves and their continent, he contended, so that we could adopt the
correct strategy to solve our problems. In his comprehensive speech at the
opening of the Conference, Nkrumah said,
Between ancient times and the sixteenth century, some European scholars
forgot what their predecessors in African studies had known. This amne
sia, this regrettable loss of interest in the power of the African mind, deep
ened with the growth of interest in the economic exploitation of the Afri
can. It served the purpose of those who wished to exploit the human and
material resources of Africa to disseminate distorted and often completely
false accounts of Africa's past to justify colonialism as a duty of civilization.
(1973:208-9)
Nkrumah concluded his remarks by stating that knowledge of Africa's past,

and of the continent's resources and peoples, would stimulate the demand
for total liberation and unification, and for a restructuring of society more
in tune with Africa's communal and egalitarian traditions. The results of
the researches to be undertaken by scholars were to be published in an En
cyclopedia Africana. To direct plans for this encyclopedia, Nkrumah invited
Du Bois to live in Ghana and work on the project, for which he was well
suited. On February 13, 1963, he became a citizen of Ghana. He died on
August 27 of the same year, five months before his ninety-sixth birthday.
The mortal remains of this great American, great African, and great pan
Africanist lie in Accra. His pan-Africanism was not based on "a romantic
European definition of the Negro," as Appiah asserts, but on the harsh
realities of world history.
The coup of February, 24 1966, occurred before the first volumes of
the encyclopedia could be published. It was planned as a twenty-volume
Dictionary of African Biography, and despite the coup, the secretariat of the
Encyclopedia Africana project remained in Accra, under the direction of L.
H. Ofosu-Appiah. Volume 1, Ethiopia-Ghana (1977), contains almost three
hundred Ethiopian and Ghanain biographies written by more than seventy
contributors. It was an epoch-making work and represented a historic land
mark in cultural understanding between Africa and America. Volume 2,
Sierra?Leone?Congo (1979), has almost two hundred and fifty Sierra Le
one and Congo biographies. The two works, initiated by Du Bois, represent
a pan-African project covering Africa north and south of the Sahara. They
are authentic and authoritative works of African biography written by Af
rica's leading scholars and African specialists. A lasting legacy of Du Bois,
"the Negro."
Appiah also contends that the conception of an African identity is a

significant cause of estrangement among African intellectuals, and states
that there is no better point of entry to the issue of the African intellectuals'
articulation of an African identity than the reflections of our most powerful
creative writers. He chooses Wole Soyinka as the archetypical African writ
er. He particularly discusses Soyinka's book Myth, Literature and the African
World (1980), and concentrates on what Soyinka prefers to call "social Vi
sion." Soyinka represents what is African about his and other African writing
as arising endogenously out of Africa's shared metaphysical resources. Ap
piah, however, argues that we cannot accept the presupposition that there
is such a thing as an African worldview, even at quite high levels of abstrac
tion.
Wole Soyinka urges intellectuals to regain their former conditions of
mind through reeducation aimed at "self-apprehension," a conscious reim
mersion in the endogenous cultural heritage and an act of self-retrieval that
will lead to a newly articulated African identity. Appiah's answer is that all
such efforts toward reeducation are fine, but that it is too late for us to forget
Europe, because to do so is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our
identities. And since it too late for us to escape one another, we might in
stead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has
thrust upon us. In other words, we should embrace intellectual hybridity.
But this apparent dichotomy is based on a primordial view of culture
as something static. Soyinka sees history both as time past and as a dynamic
myth contextualizing the present and the future, a future which could em
body exotic elements. As Fanon said, it is a becoming. This has been amply
demonstrated in the novels of Ben Okri, a Nigerian, who perhaps best ex
amplifies the movement of African literature beyond the cultural-nation
al paradigm. In both The Famished Road (1991) and Songs of Enchantment
(1993), Okri uses his multiple heritage of English education in Europe, the
writings of Amos Tuotola, Fagunwa, and Soyinka, and Yoruba oral narrative
to produce an indigenous category of thought.
Appiah also rejects any talk about African philosophy, since what Afri
cans have are only folk philosophies, which are not uniform. Appiah claims
that part of the reason we continue to talk about African philosophy lies in
racialism: a reaction to a European culture that claims?with Hume and
Hegel?that the intellect is the property of men with white skins. Hence Af
ricans reply that there is something important in the sphere of the intellect
that belongs to black men. If there is white philosophy, why not also black
philosophy? Appiah therefore concludes that black philosophy must be re
jected, for its defense depends on the essentially racist presuppositions of
the white philosophy whose antithesis it is. Again, Appiah is obsessed here
with the idea of race, and is unable to think outside of the box.
But why should we seek to confine philosophy as a discipline to so
called ethnophilosophy? Why shouldn't African philosophers pursue a
systematic, critical, conceptual inquiry into their cultures as the Germans,

French, British, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese philosophers do, without
demanding that they have the same concepts or the same beliefs? Why can't
African scholars dedicate themselves to the rational pursuit of knowledge?
On which norms are African moral conduct based? What are our ethical po
sitions on questions such as abortion, euthanasia, or human rights? What,
in our view, are the sufficient conditions for something to count as a work of
art? What caused the universe? Why does God, who is supposed to be good,
let bad things happen? How should the burdens and benefits of a society
be distributed among its members in such a way as to make it just? And why
cannot our answers to such philosophical questions be called African?
Finally, Appiah raises very serious questions of politics and identity in a
postcolonial and postmodern world. He defines postcoloniality as
the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligen

tsia: of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers
and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capi
talism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they
offer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to
Africa and through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each
other, and for Africa. (1992:149)
At the same time, Appiah asserts, postcolonial intellectuals in Africa are

almost entirely dependent for their support on two institutions: the African
university, whose intellectual life is overwhelmingly constituted as Western,
and the Euro-American publisher and reader. In the field of politics, Ap
piah discusses what he calls "altered states" and wonders whether there was
ever a moment of "nationalism" at all in Africa, given the multiethnic, mul
tilingual, multicultural, and multireligious nature of these states. He takes
the example of his country, Ghana, and ask how Nkrumah's nationalism,
for example, was able to ignore the fact of Ghana's diversity. He asserts that
Nkrumah's nationalist enthusiasm was pan-Africanist?consistently and
publicly preoccupied with the complete liberation of Africa from colonial
rule?and that eventually it failed because it was not nationalistic.
There are several problems with both of these points of view. In regard
to African intellectual life, it must be acknowledged that both of the institu
tions mentioned by Appiah?the university and scholarly publishing? are
changing very quickly. The African university has incorporated many non
Western foreign models, including the Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Chi
nese, as well as having evolved its own models in some aspects. Regarding
the second institution?the Euro-American publisher and reader?here an
even greater revolution is taking place in a country like Kenya, where there
are now numerous local publishing houses, including university presses,
that are publishing all types of books, including university textbooks.
The comments about Nkrumah, similarly, represent a simplistic and

prejudiced interpretation. This is not the place to rehearse the remarkable
progress Ghana experienced under Nkrumah's leadership, but it must be
acknowledged that in terms of the economy, the national infrastructure
(roads, houses, schools, hospitals), industry, trade, and education the prog
ress was considerable. By 1966 Ghana had one of the highest literacy rates
in Africa, among the best public services, and one of the highest living stan
dards per capita. Nkrumah was overthrown in the coup of 1966 not because
he had ignored the homefront, but because the neocolonial forces had
vested interests in keeping African countries underdeveloped. Happily, we
can now say that Nkrumah's vision and achievements were vindicated. In
July 1992, on the occasion of the thirty-second anniversary of Ghana's Re
public Day, his body was reinterred in a mausoleum in a Memorial Park on
the actual spot where he had made his historic proclamation of Ghana's in
dependence. There on a high pedestal stands a statue of Nkrumah with his
right had outstretched pointing the way ahead, indicating the CPP slogan
"Forward Ever."
Conclusion
The decolonization of knowledge is a crucial step in ensuring that Afri

cans worldwide retake control of their own destinies and histories. This
demands honest scholarly and intellectual engagement, particularly among
Africans themselves.
In the late 1950s and 1960s a new wave of scholarship began to emerge
on the continent, as many African universities that had been appendages
of European educational institutions became autonomous and developed
vibrant history departments. The African historians in these departments
asserted the viability and significance of African history. These pioneer Af
rican historians discovered purposive change in an African past which dealt
not with "tribes" but with human communities whose institutions and ideas
deserved respect in their own terms. They asserted that the past of Afri
can peoples could be studied by using methods different from those used
traditionally. And finally, these African historians emphasized the value of
African history for the social and political development of the African com
munities that were going through the process of decolonization.
The success of African nationalism during the 1960s consolidated the
place of African history in African institutions and allowed them to adopt
an even more important role in the development of African historiogra
phy. The aims of nationalist politicians such as Nkrumah and Nyerere came
to be shared by many African historians, some of whom were themselves
political leaders in their own right?Cheikh Anta Diop, Joseph Ki-Zerbo,
and Adu Boahen were leaders of political parties in their own countries.
Albert Adu Boahen (1931-2006), for example, was an eminent historian
who obtained his Ph.D. at the age of 27 at the School of Oriental and Afri
can Studies (SOAS). For the next four decades at the University of Ghana
he devoted his life to the destruction of Trevor-Roper's falsity. But Boahen
was also a fighter for African freedom. He was detained by a military dicta
tor, but in 1992, when the ban on multiparty democracy was lifted, he be
came the presidential choice of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Thus these
pioneer historians forged a constructive marriage between history and na
tionalism. By the end of the 1960s African history and historiography had
been successfully introduced in numerous academic institutions in Africa,
Europe, and the United States. Africa-based historians and social scientists
founded academic journals, formed historical associations, and held aca
demic and professional conferences in Africa. The most remarkable legacy
of these activities was the writing of UNESCO'S General History of Africa, pub
lished in eight volumes and translated into more than fifteen international
languages. This was the response of African intellectuals to the colonialist
history of Africa and the colonial library. These activities constituted our
intellectual resistance to the Western epistemic domination. They aimed at
giving agency to Africans who had been denied a history by providing an
alternative historiography to fight Western hegemony and imperialism.
Later a new generation of African historians who were inspired by a
variety of liberal and Marxist theories of political economy launched fierce
criticisms of the pioneering scholars. What is revealing is that the critics,
encouraged and funded by their foreign mentors, demanded a more con
scious use of Western social science in order to understand African his
tory. In fighting the Western intellectual domination, they insisted that Af
rican scholars should use more of Western theoretical tools! They argued
that it was only in this way that we could provide an alternative, but more
meaningful, historiography of Africa. Although dependency theorists and
Marxists influenced the historiography of Africa in significant ways, how
ever, they produced far less history. Thus in many ways, in terms of cultural
discourse, the radical historians intensified intellectual dependence in Af
rica. The much maligned nationalist historians were struggling to recover
a link between the African past in its own terms and terms relevant to both
practical issues and cultural self-expression of present-day Africa. They had
insisted that indigenous terms and ideas did exist for articulating the past of
a continent previously seen only as the object of action from the truly "his
torical" outside world. The younger radical critics rejected the specific form
in which these terms were set out. But they proceeded to replace them with
"universal" categories that ultimately represented only the Western culture
from which they originated. This was a sad episode of intellectual capitula
tion.
Today the central question is again about epistemology. Modern Af
rican historians and scholars must also confront the challenge of global
ization (the modern imperialism), which is reshaping the international
economy as well as the intellectual map of the world. In the West globaliza
tion is represented by the "Third Way" and neoliberalism's "end of history"

triumphalism?a typically neo-Hegelian concept (see Fukuyama 1992).
This "globalization library" is already erasing African voices from the inter
national intellectual tribunals. The situation is further complicated by an
upsurge of international migration, interethnic tensions, and conflicts in
many countries around the world, clashes of cultures and civilizations, and
the rise of fundamentalism and terrorism (see Huntington 2002). Being
Muslim, for example, has become the "new Black." People everywhere are
redefining ground rules and basic assumptions. People everywhere, and
particularly young people, are seeking new alliances between cultures and
societies, between public and private sectors, between government and in
dustry, between the institutions of state and those of civil society, so as to
define a new public space.
In such a complex and interdependent world, who is to define for me
who I am, if not African scholars? Culturally, I am a Luo. But "Luoness" is
a hybrid concept with significant Bantu and Central Sudanic ingredients.
I am also a Kenyan national who lived and suffered under colonialism and
who has labored tirelessly with other Kenyans to create a new nation-state.
I am also, I fully acknowledge, an intellectual who received my higher edu
cation in Europe and who has been greatly influenced by the great Euro
pean thinkers. But finally I am an African whose life and attitude have been
influenced deeply by ideas and thoughts imbibed from African cultures
and civilizations. Hence, why should my "Luoness" be the only significant
identity? African scholars, thinkers, and leaders have a moral responsibility,
therefore, to create a New Africa, an Africa they want and that they have
to decide to help shape. Such a New Africa will have to exist in the minds
of all its inhabitants and become part of their everyday life?a life that is
full, vital, and open and in which dialogue, coexistence, and mutual aid are
taken for granted. The collective identity of this New Africa-in-the-making,
which will include peoples with different cultures, languages, and histories,
will be found in a shared set of values: the primacy of individual human
rights, democracy, a balance between freedom and solidarity and between
efficiency and equity, as well as openness to the world. The New Africa must
recognize the complementarity between its values and the knowledge and
understanding of the values of others. It can be done, it must be done
On November 4, 2008, an important event, with momentous implica
tions, occurred in this beautiful city of Chicago. The people of America?
the most powerful nation in the world?chose an African American as their
forty-fourth president. This was not an action of racial tokenism: it was a
deliberate and collective resolve arrived at following an elaborate electoral
process. Through this single event, America has redefined in a significant
manner the Rationality Debate. Many of the intellectual Rationality facto
ries are destined to be closed, and some of their employees will be declared
redundant. Hegel was stood on his head in Chicago, and some of his en
thusiastic disciples have now become intellectual orphans. A remote and
rural Kogelo village in Western Kenya has suddenly become a place of pil
grimage, attracting tourists from all parts of the world; and Kenya observed
its first Obama Day on November 5th. Property speculators are already
bidding against one another over the purchase of the house in which the
young Obama lived in Indonesia. All these are manifestations of a Brave
New World which at once recognizes the diversity of humanity but which
also rejects the categorization of peoples of the world into thinking and
nonthinking beings.
But this event did not happen out of the blue?it has been long in
coming, although many refused to see the signs. The Booker Prize-winning
novelist Ben Okri has written that
For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the
wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But the apparent economic tri
umph ... deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this
crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture_The meltdown
in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value
systems. A house is on fire, we see flames coming through the windows on
the second floor and we think that that is where the fire is raging. In fact
it is raging elsewhere? Every society has a legend about a treasure that is
lost. The message of the Fisher King is as true now as ever. Find the grail
that was lost. Find the values that were so crucial to the birth of our civiliza
tion, but were lost in the intoxication of its triumphs. (Okri 2008)
"We can enter a new future," says Okri, "only by reconnecting what is best
in us, and adapting it to our times."
References
Appiah, Kwame Antony. 1992. In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Benn, S. I., and G. W. Mortimore. 1976. Rationality and the Social Sciences: Contribu
tions to the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Cohen, David W. 1985. "Doing Social History from Pirn's Doorway." In Reliving the
Past: The Worlds of Social History, edited by Oliver Zunz. Chapel Hill: The Uni
versity of North Carolina Press.
Dictionary of African Biography. 1977. Volume 1: Ethiopia-Ghana. New York: Reference
Publications.
_. Volume 2: Sierra Leone-Congo. 1979. New York: Reference Publications.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1974 (1955). The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality.
Translated by Mercer Cook. Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill and Company.
_. 1987. Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federal State. Chi
cago: Lawrence Hill Books.
_. 1991 (1981). Civilization or Barbarism. Translated by Yaa-Lengi Meema
Ngemi. New York: Lawrence Hill Books,
_. 1996. Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Develop
ment 1946-1960. London: Karnak House.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1965 (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. London: Longmans.
Evans-Pritchard. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clar
endon Press.
Fage,J. D. 1981. "The Development of African Historiography." In General History of
Africa, vol. 1, edited byj. Ki-Zerbo, 25-42. Paris: UNESCO.
Goody, Jack. 1970. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Griaule, Marcel. 1948. Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Reli
gious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1966 (1837). The Philosophy of History. Translated byj. Sibree. New
York: Dover Publications.
Fanon, Franz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
Herskovits, Melville. 1944. "Native Self-Government." Foreign Affairs 22, no. 3 (April):
413-23.
Hollis, M., and S. Lukes, eds. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Cambridge: The MIT
Press,
Horton, Robin. 1970. "African Traditional Thought and Western Science." In Ratio
nality, edited by Bryan R. Wilson, 131-71. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Horton, Robin, and Ruth H. Finnegan, eds. 1973. Modes of Thought: Essays on Think
ing in Western and Non-Western Societies. London: Faber and Faber.
Hountondji, Paulin. 1983. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Translated by Henri
Evans with Jonathan Ree. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
_. 2002. The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democ
racy. Athens: Ohio University Centre for International Studies.
Huntington, Samuel P. 2002. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
London: The Free Press.
James, C. L. R. 1965 (1903). "Introduction." In The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du
Bois, xi-xii. London: Longmans.
Jarrie, I. C. 1984. Rationality and Relativism: In Search of a Philosophy and History of
Anthropology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Karp, Ivan, and Charles Bird, eds. 1980. Explorations in African Systems of Thought.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1923. Primitive Mentality. Boston: Beacon Press.
Margolis, J. M. Krausz, and R. M. Burian, eds. 1986. Rationality, Relativism, and the
Human Sciences. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff.
Mazrui, Ali. 1987. Africans: The Triple Heritage. New York: Little, Brown.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel. 1962. The African Image. London: Faber and Faber.
Mudimbe, V. Y 1988. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
_. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nkrumah, Kwameh. 1973. Revolutionary Path. London: Panaf.
_. 1968. Dark Days in Ghana. London: Panaf.
Okri, Ben. 1991. The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape.
_. 1993. Songs of Enchantment. London: Jonathan Cape.
_. 2008. "Our False Oracles Have Failed." Times (London), October 30.
Soyinka, Wole. 1980. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Tempels, Placide. 1969. Bantu Philosophy. Translated by Colin King. Paris: Presence
Africaine.
Notes
1. Some of the major works are Benn and Mortimore (1976); Horton and Fergu
son (1973); Jarrie (1984); Karp and Bird (1980); Margolis and Burian (1986);
Hollis and Lukes (1982); Goody (1970).
2. Diop acknowledges, however, that he was mostly initiating a rereading of
cultural history, paying homage to the work of predecessors such as E. W.
Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and John Hope Franklin, all diaspora
Africans.
3. See also Diop (1991 [1981]); Diop (1987); Diop (1996).
4. See also Hountondji (2002).
5. In this discussion, Appiah has unfortunately ignored Ali Mazrui's Africans: The
Triple Heritage (1987).
6. This dogmatic statement is made despite the fact that Appiah writes about
"European philosophy" and the "European mind."

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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance in

Editors' note: This article originally was presented as the Bashorun M. K. O.

cesses, and structures. Explanation in this type of historiography?exoge

The rationality debate raises two epistemological questions: (1) How

Hegel's philosophy of history remains the most exalted statement of

an and what he called "primitive mentality," which he attributed essentially

It is obvious that the whole purport of Levy-Bruhl's characterization of

distorted by the experience of domination. Decolonization, he wrote, "is

of sustained critical reflection that real philosophy demands.

of European racialism, and that the notion of pan-Africanism, founded on

It is more than a misjudgment to think of W.E.B. Du Bois as a great leader

As a citizen of Western civilization, Du Bois struggled for many years and

1965 [1903]:xi-xii). The Congress placed great faith in scientific inter

It was therefore his consciousness of race, not as a biological concept,

In December 1962, Nkrumah organized the first Africanist Confer

Nkrumah concluded his remarks by stating that knowledge of Africa's past,

Appiah also contends that the conception of an African identity is a

systematic, critical, conceptual inquiry into their cultures as the Germans,

the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligen

At the same time, Appiah asserts, postcolonial intellectuals in Africa are

The comments about Nkrumah, similarly, represent a simplistic and

The decolonization of knowledge is a crucial step in ensuring that Afri

tion is represented by the "Third Way" and neoliberalism's "end of history"

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