Colonial caricature of Africa shaped both Tempels and Oruka as intellectual revolt

Evidence

It is probably true that the story of African philosophy would not have been what it is today were it not for the amount of provocation that the little book by Tempels triggered. There are books and essays that are canonical in African philosophy today due largely to and because of what Tempels wrote and where both he and his ideas stood in relation to the colonial history of the continent. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 346 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial ethnography reduces African rites to obscene primitive spectacle; Ideological critiques trace Tempels’ work to colonial paternalism; Canonical African philosophy emerged largely in response to Tempels’s provocation — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 346 (+5 more)

Related

• Kaoze and Tempels both rejected the image of a savage Africa. (similarity 0.92)
• Canonical African philosophy emerged largely in response to Tempels’s provocation (similarity 0.90)
• Tempels helped initiate the debate over whether African philosophy exists (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels broke with colonial paternalism to defend African rational capacity (similarity 0.87)
• Tempels’s colonial-era book provoked African philosophy into existence (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial assumptions that Africans could not think logically. (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels’s work ended Enlightenment claims that Africans lack reason, while subtle prejudice persists (similarity 0.86)
• Hume and Kant supplied the racial judgments Tempels opposed. (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels first raised whether an African ontology exists (similarity 0.86)
• Both ethnophilosophy and sage philosophy grew from revolt against colonial denial of African rationality (similarity 0.85)
• Tempels’s well-meaning text nonetheless failed to represent African interests (similarity 0.85)
• Tempels’s book targeted colonial practitioners despite his anticolonial aims (similarity 0.84)
• Tempels wrote Bantu Philosophy for practitioners, not professional philosophers (similarity 0.84)
• Tempels aimed to systematize Bantu ontology using Western philosophical categories. (similarity 0.84)
• Tempels’ book changed European and African self-conceptions despite professional criticism (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Tempels’s text shaped African philosophy’s identity despite its errors #expands (0.75)
• Canonical African philosophy emerged largely in response to Tempels’s provocation #expands (0.70) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 346
• Kaoze and Tempels both rejected the image of a savage Africa. #corroborates (0.70)
• Tempels helped initiate the debate over whether African philosophy exists #expands (0.60) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 208
• Tempels broke with colonial paternalism to defend African rational capacity #complicates (0.50)
• Oruka classified African philosophy into four distinct trends #expands (0.50) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 575