School · 52 thinkers

African & Africana Philosophy

52 thinkers of African & Africana Philosophy on the Agora star map, from Ptahhotep to Lewis R. Gordon, in chronological order.

• traditionally c. 2450–2375 BCEPtahhotep

  The teaching attributed to him says a good life follows Maat – truth, justice and order – through modesty, fair speech and listening well.

• 1556–1627Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti

  Skin colour is no ground for enslaving anyone, and the claim that Black Africans are cursed as descendants of Ham has no basis in law or scripture.

• traditionally 1599–1692Zera Yacob

  The Hatata attributed to him teaches: test every religious claim by the light of reason God gave everyone – and you will find that all people are equal.

• c. 1630–1700Walda Heywat

  His teacher’s religion of reason should become practical wisdom for daily life: moderation, education and care for the family.

• c. 1703–1759Anton Wilhelm Amo

  The mind cannot be affected by physical things, so sensation belongs to the body alone – and his lost treatise on the legal status of Africans in Europe reportedly defended their rights.

• 1754–1817Usman dan Fodio

  Rulers must govern by justice and the Sunna; when they oppress believers, scholars may call for emigration and resistance – and women, too, have a right to learning.

• 1793–1864Nana Asma’u

  Learning belongs to women as much as to men, and poetry in the languages people speak can carry faith, history and knowledge into every household.

• 1818–1895Frederick Douglass

  Slavery rests on keeping people ignorant and afraid; by learning to read and by resisting, the enslaved win the self-respect that no one can grant them, and they hold the nation to its own principles.

• 1819–1898Alexander Crummell

  Alexander Crummell held that the race needs above all civilisation – learning, moral culture and religion – created by its own educated members, not industrial training alone; Black people of the diaspora have a duty to help regenerate Africa.

• 1832–1912Edward Wilmot Blyden

  Africans have a personality and culture of their own worth and should unite and develop it instead of imitating Europe.

• 1850–1911Anténor Firmin

  All human races are equal in capacity; the science that claims otherwise rests on prejudice and bad method, and the history of Egypt and Haiti refutes it.

• 1858–1964Anna Julia Cooper

  The progress of a people is measured by the position of its Black women, who face race and gender together and deserve education.

• 1862–1931Ida B. Wells

  Lynching was not justice for crimes but terror to keep Black Americans down, and the facts – gathered from the white press itself – prove it.

• 1868–1963W. E. B. Du Bois

  Black Americans are forced to see themselves through the eyes of a society that looks down on them – a “double consciousness” – and the colour line is the central problem of the modern world.

• 1885–1954Alain Locke

  Values grow out of feeling and culture, so they are many; the task is not to make them uniform but to let cultures meet on equal terms – and Black Americans should speak for themselves in their own art.

• 1891–1960Zora Neale Hurston

  For Hurston, the tales, sermons, songs and hoodoo of Black Southern communities are an art and a knowledge of their own, marked by drama and a “will to adorn”; recorded in the speakers’ own language, they show Black life as more than tragedy.

• 1896–1985Paulette Nardal

  Paulette Nardal held that Black students in Paris, like African Americans before them, were moving from imitation of European models to a consciousness of race; Black people of all empires should know one another and join their two cultures in a new humanism.

• 1906–2001Léopold Sédar Senghor

  For Senghor, African culture has its own way of knowing, through feeling, rhythm and participation, and it belongs in a shared civilisation of all peoples – a view Soyinka, Towa and Hountondji criticised as essentialist.

• 1906–1977Placide Tempels

  For Tempels, the thought of the Bantu peoples equates being with vital force and ranks all beings by their strength – a view later criticised as ethnophilosophy.

• 1909–1972Kwame Nkrumah

  A free Africa needs a philosophy that joins its traditional, Islamic and Christian heritage on a socialist basis – and must resist neo-colonialism.

• 1912–1981Alexis Kagame

  A people’s language contains its philosophy: the grammar of Kinyarwanda reveals a complete system of categories of being.

• 1913–2008Aimé Césaire

  Colonialism does not civilise but brutalises the coloniser and turns the colonised into things – and Black culture deserves pride, not shame.

• 1915–1964Claudia Jones

  Claudia Jones held that Black women in the United States are “superexploited” at once as workers, as Black people and as women; because they are the most oppressed, their struggles are central to labour, Black and women’s movements, which have neglected them.

• 1922–1999Julius Nyerere

  African socialism should grow from the traditional extended family, where people share and rely on themselves, not from class struggle.

• 1923–1986Cheikh Anta Diop

  He argued that ancient Egypt was a Black African civilisation, and that Africans must write their own history from their own sources to reclaim their past.

• 1924–1973Amílcar Cabral

  Liberation from colonial rule is an act of culture, and revolutionary theory must grow from the real conditions of your own people.

• 1925–1961Frantz Fanon

  For Fanon, colonialism damages the minds of the colonised as much as their lands, and freeing themselves means breaking its grip on body and self-image.

• b. 1928Sylvia Wynter

  The idea of “Man” that the modern West took to be humanity as such is only one version of being human, built on excluding others – and we must invent new ones.

• 1931–2019John S. Mbiti

  In African life religion is everywhere, and the individual exists only through the community: “I am, because we are.”

• 1931–1982Okot p’Bitek

  Okot p’Bitek held that Western scholars and African theologians alike had “Hellenised” African religions, giving African deities the attributes of the Greek and Christian God; African thought must be described in its own concepts and as part of a whole way of life.

• 1931–2014Marcien Towa

  Marcien Towa held that ethnophilosophy and Senghor’s Négritude celebrate an African difference that keeps Africa subordinate; Africa must criticise its own traditions and appropriate the science and philosophy to which Europe owed its power in order to be free.

• 1931–2022Kwasi Wiredu

  African thinkers should test inherited Western concepts against their own languages, and traditional consensus can ground a democracy without parties.

• 1934–2018Fabien Eboussi Boulaga

  Eboussi Boulaga held that ethnophilosophy, by reconstructing an African worldview for European recognition, confuses custom with thought; philosophy in Africa must begin from the concrete situation left by colonial defeat and help people to exist by and for themselves, without violence or arbitrariness.

• 1934–1992Audre Lorde

  Differences between women are not a threat but a source of strength; a feminism that ignores race, class or sexuality repeats the domination it wants to overcome, and silence protects no one.

• 1935–1994Lélia Gonzalez

  Lélia Gonzalez held that racism in Brazil works by denial: the myth of racial democracy hides it, while everyday language reveals it, above all in the images of Black women; amefricanidade names the shared history and resistance of people of African descent across the Americas.

• 1935–2018Sophie Oluwole

  The oral wisdom of the Yoruba, especially the Ifá verses, is genuine philosophy with its own thinkers – Orunmila, she argued, stands beside Socrates as a founder of classical philosophy.

• 1938–2025Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o held that language carries a people’s culture and memory, so that colonial languages colonise the mind; African writers should write in African languages, and decolonisation is a continuing process of seeing oneself clearly and moving the centre.

• 1939–2019Kwame Gyekye

  A person is shaped by community but is not swallowed by it – African thought can hold communal values and individual rights together.

• 1940–2019Ifeanyi Menkiti

  You are not born a person but become one, by growing into your obligations within a community.

• 1941–2025V. Y. Mudimbe

  The Africa the world knows was invented by Western explorers, missionaries and scholars – Africans must reclaim the power to define themselves.

• b. 1942Molefi Kete Asante

  Molefi Kete Asante holds that people of African descent should interpret the world from their own location, as subjects and agents of history rather than as objects of a European perspective that presents itself as universal; ancient Egypt is Africa’s classical civilisation.

• 1942–2024Paulin Hountondji

  There is no collective philosophy that a whole people shares unknowingly; African philosophy is critical, written debate among individuals.

• 1942–1980Walter Rodney

  Walter Rodney held that Africa’s underdevelopment is not an original state but the product of its incorporation into the capitalist world economy through the slave trade and colonialism, which drained its labour and wealth to Europe; development requires socialism and the people’s own action.

• 1944–1995Henry Odera Oruka

  Traditional African communities have their own critical thinkers, wise individuals whose reflections are real philosophy, not just shared folklore.

• 1946–1977Steve Biko

  Liberation starts in the mind: Black people must first free themselves from the feeling of inferiority that oppression has planted in them.

• b. 1946Mahmood Mamdani

  Mahmood Mamdani holds that colonial indirect rule divided Africans into urban citizens and rural subjects of customary authority, a bifurcated state that survived independence; colonial categories of settler and native also explain how victims could become killers in Rwanda.

• b. c. 1948Mogobe Ramose

  A person becomes a person only through other people, and being itself is an endless becoming lived in community.

• b. 1955Souleymane Bachir Diagne

  Souleymane Bachir Diagne holds that Islamic thought, as Iqbal showed, is faithful to its sources by remaining in movement, and that African art, as Senghor read it with Bergson, is itself a philosophy; translation is the way traditions reach a lateral universal.

• b. 1956Paul Gilroy

  Paul Gilroy holds that Black culture is not the possession of a nation or an African origin but a transatlantic formation shaped by slavery and migration, inside and against modernity; ethnic absolutism and race thinking should give way to a planetary humanism.

• b. 1957Achille Mbembe

  Modern power is not just the power to govern life but to decide who may live and who must die – a legacy of colonialism and slavery.

• b. c. 1957Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

  She argues that before colonialism Yoruba society was ordered by age, not by gender – and that the category of woman was imposed by Western thinking about bodies.

• b. 1962Lewis R. Gordon

  Lewis Gordon holds that antiblack racism is a form of bad faith, a flight from the freedom and responsibility of human existence that treats Black people as problems rather than as persons; Africana philosophy asks what it means to be human under dehumanising conditions.

Explore the star map →