Many of the greatest thinkers of the modern era, including David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Jefferson, considered Africans and their descendants to be so intellectually handicapped as to make them philosophical invalids, incapable of moral and scientific reasoning. Thus, prior to the twentieth century, the idea of African Philosophy was, for most educated Europeans and Americans, an oxymoron (Eze 1997, pp. 4–5).

Moreover, the notion of African philosophy was provocative (in a way that the notion of British or French or German or Chinese philosophy was not) because the cultures of sub-Sahara Africa had no indigenous written languages in which issues were traditionally discussed and examined. Other than the Egyptians and Ethiopians, most African cultures developed a written script only in response to Islamic and European influences. Following the model of European and North American philosophy, one group of contemporary African philosophers has contended that philosophy requires...