Hegel’s [belief that] Africans supposedly exist at the lowest level of consciousness – immediate sensuousness – which is why he claims that Africa lies outside history. According to Hegel, it’s only by encountering the West and enduring slavery that Africa enters into the dialectical process of consciousness and thus world history. Hegel therefore surmises that it is both necessary and just that Africa be subjected to slavery and colonization.[19] Hegel selected and deployed details from Bowditch’s account to fit with his theoretical apriorism of Africa as a place without history. This is representative of Hegel’s academic practice, in that he looked into books written about African societies and found what he was looking for, even when this meant willful misinterpretation to construct an absurdly fictional account of African society that is steeped in popular beliefs of his time about the continent’s supposed backwardness. Hegel’s ludicrous theorizing barred him from ever admitting Africa and its people to ‘history’ as he construed it. For a continent which supposedly has no “historical interest of its own”, Hegel devoted a great deal of attention to it, primarily because Hegel’s glorification of Europe was predicated on his denigration of Africa.[20]
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