REHABILITATION OF NEGRO AFRICA IN THE 'EMPIRE OF REASONED THOUGHT': A RE-READING OF TEMPELSIAN LITERATURE

This text explores the polemical discourse on Tempelsian literature. This literature, which inspired Kagame, reveals the existence of a positive and complete thought on African soil, in response to the theory of tabula rasa and the ideology of difference dominant in the colonial period. For the philosophers of the modernist current of African philosophy, on the contrary, Tempelsianism like Kagamism constitute a fundamentally ethnophilosophical enterprise. By breaking ethnology, they develop new issues. In a supposedly philosophical methodical impulse, they redefine philosophy itself, understood as a discourse on the essential, on the Absolute in the Hegelian perspective and as a set of philosophical texts written by African philosophers playing on the articulation between philosophy, logic and method, and as a discourse of de-reification of the crisis. They thus claim to refute collective, intuitive, or so-called 'popular' philosophy. But this Western-centric, logicist and epistemological aim will be re-evaluated by another hypercritical current. The latter, considering the imperialist context that led to the elaboration of Bantu or African ontology, proposes to welcome Templar-Kagamist literature as the site of a fruitful and decisive thematic orientation for the awakening of philosophy, always in search of truth.