Abstract Afropessimism has been critiqued for not aligning with postmodern thinkers by assuming Blackness to be an all-encompassing identity that ignores intersecting identities. The article exemplifies an Afropessimist analysis that does not disregard intersectionality by analyzing the absent Black father myth. Methodologically, this article seeks to align Afropessimism with sociological data concerning fatherhood. The flawed political, economic, and cultural atmosphere that allowed for Black slaves to be perceived as inferior animals persists in the contemporary cultural and economic landscape that frames Black men as inferior fathers. An analysis of fatherhood highlights how there are two ways to discuss issues of Black masculinity. The first is an intersectional approach, which asks Black men how they view their own masculinity as intersecting with their multiple identities. The second is by analyzing the relationship of Black men to the broader cultural notion of masculinity, which posits whiteness as prerequisite. This second method can be done with an Afropessimistic analysis without denying the intersectional thinking of the first method.
Abstract This article buttresses a trans-colonial critique of knowledge production in African Studies, emphasizing the ongoing colonial legacies of power, epistemology, and representation. It goes beyond postpositivist frameworks by proposing an epistemic model that recenters African subjectivity as a key philosophical and methodological resource. Scholars increasingly challenge who owns the epistemological and methodological authority in African Studies, raising urgent concerns about representation and the politics of data. Key questions arise: Who creates knowledge about Africa? Who owns the evidence? How is Africa represented, and by whom? These questions reflect deeper epistemic crises and call for critical engagement. Using a critical and interpretive approach, the article examines how colonial distortions continue to influence the production of knowledge about Africa. It explores the marginalization of African experiences in Western-dominated research and responds by proposing an indigenous knowledge framework, e.g., Igbo epistemology. The article analyzes how coloniality continues to shape African subjectivity, knowledge, and existence within the global order. It deconstructs persistent binaries and stereotypes found in academic and public discourse. Ultimately, the article presents a forward-looking framework and emphasizes the importance of African intellectuals in driving epistemic change.
Abstract The nature of colonial epistemology and ontology was, and in some ways remains, deeply rooted in universalist and absolutist ideologies. These ideologies legitimized and undermined other conflicting positions, as they were considered “barbaric,” “debased,” “primitive,” and “devoid of time” and were in need of civilization. These arguments justified all kinds of horrendous acts such as violence, assimilation, colonization, exploitation, and dehumanization. The commitments and philosophical engagements on decolonization have often focused on a departure from colonial epistemology and ontology. In an attempt to add, in a novel way, to existing discourse on decolonization, the article draws on Richard Turner’s The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa and argues that the decolonial turn is also an invitation to engage in a new kind of violence, an internal kind.
Abstract This article begins by reflecting on the vital force as an endogenous African philosophical category and proceeds to examine a case where the philosophy of vitalism was employed as part of the practice of a West African medical doctor, surgeon, and educator, Prof. Dr. Henry-Valère Kiniffo. This article next examines Kiniffo’s use of the vital force in making sense of the presence of mysterious foreign objects in patients’ bodies, which led to diminishing vitality and illness. It argues that Kiniffo’s lecture from Paulin Hountondji’s 1987 seminar in Benin can be read as an existential cipher for the unknown because it produces in human beings a consciousness of our limits as knowers and therefore raises the question of epistemic virtue. This article concludes that the “reading” of such a cipher offers a methodological imperative for decolonial scholarship, as the central argument of Kiniffo’s lecture is that in the end, existence without mystery is dehumanizing.
