Teaching Philosophy in Senegal: An Experience of Decolonizing the Minds
Lecture by Bado Ndoye
Rethinking Universality through Decolonization
In this lecture, Prof. Bado Ndoye offered a historically and conceptually rich account of philosophical education in Senegal, tracing its colonial entanglements and the intellectual strategies developed to overcome them.
Drawing inspiration from Alioune Diop’s vision—“dewesternize in order to universalize”—Ndoye framed decolonization not as a rejection of universality, but as its necessary reconfiguration: a call for all cultures to participate equally in the creative work of humanity.
Colonial Histories and the Legacies of Assimilation
Ndoye began by outlining the specific colonial history of Senegal as France’s first African colony, emphasizing the institutional consequences of early assimilationist policies. The designation of four Senegalese towns as full-fledged French communes created a paradox: while their inhabitants enjoyed legal status as citizens, their education—especially in philosophy—was shaped entirely by French curricula. Following independence, efforts were made to Africanize most subjects, but philosophy remained largely untouched. The enduring notion that philosophy is by definition universal was often used to legitimize this uncritical adoption of European models.
Marxism, Neglect of African Thought, and the Silencing of Alternatives
Ndoye traced the dominance of a French-style Althusserian Marxism in Senegalese academic philosophy during the post-independence decades. This ideological framework, while anti-imperialist in rhetoric, often reproduced Enlightenment universalism and Eurocentric historicism. Consequently, leading thinkers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Cheikh Anta Diop were marginalized, dismissed by Marxist philosophers as insufficiently rigorous or ideologically suspect. The effect was a sustained neglect of African philosophical traditions and an enduring skepticism toward efforts at cultural and epistemic reclamation.
Turning Points: Rediscovering Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop
The intellectual climate began to shift in the early 2000s. Ndoye highlighted the centenary colloquium for Senghor in 2006 at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar as a key moment in this transformation. Philosophers who had long opposed Senghor’s thought began to reengage with his writings, recognizing their complexity and potential for articulating a genuinely African modernity. Similarly, Cheikh Anta Diop’s work—on precolonial African history, Egyptian antiquity, and national languages—gained renewed attention as students and scholars sought to formulate decolonial frameworks beyond both Eurocentric universalism and nationalist essentialism.
The Influence of Transatlantic Exchange and Postcolonial Thought
A further inflection point came with the migration of many Senegalese scholars to American universities in the 1990s, where they encountered discourses shaped by the civil rights movement and critical race theory. For the first time, many were confronted with being racially categorized as Black—an experience that catalyzed a new engagement with thinkers such as Frantz Fanon. Lewis Gordon’s philosophical introduction to Fanon, What Fanon Said, played a formative role in this intellectual reorientation, opening up paths for postcolonial and decolonial analysis within Senegalese philosophical inquiry.
Conceptual Decentering: The Case for Islamic Philosophy
In the second part of his lecture, Ndoye discussed the conceptual dimension of decolonization through the work of Souleymane Bachir Diagne. Diagne’s books—Islam and Open Society and Open to Reason—marked the first sustained effort to re-anchor philosophical inquiry in Senegal within the Islamic intellectual tradition. This was particularly significant given Senegal’s longstanding Muslim majority and the historical connections to West African centers of learning such as Timbuktu and Djenné. By recovering figures like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and al-Ghazālī as genuine philosophers rather than peripheral theologians, Diagne offered an alternative genealogy of reason, one that resonated with students seeking a philosophical heritage not exclusively rooted in the West.
Teaching Practice: African Philosophy in the Curriculum
In the final portion of the session, Prof. Ndoye responded to questions concerning the institutional implementation of decolonial philosophy teaching. He reported that courses in African philosophy are now an integral part of the undergraduate and master’s curriculum at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, with two weekly hours dedicated to the subject across all years. However, African philosophy is not confined to a discrete field. Instead, the department seeks to integrate African perspectives across all areas of teaching. For example, phenomenological questions about the “exceptionality of Europe” are interrogated through non-European experiences, revealing tensions between Eurocentric claims and methodological principles of phenomenology itself.
As Ndoye put it, the aim is not to provincialize African philosophy but to deprovincialize European thought by confronting it with the full plurality of human experience. The ultimate goal is to construct an “inclusive universality”—a universality that emerges not through domination or assimilation, but through reciprocal recognition of diverse cultural and philosophical contributions.