The African Case for The Enlightenment
I
Can one think of a more inauspicious time than now to offer a case for the continuing relevance, the necessity even, of the Enlightenment project to the fortunes of contemporary Africa? What follows is not a defense of the Enlightenment and its ideals. Where that is concerned, the great enterprise does not need my defense. By the same token, those who claim to be defending it in the name of a racial identity or an even more groundless civilizational supremacy originating in one corner of the globe may be mortified by what I have to say. Once we move away from smug affirmations of identities and from the homogenization of diverse historicities, it will become clear that just as sure as humans are zoon dunamikon, mobile animals, like the snail and its shell, their ideas are no less given to migrating. Even when their original discoverers are loathe to share them, it is well-nigh impossible for them to stop their fellow humans from copying, buying, or pilfering those ideas for whatever ends they wish to realize. In this marketplace of ideas only the foolhardy would permit themselves to think that anyone or any group can claim absolute ownership of any idea they have articulated in a form that is no longer opaque to their fellows.
It does not require courage to defend the Enlightenment project; all it requires is knowledge and an openness to considering other ways of organizing life and thought. As will become clear, much of the animus towards the Enlightenment project in the African context is traceable to an ignorance of Africa’s relations with it over time, and to witting or unwitting misreadings of its core elements. When this is not the case, it is founded on a dubious identity politics the origins of which are exogenous to the African context and the embrace of which must, perforce, trash or, minimally, deny Africa’s place in the global circuit of ideas and the meritorious contributions of African minds to that circuit through time.
There are many reasons for us, contemporary Africans, especially scholars and other intellectuals, to embrace the project. Regardless of how we account for the genealogy and the pedigree of the Enlightenment, I submit that, with all its limitations, a world in which its core elements are in place would be a superior world to the one that we inhabit, and not only in Africa. Does this mean that a world structured by Enlightenment ideals will be a perfect or near-perfect one — whatever that may mean? Absolutely not. Indeed, it is a failure to engage with the complexity of those ideals — and a related eagerness to caricature them in the service of dubious identity-driven politics — that incline many to dismiss or to demonize them. I can only hope that what follows shows this complexity and, as a result, makes it less easy to abandon them.
What obstacles have stood, in our day, in the way of the embrace of these ideals? Those obstacles are of recent vintage; they have not always been there. Africa has not always been hostile to the Enlightenment project. Despite the widespread and justifiable indictment of it by antiracist scholars, especially in our day, a responsible perusal of the history of ideas reveals an important distinction between the racialization of the Enlightenment and its historicization. It may be true that the European Enlightenment was conducted by Europeans and principally in Europe, or in a world dominated and framed by Europe. Notwithstanding this acknowledgment, the question is whether the ideas that form the warp and woof of the Enlightenment are, simply for that reason, incorrigibly “European” ideas such that they become invalid for retrieval and adoption in non-European contexts and by non-European thinkers.
When scholars write as if ideas come in colors or are indissolubly linked to certain geographies, cultures, or epidermal inheritances one should be suspicious. Doubtless, ideas emerge in certain contexts, yet when all is said and done they really emerge in individual thinkers’ minds, albeit in conversation with others. If this be granted, even if we say that the Enlightenment project and the ideals that it fostered were undiluted emanations from European minds, it is a giant step to saying that this alone suffices to make them unavailable for appropriation by non-Europeans. Similarly, it would be just as implausible to suggest that only under compulsion, enslavement, conquest, or other non-voluntary methods could non-Europeans come to have such ideas become a part of their world. And only if we dubiously assume a singular, almost hollow, conception of European identity, totally unaffected by history or with a history marked by absolute isolation, might we even permit ourselves to entertain the idea that the Enlightenment was a product of what Biodun Jeyifo, in a different context, has termed “absolute autochthony.”
Only if we racialize it and color it “white,” Caucasian, essentially European, not even Eurasian, only if we regard its provenance as the most important thing about it, can we call the Enlightenment project a strictly parochial inheritance that other racial groups must shun or, if they embrace it, find a way to justify such an orientation. The relevance of the distinction between “racializing” and “historicizing” is that the first term erects an almost unbridgeable gulf between the two sides, while the second looks upon the discourse as a consequence of historical contingencies, a move that allows members of both sides to narrow the gulf and lay claim to any part of each other’s inheritance in the broad framework of a common humanity.
The Enlightenment, a certifiably European movement that was the intellectual charter for the epoch we now identify with modernity, must be historicized, not racialized. To historicize it means that we place it where it belongs: in the history of ideas in the evolution of the history of humans and their unceasing efforts to come to terms with their world and to conceptualize that world in the most expansive manner possible — to figure out why we are here, how we should live, who we are and what we owe one another, in the context framed by having language and reason and developing tapestries of existence that involve recognition and ostracism, cooperation and conflict, praise and shame, and so on. Since the tasks that I just adumbrated are not restricted to any human group, and since we know that different groups have, over time, offered different models of being in and with the world, and since even among the same groups none can be said to have contained only one model that never changed through time, it is a plausible model of the history of ideas never to sever any new iteration from this general concern of our species.
The Enlightenment was not a bolt from the blue. Yes, it represented a severe rupture with previous models for the human tasks that I identified above, but in a very significant sense it was continuous with them. If the Greeks provided inspirations and interlocutors, then that inheritance involved Africa and Asia through Egypt, Christianity, and Islam. But of even greater significance is that, even when they are conceded as a strictly European phenomenon, the signal ideas of the Enlightenment — a philosophical anthropology that affirms that freedom and the possession of reason — are essential to human identity. The promotion of reason as the main or only arbiter of the great moral and social and political questions was the decisive break with what came before, and it held the key to mature subjectivity and self-ownership. The Enlightenment was a radical break with what had been the rule in much of Europe before it: the paramount role of revelation, tradition, and authority in the affairs of human beings and their being in the world.
The idea of free humans capable of deploying reason to enlarge and improve themselves became the template for a slew of new modes of organizing life and thought. In politics, divine ordainment became inferior to the rational enthronement of rulers whose claim to legitimacy rests on the consent of the governed. This was the answer to one of the central questions of political philosophy inaugurated by the Enlightenment: who ought to rule when not all can rule? If divine ordainment no longer passed muster in the sphere of politics or social relations generally, neither did tradition and any authority founded solely upon it. On the issue of whether we know, how we know, and how we know that we know, Enlightenment thinkers assailed any knowledge claim that was not an instance of a demonstrable proof executed by reason or, as science rapidly developed, by the experimental method. If the evils that they inveighed against were universal—the institution of chieftaincy, for example, and rule based on status, and the continuing dominance of supernaturalism in our world—and not necessarily “white,” “European,” or “Caucasian,” it would be a mistake to read their proposed solution as if they were indissolubly linked to the racial inheritance of its proponents. Nor should we assume that they had any proprietary ownership of those ideas or that they alone possessed the genius to generate those ideas. Once those ideas were formulated and shared with the world, anyone who was willing to expend the sweat equity to understand and appropriate them immediately became an interlocutor and a part-owner of the discourse. In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon wrote that “all the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time or another in European thought.”
I would not like to be misunderstood. No significant modern white European thinker, not Hume or Kant or Voltaire or Hegel or Marx, had anything good to say about African-descended people. That many of the Enlightenment thinkers were racists is not open to argument or contention. But here is the irony. When they exploded previous models of being human in the world, when they substituted “human” for particularistic and tribal descriptions and privileged the same human’s capacity to know independently of revelation or other occult powers, and adopted “self-governance” in place of other-dependent hierarchies — that is, when they claimed universality for what they had discovered — they simultaneously created a central contradiction that would forever upset any and all attempts by them or their followers to adjectivize the human and assign preselected inferior status to certain groups and people on account of ever contingent particularisms — race, creed, ethnicity, and the like. Those categories can hold only if they give up on the universal and accept that they have merely mistaken their provincialism for universalism.
Nothing in the Cartesian cogito limits it to Caucasian humans. It is either universal or it is meaningless. Even in the thralldom of chattel slavery, African humans never failed to claim their cogito inheritance even as they faced lethal consequences for their defiance. We have evidence that at no time did those who were enslaved stop proclaiming the same natural right to freedom that Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant had championed as essential to and inviolate in the human individual. The inventors of these ideas, the liberal pioneers, lived acutely inconsistent lives, and had to contort themselves into all sorts of shapes and craft various calumniations in order to live with the contradiction between their thinking and their lives — most dramatically in the case of slave owners such as Jefferson. They were universalists who also proclaimed, like Kant, that some part of that universal — black people, in this case — is not really of it.
Beyond the logical contradiction, there was the inconvenient matter of history. Various Enlightenment thinkers, notably Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Locke, enlisted in different ways the aid of non-Caucasians, from Tahiti to Haiti to the United States, for good or ill, in constructing their philosophies. The “wild Indian” was Locke’s metaphor for an unowned world waiting for labor to privatize it; travel writing offered Persians to Montesquieu and Tahitians to Diderot as foils for their critiques of the old ways in Europe. But they did not need native peoples as a foil for their constructions. They had with them fellow interlocutors, ex-enslaved persons, who themselves had become singers of freedom’s song and, this is crucial, who never failed to point out, in real time no less, the contradiction that we only now are retrospectively pointing out. Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano are two shining examples of this category of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers who are routinely excluded from its annals. Both were enslaved persons who became free and serious thinkers as well as intellectual leaders of the anti-slavery movement while they lived in London. Cugoano was born in present-day Ghana and Equiano in present-day Nigeria. Equiano’s book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which appeared in 1789 and played a role in the passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807 that abolished the slave trade, was a bestseller in its day. They, too, provided the original case for the Enlightenment — but from their African-inflected standpoint. The path that they blazed as active participants in the movement would be trodden by other African thinkers in their opposition to colonialism and the racism that was used to justify it. However sensitive they are or claim to be to African agency, many Africanist scholars, be they African or non-African, seem to think that what Africans have to say regarding the intellectual legacy of their engagement with Euro-America is not worthy of serious engagement. They often leave the impression that the idea of freedom has not exercised African thinkers at a level of sophistication and rigor that would merit the attention of serious political scientists or philosophers.
II
The crucial question is, what do we do with the legacy of these thinkers and of their successors in the global African world who have embraced the Enlightenment and its ideals? Do we ignore, deny, or dismiss them as lackeys or, at best, mimics, as many do in our time? But then we doubly orphan them: they are deprived of recognition by their fellow residents of the Enlightenment universe and their successors, and we, their legatees in the global African world, pour scorn on their legacy, for dubious reasons that I will now address.
The principal way in which Enlightenment thinkers and their successors excluded African-descended thinkers’ participation in and contributions to their shared discourse was by encasing their black interlocutors in the concrete of difference. This was the original source of what I call the metaphysics of difference, according to which the very being of African-descended peoples was defined by the attribute of their race, such that none of the ordinary affirmations applicable to every human group avail when it comes to African being. This was not merely a social distinction but an ontological one. They insisted either that Africans were not human or, if they were, that they were so far down the ladder of human attainments that they could be regarded as less-than-human who will need a long time to attain full human status. Just like that, Enlightenment humanism, the great invention that overthrew millennia of hierarchies framed by revelation, tradition, and authority, summarily banished Africans from its purview. The first casualty of this exclusion was the scrubbing from the annals of the global circuit of ideas the records of African achievements from remote antiquity through ancient times, from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. It eventually enabled Hegel’s libel against Africa in his Philosophy of History in the nineteenth century.
One does not have to subscribe to Afrocentrism or any other nationalist creed, one has only to be a good student of the history of ideas, to see through this charade. If, as we have observed, Africa had never been absent from the global circuit of ideas, the burden of proof is on those who decided to erase Africa from their account for the relationship between Egypt and Greece as parts of the Mediterranean continuum of commerce in goods, services, and ideas; and to omit Africa’s role in the emergence of Christianity and its evolution through its many schisms and the resulting constitution of the Roman and Greek Eastern Orthodox denominations, respectively; and scant to Africa’s part in the intercourse that persisted in Roman and Byzantine colonialisms in the continent’s north, the Maghreb more specifically, and so on. When it comes to the modernity for which the Enlightenment provided the intellectual charter, Howard French has powerfully argued, in Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, for the restoration of Africa to its place at the very origin of the epoch. We need to recognize the long historical period when nothing human was foreign to Africa and Africans were an integral part of the movement of ideas and people in the world. That world did not exclude the Enlightenment, even if its principal proponents sought to exclude the continent and its peoples. What they crafted would later become a ready tool for Africans — including for those who chose to inherit not the liberal doctrine of the Enlightenment but its metaphysics of difference, who decided that Africans are indeed essentially different.
Fast forward to the nineteenth century, in which the pivotal events took place that structured the alienation of Africans from the Enlightenment based on the metaphysics of difference, and in which, simultaneously, other African embracers of Enlightenment freedom picked up from where those we have already encountered left off. Not even the long dark period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade witnessed any break in Africans’ continuing engagement in the global circuit of ideas; and one of the lamentable elements of contemporary discourse is a disinterest in taking this dimension of Africa seriously. The nineteenth century, in its early decades, saw the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the intensification, especially in West Africa, of Christian evangelization spearheaded by the Church Mission Society, the evangelizing arm of the Church of England, which would be the crucial link to the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment project even when it was couched in the language of Christianity and civilization.
Again, because too many scholars could not or would not wrap their heads around the agency of Africans — chiefs or plebeians, it does not much matter — African participation in the relevant discourses has been elided, denied, or denigrated. But — and this is key — when formal colonialism was imposed on the continent in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, the beginning of which was the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884 -1885, the colonizers had to contend with Africans who had not merely embraced the new ideals but were also already engaged in the task of attempting to transition their societies to modernity. The colonialism that dominated in Africa, whether settler, exploitation, or settler/exploitation colonialism, all shared a defining characteristic when it came to the view of the humanity of African: Africans were adjudged to be either not human or, if human, of the most inferior kind. The old metaphysics of difference of the eighteenth century received a new charter in the nineteenth. And just as in the previous era there were Africans who challenged, precisely in the name of the ideals of the Enlightenment, the metaphysics of difference, in this later period there were also African apostles of modernity, as I will show. These included the converts that the Church Mission Society and other missionary groups had sought to train to put African agency back in control of African affairs and accelerate the progress of the continent towards securing the gains of modernity for their people.
These African modernizers made common cause with their fellow denizens of modernity’s universe powered by the Enlightenment ideas that some of their forebears had helped to elucidate a hundred years earlier. Once colonialism prevailed, however, Africans ran into the buzzsaw of colonial racism and its ontological distinctions. Something terrible happened. Many African thinkers, though by no means all, resorted to what some have called a reactive nationalism characterized by, guess what, the metaphysics of difference. Notable examples would include Rev. Dr. Mojola Agbebi (previously called D.B. Vincent), William Essuman Gwira Sekyi a.k.a. Kobina Sekyi, Orishatuke Faduma a.k.a. W.J. Davies, and Edward Wilmot Blyden, all men of letters and public intellectuals. They gave up on the idea of modernity, which they began to impute to racism. The key ideas of the Enlightenment — universalism, humanism, the centrality of reason, the insistence that knowledge not be based on revelation, tradition or authority, governance by consent — began to be counterposed to a pristine African identity uncontaminated by alien ideologies and borrowings emanating from their colonial oppressors. They responded to racism with the same racialization of ideas that had led their colonial oppressors astray to begin with. This was a tragic response, if psychologically understandable. Thus was inaugurated many of the ills that we are still struggling to remedy today, and for the remedying of which, I believe, the Enlightenment remains urgently relevant.
Those who are familiar with African history know that before the imposition of formal colonialism, the continent was a veritable workshop of political experiments ranging from the incorporation of various Islam-inspired theocracies to the dismantling and reconstitution of many old regimes, the agglomeration of different demographics to form new identities, and so on. At the intellectual level, in West Africa, the dominant discourses turned on what to do with Enlightenment-inspired ideas with Protestant Christianity as the vector, Islam as an intellectual tradition, and the competition between these two (and other indigenous intellectual traditions) as the context for any possible progress. In North Africa, Napoleon Bonaparte’s failed colonial adventure had inaugurated for Egypt and the rest of the region a momentous debate, still continuing, about the relationship between Islam and modernity. Many arguments for liberal constitutionalism and social reform figured in this debate.
These contestations included different factions of various African elites, old and new. Some wanted to preserve their original modes of being human with minimal or no changes; others wanted to cast out the old tout court and substitute borrowings from either Islam- or Christianity-inflected modernity, and still others wanted a creative admixture of the old and the new. It is West Africa that interests us here. Similar situations obtained with different actors in North Africa and South Africa, but it was in West Africa that there was a critical mass of intellectuals of varying sorts and all in conversation with Enlightenment ideals and the modernity that they undergirded. They set in motion a transition to modernity directed by native agency. The Fanti nation in what became Ghana, for example, formed a confederacy for which they authored and formally adopted a broadly liberal constitution in 1871, one of the earliest efforts at liberal constitution-making outside the European heartland. About the same time, a new form of constitution-making under modern inspiration was undertaken by the Egba in Abeokuta, Nigeria, called the Egba United Board of Management, around 1868.
For these graduates of the missionary school of modernity, the metaphysics of difference had no resonance, because the Enlightenment and modernity were an epoch in human history that was to be judged by how well or ill it enhanced being human, and because they had decided that their societies were backward not on account of any genetic defects in their race but as a contingent fact of history, a good part of which was traceable to the inhumane and unChristian trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here the example of James Africanus Beale Horton (1835-1883) is particularly instructive. In his West African Countries and Peoples, he countered from a place of superior knowledge the scientific racism that was being peddled and he showed that science did not support the attributions that were being made to African-descended peoples by racists. These modernizers also believed that Africans and their societies would do well to shun exactly all that the Enlightenment was meant to overthrow — revelation, tradition, and authority — even as they were Christians like their Euro-American co-speakers of the Enlightenment vocabulary. In sum, they set out to reorganize their societies on the basis of those principles. Like their African predecessors, they had historicized, not racialized, the Enlightenment.
The record is indisputable. The example of Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford of Ghana, teacher, journalist, lawyer, a pioneer leader of the anticolonial movement in West Africa, is instructive. While Horton, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, from Nigeria, the first black to be consecrated Bishop in the Church of England, and a genuine polymath, and Edward Wilmot Blyden, a polyglot philosopher and diplomat, originally from the West Indies, and Alexander Crummell, pastor and theologian and an African American, were all firmly of the nineteenth century, Hayford was writing at the turn of the twentieth century, signaling a remarkable continuity in thought that deserves serious attention from scholars, and not only African ones. He adduced all the elements of the Enlightenment that we have been talking about. I will cite him here directly, so that those who wish to make it seem as if there was a break in African intellectual history when the Enlightenment lost its relevance will hear the voice of a thinker and political leader who was the heir to its intellectual strivings.
We are living in a new age and a new order of which we who participate in them, are hardly aware. One important element of this new order is the growing consciousness of our race the world over, of which practical statesmanship must take cognizance. Among world problems today is the appeal which goes from the heart of the African to be accorded certain rights which are common to humanity… We claim that we have the right to our opinion and to the expression of it. We say that we have passed the childhood stage, and that, much as we appreciate the concern of our guardians, the time has come for us to take an intelligent, active part in the guiding of our own national destiny; and that is the primary fact that has called into being the National Congress of British West Africa.
Elsewhere, he declared:
We claim, in common with the rest of mankind, that taxation without representation is a bad thing, and we are pledged, as all free peoples have had to do, that in our several communities the African shall have that common weapon for the protection and safeguarding of his rights and interests, namely, the franchise. It is desirable, we hold, that by our vote we shall determine by what laws we shall be governed and how the revenues which we help to put together shall be utilized. Equally do we hold with others that there should be free scope for the members of the community, irrespective of creed or colour, to hold any office under the crown or flag to which a person’s merits entitle him or her.
And, finally, we have the following:
We shall have to examine the constitutions of British West Africa and discover how far they make for national progress, and, where they fail, it will be our duty to say so explicitly and without reserve. If we find that the instrument which we have forged in defense of our national rights, our national integrity, is not sufficiently effective, we shall have to devise means to strengthen it. What is obsolete must be scrapped, and unwieldy agencies and obstacles in our path must be weeded out. Personalities must not stand in the way of principles, and the national soul must be more important to us than the strappings of mere conventionality to the end that we, Africans, who have borne the heat and burden of the day in the world’s work and in the world’s progress, may benefit fully by the resultant harvest.
Hayford was channeling the “Western” ideals that we are considering here.
If Africans are not essentially different, it stands to reason that their histories and those of their ideations, institutions, and practices, too, would have undergone the same buffetings through time that is the inescapable fate of humans and their lifeworlds anywhere in the world. To the extent that the ills that Enlightenment ideals were designed to heal are replicated anywhere in the world, at any given time, why would we forbid those confronting and suffering from similar woes from laying hold of what their fellow humans elsewhere have offered as remedies in their own locations? After all, humans have always borrowed and “appropriated” from each other, and an unreasoning insistence on purity is the path to extinction for civilizations. Why do we make it seem that to acknowledge a lack in ourselves is to concede the point that our racist detractors appear to be making when it comes to Africa’s place in the world of ideas: that Africa has always been an absence?
Meanwhile, as we remarked above, these modern prophets, beginning in the third quarter of the nineteenth century and accelerating in the decades after 1885, had to contend with the administrators that ran colonialism and a new cohort of white missionaries who jointly installed a regime built wholly on the metaphysics of difference. This preference was embodied in the primary denial of the humanity of Africans, and they did everything and I mean everything, to undo the achievements that Africans had garnered for themselves before colonial dominance. Over time, two things happened. First, there persisted among our “excluded moderns” a group that remained steadfast in their commitment to changing their communities along modern lines — but they started working mostly in civil society, many choosing to become professionals who did not have to depend on civil service appointments that required them, no matter their skills and credentials, to serve under otherwise inferior white superintendents. And second, there emerged in their ranks a group that turned its back on the modern idea, embraced the metaphysics of difference and sought to preserve, proudly, as a matter of identity and authenticity, the arrested image that the racist colonial establishment foisted on them. They began embracing ideas consistent with the conservatism that was holding the continent back and was exemplified most tragically in the colonial regime’s preservation and enhancement of chieftaincy. For the colonial rulers, the lineaments of the Enlightenment project were not for Africans, who, they insisted, would need centuries to qualify for its ideals.
In what was at best a reactive nationalism, this portion of the African elite began embracing cultural practices many of which they had neither studied nor even understood, and began to make common cause with the same rulers that they had earlier shunned for being complicit in the slave trade and the rapine that was its calling card. The most heartbreaking consequence was that they, too, began to racialize the Enlightenment and modernity, and to promote African institutions and ideas as the counter to European hegemony. Difference became the defining mode of being African, and borrowing from Europe was a sign that the racists were right: Africa had never contributed anything to the march of human progress. Mercifully, however, the likes of Hayford, a leading light of the anticolonial struggle in West Africa, were not buying it.
III
Here, then, is the crucible in which was forged the inertia that all of us must push against who wish to have our contemporary African societies and their peoples become beneficiaries of the best that the Enlightenment ideals have to offer. Other than the Native Americans, no people have borne more of the burdens of modernity without ever having enjoyed any of its tremendous benefits than Africans. Or again, as Hayford put it: “we, Africans, who have borne the heat and burden of the day in the world’s work and in the world’s progress, may benefit fully by the resultant harvest.” That harvest continues to elude ordinary Africans.
A few other consequences follow from the sad convergence of racist colonialists defining the very being of Africans in the terms of an absolute difference and a group of African intellectuals who were either ignorant of their own complicated intellectual heritage, or saw a quick and easy path to recognition, or were just weary of being told they that were worth nothing and, as a result, were content to define themselves and their heritages by the same absolute difference. If, indeed, Africans are unlike common humanity, it is but a short distance to embracing Africa as it is, and to concluding that its institutions and practices must change little, if at all. Concurrently, preserving this inherited situation and essentialist identity becomes an all-consuming concern, and this, again, produced the convergence that enabled colonial authorities — French, British, Portuguese, German — to arrest the progress of African societies on the path of change to better futures. Instead, as the colonial authorities insisted on petrifying African institutions even while distorting them in the name of “respecting” the integrity of African usages, these native aficionados of difference became mortally afraid of altering their actual inheritances, because to seek inspiration in foreign Enlightenment ideals would be tantamount to borrowing from the colonialists and their band of racists, or an index of one’s inauthenticity as an African. I cannot think of a better route to the fossilization of our best inheritance and its ultimate extinction.
But even this cult of authenticity does not mean that the colonialists are out of your hair. One unfortunate, if unintended, consequence of embracing the metaphysics of difference is the emergence and dominance of what I have called “occident anxiety” in the African mindscape. Your frozen reality induces anxiety because you are continually agitated by how well it stands up to what the West claims about itself and about you. An idealized past is always more satisfying, more fortifying, than a racist present. And since you have not really embraced your inheritance critically, critical evaluations by your fellows or, worse, by outsiders will always sound to you like declarations of hostility. The so-called West that you are separating yourself from hovers over you like a ghost, and your almost every move is circumscribed by it. Though you proclaim your autonomy, you have thickened your servitude.
The preceding has made it necessary to remind ourselves, and especially our younger scholars, that things have not always been this way. We now know from the historical evidence that the career of the Enlightenment in Africa has not always been defined by hostility. Nor has its path been singular: Africans contributed to its constitution, have embraced, shunned, criticized, and helped to shape its course globally. This is partly why colonialism had a hard time of it in West Africa, where African intellectuals called out its hypocrisy and fought it on the same principles that it pretended to share with them. It is imperative to insist, contrary to conventional wisdom and a lot of the scholarship dominated by “decolonizing” and related discourses, that there never was a time when African thinkers were absent from the global discourse on the Enlightenment. What I have offered here is only one version of an old truth about African intellectual history. The tragedy of contemporary scholarship about Africa is its willful neglect of the prior embrace of the Enlightenment project by African thinkers.
How might life be different were we deliberately to embrace the Enlightenment ideals and incorporate them into life as we lead it at the present time across the continent? Recall that our forebears embraced this philosophy because they were convinced that it was the path to a better world than the alternatives available to them in their own time. Yet my defense of African Enlightenment is not the same as claiming that, on balance, this is the best possible life for humans. Even if we could incorporate the best society that Enlightenment-based modernity can deliver, it would still fall short of “the good society.” Moreover, there may be some admirable local models of society in some of our African civilizations. No thanks to my limited knowledge, I cannot claim to know if this is so, and if others do, I hope they educate the rest of us. (The “authentic” models that are often on offer generally build on the idea of communalism or communitarianism, which do not hold much appeal for me.) Nor is there any suggestion in my argument that the kind of borrowing I am recommending is tantamount to a concession that some racial group is superior to another. To the extent that even the European Enlightenment was European only in respect of its geographical location, but was not authored only by Caucasians (it even included non-Caucasian Europeans), it cannot be a stretch or a betrayal for Africans to embrace it. And for those who continue to racialize the Enlightenment and liberal modernity, they would do well to note that even in countries such as the United States, which many people too glibly regard as a paragon of both, and in the “post-liberal” countries of Europe, the principles of the Enlightenment are imperiled. White people, too, need to learn, or re-learn, them.
I will give two concrete examples, one African, one American. In 1997, at the Pan-African Historical Festival in Cape Coast, Ghana, I gave a lecture in which I laid out what the doctrine of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty really involves, and why it is one of the cornerstones of the modern legal system that is dominant in Africa today, and what it means for the idea of human dignity and the freedom that is its principal means of expression. A presenter on one of the radio stations in the country insisted that I come on his very popular radio show to explain to his listeners exactly what had struck him at my session, which he had attended merely to report the event for his station. Something inside him had kindled. Dissolve now to the classes that I teach in philosophy in the United States. I often ask my American students if a police officer can, at a traffic stop, routinely search their cars. Of course they say no. Then I ask them to explain why not. Often enough, they have no idea; they just think it’s wrong. And this gives me an opportunity to make them aware of how much what they take for granted is dependent upon a discipline that they hardly ever think about and which they are convinced is totally irrelevant to their daily lives: philosophy.
What is the connection between the doctrine of the presumption of innocence and the prohibition of routine searches of people’s property? A fundamental tenet of the Enlightenment is the idea that, despite certain Biblical accounts of human origins, the abjection that attached to human nature, which doomed the species to the rule of revelation, tradition, and authority, is not an essential element of our being. On the contrary, we are equipped with reason that gives us a path to true and useful knowledge that is not beholden to the three sources just mentioned. One sure consequence of this endowment is that we must be free to deploy this attribute, and whoever is counted in this species must not be hampered in their development and deployment of this capability. That is, freedom is an essential element of what it is to be human, and curbs on this freedom must necessarily be adjudged a diminution of the dignity and respect that attach to every human individual. Additionally, this liberty to know and to think must be unfettered, and anything that interferes with these paradigmatically human powers must be condemned.
Over time, this philosophical model yielded practices, institutions, and processes that made the protection of individuals against unwarranted interventions by the state and their fellows and their dignity inviolate. But it is not just the body of the individual that is implicated in this demand for respect, it is also everything else that can be construed as pertaining to the idea of the individual. To the extent that your property is regarded as an extension of your body or as the right reward of its labor, it is peremptorily exempt from unwarranted interference from outside. The officer searching your glove compartment without your permission, absent evidence of a crime, is violating all these rational principles.
The concern for the individual is the template from which is fashioned that central object of solicitousness in the legal system: the legal subject. In any situation of legal wrongdoing, how you process the subject, when you are an agent of the state, matters to whether you are going to have a successful prosecution of the case. This is where the doctrine of the presumption of innocence converges with this prohibition of what is called illegal search and seizure — hence the requirement that, in order to interfere with an individual’s person or her possessions, you must show that there is a good reason for such an interference. The doctrine of the presumption of innocence draws in its wake also another core principle of the modern legal system, that is, the insistence that the onus of proving the guilt of an accused person lies on the state and not on the individual to prove his or her innocence, and this disables the state and its agents from taking liberties with the individual that may violate her dignity and her rights. More generally, the Enlightenment injunction about the preservation of human dignity issues in the fundamental recognition that it is the individual that needs to be protected from the power of the state, not the state that needs protection from the individual.
This recognition, or the lack of it, is important for a proper understanding of contemporary Africa and its ills. Many of those who led the first struggle for freedom, the struggle for independence, in Africa were committed to ensuring that these prohibitions would be institutionalized in the post-independence order that they created. In the colonial era, they had been honored only in the breach, and routinely so, even though the colonizers proclaimed that a part of their mission in Africa was to bring the continent to modernity. (They lied.)
Unfortunately, two things impeded progress on this path. First, given that colonialism was not exactly a finishing school for liberal democrats or civil servants or other state agents equipped with the Enlightenment temperament, it is no surprise that many African states succumbed to the inadequacies that resulted, and to the political disasters that were facilitated also by other elements, such as wayward personalities and external interventions. This brought the second thing that ruined the successor regimes of the colonial state: military coups, which proceeded to make an already illiberal culture worse. And this provoked what I call the second struggle for freedom across the continent, which is still unfolding, This second struggle includes the end of various military regimes and other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, or one-party states, under the pressure of ordinary Africans who still cling to the goals of the first struggle for independence — the freedom to be the authors of the own lives, to have states that they charter and governments that are responsible and responsive to them, and to enjoy the inviolate dignity that attaches to their persons by right. The second struggle has made an embrace of Enlightenment ideals, and the establishment of states that are more than superficially modern, even more urgent.
Across the African continent the dominant judicatures are based on these ideals, but they are unfortunately thwarted by the pressures of the identity-driven opposition to modernity and its Enlightenment principles. The education, especially in philosophy and jurisprudence, that is needed for the system to work as it does in the places from which we have borrowed them is sorely lacking. As I write, the continent is awash in NGOs, governmental agencies, and numerous movements canvassing everything from child rights to civil rights to women’s rights, workers’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the rule of law, freedom of expression; the list is long. I am convinced, alas, that these reformist efforts still lack a basis in our culture. This surfeit of movements and organizations is not matched by an equally intense participation in the philosophical discourse that undergirds these practical engagements, or in the widespread dissemination, especially through institutions, of the relevant education.
Ironically, all this is happening at the same time as scholarship in the continent is dominated by an anti-Western spirit that determinedly and wrongheadedly, strives to delegitimize these philosophical ideals as indelibly tarnished by colonialism and racism. We end up in a situation in which judges think more like civil servants than impartial arbiters empowered to protect the puny individual from the overweening powers of the modern state. We have law professors and political philosophers who start out always with the idea of freedom being limited rather than what it really is: absolute, unless its exercise clashes with its equal exercise by others. We have constitutions that boast the most ponderous Bills of Rights but are chock full of “clawback clauses” that take away with the left hand what they gives with the right. We have young women proclaiming their rights of ownership of their bodies who at the same time know nothing about the philosophical foundations of that idea, its recent intellectual history and its universal reach. Some African societies have recently recognized or decriminalized homosexuality even as many African scholars denounce such moves as alien to their “African cultures,” which are founded, they are quite sure, on the creation story of the Christian Bible.
What I am arguing is that all the institutions that dominate our social and political landscape across the continent at the present time, however well or not they are working they are working, and irrespective, irrespective of the civilizational diversities to be found therein, are traceable to Enlightenment-inspired modern origins. This does not mean that our diverse indigenous civilizations are no good, or that our embrace of foreign models is proof of our backwardness or of having contributed nothing to humanity’s progress through time. We are merely evincing the human imperative to cross borders without qualms and beg, borrow, or steal whatever in our neighbors’ lifeworlds would make a better one for us.
Here is a final illustration of this imperative at the present time. When judges are empaneled as impartial arbiters, we are fully cognizant of the fact that, like other human beings, they have personal preferences, and in many situations may have been card-carrying partisans of various factions in their respective societies. What is required of judges — and of jurors — is that they be willing and able to put aside their preferences and judge the case at hand purely on the basis of the merits. When this standard is met, we celebrate the jurors and the judges for approaching the almost superhuman capacity for impartiality. They do not develop this ability overnight. Jurors and judges have had lifetimes to develop the appropriate temperament through education, socialization into public life, a commitment to this practice as essential to what they regard as a just and admirable society. But this kind of existential training does not occur in many African jurisdictions. A judge who approaches the person in the dock suspiciously — if you didn’t do something, why were you picked up by the officers from among your fellows and brought before me? — is already on his way, without any political push, toward a miscarriage of justice. The standard is even more difficult for ordinary jurors who have never had to think about what impartiality entails when it comes to judging cases, especially when those cases involve sending someone to jail for long terms. And the fact that we do not have jury systems in much of the continent means that we are even more at the mercy of individual judges who, increasingly, may not be seriously educated in or engaged with the rigorous demands of their institution beyond their “technical” understanding of the rules. Our purview must be extended, then, beyond technical training in law to deeper engagements with philosophy, sociology, political theory, and so on. The reason is very simple. The philosophical anthropology that undergirds the institutions spawned by the Enlightenment, even when it dumped revelation as a source of knowledge, held on to the idea of the radical insufficiency of human nature. This ineradicable proclivity to error, this essential fallibility, is what reason is partly required to remedy.
As in law, so in science. Since the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution that it accelerated, our relationship to the world has no longer been dominated by an attitude of submission to and worship of nature. Instead we decode more and more of the underlying operative principles of nature. As we tame its previously unpredictable ferocity, we now make nature work for us, for the most part. The experimental method, certified by corroboration, replicability, and predictability, has shrunk the number of people in many societies who are still dominated by mythological and religious paradigms; such “explanations” are regarded as quaint, funny, maybe crazy. It used to be that our explanatory framework for phenomena which we could not otherwise wrap our heads around featured stories about gods, goddesses, and similar creatures — and this was not the exclusive preserve of any people. The scientific revolution changed all that. And one does not have to be subjugated to Western hegemony, however that is construed, to be a partisan of the scientific revolution. As we say in Yoruba, the sky is big enough for all birds to fly without touching wings.
And yet we, across the African continent, have never embraced the scientific method, even though many of our ancient civilizations handed down to us evidence of their commitment to evidence-based processes of engaging the world even as they identified with religious myth, Egypt being the most important example. We persist in embracing, deploying, and celebrating magical attitudes. I daresay that ours is the only continent that continues to thrash around in this morass. Certainly, other societies in our world have their share of such explanatory fantasies. India is full of gurus who are ready to convey the gullible and the confused to nirvana (if they pay up). In the United States there is no shortage of mad pastors who teach that hurricanes are our recompense for homosexuality and legislators who insist that Jews have special access to celestial laser weapons. But in those places few pay such occultists any heed, and their media and intellectuals refuse to be complicit in the swindle, in the peddling of ignorance. I wish I could say the same about Africa, where we need science so desperately.
It is past time to heed the admonition of one of the most modern African thinkers of the twentieth century. Amilcar Cabral, the writer and anti-colonial revolutionary from Guinea-Bissau, was a legatee of the Enlightenment. He worked with peasants for the most part, but was never reticent when it came to educating Africans about the limits of mythical and religious thinking and its irrelevance in our present world. “Our culture should be developed on the basis of science,” he wrote in Resistance and Decolonization, “it should be scientific—which is to say, not involve believing in imaginary things. Tomorrow our culture should avoid instances where any one of us thinks that lightning is a sign that God has become enraged or that a thunderstorm is the sky’s voice when a furious ‘spirit’ speaks. In our culture tomorrow, everyone should know that, while we dance when there are thunderstorms, a thunderstorm occurs when two clouds clash, one with a positive electrical charge and another with a negative electrical charge; and when they clash they cause a flash, which is lightning, and a noise, which is the thunder.” What Cabral called our tomorrow ought to have been our yesterday. The scandal is that it is not even our today.
The Enlightenment was crafted to end our uncritical dependence upon revelation, tradition, and authority. These defects continue to afflict African life and thought in our time. Does availing ourselves of modern tools make us into permanent subalterns, or an inferior race, or people who have never contributed to the world’s progress? There is no basis for such a conclusion. If we are set on securing for Africans a better life than we have right now, can we afford to ignore these tools? Of course not. 