Africa Is Not A Historical Part Of The World

I thought it was fascinating how Hegel used logic to naturalize systems of oppression such as slavery and hierarchically places cultures and geographic areas as more or less important historically as another way of institutionalizing oppression through the production of history. Hegel writes that, “slavery is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence- a phase of education- a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it.....(Africa) is not historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” (99). I was able to connect this quote to my own experiences in classes that have aimed to explore larger colonialist and imperialist narratives through which systems of oppression are instituted, maintained and reproduced. Last semester I read a portion of Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather in my American Studies class about colonialism and imperialism. She discussed the concept of the porno-tropics, wherein indigenous “othered” bodies are often overtly sexualized for white male fantasy. This is grounded in the fact that indigenous peoples were seen as bound to the land, corporeal, savage, uncontrolled, dangerous and threatening. Hegel suggests through the above quote that it is justified to use the bodies non-dominant groups as slaves in order to better “introduce” them into civilization so that they can become docile bodies through acculturation by European standards. Africa is seen as a place unable to produce any history because its inhabitants were not thought by Hegel to be capable of anything more than throwing spears out of caves. Reading Hegel and looking at it critically as a colonialist and imperialist text that works to promote and perpetuate certain power structures is fascinating because I believe that Hegel’s idea of history has helped to perpetuate the idea that indigenous and non-European peoples have no history and furthermore that their histories and cultures are insignificant at best. This Euro-centric mode of thinking places specific cultures and histories as being more important than others and is not only biased but provides the basis for continued oppression.