African philosophy in the eyes of the West

Abstract

In this paper I unpack some nuanced aspects of cultural imperialism against the backdrop of Du Bois’s analysis in The souls of black folk, dealing with the confrontation of African Americans or blacks by the other (the West). My aim is to gesture towards how certain ways of doing African philosophy can be considered culturally imperialistic. I seek to illustrate one culturally imperialistic way of doing African philosophy by discussing Thaddeus Metz’s brilliant presentation of Ubuntu as an African moral theory. My motivation is to suggest along the way that his version of an Ubuntu-inspired moral theory seems to me a paradigmatic case of one such way