Development 2

In the real Africa, it is sensuality that hinders man […] These peoples have never surpassed themselves, have never gained a foothold in history. […] This Africa remains in its calm, torpid sensuality which does not propel it forward. It has not yet entered history and has no other connection with history than the fact that its inhabitants were, in more impoverished times, used as slaves.

Source of the German original: Karl Bremer (1996): G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen, Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte (1822/1823). Bd. 12. Hamburg: Meiner, p. 98-100.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was one of the most important German Enlightenment philosophers.

During the Enlightenment, the idea emerged that societies owed their ongoing development to reason. In order to achieve a higher level of development, it was considered necessary to control and subjugate nature, along with those people who were termed primitive peoples. According to G.F.W. Hegel, only white people possessed the "reason” necessary for progress, which is why they had to "humanise" the rest of the world. Africa was considered to be a continent without history in which people “did not develop”. Europeans justified colonial violence through the philosophical construction of their superiority.

*Rebekah Nicholson (2006): The Enlightenment and Its Effects on the Haitian Revolution of 1789-1804. *Eduardo Grüner (2008): “Haiti: a (forgotten) philosophical revolution.”

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