African Past and the Sin of ‘Pre-Coloniality’

This chapter opens the contention of this book with the discourse on one of the three impasses militating against an authentic African identity and metaphysics. I limit myself to one of these impasses here as I focus on how the concept, ‘pre-coloniality’ has succeeded in offering an unreliable account of the African past. In order to understand how this ‘sin’ erects itself as a challenge to the comprehension of the African past, I use three essential topics—language, religion and history. I argue that the African is first of all exposed to a language and religion that are foreign to those of their ancestors. By the time the African encounters African historyAfrican history, the term, ‘pre-colonial’ is used to limit or even dictate what aspect of the African past is learned or taught. I disclose how this term offers the prejudiced outlook that African history can only be understood as an appendage to Euro-American presence in Africa. Consequently, no authentic effort is made to go as far back as ancient Egyptancient Egypt to begin an authentic exposition of the African past that signifies Africa’s contribution to world intellectual heritage. Because Ìwà metaphysics seeks to evince a unique system of metaphysics that does not owe allegiance to Greece, this chapter suggests an improved way of understanding the African past outside the straitjacket of the concept, ‘pre-coloniality.’