Three Racists: Hume, Hegel, and Jefferson

Kenyan Freedom Fighter, in Nairobi

On my flight from Detroit to Nairobi I read Ngugi wa Thiongo's Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. It's brilliant, even though at times he, e.g., misconstrues Christianity, confusing the real thing with the "Christendom" of the colonizers.

I took a lot of notes. Here's one.

Some of "the giants of western intellectual and political establishment" were racists. Like the philosophical heroes David Hume and Hegel. Hume wrote that "the negro is naturally inferior to the whites." (18) Hegel spoke of Africa as being comparable "to a land of childhood still enveloped in the dark mantle of the night as far as the development of self-conscious history was concerned." (Ib.) Thiongo writes: "Hegel's statement that there was nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in the African character is representative of the racist images of Africans and Africa such a colonial child was to encounter in the literature of the colonial languages." (Ib.)

Since philosophically Hume and Hegel are huge such racist statements would have been very influential. One thinks of the other great European 'H' philosopher, Heidegger, and his association with German Nazism.

Thomas Jefferson the racist wrote that "the blacks... are inferior to the whites on the endowments of both body and mind." (Ib.)

So these giants of European thought are not large in the minds of literary genius wa Thiongo.