On the idea of freedom in modern African political philosophy

Abstract

When Liberia, at its inception, adopted for her motto, “The Love of Freedom Brought Us Here,” they were registering their embrace of a core tenet of modernity: the idea that freedom was the primary state of humanity and that any form of social living that turned this free being into a bonded phenomenon, forces it to obey dictates and laws not of its own choosing, to bow before rulers it had no hand in electing, and to live at the behest of another must stand condemned. They were merely the latest, back then, instantiation of Africans as singers of freedom's song in the modern age. Unfortunately, neither theirs nor earlier iterations in the Haitian Revolution, much less later contributions by other Africans in the continent, are to be found routinely, if at all, in the annals of modern philosophy. In this essay, I bring to our awareness how African thinkers have domesticated the idea of freedom as a legacy of modernity in their world. This is one of the bodies of work that is obscured by the wall that I argue, in Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst Publishers, 2022), decolonizers have erected in their mistaking, wittingly or unwittingly, modernity for colonialism and/or Westernization.