The Africans' Identity Crisis: Hegel vs. Darwin

“The African Character” by G. W. F. Hegel (1830), p. 208-12
• The African is the “natural man in his completely wild and untamed state” (208), who does not realize that there is a higher power greater than him is. Africans instead practice sorcery, which “exhibits man as the highest power” and gives them “control” over the natural elements, such as rain and storm (209).
• Consequently, Africans have contempt for humanity because there is nothing above them to revere. Furthermore, they have no knowledge of the human soul’s immortality.
• The disrespect for human life and soul manifests itself in political tyranny/constitution, cannibalism, interracial slavery—parents and children sell one another for survival, suggesting instinctual, or animalistic, tendencies—, polygamy, and African fanaticism.
• In terms of slavery, Hegel contends that African enslavement under European control has been essential for “the increase of human feeling among the Negroes” (212). Nonetheless, Hegel insists that slavery is unjust but also that it should be abolished slowly rather than instantly, because slavery needs to “mature” the Africans.

“On the Races of Man” by Charles Darwin (1871), p. 212-17
• There are two schools of anthropologists over the debate of the number of humankind’s species: monogenists and polygenists—“those who believe that human beings descend from a single origin (Darwin’s view that humans evolved from apes) or from many different species.
• Apparently, polygenists are just wrong, because they are rejecting the notions of evolution, thus saying that species, in this case different forms of man, are separate creations, which in turn forces them to decide what forms of man will be considered species. However, “it is a hopeless endeavor to decide this point, until some definition of the term ‘species’ is generally accepted” (213), which apparently is impossible to do.
• On the other hand, monogenists agree despite the superficial aspects of each existing race of man, all the races must come from the same “primitive stock” because there numerous similarities found in the entire human structure across racial lines, including Africans and Europeans.
• Essentially, Africans and Europeans are very alike in habits, dispositions, and inventive or mental powers. Differences do exist manifested in languages, behaviors, and qualities of life.
• Differences between the various races cannot be accounted for by different conditions of life, by evolutionary changes in body—both body parts and physical aspects.