African Unification Front
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THE NEW FRONT IN THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMANITY
The African Upland in Hegelian Philosophy
By Dan Kashagama 2005
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 Many African scholars justifiably dismiss the axial modern philosophers, scientists and thinkers because of their irrational and erroneous views of Africa. Typical among these theorists is Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), perhaps the most influential exponent of political and social philosophy in Western thought.
The false claims that Hegel made about Africa, and more importantly, his ontological and dialectical systems, explain and continue to provide theoretical basis and rationalisation for the "stages of developement" theories that are central to the concepts of Development and of Evolution. Hegelian dialectics are also central to genocidal tendencies of both the Bolsheviks and Nazis, as well as the rise of Liberalism, Colonialism, and NeoColonialism.
The influential and key thesis underpining Hegelian Dialectics, and which was incorporated into ideas that continue to be repeated and are implicit in both Marxist and Capitalist worldviews, and which formed the basis of modern intellectual anti-African racism, was Hegel's highly elaborated claim that Upland Negroes exist in a state of consciousness which he called the "Infancy of Humanity".
'African Uplands' was a term commonly used by European scholars, especially in the 19th century. It refers to the region now commonly known as Sub-Saharan Africa. The term African Upland became an important element of philosophical and historical study at that time, especially because works by Hegel, and theories deriving from the imputed characteristics of the history of the African Upland became the basis for the utopian visions of Communism, socialism and anarchism.
In part two of his seminal work on the philosophy of history titled "Geographical Basis of History" (1857), Hegel asserted that "of the three portions of the globe with which History is concerned... Africa has for its leading classical feature the Upland." Hegel goes on in great detail to derive a theory of history based on the geographical characteristics of the African Upland in contrast with the important regions of Asia and Europe.
For Karl Marx and others, the African Upland initially represented a model for the perfection of Society, because of the morality, ennobling, and intensely life-affirming relations between Africans. However, the European scholars made a mistake in presuming that the perfection they perceived to be integral to African order had come about unconsciously, among "upland negroes", who were purportedly intellectually "inferior", or more specifically, "infantile".
This led to the assumption, even more pervasive today, that essential elements of African order and success constitute an instinctual, primitive and supposedly "natural" state of being. Western thinkers refused to believe the fact that functional and enduring African social order and norms could only be the result of a very high order of human intelligence, and that Africans have invested much conscious thought and effort to bring about cultural, social and environmental harmony.
Hegel was clearly unfamiliar with the history and geography of Africa, yet he based his entire theory of human history on this incomplete view of Africa. Hegel divided Africa into three parts corresponding to "that which lies south of the desert of Sahara, - Africa proper, - the Upland almost entirely unknown to us; the second is that to the north of the desert, - European Africa (if we may so call it), - a coast-land; the third is the river region of the Nile, the only valley-land of Africa, and which is in connexion with Asia."
Hegel claimed that African Upland was an ancient Utopia, which he called a golden land that had become insulated from moral corruption. He wrote that "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 compressed within itself, - the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night. Its isolated character originates not merely in its tropical nature, but essentially in its geographical condition."
Hegel also claimed that the African interior "surrounded by these mountains is an unknown Upland, from which on the other hand the Negroes have seldom made their way through"...except when there were "outbreaks of terrible hordes which rushed down upon the more peaceful inhabitants of the declivities. Whether any internal movement had taken place, or if so, of what character, we do not know." Yet contrary to Hegel's understanding, of course the Upland was known to Africans, and the ancient records of the Egyptians, Kushites, Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans and Greeks attest to this.
In Hegel's otherwise brilliant theses, one confronts in his understanding of Africans, a naive and troubling lack of intellectual rigour. He claims that black Africans not only constitute a unique and separate race, but that humanity lacks the scientific or intellectual tools with which to comprehend black Africans. Hegel wrote that "the peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas, - the category of Universality."
Hegel believed that African Uplanders were a unique phenomenon in history, but also biologically. He states that "In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence, - as for example, God, or Law, - in which the interest of man's volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. This distinction between himself as an individual and the universality of his essential being, the African in the uniform, undeveloped oneness of his existence has not yet attained."
The ignorance and degradation of Africans is essential to Hegel's theories on historical development. The alleged nature of Africa, has had a decisive impact not just of Marxist analyses and liberalism, but of religion, anthropology, sociology and all other fields of modern sociology and politics, and continues to be an important component of modern economic theory.
Like other leading modern thinkers, including such luminaries as David Hume (1711-1776), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Adam Smith (1723-1790), the Framers of the US Constitution, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Darwin (1809-1882), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Hegel's attitude towards black Africans is the central weakness of his theses.
Hegel's erroneous assumptions about human nature were not unique and are still common, and are woven into the fabric of our everyday thinking and living. Our social, political and spiritual choices and impulses are limited and misdirected by the elemental anti-Africanism that is like the ether in which our living takes place.
Today the dominant worldviews are fundamentally corrupted fictions that inform people about who they are, and what the potential of human society is. The grip of racism in science and philosophical thought is so pervasive, insidious and corrosive that people have come to think that the way the world is today is "normal".
Because of racism, people all over the world have been brought up to believe that conflict and competition and misery are essential to our nature as humans. These harmful fictions are reinforced by scholarship and institutions that are rotten in their ideological and spiritual core. Modern thought selectively distorts human history and spirituality to justify and rationalise despair and evil.
The struggle for Africa's soul is an elemental struggle for the liberation, not just of Africans, but of humanity, and of also the liberation of history. This is what Pan Africanism is about, this is what the African Renascence is about. Africa is truly the new front in the struggle for the soul of humanity.
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References: Geographical Basis Of History, Part II. Author: Hegel, G.W.F. [Date: 1857] Translation: Sibree, J., M.A.
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