Critics charge that Bantu Philosophy served to safeguard colonial order and break African resistance

Evidence

I apologize for this long quotation, but it permits me to bring out some possibilities of black men’s mistakes. Alioune Diop, for example, in his introduction to La philosophic bantoue, remarks that Bantu ontology knows nothing of the metaphysical misery of Europe. The inference that he draws from this is none the less dangerous: … Be careful! It is not a matter of finding Being in Bantu thought, when Bantu existence subsists on the level of nonbeing, of the imponderable. It is quite true that Bantu philosophy is not going to open itself to understanding through a revolutionary will: But it is precisely in that degree in which Bantu society, being a closed society, does not contain that substitution of the exploiter for the ontological relations of Forces. Now we know that Bantu society no longer exists. And there is nothing ontological about segregation. Enough of this rubbish. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 652 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Across the post-independence period — particularly from approximately the 1970s onward — a specific rhetorical move became common among African political leaders, school administrators, religious authorities, and parents. The move was to articulate the inherited corporal-disciplinary practice as African — as part of “African culture,” “African values,” or “the African way of raising children” — and therefore as something that Western liberal critique should not be permitted to displace. The move was operationally consequential. It re-attributed the third transmission vector’s apparatus from its actual colonial-mission origin to a constructed indigenous-African origin, and used the re-attribution as a defense against contemporary children’s-rights advocacy. — , The Rod and the Child, 4490 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial assumptions that Africans could not think logically. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 69; Defenders reframed a colonial-inherited practice as indigenous African heritage — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 4490; Praising Bantu ontology masks the destruction of Bantu society by segregation. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 652 (+1 more)

Related

• Praising Bantu ontology masks the destruction of Bantu society by segregation. (similarity 0.86)
• Tempels broke with colonial paternalism to defend African rational capacity (similarity 0.83)
• Defenders reframed a colonial-inherited practice as indigenous African heritage (similarity 0.81)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial assumptions that Africans could not think logically. (similarity 0.81)
• Tempels’ force ontology made African philosophy a Bantustan philosophy (similarity 0.81)
• Bantu Philosophy challenged the colonial paternalism underpinning mission methods (similarity 0.81)
• Critics accused Tempels of using Bantu Philosophy to safeguard colonial exploitation (similarity 0.80)
• Tempels’s question about African ontology counters Western denial of African philosophy (similarity 0.80)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy enforced a philosophical segregation of African thought (similarity 0.80)
• Tempels’s book targeted colonial practitioners despite his anticolonial aims (similarity 0.80)
• Hume and Kant supplied the racial judgments Tempels opposed. (similarity 0.79)
• Césaire dismissed Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy as colonial deception (similarity 0.79)
• Scholars dispute whether Bantu Philosophy or Ubuntu is the root of African philosophy (similarity 0.79)
• Tempels’s well-meaning text nonetheless failed to represent African interests (similarity 0.79)
• Tempels’s Bantu Philosophy challenged colonial paternalism toward African intellectual capabilities. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Praising Bantu ontology masks the destruction of Bantu society by segregation. #corroborates (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 652
• Ethnophilosophy debates are tied to colonial ideology and contested concepts of philosophy #expands (0.50)
• Defenders reframed a colonial-inherited practice as indigenous African heritage #complicates (0.40) — , The Rod and the Child, 4490