Colonial philosophy’s categories are inextricable from instruments of dominion

Evidence

A particular example of this problem is the process of the history of Western thought from the ancient world to the medieval world. The Germanic peoples who invaded the West, represented by the Roman Empire at that time, encountered the Hellenistic-Latin culture. As a result, a new mentality and a new philosophy were born. Christianity made this encounter decisively easier. Today, in trying to describe African thought, we find ourselves in a singular situation, very similar to the medieval-world example but with the roles reversed: the colonisers (the Westerners) claim a more ancient cultural tradition and a more elaborate and systematic awareness, not the subdued peoples. Thus, in the African case it becomes very difficult to distinguish the philosophical categories of Western thought from their application as instruments of dominion. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 287

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the critique that Western philosophical tools encode domination, comparable to the Frankfurt School’s analysis of reason as control instrument — but here applied to colonizer-colonized rather than class. — connects to: Glissant rejects linear logic as a colonial epistemological imposition — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 26; Colonial conquest preceded and founded Cartesian rational thought; Mechanical philosophy’s view of brute matter modeled colonial descriptions of colonized peoples
• QUESTION: Could pursue: what would it look like to separate Western philosophical categories from their historical deployment as tools of colonial rule, or is the entanglement irremediable?
• DEEPTHINKING: The reversed medieval analogy — the unlettered invader becomes the philosophical heir while the self-appointed heir of antiquity claims dominion — is a dense and pointed reframing of who inherits and who is ‘subdued.’ These passages pair into the chapter’s sharpest thought