About

The College of African Philosophy is an independent intellectual institution dedicated to research, publishing, translation, and dialogue in African philosophies.

Our Mission

We work to make African philosophical texts, concepts, and debates more visible and accessible, and to highlight Africa’s contribution to the history of human thought.

What We Publish

The College publishes articles, studies, translations, interviews, reviews, podcasts, lectures, and audiovisual materials. It welcomes researchers, students, translators, and readers who share a commitment to rigorous and plural knowledge.

An Open Intellectual Space

African philosophy is approached here as a diverse and living field, open to different traditions, methods, languages, and conversations with philosophies across the world.

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Senghor and Négritude: Poetry as a Way of Knowing the World

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Introduction Négritude arose against colonial assimilation and in search of a language that could affirm the historical and aesthetic value of Black experience. Léopold Sédar Senghor treated rhythm, image, and feeling as modes of knowledge irreducible to calculating reason. Historical Context His contrasts between African emotion and European reason must be read critically because they risk reproducing racial binaries. Yet his project also reversed a colonial hierarchy that had denigrated art, embodiment, and rhythm. Core Concepts Négritude is most productive when understood as a politics of creation: recovering linguistic, musical, and historical materials and transforming them into modern forms that enter global exchange from a position of agency. Philosophical Significance Critical reading must also expose class and gender differences within Black identity. Such criticism can extend rather than simply negate the project: culture is not a fixed essence but a collective capacity to re...
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Frantz Fanon: Liberation as the Reconstruction of the Human

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Introduction Frantz Fanon analyzed colonialism not only as an economic and political system but as a world that partitions humanity and reshapes body, language, and desire. The colonized subject is compelled to see the self through an image produced by the colonizer. Historical Context Black Skin, White Masks examines racial alienation; The Wretched of the Earth turns to national liberation. Violence is not an abstract value in Fanon but a response generated by an already violent colonial structure. By itself, however, it cannot guarantee a just society. Core Concepts Fanon warns against a national bourgeoisie that replaces foreign administrators without transforming the economy or distributing power. Genuine liberation requires popular participation, political education, and institutions that block the reproduction of domination. Philosophical Significance His continuing importance lies in joining psychic experience to social structure. Dignity is not restored through identity rhetori...
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African Feminist Philosophy: Gender Between History and Colonialism

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Introduction African feminist philosophy challenges the assumption that women share one universal experience. Gender intersects with race, class, colonialism, religion, and kinship; a social model cannot simply be transferred from one context to another. Historical Context Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí showed how colonial administration reorganized some modern gender categories. Obioma Nnaemeka developed “nego-feminism” to describe situated practices of negotiation and coalition rather than adherence to a single formula. Core Concepts This does not deny patriarchal domination; it historicizes it. Romantic appeals to a precolonial past may conceal older inequalities, while blaming local culture alone excuses modern economic and political institutions. Philosophical Significance African feminism enlarges philosophy by treating everyday life, labor, care, and embodiment as sources of conceptual questions. Liberation requires redistributing voice, resources, and the authority to define problems. Histo...
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African Environmental Ethics: From Owning Nature to Relations of Care

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Introduction Many African traditions offer resources for understanding the environment as a network of relations among people, land, water, living beings, and future generations. This does not imply that traditional societies always lived in ecological harmony; it broadens moral concern beyond immediate individual interest. Historical Context Environmental responsibility appears through ideas of trusteeship, kinship, and continuity among the living, ancestors, and those yet unborn. Land becomes a condition of identity, food, and memory rather than merely an exchangeable commodity. Core Concepts Africa must not be romanticized as naturally green. Climate change, extraction, and waste are tied to global economic structures and decisions by states and corporations, while harms are unequally distributed within communities. Philosophical Significance Relational ethics can support climate justice by joining cultural recognition, material distribution, and political participation. Care for na...
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Achille Mbembe: The Postcolony and the Politics of Death

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Introduction Achille Mbembe analyzes the postcolony not as a time simply after colonialism but as an assemblage of inherited institutions, local networks, and global capitalism. Power does not rely on repression alone; it produces rituals, images, and desires that subjects may also circulate. Historical Context Necropolitics asks which authorities decide who may live and who is exposed to death. Camp, border, occupation, and war are not marginal exceptions but laboratories revealing the unequal value assigned to life in the global order. Core Concepts The analysis is powerful because it joins sovereignty to body, space, and infrastructure. The concept must nevertheless be historically specified so that distinct forms of violence are not collapsed into one. Philosophical Significance Mbembe also makes it possible to study Africa beyond narratives of failure. Societies are not reducible to victims of power; they generate forms of irony, mobility, and everyday life that negotiate with and...
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Amílcar Cabral: Culture as a Site of Liberation

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Introduction Amílcar Cabral connected national liberation with recovering the capacity to produce culture. Domination seizes not only land and labor; it also attacks memory and persuades the colonized that their history has no value. Historical Context Cabral did not treat culture as fixed folklore. Culture is a society’s changing response to its material history, work, conflict, and inequality. It can carry resources of resistance, but it can also legitimate internal hierarchy. Core Concepts He called on revolutionary elites to commit “class suicide”: to abandon privilege and align themselves with popular interests. The phrase names an ethical and political transformation designed to prevent a national movement from becoming a new ruling class. Philosophical Significance Cabral shows that cultural freedom cannot be separated from land, education, and economic justice. A free culture is not a museum of the past; it is the people’s capacity to name their reality and shape their future. ...
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African Philosophy and Epistemic Justice: Why We Need to Rewrite the History of Philosophy

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Epistemic justice asks who is recognized as a producer of knowledge, whose concepts are taught, and which archives are preserved. These questions are central to the place of African philosophy in global intellectual history. Absence is historically produced The limited presence of African thinkers in philosophical curricula is not evidence of an absence of thought. It reflects unequal systems of publication, translation, classification, and institutional authority. Beyond adding names Rewriting the history of philosophy cannot be reduced to inserting several African figures into an unchanged narrative. It requires rethinking periods, problems, encounters, and the routes through which ideas have travelled. Justice and philosophical rigor Epistemic justice is not a charitable gesture. It improves philosophical knowledge by correcting incomplete archives and opening debate to arguments, languages, and experiences that dominant canons have overlooked.
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Why the College of African Philosophy? Toward a Space for Thought and Epistemic Justice

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The College of African Philosophy was founded in response to an urgent intellectual need: to restore visibility to African philosophies, introduce their achievements, and create a space for dialogue around their concepts and questions. A platform for research and publication The project brings together articles, studies, translations, interviews, bibliographies, lectures, podcasts, and audiovisual materials. It seeks to connect careful scholarship with an accessible public presence. Plural languages and audiences African philosophical work is produced in many languages. The College therefore treats translation as a central intellectual responsibility and aims to build bridges between Arabic, English, French, African languages, and other scholarly traditions. Knowledge as a common work The College is not conceived as a closed authority. It is a collaborative space in which researchers, students, translators, and readers can participate in producing a more plural and just philosophical m...
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Philosophy as Practice: Reading, Translation, and Indexing as Intellectual Work

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Philosophy does not live only in spectacular theories. It also lives in the patient practices that allow ideas to circulate: close reading, accurate translation, cataloguing, editing, and teaching. Reading as reconstruction To read philosophically is to rebuild an argument, identify its concepts, and situate it within the problems to which it responds. This is especially important when texts come from intellectual traditions that have been simplified or ignored. Translation as interpretation Every translation makes conceptual decisions. The translator must preserve differences without turning them into exotic curiosities, while also making the text intelligible in another language. Indexing as intellectual infrastructure Bibliographies, archives, and indexes may appear secondary, yet they determine what researchers can find and what future scholarship can build upon. In African philosophy, this infrastructure is itself a form of intellectual repair. These practices make philosophy publ...
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Is African Philosophy a Margin of Western Philosophy?

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The question is not whether African philosophy can be admitted into a history already written elsewhere. The deeper question is how the history of philosophy changes when African traditions and thinkers are taken seriously. The problem of the center What is called the philosophical center was produced through institutions, canons, translations, and exclusions. It is not a neutral geographical fact. Treating African thought as marginal repeats that history instead of examining it. Difference without isolation African philosophy should not be enclosed in cultural uniqueness, nor dissolved into a supposedly universal vocabulary. Its works participate in shared philosophical problems while also transforming their terms. Rewriting the map The task is therefore not to move a margin closer to a fixed center. It is to construct a more accurate and plural map of philosophical creation, circulation, and debate.
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