Africana Philosophy and Harlem Renaissance

Introduction: Refinding and Redefining Black Personality

What is known today as professional Africana philosophy has its roots in the search of identity undertaken by black writers in the late 1800s and early 1900s and culminated in the emergence of, on the one hand, a civil rights movement, which sought to remedy the evils of social segregation, political disfranchisement, economic exploitation, and cultural discrimination of the balck people of America, Africa and elsewhere, and, on the other hand, a literary movement whose aim was, in the words of the Kenyan philosopher D. A. Masolo, "to rehabilitate the image of the black man wherever he was" through "the expression of black personality" (D. A. Masolo, African Philosophy in Search of Identity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 10). The members of this literary movement, which came later to be known as the Harlem Renaissance in America and the Negritude, its francophone siblings in Europe and the colonies sought to refute the unfounded assumptions of the eurocentrism of Levy-Bruhl, Hegel, Kant, and many others who saw in reason a trait unique to the Anglo-Saxon male thinker. In short, the Harlem Renaissance was a universalist movement whose form was poetry and whose content was pluralism. As D. A. Masolo is right to point out, "This value of pluralism was built around an ontology that accepted diversity or otherness without hierarchial judgments of human worth on the basis of racial and cultural characterisitics" (Idem).

In his Race and Study (Freetown, 1895), Edward Wilmot Blyden defined and described the objectives of the black personality movement, which culminated in the Harlem Renaissance.

"For each one of you-for each one of us-there is a special duty to accomplish, a terribly necessary and important job, a job for the race to which we belong ... there is a responsibility that our personality, our belonging to this race, presupposes.... The duty of every individual and every race is to struggle for its own individuality, to maintain it and develop it.... Therefore honour and love your race for yourselves ... if you are for yourselves, for if you abdicate your personality, you will not have left anything to give to the world. Neither will you be happy nor of any use, and you will have nothing to attract and fascinate other people because with the suppression of your individuality you will also lose your distinctive character. You will also realize then that having abdicated your personality you will also have lost the special duty and glory to which you are called. In truth you will be denying the divine idea-god-and sacrificing the divine individuality; this is the worst type of suicide."