Caroline Rooney asks how “inventions of Africa” differ from inventions of the Orient, and questions writing that has repeatedly cast doubt on the status of African thought, reading African literature through animism and politics.
M.S.C. Okolo reads African literature as political philosophy, starting from the closeness of the two disciplines: both aim to raise social consciousness and reflect on how society should be.
Edited by Kwasi Wiredu, essays on African philosophy across its ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary history and all its main branches, from logic and the theory of knowledge to metaphysics and aesthetics.
A French-language work on Aristotle and ancient Egypt. The old library recorded no author, date or description; these must be confirmed from the copy before the record is published.
Lewis Gordon’s undergraduate textbook, the first full treatment of Africana philosophy, tracing an African diasporic consciousness from the Afro-Arabic world of the Middle Ages.
Scholars and activists explore African indigenous knowledge systems across many disciplines, and how such knowledge is produced, shared and developed.
Timbuktu, in present-day Mali at the edge of the Sahara, was an intellectual and spiritual capital in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the Sankore university and many Qur’anic schools. It was also a market where salt, gold, cattle, grain and manuscripts were traded. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall this golden age. UNESCO notes that the monuments, though regularly restored, are threatened by desertification.
In 1954 the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop published ‘Nations nègres et culture’. In it he challenged Western histories that had justified European imperialism and the idea that Black peoples were inferior, and argued for histories that recognise Africa’s past and its contributions to world history, including his thesis that ancient Egyptian civilisation was African. His work remains influential and his specific claims are still debated by historians and made history a key field of anticolonial thought.
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