Tempels’s difference-emphasis contradicted his egalitarian aim

Evidence

In his presentation of this primitive philosophy or thought system, Tempels was able to achieve an undesirable double: raising the Muntu to some thought system capable of its own standard of justification while at the same time lowering the Muntu to a different standard from the Westerner. This is why Tempels advocated that if the Westerner wished to understand the Muntu, that Westerner would have to overthrow all the systems he knew to embark on a different epistemological quest that would make him understand the Muntu. This commitment is, in my view, contradictory. If Tempels was seriously committed to raising the Muntu to the status of having a coherent philosophical system, he undid that aim with his insistence that the Muntu’s system was so different from the Westerner’s, that it required initiation into its special categories of thought. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 447

Categorization

• XREF: This double-bind of asserting both equality and incommensurable difference resembles debates about whether cultural relativism grants respect or merely segregates, as in multiculturalism critiques.
• DEEPTHINKING: A sharply-etched structural dilemma: rehabilitating a ‘different’ system can perform inferiority even while asserting value, a recursive bind that recurs across colonial and postcolonial knowledge production.