Tempels’ force ontology made African philosophy a Bantustan philosophy

Evidence

While it is not possible to unpack all of Tempels’s arguments in his seminal text in English-speaking Africa, I hope what I have succeeded in showing is how Tempels contributed to a great degree in making African philosophy a Bantustan philosophy. This was achieved by creating distinct categories of thought for the black person. This inferiorization of African thought was similar to Bantustan policies that sought to give meaningless freedom and recognition to Bantu territories. Through Tempels’s creation of the category of “force” as responsible for how the black person thinks, Tempels effectively condemned the African to being different. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 468

Categorization

• XREF: This is the book’s central thesis — Tempels’ force category inferiorized African thought exactly the way apartheid Bantustans offered meaningless recognition.
• SEED: Strong angle: comparing epistemic segregation of a tradition (force-ontology ghettoization) to geographic segregation via Bantustan policy.