African Intellectual History

Abstract

Abstract The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have been dominated by major questions surrounding the assumptions of two grand narratives — the liberal faith in progress, modernization and the bureaucratic state, and the conservative faith in free trade, deregulation and the free market. In this regard, African cultural and intellectual history as part of the global historical discourse of continuity and change has yet to be fully appreciated in spite of the fact that the collapse of state structures in many parts of Africa at the end of the 20th century brought into fore questions of authority, political legitimacy and social change. Intellectual and cultural life in Africa in the last 250 years could not escape the political, economic and social constraints of the “international encounter” of African and non-African powers, economies, social practices and cultures. An engaged and yet self-critical intellectual history must therefore also continually engage in the interpretation of seemingly nonintellectual factors but factors which nonetheless shaped and called for intellectual expression. This alone can help the history of African social and political ideas escape racialized preconceptions which can be summed up in terms of the Hegelian notion of a “peoples without history”, because their history cannot easily supplant or compete with the predominant narratives of the emergence of western self-identity.