The Dark Continent

The Dark Continent

One of the ideas that influenced the Western world to a great extent in the 19th and 20th centuries was G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history, which describes the history of mankind as a rational development led by the World Spirit, where the spirit moves in parallel with the development of statehood towards an increasingly perfect sense of reality.

Africa has a special place in Hegel’s model of world history: namely, it has no place. According to Hegel, Sub-Saharan Africa is ahistorical. Due to the geographical isolation of Africa, the spirit has not yet become aware of it.

As stated by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the spirit can become conscious of itself – and history can begin – in Africa only in connection with Europe.