Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to philosophically and critically examine and outline the bases of African freedom. The approach will adopt the following sub-headings: Introduction, Metaphysical Basis of African Freedom, Beyond “Black” and “White” to Pluralism, African Philosophy and the Paradox of African Freedom. The philosophical basis of African freedom consists essentially in the categorical assertion and defense of the freedom of man. The philosophical basis of African freedom is to seek the theoretical, metaphysical, ideological and scientific bases or justification for African freedom. Hence the intention is an attempt to establish the universality of mankind and ipso facto examine the propositions and ideologies that justified African freedom. We shall first of all take up the issue that the African race is an inferior race and a different “species” of being from the white man and then assert the common ancestry of man or humanity of man.
Highlights
The dismembering of human race is historical and is accentuated and propagated by racist philosophy
Nkrumah Kwame and Walter Rodney in their books Consciecism and How Europe underdeveloped Africa respectively are plainly and uncompromising ideological. It is within the foray of the ideological and monist approaches to African freedom that a reconciliation must be sought
While the monist approach to human freedom, including that of the Africans, is necessarily true, the monists must at the same time appreciate the predicament of the Africans and the ideological assault on them by their overlords, the whites
Summary
The dismembering of human race is historical (as Darwin would argue in his theory of evolution) and is accentuated and propagated by racist philosophy. Aristotle laid the theoretical background of this conception of the African in his natural slavery which sees the slave, the African, as not being a grown man, he may have the body of one He is part of a whole only as he belongs to another, in the sense comparable to that in which any grown man’s body is part of him, namely, as an instrument of his intelligence (Leo-Strauss & Joseph Cropsey, 1981). The paradox which is before us is that each group of human appears to be externally different yet underneath these differences there is fundamental similarity (Watch Tower Bible, 1985) It is on this basis that UNESCO made the following declarations: 1) All men living today belong to same species and descent from the same stock. Belongs to the family of humanity, and no particular race is outside humanity
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