African intellectuals: occident anxiety By Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò A spectre is haunting Africa. It is the spectre of occident anxiety. Okay, I exaggerate: it is not haunting Africa but the imagination of its intellectuals. I call it “occident anxiety”. I began to understand this in my graduate school days. A peer from Tanzania said to me that in my choosing to study philosophy and working to be a first-rate theorist regarding African phenomena, I was engaged in a war with white people that I could not hope to win. Why, you ask? Because, according to my friend, theory is white people’s…
Olufemi Taiwo
Contrary to popular belief, Africa’s fortunes and modernity have been intertwined for at least two and a half centuries Africa’s challenge to modernity – and the continent is by no means alone in this – should be understood in terms of the following: (1) what have been the relations between Africa and modernity? (2) how has Africa and its phenomena featured in the discourse of modernity? and (3) why should we care about these questions? Modernity refers to that movement of ideas, practices and institutions that originated in Europe and filled out with accretions from across the globe. This means…
