At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again.
For it is no historical part of
the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it-that is in its northern part-belong to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of ssthe human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History The essence of Hegels commentary on Africa can be extrapolated from the aforementioned excerpt and the air of superiority it is shaded with. The commentary under study explains the African continent by shining light upon the duality that exists between The African conceptions of Being, Life and Political Constitution with better understood and often further developed, European Ideas of the same. Despite the Colonial shade to his writing, Hegel makes the effort of not grouping all the sub-altern groups of Africa together and divides it into three parts; Africa Proper or the Uplands, The Nile Region and European Africa, which can alternatively be read as: Negroes and their unchartered territory, Egypt, and Conquered Africa. By adopting this classification, Hegel skillfully skirts away from issues concerning the latter two, and concerns himself exclusively with Africa Proper; or the land which Hegel thinks has been more or less Iron-Clad against the documented trajectory of Human History owing to its Geographical exclusion. Hegel believes that the fundamental point of diversion between Africa Proper and The rest of the world lies within the realization of substantial objective existence; which he believes grounds the universal conception of ideas such as God and society. These ideas, along with the distinction between the individual and the universality of the essential being are ideas that the African people have not grasped. Hegel is of the opinion that the Africans entirely lack the idea of a higher being fundamentally because the acceptance of the idea of a higher being is necessarily contingent of the admittance if the human being, universally and in particular to be weaker or inferior to something or someone, which the Africans cannot comprehend. This entails that the Africans consider themselves to be the supreme being, who rather than being a part of nature are the ones who control nature. Hegel claims that this fundamental gap in understanding is the closest Africans come to religion, wherein their conceptions of religion are not the same as European conceptions of worshipping a Supreme Being to improve the conditions of their existence. For the Negroes the concept of Religion does not include worship but instead it entails what they term Magic, by which they manipulate Nature to provide them with favorable outcomes. This Magic is performed by what the Portuguese have termed as a Fetich who represents a form of objective existence, who too is eventually under the control of the Negroes. .
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