Michel de Montaigne, the French author of the celebrated Essays derided the fact that philosophers, whom he mockingly called those âmes principals, or ‘chief souls’, who pretend to be only preoccupied with the pure truth, ultimately are simply — ‘heavily’— says Montaigne, humans.Footnote ¹ What many philosophers had to say about those they constructed as others, including women, non-Europeans in general, and Africans in particular, indicated that they were certainly not worthy of being considered ‘chief souls’. It follows that those philosophers could be as prejudiced as the vulgum pecus (ignorant multitude) when it comes to the African continent and its inhabitants.

Examples abound of prejudiced philosophers, but the most quoted passages from such ‘chief souls’ on the topic of Africa and Africans are those of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, famously declared that the African continent was outside of the course of history because its massive geography, which was insufficiently interspersed by seas and rivers, had condemned it to remain self-enclosed and wrapped in the ‘dark mantle’ of a spiritual night.Footnote ² Hegel furthermore decreed that Egypt and its ancient civilization did not belong to the continent where it was born and developed, but rather to Asia and the Mediterranean North.

Many an African philosopher and Africanist scholar have responded in different ways to Hegel's declarations. The book under consideration here, by Alfred Adler, Hegel et l'Afrique: histoire et conscience historique africaines (Hegel and Africa: African history and historical consciousness) is yet another rejoinder to Hegel's ‘lecture’ that Africa has not entered history. Adler is an ethnologist who has dedicated most of his research to the Moundang people from Chad, and this book is written from the disciplinary perspectives of both history and anthropology. After noting in the introduction that sentiments similar to Hegel's had been expressed in 2007 by then-president of France Nicolas Sarkozy in his infamous Dakar address, Adler relates that when he was a young student he was ‘infatuated with’ Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. While Adler maintains enthusiasm for the German philosopher, he also notes the need to denounce the ignorance and the Eurocentrism manifest in Hegel's declarations as they relate to Africa.

The direct examination of Hegel's argument itself is not the most important aspect of the book. Only two of the chapters of nine are devoted to the themes: ‘Hegel and African civilizations’ and ‘Was Hegel racist?’ The rest of the book is dedicated to applying Adler's vow to ‘put anthropology and history in dialogue’ and to present Africa, its history, and its civilizations differently from that of Hegel. Adler posits that Hegel's views were the product of ‘serious errors, quite understandable in the years 1820–1825, when the inland exploration of the black continent was at its beginning’ (30, 35).

In his reflection on the need to foster an ‘intimate dialogue between anthropology and history’, Adler cites Luc De Heusch, the Belgian anthropologist and filmmaker. In an article he wrote in 2015 on ‘Anthropology and History’, Adler presented a similar encounter in the form of a conversation between De Heusch and the historian Jan Vansina, and he proceeds likewise in Hegel and Africa, combining anthropological facts and knowledge of African history to respond to the ‘serious errors’ made by the ‘understandably’ ignorant Hegel.Footnote ³

Thus, Adler describes what historians and anthropologists have to say about ancient Egypt, West African kingdoms and empires, Islam and African traditional religions, and slavery, among other topics, in order to give a general sense of history and consciousness that is specific to Africa. But such an approach runs the risk of producing essentialist generalizations, and it must be said that Adler has a tendency to draw broad conclusions from very specific examples. That move is problematic, especially given the fact that the examples Adler presents come almost exclusively from West African regions and the Moundang of Chad. What is asserted about ‘Islam’ in this book comes, in fact, from Islam in West Africa, the region traditionally known as the Bilad al-Sudan or simply Sudan. Other regions, such as the Swahili world of Islam in East Africa, are totally absent from consideration.

In the same vein, Adler makes statements about notions such as ‘African thought’, even when the author acknowledges that such claims are problematic. Thus, for example, under the title ‘A System of African Thought’ a subchapter develops an example from a particular region of Burkina Faso and generalizes the case into a ‘voltaic’ system of thought. That is because the author insists that he does not want to limit his statements solely to the area where he conducted fieldwork and interviews. There is certainly a need to discuss further the possibility of generalizing about the entire continent. In this book, that effort would have been helped by some engagement with what has been labeled by many African philosophers as ‘ethnophilosophical’ literature.

But this particular book falls into somewhat dubious ethnophilosophical territory because of Adler's willingness to use Hegel's statements on Africa as a foundation for a more general meditation on the significance of historical and anthropological works on Africa. Nonetheless, that effort makes Hegel and Africa an important addition to the literature on Hegel's views on ‘the dark continent’, untouched as it allegedly was, by the spirit of history.