Ideological critics charged Tempels with diverting attention from colonialism’s real harms

Evidence

The ideological critique of Tempels’s work stems from its implied racialist and paternalistic ideology of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism— which merely follows the common spirit of Western society at the time. Aimé Césaire, for example, denounced the neo-colonial character of Tempels’s work. He likens it to creating a diversion, a way of diverting attention “from the fundamental political problems of the Bantu peoples by fixing it on the level of fantasy,” remote from the corrosive effects of colonialism (Hountondji, 1996, p. 37). — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 561

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ethnophilosophy debate (Hountondji, Oruka) and to postcolonial critiques of Western anthropology more generally.