Nompumelelo Manzini

To practice philosophy is to be part of a conversation, and this autobiography is a conversation about Mabogo Percy More’s experiences as a black African philosopher in South Africa. Not only is this a conversation about philosophy, but it is also a conversation with philosophy as a profession, its interlocutors, and the philosophical canon. Moreover, it is an account of the philosophers both living and dead who have informed More’s worldview, matched with his lived experience. More specifically, as he himself says, this is “an autobiography of a black philosopher in apartheid and apartheid South Africa and its academic institutions”.

This chapter argues that African Environmental ethics or African beliefs regarding the environment is not as anthropocentric as Kai Horsthemke :22–31, 2009) has argued for it to be. Instead African Environmental ethics proves itself to be biocentric in nature. In this chapter, I first argue against the views supported by anthropocentrism. My aims are to show how Tempels ‘force thesis’ allows us to see how African beliefs/views regarding the environment are not anthropocentric. Having said that, the chapter questions whether biocentric views like Father Placide Tempels force thesis are uniquely African?. I gesture towards the view that such arguments are not uniquely African. That is, we cannot talk about a unique African thinking/approach about the environment. Instead, I argue for a “Southern Environmental Ethics”. Here South refers both to the geographic South and the South within the North. The argument for “Southern Environmental Ethics” refers to individuals who are located on the marginal side of the Abyssal line as theorised by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.