Pre-war Western thought deemed African belief illogical idolatry

Evidence

Even before the end of the Second World War, Tempels realized that the world order had changed. Before the war, world order was deemed simple. There were civilized people who lived in the Western world and primitive people who lived in the rest of the world, particularly in Dark Africa. Thus, according to mainstream thinking at that time, African thought was illogical and African belief was idolatry. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 71

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Colonial observers falsely attributed insurgent royalism to African ignorance (similarity 0.85)
• Africa cannot claim pure history because the West shaped it (similarity 0.81)
• The ‘Negro’ category erased Africa’s contributions to Western civilization (similarity 0.81)
• Denying colonial subjects the rights Europeans fought for required racializing them as essentially fixed (similarity 0.81)
• Tempels’s well-meaning text nonetheless failed to represent African interests (similarity 0.81)
• Tempels broke with colonial paternalism to defend African rational capacity (similarity 0.80)
• Western definitions of Africans served domination rather than understanding. (similarity 0.80)
• The Bantu Philosophy controversy tested the colonial civilizing-mission ideology at its foundation (similarity 0.79)
• Western Africanist scholarship inherited a Hegelian grid of interpretation that denied African rationality (similarity 0.79)
• Western scholarship’s denial of Black radicalism served an ideology that obliterated the African (similarity 0.79)
• Pre-colonial African ethos valued women as leaders across various fronts (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Racialism pervaded Western consciousness before and beyond capitalism #expands (0.75)
• Colonial race epistemology merged physical traits with moral character assessments #expands (0.70)
• Colonial officials used language hierarchy to justify claims of Indigenous mental inferiority #expands (0.70)
• Bantu Philosophy challenged the colonial paternalism underpinning mission methods #responds-to (0.60)
• European views on African civilization dramatically changed in the early 20th century. #complicates (0.50) — Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects, 988
• Colonial race was judged by conduct and affiliation rather than appearance #contradicts (0.45)
• The African-European relationship inverted over three millennia before the Negro #contradicts (0.45)