What Is Africana Philosophy? Thinking Born of Struggle

Here’s a strange thing about the history of philosophy: for hundreds of years, most philosophers in Europe and America assumed that people of African descent simply didn’t do philosophy. They thought that philosophy required a kind of leisured, abstract thinking that enslaved and colonized people couldn’t possibly have time for—and maybe weren’t even capable of.

But that assumption turns out to be deeply wrong. In fact, there’s a whole tradition of philosophy—stretching back centuries—that was created by people of African descent precisely because they were struggling against slavery, colonization, and racism. Their thinking wasn’t done in quiet libraries by people with nothing else to do. It was done by people who had to figure out, almost every day, how to survive, how to keep their sense of being human when the world told them they weren’t fully human, and how to fight for freedom and justice.

This tradition is called Africana philosophy. It’s not one single philosophy—it’s a whole field of thinking that includes work from Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Europe, by people of African descent. And right from the start, it raises some tricky questions: What counts as philosophy? Who gets to decide? And what happens when you take philosophy out of the academy and put it into the lives of people who are fighting for their humanity?

What Makes a Philosophy “Africana”?

You might wonder: is there really enough in common between, say, a 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher, an enslaved person in the American South, and a 20th-century civil rights activist to put them all under one heading? That’s a fair question. The people we call “African” or “of African descent” are incredibly diverse—they live in different countries, speak different languages, have different histories and cultures.

The reason they’re grouped together in Africana philosophy isn’t because they all think the same way. It’s because they were treated as if they were all the same by Europeans who wanted to justify enslaving and colonizing them. European thinkers invented the idea of a single “Negro race” and used that invention to rank human beings, with white Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. They said that Black people were naturally inferior, couldn’t think rationally, and were better off being ruled by Europeans.

So Africana philosophy is, in part, a response to that. It’s the thinking that people of African descent did—and still do—to push back against being told they weren’t fully human. It’s philosophy that asks: What does it mean to be a person when your personhood is being denied? How do you keep your sense of self when the law, science, and religion all say you’re less than human? What is freedom, really, and how do you get it?

This is what the philosopher Leonard Harris means when he says that much of Africana philosophy is born of struggle. It wasn’t created by people sitting around thinking up abstract puzzles. It was created by people who had to think deeply about the most basic questions of existence just to keep going.

Before the Struggles: Philosophy in Ancient Africa

It’s important to know that philosophy in Africa didn’t start when Europeans showed up. Long before the slave trade and colonialism, there were complex societies on the African continent with their own traditions of wisdom, knowledge, and systematic thinking.

Ancient Egypt—which is in Africa, though many people forget that—had institutions of learning and libraries. The kingdoms of Mali and Ghana had scholars and griots, people who were trained to memorize and pass down an entire community’s history, genealogy, and wisdom. The 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob wrote a philosophical work that dealt with questions about God, morality, and reason, completely independently of European philosophy.

Some scholars, like the Senegalese thinker Cheikh Anta Diop, have argued that Greek philosophy—which Europeans often treat as the origin of all philosophy—was itself influenced by Egyptian thought. This is still hotly debated. But what’s clear is that there were rich traditions of reflection and wisdom in Africa long before the continent’s people were enslaved and colonized.

Philosophy Under Enslavement

Now imagine being taken from your home, forced onto a ship, and sold as property. Imagine being told, every day for centuries, that you are not really a person—that you are a thing that can be bought and sold. And imagine that the people saying this are supported by the best science, religion, and philosophy of their time.

What do you do?

For millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the answer was: you think. You think about what it means to be human when your humanity is denied. You think about whether it’s better to die fighting for freedom or to endure and hope for better days. You think about how to keep your sense of self when your name, your language, and your history have been taken from you. You think about justice when the legal system is built to keep you enslaved.

This wasn’t abstract, academic philosophy. It was philosophy that people lived—and sometimes died for.

Take Olaudah Equiano, who was kidnapped from what is now Nigeria as a child, enslaved, and eventually bought his freedom. In 1789 he published a book about his life. In it, he describes having to fight to reclaim his own sense of self after being renamed “Gustavus Vassa” by his enslavers. He had to figure out who he was when everything about his original identity had been stripped away. That’s not just a story—it’s a piece of existential philosophy, worked out in real life.

Or consider David Walker, a free Black man in Boston who in 1829 published an Appeal urging enslaved people to rise up against their oppressors. He used a clever strategy: he addressed his pamphlet to “the Coloured Citizens of the World,” knowing that most enslaved people couldn’t read it, but that white slaveowners would read it and be terrified. This was a philosophical argument about freedom—and also a practical political tactic.

The Great Debate: Assimilation or Separation?

As Black thinkers in the United States grappled with what freedom would mean after slavery, a major split emerged. This debate continued for more than a century and is still not fully resolved.

On one side were people like Booker T. Washington, who was born into slavery and became a powerful educator. Washington argued that Black people should focus on practical skills, economic self-reliance, and proving themselves through hard work and good character. He was willing to accept social separation from white people in exchange for economic progress. He famously said, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

On the other side was W.E.B. Du Bois, a brilliant scholar who was the first Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard. Du Bois argued that Black people should demand full civil and political rights immediately. He criticized Washington for being too accommodating to white supremacy. He believed that education should produce leaders and thinkers, not just workers.

Du Bois also developed an idea that has become famous: double consciousness. He described the experience of being Black in America as a kind of split identity:

“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

This is a philosophical idea about identity and experience. What does it do to a person to see yourself through the eyes of a society that despises you? How do you hold together two identities that seem to be in conflict? These are questions that resonate far beyond the Black American experience.

The Civil Rights Movement as Philosophy

When we think of the Civil Rights Movement, we usually think of marches, speeches, and laws. But at its heart, it was driven by a profound philosophical commitment: nonviolent resistance.

Martin Luther King Jr. studied the philosophy of nonviolence developed by Mahatma Gandhi in India. But King wasn’t just copying Gandhi—he was adapting it, grounding it in his own Christian beliefs about love (agape, in Greek). For King, nonviolence wasn’t just a tactic. It was a moral philosophy based on the idea that every human being is sacred, that love for your enemies is a moral requirement, and that suffering can be redemptive.

This gets complicated. Is it really possible to love someone who is oppressing you? Is nonviolence always the right approach? These questions were debated intensely within the movement. Malcolm X and others argued that self-defense was justified. Some young activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) grew frustrated with nonviolence and turned toward “Black Power.”

These weren’t just disagreements about strategy. They were deep philosophical disagreements about human nature, about what justice requires, about whether violence can ever be justified, and about what freedom actually means.

The Question That Won’t Go Away

Here’s something that might bother you, and it bothers philosophers too: if Africana philosophy is defined as the philosophy of people of African descent, does that mean someone has to be Black to do it? What about non-Black philosophers who study and write about these ideas? Can they contribute?

Most practitioners of Africana philosophy say yes—but carefully. The philosopher Paul Taylor, for example, has written extensively about Black aesthetics: what it means for Black people to create and appreciate art in a world shaped by racism. But he’s not saying that only Black people can understand or contribute to this discussion. He’s saying that the experiences of Black people have been ignored in mainstream aesthetics, and that taking them seriously changes the way we think about art.

This raises another question: should philosophers of African descent have to work on these topics? Should someone’s identity determine what they think about? The answer from most Africana philosophers is no. Just because you’re Black doesn’t mean you have to study race or racism or African philosophy. You might be interested in logic or metaphysics or the philosophy of science. That’s fine. Africana philosophy is a field of study, not a set of obligations.

Why This Matters Now

You might be thinking: this is all interesting, but isn’t slavery over? Aren’t there laws against racism? Why do we still need Africana philosophy?

Here’s why: the problems that Africana philosophy wrestles with haven’t gone away. People are still deciding who counts as fully human. People are still struggling for freedom and justice. The question of how to maintain dignity and identity when society tells you you’re less than others—that’s not a historical question. It’s alive right now.

And there’s something else. When you look at the history of philosophy, the way it’s usually taught in schools and universities, you’d think that only European men had interesting ideas. Africana philosophy shows that this picture is wrong. It shows that philosophy happens wherever people are thinking deeply about their existence—in slave cabins and on freedom rides, in poetry and in music, in sermons and in songs.

That doesn’t mean everything in Africana philosophy is right or good. It’s a field full of arguments and disagreements, just like any other. But it means that the story of philosophy is bigger, richer, and more surprising than most people realize. And it means that the people who have been pushed to the margins of history weren’t just suffering—they were thinking, creating, and fighting for their humanity.

And that’s a philosophical achievement worth taking seriously.

Appendix: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Africana philosophy	Names the whole field of philosophical thinking by and about people of African descent
Born of struggle	Captures the idea that much of this philosophy came from people forced to think deeply about existence because of oppression
Double consciousness	Describes the experience of seeing yourself through the eyes of a society that devalues you
Nonviolent resistance	A moral and political philosophy based on love and the sacredness of all human life
Racial ontology	The philosophical belief that races are real, fixed categories that determine what people are like
Ethnophilosophy	A controversial term for approaches that describe shared beliefs of an African ethnic group as “philosophy”

Appendix: Key People

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963): The first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard; developed the concept of double consciousness and argued for immediate civil rights
Booker T. Washington (1856–1915): Born into slavery, founded Tuskegee Institute, argued for economic self-reliance over immediate political equality
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968): Civil rights leader who developed a philosophy of nonviolent resistance grounded in Christian love
Leonard Harris (b. 1949): Philosopher who coined the phrase “philosophy born of struggle” and has done crucial work collecting and editing Africana philosophical texts
Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986): Senegalese scholar who argued that ancient Egyptian civilization was a Black African civilization with influence on Greek philosophy
Alain Locke (1885–1954): First Black American to earn a PhD in philosophy; midwife to the Harlem Renaissance and theorist of the “New Negro”

Appendix: Things to Think About

What counts as “philosophy”? If someone who has never studied philosophy in school thinks deeply about freedom, justice, and what it means to be human, is that philosophy? Why or why not?
Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness applies to being Black in America. But can you think of other situations where someone might experience a “twoness” like this? What about being a kid in an adult world? Being from a different culture than the one you live in?
Was King’s nonviolence philosophy realistically the only way the Civil Rights Movement could have succeeded? Or did it work because of particular circumstances? What would you do if you were fighting for your rights and nonviolence wasn’t working?
Should philosophy be “universal”—the same for everyone—or does it make sense to have philosophies that grow out of particular experiences (like being Black, or being a woman, or being colonized)? What do we lose either way?

Appendix: Where This Shows Up

In music and art: Many hip-hop artists, novelists, and filmmakers are doing philosophy without calling it that—thinking about identity, struggle, justice, and what it means to be human
In school debates: Arguments about whether schools should teach “African American history” or “Black Lives Matter” are really arguments about whose thinking counts as important
In everyday life: Any time someone is told they don’t “look like” a philosopher or a scientist, or any time someone has to explain who they are to people who assume things about them—that’s the kind of real-world philosophy Africana thinkers have been doing for centuries
In politics: Debates about reparations, policing, and racial justice are all, at bottom, philosophical debates about what justice requires and who counts as a full member of society