There has been the recurrent suspicion that community, harmony, cohesion, and similar relational goods as understood in the African ethical tradition threaten to occlude difference. Often, it has been Western defenders of liberty who have raised the concern that these characteristically sub-Saharan values fail to account adequately for individuality, although some contemporary African thinkers have expressed the same concern. In this chapter, I provide a certain understanding of the sub-Saharan value of communal relationship and demonstrate that it entails a substantial (...) allowance for difference. I aim to show that African thinkers need not appeal to, say, characteristically Euro-American values of authenticity or autonomy to make sense of why individuals should not be pressured to conform to a group’s norms regarding sex and gender. A key illustration involves homosexuality. (shrink)

This is a book of interpretation, not of fact. It studies the major discourses in African political thought throughout the last one and a half centuries, rendering new interpretations of a number of important theorists. Subsequently, this book analyzes paradigmatic models of thought that recur in pre-colonial, colonial, as well as post-colonial political discourses. This in depth analysis allows for a critical inventory of African political thought at the close of the twentieth century.