In postcolonial theory and critical race theory, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is (in)famously known for two things – firstly, for his lord–bondsman dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel [1807] 1977), which has been mistranslated as the ‘master–slave dialectic’; and secondly, for the racism expressed in his lectures on the Philosophy of History (Hegel [1837] 2001). The lord–bondsman dialectic as a struggle for spiritual unity of two aspects of a shape of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology has been construed in terms of the struggle of racialised and colonised African subjects in Hegel's description in the Philosophy of History. There has been a tendency to reference the lord–bondsman dialectic in conceptualising the process of African enslavement, colonisation and liberation, on the basis of what Hegel outlined in his lectures on the Philosophy of History as the consciousness of Negroes lacking self-conscious history. What concerns me here is the relationship between the shapes of self-consciousness designated in the Phenomenology as the lord–bondsman dialectic and the ascriptions, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, of unconsciousness and sub-humanity to indigenous people of sub-Saharan Africa, who are said to be devoid of universal historical self-consciousness. This relationship poses the question: is the self-consciousness of the lord–bondsman dialectic in the Phenomenology the same as the self-consciousness in world history and the self-consciousness attributed to the indigenous peoples of sub-Saharan Africa in the Philosophy of History? The answer to this question has implications for our understanding of Hegel's argument in the Philosophy of History that the indigenous people of sub-Saharan Africa lack self-conscious history, and for the philosophical understanding of African slavery, colonisation and liberation processes based on the model of the lord–bondsman dialectic.

In trying to clarify the notion of the shapes of self-consciousness in Hegel's philosophy, and the way in which this notion has been instrumentalised to theorise the processes of African slavery, colonisation and struggles for liberation, this chapter tackles three tasks. Firstly, it expounds Achille Mbembe's application of the notion of the lord–bondsman dialectic in his book On the Postcolony (Mbembe 2001) in explaining the processes of African slavery, colonisation and liberation. Secondly, the chapter attempts to clear away the confusion arising from the conflation of the shapes of self-consciousness engaged in the lord–bondsman dialectic with human self-consciousness.