African Philosophy, Reparations, and Epistemic Justice

The Center for Advanced Studies “Philosophizing in a Globalized World: Historical and Systematic Perspectives” at the University of Hildesheim is organizing an International Conference titled African Philosophy, Reparations, and Epistemic Justice. The conference  will take place on June 18, 2026, at 2:00 PM (CEST) / 9:00 AM Brasília time, with online participation via Zoom (see registration below).

Under the aegis of Africa Day, celebrated on May 25 as a symbolic milestone established by the Organization of African Unity in 1963, this event serves as a forum for critical reflection on African philosophical thought, and the contemporary challenges facing Africa and its diasporas.

The conversations will evolve around reflections on the role of philosophy in the decolonization of knowledge and in the promotion of epistemic justice as a central axis in the global agenda of historical reparations. The conference explores the relationship between African philosophy, historical reparations, and epistemic justice in the contemporary world. It is driven by the recent milestone of the United Nations (UN) which consolidated the recognition of slavery as the worst crime against humanity, requiring a  reconfiguration of the ethical and ontological foundations of contemporary philosophical thought.

The contribution of Prof. Dr. Sylvain Mbohou brings a crucial historical and geopolitical dimension to the conference. As a Cameroonian historian trained in African History and International Relations, his work has focused for more than a decade on slavery, the Arab-Muslim and transatlantic slave trades, and their memories from postcolonial, decolonial, and Afrocentric perspectives. His lecture, “The Recognition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade by the UN/Ghana as the Worst Crime Against Humanity: A Critical Historical Analysis,” examines the historical, political, and ethical implications of framing the transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity. By situating contemporary debates on reparations within long histories of enslavement, memory, and international recognition, Mbohou’s intervention offers an indispensable contribution to the conference’s reflections on African philosophy, epistemic justice, and the reconfiguration of global historical consciousness.

The participation of the Nigerian philosopher, Dorothy Oluwagbemi-Jacob deepens the meeting with the significant theoretical accumulation of her work in intercultural and Afro-referenced philosophy. Her reflections provide essential categorical support for the decolonial debate, operating the decentering of hegemonic matrices through a non-canonical philosophy and counter-colonial epistemologies that radically challenge Eurocentrism.

Philosopher and lecturer Adilbênia Freire Machado joins us from Brazil, the holder of the largest black population outside the African continent and the second largest in the world, whose intellectual production condenses investigations in Afro-referenced and intercultural philosophy. Anchored in secular resistance epistemologies and forged in the complex social dynamics of Latin America, her theoretical-practical approach mobilizes critical categories that challenge the status of Western rationality from the diasporic margins.

Program

Registration

Organizer

Rutte Tavares Cardoso Andrade is a professor at the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (UNILAB). She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in African Philosophy at the University of Ghana and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil), as well as a master’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Cape Verde. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Higher Institute of Education (ISE), Cape Verde. She served as General Coordinator of the Africana Studies Center at UNILAB from 2023 to 2025 and is a member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). In 2023, she received the Award for Excellence in Research and Social Impact at the Pan-African Humanitarian Summit Awards Gala.