African Political Philosophy

Abstract

The field of African political philosophy as an academic discipline is new, with systematic argumentation expressed in a corpus of written texts having appeared for the first time only in the postwar era. “African” in this context means thought informed by the indigenous mores salient among black peoples in the sub‐Saharan region, which differ from, say, the Islamic religious practices so predominant above the Sahara desert. Although professional African political philosophy has originated only recently, it has invariably drawn on ideas and practices that have been widely held below the Sahara desert for many centuries. Much of the sub‐Saharan project of philosophizing normatively about government consists of mining intellectual resources from traditional black African peoples with an eye to seeing what might be relevant to understanding and advancing justice today.