Humanism in Africa

In the twentieth century, a form of secular humanism emerged in Africa primarily through the efforts of the Senegalese intellectuals Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–1986) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001). Diop advocated a strong historicist humanism that focused on the achievements of ancient Africans as the first Homo sapiens, arguing that they laid the groundwork for the cultural life of the species. Although secular, the familiar theme of ancestral value is echoed in his work. Senghor is best known as a co-founder, with the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (b. 1913) of the negritude movement, which focused on the creative potential of black consciousness. Whereas Diop represented the historicist tradition of African secular humanism, Senghor is the father of the poeticizing tradition. He defended the humanity of black Africans primarily through literature, although his thought also included reflections on music. Senghor argued that African value systems were more properly humanistic than European ones because the African models affirmed that the passionate or emotional side of a person carries the same value and legitimacy as the rational, analytic side. In Ghana, the secular humanist tradition also took hold through the thought of Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), who in 1946 offered what he called consciencism, or critical material consciousness. For Nkrumah, African humanism was a call for explicitly political responses to social problems.

The most famous formulation of secular humanism to emerge on the African continent came, however, by way of the thought of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a Martinican expatriate in Algeria. Fanon diagnosed a sick modern world premised upon human actions, wherein the tasks faced by contemporary Africans must be to build up their material infrastructure (based on national consciousness) and thereby transform negative cultural symbols into positive ones that could set humanity aright. The secular humanist tradition continued along historicist and poeticizing lines, and with political allegiances of the Marxist (and, occasionally, liberal) variety through such writers and political leaders as Almicar Cabral and Julius Nyerye until the emergence of leaders in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa took center stage.

The two most influential formulations of secular humanism to emerge focused on the question of consciousness. The first was Stephen Bantu Biko (1946–1977), who developed a theory of black consciousness that drew upon the political dimension of racial oppression. Black, for Biko, designated a form of oppression that could be faced by an East Indian, an East Asian, or a colored (in Africa, a person of mixed race, for example of indigenous and Afrikaaner parents) as well as an indigenous African. The second was Noël C. Manganyi, advisor to the vice-chancellor and principal of the University of Pretoria. Manganyi is a psychologist whose writings during the apartheid years were of an existential phenomenological variety, with many similarities to Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. There have, however, also been highly political Christian humanist responses in the South African context that should be considered, the most noted representative of which is the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, whose leadership in forming South Africa's Peace and Reconciliation Commission exemplifies what might be called the Christian liberal tradition.