When it comes to philosophy, for instance – a particularly important discipline as our world is built on ideas – the work of white males, dead or alive, dominates the field. This is not simply because white males have contributed profound work, but also due to the glaring yet tacitly silenced relationship between power structures and knowledge. This is why philosophy professor Angela Davis’s complex body of work on the social justice system has not influenced contemporary philosophical studies on prisons in the way Michel Foucault’s work on the same topic has. Or why the Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yaekob, who long before Nietzsche declared that “God is dead”, daringly criticised organised religion in his 1667 treatise, Hatata, where he also said: “He who investigates with pure intelligence … will discover the truth.” But despite promoting reason in this way, he is not dubbed the father of modern philosophy, Descartes is.
It is why Oriki – in short, performative, spiritual and philosophical African “praise poetry” about a plethora of universal topics – are considered mythological, while Homer’s mythological epic poem, The Iliad, is philosophy. And why everyone is familiar with philosophers such as Montesquieu, Machiavelli and Marx, but not Ibn Khaldun whose thinking about everything from the physical environment to cultural history to social bonds was pioneering.
In short, it seems that when a white male thinks about the meaning of things, any things, it is philosophy, while philosophers like those above are rarely discussed in British universities.
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