Critical notes on Hegel’s treatment of Africa

Abstract

This paper interrogates the adequacy of Hegel’s cultural framework upon which he constructed a philosophy of history which excludes Africa from the scheme of things. In what follows, I argue that the Hegelian dialectic is a project aimed at the exclusion of Africa from the universal history, leading to certain problematic theses like the Hegelian thesis on slavery, which is connected to theproblem of class formation and his concept of thestate. This paper is therefore a refutation of the Hegelian position, drawing insights from Senghor’s discussion of Negritude as a geo-climatic contextualized ideology.