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L5, Leclant El Imperio de Kush
L5, Leclant El Imperio de Kush
L5, Leclant El Imperio de Kush
Africa
Author(s): Bethwell A. Ogot
Source: African Studies Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Apr., 2009), pp. 1-22
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27667420
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Rereading the History and
Historiography of Epistemic
Domination and Resistance in Africa
Bethwell A. Ogot
The process of narrating and interpreting the African past has long been an
intellectual struggle against European assumptions and prejudices about
the nature of time and history in Africa. As the historian David William
Cohen states, "The major issue in the reconstruction of the African past
is the question of how far voices exterior to Africa shape the presentation
of Africa's past and present" (1985:198). Many historians, especially those
without any background or training in African historiography, have as
sumed, incorrectly, that prior to European contact with Africa, indigenous
"traditions" were ancient, permanent, and reproduced from generation to
generation without change. This is the false image of cultural isolation and
temporal stagnation that has been assiduously disseminated in many parts
of the world.
Little or no attention was paid to indigenous African views of the past
or to the role Africans played in the shaping of global developments, pro
African Studies Review, Volume 52, Number 1 (April 2009), pp. 1-22
Bethwell A. Ogot is chancellor of Moi University and a professor emeritus at Masono
University, Kenya, where he also founded and directed the Institute of Research
and Postgraduate Studies and held the UNESCO Chair in Higher Education in
Africa. He has taught at Makerere University, the University of Nairobi (where he
founded and directed the Institute for Development Studies and the Institute of
African Studies), and Kenyatta University. He was president of the International
Scientific Committee for the preparation of UNESCO's General History of Africa
and is also a member of the International Commission for UNESCO's History
of Humanity. His latest works include History as Destiny and History as Knowledge
(Anyange Press, 2005) and the History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples in Eastern Africa
(Anyange Press, 2009).
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2 African Studies Review
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 3
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4 African Studies Review
posite pole to Europe. In his The Philosophy of History, edited from notes for
courses of lectures delivered in the 1820s, Fredrick Hegel writes:
Africa proper as far as History goes back, has remained for all purposes of
connection with the rest of the World?shut up; it is the Gold-land com
pressed within itself?the land of childhood, which lying beyond the days
of self-conscious history, is enveloped in dark mantle of Night? The ne
gro ... exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.
We may lay aside all thought of reverence and morality?all that we call
feeling?if we would rightly comprehend him; there is nothing harmoni
ous with humanity to be found in this type of character.... Africa... is no
historical part of the World; it has no movement for development to ex
hibit. Historical movements in it?that is in its northern part?belong to
the Asiatic or European World_What we properly understand by Africa,
is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of
mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the thresh
old of the World's History.... The History of the World travels from East
to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning."
(1966 [1837]: 91, 93, 99, 103)
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 5
The two mentalities which are face to face are so foreign to each other, so
divergent in their habits, so different in their means of expression! The
European employs abstractions almost without thinking, and the simple
logical operations have been rendered so easy for him by his language that
they cost him no effort. With the primitives, thought and language are of
character almost exclusively concrete_In a word, our mentality is above
all 'conceptual', the other barely so. (Levy-Bruhl 1923)
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6 African Studies Review
that came to reverse its ideological thrust with regard to the colonial situa
tion. Anthropology now provided both inspiration and ideas for a challenge
to the colonial ideology with which it had been bound up. It now offered
a new and positive evaluation of non-Western cultures, with far-reaching
effects. The assumption of the cultural superiority of Europe began to give
way to a new attitude toward non-Western forms of cultural expression.
Also, the idea of Western culture as universal norm began to be abandoned
by those anthropologists whose direct experience of other cultures during
fieldwork had impressed them with the range of possibilities of human ad
aptation to the natural environment and of human potential for cultural
creation. From this revelation emerged the concepts of cultural pluralism
and cultural relativity that soon became a marked feature of anthropology
in the interwar period and finally came to dominate it after the Second
World War. The relativists argued that in general there are no absolute or
universal truths: all moral appraisal and assessments should only be made
relative to the social norms of the groups involved. The champion of this
new position was the American culturalist school of anthropology led by
Melville Herskovits (see Herskovits 1944).
Of particular interest for the development of African thought in its
confrontation with the colonial ideology were the contributions of French
anthropologists, led by Marcel Griaule, who presented a Dogon worldview
whose symbolic and conceptual organization revealed an evident architec
ture. In 1931 Griaule, together with eight colleagues affiliated with the Mu
seum of Man in Paris, set out on a twenty-one-month expedition, known as
the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, which crossed the continent of Africa from the
Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The aim of the mission was to collect and
record local knowledge and material culture. It was in the course of this
extensive expedition that Griaule first came into contact with the Dogon
people who today live in the Republic of Mali. He subsequently returned to
the Dogon region on many occasions to study their culture.
Sometime in the late 1940s Griaule was introduced to an elderly sage
named Ogotommeli who had lost his sight many years earlier in a hunting
accident. In a long series of interviews, Ogotommeli recounted the elabo
rate creation myth of the Dogon universe. Written in the form of a series
of object lessons, Griaule published Conversations with Ogotommeli m 1948 as
an attempt to present to the outside world a unified Dogon cosmology and
complete philosophical system. In the preface to his book Griaule wrote:
"These people live by a cosmology, a metaphysics, and a religion which put
them on a par with the peoples of antiquity, and which Christian theology
might indeed study with profit."
However, from the point of view of its ideological impact and of its
immediate relevance to the debate on African social thought, the most im
portant work to emerge from the new orientation in anthropology was pro
duced by a Belgian missionary, Placide Tempels. It is true that his work, Ban
tu Philosophy, published in French in 1945, remained within the stream of
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 7
European discourse upon the non-Western world, and that it was conceived
as part of a strategy for the spiritual conquest of Africa. Nevertheless, Bantu
Philosophy, despite its paternalistic tone, registered a decisive break with the
ethnocentric emphasis of classical anthropology by attributing a developed
philosophical system to an African people, the Baluba of present-day Con
go. Tempels insisted particularly on the need for a recognition of the ra
tionality of so-called primitive man and claimed for the Baluba an elevated
system of thought which, though peculiar to them, deserved to be honored
by the term "philosophy." More fundamentally, Bantu Philosophy provided
a conceptual framework and reference for all future attempts to formulate
the constitutive elements of a distinctive African mode of thought?to con
struct an original African philosophical system.
Later, however, a reaction set in among a significant section of the
younger generation of African philosophers against what they would call
"ethnophilosophy," one manifestation of which was the idea of n?gritude
developed in the French-speaking parts of Africa. The central issue in the
debate over the relevance of n?gritude to the postcolonial situation had
to do with identity: Is there an authentically African identity, and can it be
reconciled with technological progress? Leopold Senghor, the most promi
nent Francophone African intellectual of his generation, became the pri
mary spokesman for n?gritude, which he promoted as a form of negative
consciousness that could liberate black people from the mental prison of
European stereotypes. Throughout his writings he defended n?gritude as
a mode of being that offers Africans the only viable basis for defining their
collective identity, asserting that this mode of being is inscribed in tradition
al cultural practices that reveal an African aptitude for intuitively grasping
the inner reality, or essence, of things. This kind of perception, in his view,
is linked with an intense emotivity, a mystical unified image of the world,
a highly developed sense of rhythm, a propensity for analogical reasoning,
and a capacity to appreciate asymmetrical parallelisms.
By 1960 there was considerable opposition to Senghor's brand of n?
gritude. Marxists objected that differences between Africans and Europe
ans reflected economic conditions, not racial characteristics. Others com
plained that Senghor's identification with French colonial policies and his
allegiance to French literary culture prevented him from empathizing with
the real concerns of most Africans. Those involved in the anticolonialist
struggle faulted Senghor for failing to support the cause of political inde
pendence.
At the same time, n?gritude was largely rejected by English-speaking
African intellectuals. Ezekiel Mphahlele, in The African Image (1962), char
acterized n?gritude as a reverse racism that could be misused to keep Af
ricans in their places. According to him, the cultural traits idealized by n?
gritude writers could simply be taken for granted, and their preoccupation
with the past was an overcompensation for the void experienced by highly
educated individuals who had become alienated from their own people.
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8 African Studies Review
Wole Soyinka, in Myth, Literature and the African World (1980), regarded n?
gritude as the intellectual luxury of a small Francophone elite; remarking
that an African has as little need to proclaim its n?gritude as a tiger has to
announce its "tigritude," he coined a slogan that has repeatedly been used
to ridicule the movement.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, socially engaged writers in Franco
phone Africa were attacking n?gritude as an irrational concept that divert
ed attention from the economic causes of poverty and oppression. They
argued that national identity was not an essence to be discovered in the
cultural practices of the past but a potential that could be realized only by
working in the material world of the present to bring about a socially just
society in the future. For them, the way toward truth was not a mystical ex
perience of an absolute but a rational probing of concrete reality.
It is important in this connection to mention the work of Cheikh Anta
Diop, who, unlike Senghor, with his metaphysical conception about Afri
cans, attempted to define African identity in strictly sociological and mate
rialist terms and in proper historical depth. Diop's first work, Nations N?gres
et Culture (1955), has attained the status of a classic in black intellectual
circles. The primary objective of the book is to demonstrate the African
origin of ancient Egyptian civilization and thus the importance of Africa to
the culture of classical Greece and the formation of Western civilization.2
In his subsequent works Diop extended his theory to demonstrate the con
tinuity between ancient Egyptian civilization and the traditional cultures of
contemporary Africa, especially in terms of the affinity between Egyptian
social organization and cosmology and those of black Africa. His histori
cal approach to the question of African identity acts as a counterweight to
the evolutionist view of classical anthropology, which contrives to place the
white race and Western civilization at the apex of human development,
as well as representing an epistemological rupture with the unilateral and
ethnocentric conceptions of Hegel and other Western scholars.
Later writers have concentrated less on the problem of defining the
African identity than on problems related to the postcolonial situation.
The social and political realities of independent Africa have modified the
climate of African opinion to such an extent that the ideological confron
tation with imperialism has lost much of its earlier force and significance.
The ideological cleavages that have developed on the continent since in
dependence reflect a concern with new social problems consequent upon
the formal end of colonial rule and the creation of a new internal order.
This concern now exerts a far greater pressure upon African minds than
the question of identity. The writings of Frantz Fanon, especially his most
famous work, The Wretched of the Earth, helped greatly in securing a clear
ideological base for this new orientation and in imparting a radical spirit
to it. For him the struggle against colonialism had meaning not simply as a
means for attaining political independence, but also as a process through
which colonized people would remake their humanity, diminished and
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 9
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10 African Studies Review
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 11
cal plot rather than a fact, part of a more complex discourse invented and
maintained by Europe as an aspect of the epistemological order through
which it has affirmed itself in opposition to "others." For Mudimbe, there
fore, the most important questions in the debate on African philosophy are
those about the epistemological groundings that define African rationality.
Doesn't Africa have its own order of knowledge, or episteme, on the basis
of which it can define its rules and parameters of rational discourse apart
from the epistemological locus in the West? Unfortunately, Mudimbe him
self provides no satisfactory answer to this fundamental question. Further
more, in raising the question itself he relies heavily on the work of French
scholars. So how does one reach the African epistemological locus without
recourse to established Western methods?
This question is regarded as a nonissue by Kwame Anthony Appiah in
his book In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992). The
title refers, of course, to Christ's words at the Last Supper, when he said
that "in my Father's house there are many mansions?meaning that there
is room enough for all in heaven. In Appiah's case, however, his "father's
house" is Africa, which has many houses, many cultures, many identities.
The theme of this iconoclastic book is a question: "How are we to think
about Africa's contemporary cultures in the light both of the two main ex
ternal determinants of her recent cultural history?European and Afro
New World conceptions of Africa?and of her own endogenous cultural
traditions?" (1992:ix-x). He claims that many African (and African Ameri
can) intellectuals have failed to find a negotiable middle way between en
dogenous "tradition" and exogenous "Western" ideas, and that without
such a successful negotiation ideological decolonization is bound to fail.
For a long time, Appiah asserts, Africa's intellectuals have been engaged in
a conversation with one another and with Europeans and Americans about
what it means to be African; these debates, he says, are really about African
identity.
In In My Father's House Appiah offers us what he regards as a ground
breaking?as well as ground-clearing?analysis of absurdities and damag
ing presuppositions that have clouded our discussions of race, Africa, and
nationalism since the nineteenth century. He first explores the role of ra
cial ideology in the development of pan-Africanisn, focusing particularly
on the ideas of the African American intellectuals?with Alexander Crum
mell and W.E.B. Du Bois as his archetypes?who initiated pan-Africanist
discourse. In examining their works, he argues that the idea of the Negro,
and of an African race, is an unavoidable element in the discourse, and
that these racialist notions are grounded in bad biological?and worse,
bad ethical?ideas inherited from the increasingly racialized thought of
nineteenth-century Europe and America. He contends that Crummell and
Du Bois accepted a conventional notion of racial nationalism based on a ro
mantic European definition of the Negro. He adds that the very invention
of Africa as something more than a geographical entity was an outgrowth
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12 African Studies Review
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 13
I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this
century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that at the back of the
problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and
implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing
to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease
of the majority of their fellow men; that to maintain this privilege men
have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous,
and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race. (1965
[1903]:xi-xii)
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14 African Studies Review
Between ancient times and the sixteenth century, some European scholars
forgot what their predecessors in African studies had known. This amne
sia, this regrettable loss of interest in the power of the African mind, deep
ened with the growth of interest in the economic exploitation of the Afri
can. It served the purpose of those who wished to exploit the human and
material resources of Africa to disseminate distorted and often completely
false accounts of Africa's past to justify colonialism as a duty of civilization.
(1973:208-9)
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 15
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16 African Studies Review
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 17
Conclusion
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18 African Studies Review
who obtained his Ph.D. at the age of 27 at the School of Oriental and Afri
can Studies (SOAS). For the next four decades at the University of Ghana
he devoted his life to the destruction of Trevor-Roper's falsity. But Boahen
was also a fighter for African freedom. He was detained by a military dicta
tor, but in 1992, when the ban on multiparty democracy was lifted, he be
came the presidential choice of the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Thus these
pioneer historians forged a constructive marriage between history and na
tionalism. By the end of the 1960s African history and historiography had
been successfully introduced in numerous academic institutions in Africa,
Europe, and the United States. Africa-based historians and social scientists
founded academic journals, formed historical associations, and held aca
demic and professional conferences in Africa. The most remarkable legacy
of these activities was the writing of UNESCO'S General History of Africa, pub
lished in eight volumes and translated into more than fifteen international
languages. This was the response of African intellectuals to the colonialist
history of Africa and the colonial library. These activities constituted our
intellectual resistance to the Western epistemic domination. They aimed at
giving agency to Africans who had been denied a history by providing an
alternative historiography to fight Western hegemony and imperialism.
Later a new generation of African historians who were inspired by a
variety of liberal and Marxist theories of political economy launched fierce
criticisms of the pioneering scholars. What is revealing is that the critics,
encouraged and funded by their foreign mentors, demanded a more con
scious use of Western social science in order to understand African his
tory. In fighting the Western intellectual domination, they insisted that Af
rican scholars should use more of Western theoretical tools! They argued
that it was only in this way that we could provide an alternative, but more
meaningful, historiography of Africa. Although dependency theorists and
Marxists influenced the historiography of Africa in significant ways, how
ever, they produced far less history. Thus in many ways, in terms of cultural
discourse, the radical historians intensified intellectual dependence in Af
rica. The much maligned nationalist historians were struggling to recover
a link between the African past in its own terms and terms relevant to both
practical issues and cultural self-expression of present-day Africa. They had
insisted that indigenous terms and ideas did exist for articulating the past of
a continent previously seen only as the object of action from the truly "his
torical" outside world. The younger radical critics rejected the specific form
in which these terms were set out. But they proceeded to replace them with
"universal" categories that ultimately represented only the Western culture
from which they originated. This was a sad episode of intellectual capitula
tion.
Today the central question is again about epistemology. Modern Af
rican historians and scholars must also confront the challenge of global
ization (the modern imperialism), which is reshaping the international
economy as well as the intellectual map of the world. In the West globaliza
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 19
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20 African Studies Review
rural Kogelo village in Western Kenya has suddenly become a place of pil
grimage, attracting tourists from all parts of the world; and Kenya observed
its first Obama Day on November 5th. Property speculators are already
bidding against one another over the purchase of the house in which the
young Obama lived in Indonesia. All these are manifestations of a Brave
New World which at once recognizes the diversity of humanity but which
also rejects the categorization of peoples of the world into thinking and
nonthinking beings.
But this event did not happen out of the blue?it has been long in
coming, although many refused to see the signs. The Booker Prize-winning
novelist Ben Okri has written that
For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the
wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But the apparent economic tri
umph ... deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this
crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture_The meltdown
in the economy is a harsh metaphor of the meltdown of some of our value
systems. A house is on fire, we see flames coming through the windows on
the second floor and we think that that is where the fire is raging. In fact
it is raging elsewhere? Every society has a legend about a treasure that is
lost. The message of the Fisher King is as true now as ever. Find the grail
that was lost. Find the values that were so crucial to the birth of our civiliza
tion, but were lost in the intoxication of its triumphs. (Okri 2008)
"We can enter a new future," says Okri, "only by reconnecting what is best
in us, and adapting it to our times."
References
Appiah, Kwame Antony. 1992. In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Benn, S. I., and G. W. Mortimore. 1976. Rationality and the Social Sciences: Contribu
tions to the Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Cohen, David W. 1985. "Doing Social History from Pirn's Doorway." In Reliving the
Past: The Worlds of Social History, edited by Oliver Zunz. Chapel Hill: The Uni
versity of North Carolina Press.
Dictionary of African Biography. 1977. Volume 1: Ethiopia-Ghana. New York: Reference
Publications.
_. Volume 2: Sierra Leone-Congo. 1979. New York: Reference Publications.
Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1974 (1955). The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality.
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cago: Lawrence Hill Books.
_. 1991 (1981). Civilization or Barbarism. Translated by Yaa-Lengi Meema
Ngemi. New York: Lawrence Hill Books,
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Rereading the History and Historiography of Epistemic Domination and Resistance 21
_. 1996. Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in African Culture and Develop
ment 1946-1960. London: Karnak House.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1965 (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. London: Longmans.
Evans-Pritchard. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clar
endon Press.
Fage,J. D. 1981. "The Development of African Historiography." In General History of
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Goody, Jack. 1970. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Griaule, Marcel. 1948. Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction to Dogon Reli
gious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1966 (1837). The Philosophy of History. Translated byj. Sibree. New
York: Dover Publications.
Fanon, Franz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
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413-23.
Hollis, M., and S. Lukes, eds. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Cambridge: The MIT
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Horton, Robin. 1970. "African Traditional Thought and Western Science." In Ratio
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Horton, Robin, and Ruth H. Finnegan, eds. 1973. Modes of Thought: Essays on Think
ing in Western and Non-Western Societies. London: Faber and Faber.
Hountondji, Paulin. 1983. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Translated by Henri
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_. 2002. The Struggle for Meaning: Reflections on Philosophy, Culture, and Democ
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Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1923. Primitive Mentality. Boston: Beacon Press.
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Human Sciences. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff.
Mazrui, Ali. 1987. Africans: The Triple Heritage. New York: Little, Brown.
Mphahlele, Ezekiel. 1962. The African Image. London: Faber and Faber.
Mudimbe, V. Y 1988. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University
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_. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Nkrumah, Kwameh. 1973. Revolutionary Path. London: Panaf.
_. 1968. Dark Days in Ghana. London: Panaf.
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_. 1993. Songs of Enchantment. London: Jonathan Cape.
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22 African Studies Review
Soyinka, Wole. 1980. Myth, Literature, and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Africaine.
Notes
1. Some of the major works are Benn and Mortimore (1976); Horton and Fergu
son (1973); Jarrie (1984); Karp and Bird (1980); Margolis and Burian (1986);
Hollis and Lukes (1982); Goody (1970).
2. Diop acknowledges, however, that he was mostly initiating a rereading of
cultural history, paying homage to the work of predecessors such as E. W.
Blyden, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and John Hope Franklin, all diaspora
Africans.
3. See also Diop (1991 [1981]); Diop (1987); Diop (1996).
4. See also Hountondji (2002).
5. In this discussion, Appiah has unfortunately ignored Ali Mazrui's Africans: The
Triple Heritage (1987).
6. This dogmatic statement is made despite the fact that Appiah writes about
"European philosophy" and the "European mind."
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