Zeyad El Nabolsy

Abdulrahman Mohammed Babu (1924–1996) was one of the most significant African Marxist thinkers and political figures of the twentieth century. One of the key problems that confronted Babu was the claim that Marxism was a Western product, marked by the particular concerns of the West, and thus could not be applied elsewhere. In response, Babu argued that the materialist conception of history is not exclusive to the West. Babu claimed that Ibn Khaldun anticipated some of the elements of Marx’s thought.

One of the central questions concerning modern African intellectual history has to do with the relationship between modernity and colonialism. This book approaches this question from the standpoint of debates about modern science on the African continent. This topic, despite its importance, has not received much attention in the writings of African philosophers. However, there is an African philosopher who has provided us with what is perhaps the most well-articulated African theory of the relationship between modern science, African cultural identity, and colonialism. The philosopher in question is the Beninois philosopher, Paulin Hountondji (1942–2024). While Hountondji’s critique of what he called “ethnophilosophy” has been tremendously influential in shaping African philosophy, his later work on scientific dependency has not received the level of attention that it warrants. What is especially significant about Hountondji’s work on scientific dependency is that it approaches the issue from four disciplinary angles: philosophy, history, sociology of knowledge, and political economy. At the (meta-)philosophical level, Hountondji argues that philosophy itself is dependent on science. Moreover, he implicitly provides an answer to a classical problem in philosophy of science as it pertains to African philosophy of culture, namely the demarcation problem (i.e., the problem of how to distinguish between scientific theories and other knowledge claims). Hountondji’s solution to the demarcation problem forces us to turn to history, because he makes it clear that the relevant demarcation problem for African philosophers has to do with the demarcation between modern science (as opposed to science without qualifications) and other bodies of belief that make knowledge claims. In addition, Hountondji turns to the history of colonialism in order to understand the relationship between colonialism on the African continent and modern science. At the level of the sociology of knowledge, Hountondji makes claims about the conditions which make modern science possible, and which are relevant to understanding the relationship between capitalism, modern science, modern technology, and modern philosophy. At the level of political economy, Hountondji draws on dependency theory in order to contextualize his claims about scientific dependency and to tether this phenomenon to neo-colonial macro-level structures. The unifying theoretical orientation behind these four different disciplinary angles is his commitment to historical materialism as a theoretical framework.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed political turmoil that expressed itself not only in the questioning of the hegemonic political, economic, and social orders, it also turned towards questioning the relationship between science and technology on the one hand, and the hegemonic order on the other hand. This led to the rise of the radical science movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. These movements were deeply influenced by Marxist intellectual currents and they thought to demonstrate the non-neutrality of science without falling into the trap of complete nihilism regarding the possibility of objective scientific knowledge. This Chapter seeks to demonstrate how Hountondji’s writings on the relationship between science and technology can be understood in relation to an influential current of Marxist theorizing about science and technology, namely the current influenced by the work of Boris Hessen. Given Hountondji’s historical context, it is not surprising that he would seek to think about how such Marxist influenced theorizing could help us make sense of the state of science and technology in the Global South. To this end, Hountondji drew upon another intellectual current which was deeply influenced by Marxism, namely dependency theory.

This Chapter is concerned with the place of science, specifically modern science, in African philosophy. More specifically, it is concerned with placing the work of Hountondji in conversation with the work of some of the most important figures in professional African philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. In the previous chapters of this book, I have emphasized the important role that is played by the concept of modern science in the work of Hountondji. In this Chapter I contextualize Hountondji’s work, by showing how conceptions of modern science play an important role in the work of other African philosophers such as Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. In particular, all three philosophers draw on some conception of science in order to differentiate between “modern” and “non-modern” societies (frequently called “traditional”). They all argue that “modern societies” have institutionalized a modern scientific worldview in a way that “non-modern” societies have not. To this extent, all three philosophers are, like Hountondji, defenders of what I have described in Chap 1. as the confident self-critical spirit of the 1960s and, just like Hountondji, they continued to defend this spirit well into the 1980s and the 1990s. In particular, they refused to concede defeat and to shift the goal posts so that the epistemic limitations of “traditional” modes of intellectual inquiry can come to be re-described as unique epistemic achievements based on a different set of evaluative standards.

Today there is a renewed interest in indigenous (or endogenous) knowledge partially in response to social movements and partially in response to the perception that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that we have sought to systematically exploit our natural environment. However, such interest often tends towards presupposing the necessity of adopting some form of epistemic relativism about the epistemic achievements of modern science. Hountondji does not in fact reject the significance of indigenous or, as he prefers to refer to it, “endogenous” knowledge. I suggest that Hountondji, by rejecting the use of “indigenous” as an adjective, sought to distance himself from the de-politicized celebration of indigeneity as a facet of multiculturalism in the 1990s. What is significant about Hountondji’s approach, and which makes it especially pertinent today, is that he does not reject the existence of significant epistemic achievements amongst the adherents of endogenous modes of intellectual inquiry, yet he does not succumb to the temptations of relativism. In particular, he emphasizes that there are universal goals that drive intellectual inquiry which allow us to make an evaluation of the adequacy of traditions of intellectual inquiry which are embedded in different societies (and which in turn reflect the dominance of certain social elements in those societies). Hountondji’s theoretical work should be contextualized in relation to efforts in the Global South in the 1960s and 1970s to think about the possibility of integrating some elements of endogenous knowledge with some elements of modern science and technology with the goal of creating societies that are characterized by equitable development, and with the aim of ending the curse of scientific and technological dependency. Thus, Hountondji’s writings can be seen as an attempt to provide a theoretical justification for a specific developmental policy.

The abandonment of the attempt to indigenize and institutionalize modern science and technology on the African continent at the level of theoretical discourse was preceded by the actual material destruction of African institutions of higher learning and research centers as a result of the imposition of structural adjustment programs. Seen in this light, the increasingly prevalent view among decolonial scholars that the African continent does not need research on modern science and technology carried out in formal institutions is nothing but an attempt to make a devastating world-historical defeat for African liberation appear as if it were a triumph over Eurocentrism. This argumentative move is often based on the characterization of modern science as intrinsically colonial in character. Hountondji’s key contribution is to show that a socially and historically sensitive account of the genesis and development of modern science need not lead to the thesis that modern science is intrinsically colonial or intrinsically Western in character.

The focus of Hountondji’s studies in France during the 1960s was on Edmund Husserl. The 1960s were also the years when Louis Althusser was writing and publishing some of his most important work on the interpretation of Marx. Hountondji’s thinking about the relationship between philosophy and science (and the idea of philosophy as a theory of science, i.e., a Wissenschaftslehre) was deeply influenced both by his work on Husserl and his encounters with Althusser. Moreover, the 1960s were also years of political instability which culminated in the events of May 1968 in France, and, as I have pointed out in Chap. 1, the 1960s was a period of intense activity on the African continent, with the newly independent nations trying to chart a developmental path that would rid them of the shackles of colonialism. Thus, while the debate about the relationship between philosophy and science seems quite technical, it was not, as I will show, isolated from questions of development and the political and social contestations which marked life in the newly independent African states.

It is not uncommon today for some scholars to claim that insofar as post-colonial African leaders framed their political projects in terms of development as well as the “enlightenment of the masses” (through expanding literacy, and through the dissemination of “enlightened” or “modernist” discourse through various media, i.e., print, radio, cinema, etc.) they remained beholden to colonialist assumptions and practices. We detect this orientation, for example, in some of the post-development theorists. Post-development discourse tends to be explicitly “anti-modern”. We also find it in some of the proponents of “decoloniality” as a theoretical framework. Like post-development discourse, this “decolonial” discourse also tends to collapse modernity into coloniality. Some scholars working in a Foucauldian vein also collapse the distinction between modernity and colonialism. The decolonial critique of Hountondji accuses him of accepting the “civilizing mission” associated with colonialism. In this Chapter, I argue that the decolonial standpoint fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between colonialism and modern science on the African continent. I show that colonial policy systematically sought to prevent Africans from accessing and mastering modern science. Thus, on this front, Hountondji's project is a thoroughly anti-colonial one that involves a revolt against the structures of colonialism.

This paper provides a comparative study of Amílcar Cabral and Ghassan Kanafani. It defends the thesis that both figures were responding to similar historical junctures. Moreover, it shows that they both converged in terms of how they theorized colonialism. For both thinkers, colonialism can be described as an attempt to halt the history of the colonized. A sustained analysis is provided of what the term ‘history’ means in this context. It is argued that they intended to speak of history in terms of progress. This in turn led them to argue that the colonized societies were dynamic societies before colonialism. If colonialism attempted to ossify the colonized societies, then anti-colonialism cannot be reduced to a defence of inherited cultural traditions.

Edward Wilmot Blyden’s contributions to Pan-Africanism have been widely recognised. Scholars have noted that Blyden’s conception of what he called the “African Personality” reflects the influence of his reading of Herder, Fichte, and Mazzini. However, there has hitherto been no attempt to identify the precise elements that he borrowed from the aforementioned thinkers. This paper focuses on the potential influence of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation on Blyden’s philosophy of history and his philosophy of education. I argue that while Blyden does not explicitly refer to Fichte, or to Herder for that matter, his philosophy of history as presented in his Islam, Christianity, and the Negro Race, with its emphasis on the existence of racially specific laws of growth, can plausibly be interpreted as having been influenced by Fichte’s philosophy of history. I provide textual and contextual evidence to support this thesis. I show that Fichte’s idea that there is a Bildungsplan for humankind, which requires that each people [Volk] should develop its particularity [Eigenthümlichkeit] provided a suitable framework for Blyden’s defence of a special developmental path for peoples of African descent.

This book offers a systematic reconstruction of Paulin Hountondji’s contributions to the debate about the place of modern science on the African continent. The book shows that Hountondji develops an account of modern science that is sociologically sensitive to the entanglement between modern science and colonialism on the African continent without falling into epistemic relativism about the claims of modern science. It is argued that Hountondji’s views on modern science express a strong historical materialist influence, and that he develops a theory of science that draws both on the Hessen-Grossmann hypothesis and dependency theory. Thus, this book brings together two strands of historical materialist thought about science that have hitherto been isolated from one another. This book is of interest to scholars who specialize in African philosophy, history and philosophy of science, global philosophy, and African studies.

Both Amílcar Cabral and Ghassan Kanafani can be said to belong to the second generation of anti-colonial leaders in the wave of independence movements that characterized the second half of the twentieth century. In this essay I show that not only was there a significant overlap between their primary concerns, particularly revolving around the need for a theoretical analysis of the limitations of the leadership of the first wave of independence movements, but also, a convergence with respect to their understanding of the importance of social analysis, and, more specifically, class analysis in the struggle for liberation from colonialism. In fact, one of the things that they wanted to point out when they claimed that the leaders of the first wave of independence movements did not develop an adequate ideology was that these leaders failed to understand the social structure of their own societies; in particular, they failed to understand that liberation from colonialism and neo-colonialism was not in the interests of all members of the colonized societies and that appeals to an amorphous entity called “the people” were likely to backfire. In fact, both Cabral and Kanafani pointed out that there were some classes in their respective societies who benefitted from colonialism and who therefore could not be expected to support the struggle against it.

Zeyad el Nabolsy: Hountondji, while critical of the ethnosciences, namely the study of things like “traditional” mathematical and astronomical knowledge from an anthropological perspective, does defend the importance of studying what he calls “endogenous knowledge”. Can you say something about this? Carmen De Schryver: We should say something about his choice of the term “endogenous” over the term “indigenous”. He really wants to question the idea that, insofar as we are talking about African systems of knowledge, we are talking about “indigeneity” because of the connotations of that term, especially in the anthropological literature that he is responding to, with pre-modernity. The concept of “endogeneity”, by contrast, is really getting at the contrast, not between the indigenous and the modern, but between endogenous and exogenous, where it is a question of where do these systems of knowledge emanate from; are they in the first place of African providence? Are they imported from Europe? That is the key distinction for Hountondji, rather than this tradition-modernity distinction. This idea that something that is contemporaneous with European science is pre-modern is, I think, worth challenging.

Boris Hessen’s 1931 paper, The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia, has often been pointed out as a precursor to externalist approaches to history of science, yet a more systematic approach to Hessen and his overall oeuvre has been missing. Sean Winkler seeks to provide a systematic introduction to the work of Hessen, emphasizing his contributions to Marxist history and philosophy of science. The book is composed of four chapters and an appendix of translations of Hessen’s entries on physics in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In the first chapter, we get a reconstruction of some of the basic concepts that Hessen deployed, namely, the concepts of ideology and practice. Winkler situates Hessen’s work in the context of debates in Soviet philosophy in the 1920s between the mechanists and the Deborinites over how to interpret the relationship between dialectical materialism and the natural sciences. Both parties to the debate accepted that Marxist philosophy must base itself on science. The debate was over what it means to say that philosophy must base itself on science. The mechanists thought that to base philosophy on science was to liquidate philosophy. The Deborinites, by contrast, thought that philosophy was inescapable and that it cannot be liquidated in the name of science without burdening science with inadequate and unexamined philosophical assumptions. Hessen sided with the Deborinites.

Many Victorian philosophers of history attempted to explain what they took to be the evident divergence in the level of civilizational achievement that was attained by different peoples. One prominent paradigm for explaining this divergence was the biological-racialist paradigm. According to this paradigm, endorsed by the likes of Robert Knox, Samuel George Morton, Carl Vogt, and James Hunt, what explains divergence is racial difference. In this paper, I show how one African philosopher, James Africanus Beale Horton, sought to undermine this paradigm and to offer an alternative explanatory paradigm. I argue that Horton presents an alternative paradigm which does not deny that there are divergences that must be explained and which seeks to explain such divergences by appealing to factors such as environmental changes, cultural contact with other societies (and the severing of such contacts), and failures of social organization due to decadence after a period of high civilizational achievement in a given society. Horton presented an alternative philosophy of history which does not give up on the concept of progress, but which also does not condone colonialism and imperialism.

This chapter focuses on an important problem in the intellectual history of the Global South, namely the relationship between modern scientific knowledge and colonialism. This problem was of concern to theorists from the Global South, such as Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral, who were active during the high tide of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and it continues to be of relevance today. This chapter shows how this problem has deep historical roots in the Global South, beginning from at least the late eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on two intellectuals, Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) from Egypt, and James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883) from Sierra Leone. Tahtawi and Horton, despite coming from societies with different histories, found themselves confronting similar problems having to do with their encounter with modern European societies. The main problem that they faced was how to make use of the elements of modern European societies that they admired, especially in relation to the social organization of knowledge production about nature, while rejecting European justifications for colonization. Both Horton and Tahtawi sought to de-associate modern scientific knowledge, which they obviously admired, from claims of racial superiority and justifications of despotic colonial rule.

In this paper I show that James Africanus Beale Horton launched an internal critique of race science as it developed in the hands of Robert Knox, Carl Vogt, and James Hunt. The latter three held an inductivist Baconian conception of science. Horton shows that their practices as scientists and natural philosophers contradict their own conception of what one must do in order to do good science. Horton’s critique of race science has important implications for philosophical anthropology as it took shape over the course of the nineteenth century and for our understanding of the history of African philosophy in its global context.

In The Problematics of Enlightenment: Human Reason, North African Philosophy, and the Global South , Mourad Wahba explores the relevance of the philosophy of the Enlightenment to contemporary issues in Egypt and the Global South more generally. Wahba provides a historical account of the reception of Enlightenment philosophical discourse in the Arabic-speaking world through the study of the work of Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi, Muhammed Abdu, Farah Antun, Abbas Mahmoud al-ʿAqqad, and Louis Awad. Wahba argues that the claim that human reason is the ultimate source of justification—trumping the authority of inherited social institutions and the claims of historical revelation—is a universalizable principle whose actualization would make progress possible in Egypt and elsewhere. This book, translated by Zeyad el Nabolsy, provides Anglophone readers access to a philosophy from the Global South that does not take the alleged Eurocentrism of Enlightenment philosophies as its central problematic. Moreover, Wahba is concerned with situating the problems that emerge in the context of contemporary Arabophone North African philosophy in the larger context of African philosophy, including engagement with the work of Senghor and Nkrumah.

Losurdo analyzes the debate which took place in 1954 between Galvano Della Volpe and Palmiro Togliatti (the General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party) over the relationship between Marxism and liberalism. Della Volpe championed the standard position that liberalism enshrined formal (negative) freedom which Marxism seeks to preserve while also extending social rights (or positive freedom). Togliatti recognized the main problem with this view: the majority of people who lived under the rule of states which purportedly adhered to Western liberalism were colonized peoples who did not share in the experience of exasperation with the merely formal nature of bourgeois negative freedom, because it was never extended to them in the first place (pp. 94–95)! In a sense, we can say that the problem with Marxism in its Eurocentric form is that it is too charitable towards liberalism. It attributes to liberalism achievements that it is innocent of (p. 216). Losurdo remarks on the irony of the date of this debate, for 1954 was the year of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ when the Việt Minh forces defeated the French in a war of independence which was fought, at least partly, in the name of the formal bourgeois freedom which Western liberal states had, according to Della Volpe and other Western Marxists, already actualized in the world.

This article shows that Olaudah Equiano’s struggles to escape from the condition of enslavement allowed him to attain a privileged epistemic position in relation to certain domains of knowledge. Equiano utilized this privileged epistemic vantage point to launch an internal critique of some strands of Enlightenment philosophy. In the process of launching this internal critique, Equiano also undermined a claim to ownership that was implicitly made by prominent defenders of both slavery and theories of racial superiority in relation to the normative principles which constituted the core of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. This article shows that to think of Enlightenment discourse in terms of the trope of the “master’s tools” is to misunderstand what Equiano brought about by way of successful internal critique in his Interesting Narrative.

This chapter aims to revisit some of the key questions which were debated at the University of Dar es Salaam during the 1970s and 1980ss. The University of Dar es Salaam was a hotbed of progressive politics during the period in question. Radial political economy was frequently taught and discussed by the students and professors at the university. The ruling party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), under the leadership of Julius Nyerere, was embarked on a project of building socialism, but this was not a Marxist project, rather it was informed by the theory of ‘African Socialism’ which was adhered to by Nyerere. Proponents of African Socialism claimed that because African societies were and are classless societies, a theory of social transformation which was centred on class struggle was inapplicable to such societies. There were other proponents of African Socialism, but it was only in Tanzania that this theory was applied as a theory of socialist development. The proponents of African Socialism in Tanzania held that the situation there was exceptional compared to developments across the African continent in so far as communal forms had survived into the end of the colonial period. On this basis, the claim was made that such communal forms could provide an alternative basis for building a socialist society without the need for going through a stage of independent capitalist development. This view might have appeared especially plausible when its proponents contrasted the case of Tanzania with the case of neighbouring Kenya, where a fairly strong class of rich peasants able to hire the labour of others emerged during the colonial period.

The absence of Islam from recent scholarship on Hegel's account of world religions is puzzling. In the first part of the article, we argue that Hegel's neglect of Islam in his systematic account of religious phenomena is not accidental and that he did not think of Islam as a determinate religion. Its size and believers aside, we suggest that it is not possible to assign any determinacy to Islam as a world-historical phenomenon under Hegel's rubric, because such determinacy that applies to other religions would be in conflict with what Hegel takes to be Islam's emphasis on the negative moment of truth, its revolutionary tendencies, and its lack of any novel conceptual content as a response to Christianity. In the second part of the article, we point out how one could respond to Hegel's characterization of Islam when it is mentioned in relation to other religious traditions. First, we argue that Hegel overemphasizes the significance of Islam qua religion in explaining the history of Muslim peoples. More than that, Hegel does not see that the history of Islamic philosophy and science can be characterized by sublation and that it can be integrated into conceptual developments in the West on these terms. However, our critique of Hegel's Eurocentrism does not remain at this level, for in the third part of the article we argue for the significance of considering the response of Muslim philosophers to Hegel. In particular, we look at the responses by Mohammed al-Khosht and Mahmoud Haider, respectively. We conclude that Hegel's exclusion of Islam from any involvement in the history of the Concept indicates an undialectical commitment on his part and that to this extent being Hegelian today requires that we rectify this oversight.

Presby raises an important criticism of Oruka; she notes that in his critique of Tempels and Mbiti, he assumes, without providing adequate evidence, that myths and the traditions which transmit them are static and that, consequently, they lack the openness to criticism and transformation that characterizes genuine philosophical discourse. Presby responds that ‘those who study oral traditions or ritual practices will note that traditions are always changing, even when people think they are merely reproducing them’ (108). However, one can defend Oruka by pointing out that there is a vast difference between an intellectual tradition whose adherents are aware of the fact that it is constantly changing based on a dialectic characterized by arguments, objections to arguments, and responses to objections on the one hand, and on the other hand, an intellectual tradition that is changing but whose adherents at any given moment are unaware of the fact that this intellectual tradition is subjected to change. In the latter case, individuals are likely to think of criticism as a futile activity and perhaps as unnecessary given the fact that this tradition has proved to be functionally adequate for that society’s requirements, and they would be unaware of the fact that this tradition has maintained its functional adequacy precisely because it has changed as a function of time.

Cet article vise à comprendre comment les études africaines en Égypte ont été influencées par le préjugé d’une différence essentielle entre « l’Égypte » et l’Afrique du Nord, d’une part, et « l’Afrique subsaharienne » de l’autre. Il est communément admis que la plupart des Égyptiens ne se considèrent pas comme des Africains. Dans cet article, je cherche à explorer la manière dont les études africaines en Égypte ont été façonnées par cette conception populaire de soi, et comment cette dernière a été influencée par les discours académiques. J’y discute les origines coloniales et raciales des études africaines modernes en Égypte. J’y souligne également l’importance de l’existence d’un discours contre-hégémonique, incarné par la vie et l’œuvre d’Helmi Sharawy. Helmi Sharawy est aujourd’hui à la tête du Centre de recherche arabo-africain du Caire, et il a été politiquement actif pendant la période nassérienne en tant qu’agent de liaison entre le gouvernement de Nasser et les divers mouvements de libération africains qui ont établi des bureaux au Caire pendant cette période. Ce qui est particulièrement important dans la vie et la pensée de Sharawy, c’est que sa critique des études africaines égyptiennes a été élaborée en dehors de l’académie ; elle est le produit de son travail autodidacte combiné à son immersion dans les luttes politiques. Je soutiens que nous pouvons identifier dans le travail d’Helmi Sharawy une critique des paradigmes raciaux et coloniaux qui ont survécu dans les études africaines égyptiennes contemporaines, une critique que je relie aux débats sur le racisme dans la société égyptienne.

In a speech delivered to the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America held in Havana in January 1966, Cabral posed the question: “does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, and consequently, of class struggle? Cabral raised this question because he is concerned with the fact that maintaining the thesis that the existence of classes is a necessary condition for the existence of dynamic social processes logically commits one to excluding several peoples from the historical process, provided that one accepts that at least some societies were classless until they came into contact with European imperialists. The latter is an assumption that is shared by Cabral and his interlocutors. Of course, in order to understand what Cabral is asking here we have to understand what is meant by the word ‘history’ in this context. I think that if one takes into account the Marxist polemical context that Cabral is wading into with this speech, and his attempt to develop a version of historical materialism that would be suitable for conditions in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, one would be justified in thinking that Cabral is referring to a process of social development (or even progress). In other words, the question at hand is not whether peoples without classes have a past, they obviously do. The question is whether they have lived in societies that were dynamic, and where such dynamism could lead to qualitative transformations in social relations such that one could describe those societies as having specific developmental trajectories. Cabral wants to argue that they did in fact live in societies that were dynamic, even if such societies did not contain classes.

This paper seeks to understand how conceptions of essential differences between “Egypt” and North Africa more broadly on the one hand, and “Sub-Saharan Africa” on the other hand have informed African studies in Egypt. It is commonly claimed that most Egyptians do not think of themselves as Africans; in this paper I aim to explore how this popular self-understanding has both informed African studies in Egypt and has been affected by academic discourses. I discuss the colonial and racial origins of modern African studies in Egypt. I also emphasize the significance of the existence of a counter-hegemonic discourse which is exemplified in the life and work of Helmi Sharawy. Helmi Sharawy is today the head of the Arab African Research Center in Cairo, and he was politically active during the Nasserist period as a liaison between Nasser’s government and the various African liberation movements which established offices in Cairo during that period. What is especially significant about Sharawy’s life and thought is that his critique of Egyptian African studies was developed outside of the academy; it was the product of his autodidactic impulses combined with his immersion in political struggles. I argue that we can identify in the work of Helmi Sharawy, a critique of surviving racial and colonial paradigms in Egyptian African studies. I relate this critique to discussions of racism in Egyptian society.

Hountondji contends that without investment in the creation of autonomous African research institutions that are integrated with the national economies of African states, Africa’s scientific and technological dependency will persist. To be sure, Hountondji did not neglect what he termed “endogenous knowledge,” yet for him such knowledge had to be integrated with the research programs of contemporary scientific disciplines and critically assessed on this basis. Endogenous knowledge can have a role to play in ending Africa’s scientific and technological dependence, but only if it is liberated from the petrification that it is subjected to when it is described purely in ethnographic terms, and only when its truth claims are assessed in a serious way using the means of hypothesis testing that having been developed in the relevant contemporary scientific disciplines. To the extent that Hountondji thinks of modern science as the paradigm of successful inquiry, he is a modernist. His work on scientific dependency is especially relevant in this current moment given the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that Africa’s dependence on imported vaccines is not sustainable in the long run. The fact that the African continent as a whole imports 99% of the vaccines that are delivered to its inhabitants shows that thinking about scientific dependency in a serious way is imperative today.

Compared to the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year, the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh has been distinguished by greater inclusion of voices from the Global South, as evidenced by the acceptance of a proposal to create a ‘loss and damage’ fund for developing countries that are suffering from climate disasters. However, it remains to be seen how the mechanisms for the implementation of this fund will be worked out. Western developed countries were vocal in their opposition to the fund throughout the summit, and it was only due to relentless pressures by developing countries that they eventually relented. If past events are anything to go by, then it is highly unlikely that the most vulnerable countries will get to have a substantial say in how the climate fund is operated. In fact, the Western developed countries are already trying to use this as an opportunity to drive a wedge between developing countries and China, whose lending and investment policy presents a favourable alternative to ‘strings-attached’ IMF funding. This is precisely one of the hallmarks of ‘climate colonialism’: a concept that refers to the deployment of justifications ostensibly related to the need to bring the causes of anthropogenic climate change under control, but which in fact serve to legitimize the domination of weaker, poorer states in the periphery of the world-system by stronger wealthier states in the core. What this means is that those who are most responsible for the impending catastrophe will get to dictate the terms of the response (even if ineffective) in a manner that would ensure they can externalize the costs to those who are least culpable. It is well known that poorer countries in warmer climates will be the most severely affected as the plant continues to warm.

One of the key factors that contributes to global political, social, and economic inequality is the lack of adequate scientific and technological resources in the Global South. A desideratum for a coherent program for a New International Economic Order is to end the Global South’s scientific and technological dependency on the Global North. The end of the unipolar era brings with it opportunities for many countries in the Global South to improve their bargaining position in a manner that would enable them to take substantial steps towards ending scientific and technological dependency.