Tempels’s book influenced the formation of negritude.

Evidence

It cannot be denied that, among African intellectuals, Bantu Philosophy is a very important book. It may not be known to many, but according to Chachage (1994), the book played a very significant role in the formation and articulation of negritude, a movement rooted in the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, which was popularized in Africa by Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), the first president of Senegal (1960–1980). Senghor’s quest was similar to that of Tempels. He wanted to find out if Africans have a philosophy and world view that is distinct from their Western counterparts. The conclusion he reached was that the African world view and philosophy is indeed different from the European world view. For Senghor, the factor that accounts for the difference is “emotion”, not “reason”. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the wider genealogy connecting Bantu Philosophy to negritude, Senghor’s emotion-vs-reason divide, and Kagame’s universalizing linguistic reconstruction of the ontology.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing how a missionary’s colonial ethnophilosophy seeded two such different lines (negritude’s emotion thesis and Kagame’s universalist analysis).