GENERAL INTRODUCTION

That we live in a world suffering from a plague called colour is a matter of historical record. Racism is an ideology that claims to explain an alleged inferiority of a certain race or ethnic group in terms of their biological or physical characteristics.1 Racist beliefs have been used to justify genocide, slavery and slave trade, chronic poverty and the maintenance of the system of inequality (as the case in South Africa during the Apartheid period). Also Racism is defined as a doctrine that a group of people is morally or mentally superior to another and that this superiority arises due to inherited biological differences which aimed at dividing one portion of humanity from another.2 Lastly racism is an unfair treatment of people, or violence against them, because they belong to a different race from another. Also, it is the belief that different race of people have different character, abilities and qualities different from others which are considered as inferior.3 Richard Schermerhorn posits that there are two major forms of racism namely; minimal and maximal racism. Minimal racism defines darker people as backward or less evolved, different in degree but not in kind from their masters, therefore capable, with training and education to arise individually from their lowly position to a status of equality with the ruling group.4 The great mass of the lower races, in this view, remained at an inferior level through no fault of theirs but because of the accidents of history which made some men rulers and others slaves or servants. In this minimal form of racism, exogamy (marrying outside of the tribe or clan or race) was tolerated and for the most part the paternalism softened the harsh realities of power. This tends to be the form of racism among Catholic dominants, as in Latin America or in the French, Spanish or Portuguese colonies of Africa.5 Maximal racism takes the form where the distinction between super-ordinates and subordinates assume as absolute rather than a relative character, one of kind and not degree. This is a cognitive effort to perpetuate the social realities of command. It becomes a highly reassuring ideology because it convinces dominant members that their ascendancy is no accident of history but is a part of natural order.6 Schermerhorn asserts that:

This ideology becomes the inherent superiority of the darker coloured. The inequalities of social dominion are therefore only an expression of the inequalities endowment and from this there is no appeal. But for humanitarian reasons, superior racial members may train or educate the members of inferior races, but, in the view of maximal racists, this can never be wholly successful because members of the dark coloured races are believed to have inherent limitations that prevent them from attaining intellectual equality with their master.7

Such notion of unbridgeable gulfs between men of different colour, promote an aversion to exogamy. In its more extreme forms, maximal racism became the basis of an imposed regime of complete separation or institutionalized in law. One cannot talk of the forms of racism without bringing in some manifestations of racism. These two forms of racism are very much manifest in Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Hegel insinuates that of all the races, only the Caucasian race (white European and the descendants) has inherent capacity for rationality. According to Hegel the Africans lacked the capacity for rationality. Thus they cannot be classified as humans. At best they are to be treated as sub-humans. Thus, in his classification of history, Africa has no history as a result of her lack of the capacity for rational inquiry. Hegel’s views were unfortunately not original with him. David Hume and Immanuel Kant before him had equally espoused such racist views against Africans and after Hegel thinkers like Lucien Levy-Bruhl and Arthur De Gobineau developed similar racists views against Africans on the basis that Africans are characterized by primitive mentality incapable of any rationality and that naturally the white race is superior to the black race, respectively. Our concern in this dissertation is not with Hegel’s Philosophy of History in general but with his views on Africa. For him, Africa has no history, no development, has contributed nothing to world history.8 The characteristic feature of the Negro, Hegel emphasizes, is that their consciousness has not yet reached an awareness of any substantial objectivity, for example, of God or the law. The Negro is an example of an ‘animal man’ in all his savagery and lawlessness and if he must be understood, all European attitudes must be put aside.9 While humans are capable of abstractly representing things such as a God or reason outside of themselves in order to bring order and necessity into a chaotic world, Africans are incapable. This Hegelian racially
motivated views are unacceptable, yet in practice, sadly even today, some non-Africans still
continue to hold on to the them and to treat Africans as such. This is the fundamental problem
that his work seeks to tackle. Not to leave the dissertation on such a negative note, we argue for
philosophic, or more precisely, inclusivity. It is time African voices are heard in the philosophical
environment without any bias. For, as Lyotard asks in his The Postmodern Condition, who confers
legitimacy on the west to think that only their method of doing philosophy and science count?
We argue that a diversity of philosophical thoughts is a blessing and not a curse.
The main question that this dissertation seeks to answer is: In our postmodern democratic
world with its theoretical claims to being a global village, what accounts for the persistence of
this Hegelian mentality and the consequent unequal and denigrating treatment of Africans at the
international level? To properly answer this question, we must excavate the roots Hegel’s racial
syllogism by asking: what is Hegel’s distinctive Philosophy of History and his views on Africa? How
will an inter-cultural resolve the deep racism that has eaten deep into the human psyche and put
Africa and others at par on the world stage?
To properly answer these questions, we shall use the historical method to situate and
contextualize Hegel; the analytical method to logically present his and others’ views, the critical
method to lay bare the fallacies at the roots of his racial syllogism; and finally the hermeneutical
method to help propose meaningful ways of getting out of our present predicament while
attempting an African Philosophy of History.
The significance of this work lies in its insistence on the promotion of the dignity of human dignity. Racism robes a designated race of humans of their dignity as human beings. Human dignity means the worth inherent in the human being, a value that man has, granting him special consideration and treatment because he is different from the irrational creatures. This treatment should be free from any discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, nationality, religious or social conditions.10The word dignity also refers to a property or properties that cause one to excel and merit respect from others. What makes human beings persons rather than things is their rational nature. Hence Human beings are rational creatures by virtue of possessing natural capacities for conceptual thought, deliberation, and free choice, that is, the natural capacity to shape their own lives.11 Thus, we do not discover the dignity of a human person in the faces of white and black people. The dignity of a person is common to all humanity whether black or white race. We do not discover the full humanity of a racially denigrated people in books by social scientists, or by the colour, sizes or intelligence, but we discover the full humanity of a person by the very nature of his existence.