Portuguese was the first European language to reach sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, by the middle of the fifteenth century many Africans spoke Portuguese-based pidgins and creoles. As a consequence of this early presence, African writing in Portuguese appeared before anything comparable in English, French, and other European languages.

Literary precursors in the colonial period

With a few exceptions, documented as far back as the nineteenth century, precursors of a representative lusophone African literature did not come into being until the 1930s and 1940s. Joaquim Dias Cordeiro da Matta (1857–94) perhaps stands as Angolan literature’s most important nineteenth-century precursor. A native of Icolo-e-Bengo, Cordeiro da Matta was a poet, the author of an unpublished novel, and the organizer of a Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary.

António de Assis Júnior (1887–1960), a later precursor, was an “assimilated” African, according to the colonial Indigenous Law enacted by the Portuguese New State in the early twentieth century. In spite of his official social status of assimilado, Assis Júnior was transcultural, and he paid tribute to his Kimbundu ethnic origins. Like his predecessor Cordeiro da Matta, he compiled a Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary. He established himself as a direct precursor of modern Angolan literature with O segredo da morta (1934) (The Dead Woman’s Secret), subtitled Romance de costumes angolenses (A Romance of Angolan Customs). Although written in the style of Victor Hugo, Assis Júnior’s early romance is a forerunner of the ethnographic Angolan prose fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.

Wilfred Cartey reminds us that a literature grows out of a people’s relation to place. Cartey was a visionary critic of anglophone Caribbean literature, refusing to be silenced or impeded by the sudden onset of physical blindness in his adult life. His vision of the Caribbean understands that people change place as much as place shapes them, and that place is a complicated concept in the light of the widespread Caribbean experience of migration and transcultural identity. Those factors make it the more remarkable that West Indian writers have been able collectively to achieve a large body of outstanding literature, responding to their own visions of the Caribbean from wherever they happen to be, and recreating it in different parts of the world. This despite a history, both individual and collective, both in the region and outside, both historical and contemporary, of intense uprooting, separation and isolation from tradition, home and the voices of the past. Walcott powerfully describes Caribbean place as injured with human experience, “the drowned of the Middle Passage … the butchery of its aborigines … indentured Asians” (1998: 81). Wilson Harris envisions tradition complexly, “For if tradition were dogma it would be entirely dormant and passive but since it is inherently active at all times, whether secretly or openly, it participates the ground of living necessity by questioning and evaluating all assumptions of character and conceptions of place and destiny” (Bundy 1999: 150). Caribbean tradition is thus a complicated interaction of old custom with new modes of being: old traditions being fragmented and often lost by the violence of history.

In this concluding section, an overview is provided of the three streams of philosophical thought flowing out from late antiquity. The aim here is to show how ancient Greek philosophy and its Christianized versions were received. Philosophy in early Byzantium seems to have been completely subordinated to theological and ecclesiastical ends. Nevertheless, that explicit constraint did not prevent the further exploration of the ontological and epistemological issues that constitute the permanent inheritance of the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. When the political and theological controversies between Latin West and Greek East later erupt, it will become evident that philosophical disputes, for example, regarding the interpretation of Aristotle’s account of the activity of divinity, are much to the fore. With the fall of Byzantium in 1453, the exodus of Greek scholars to the West will provide the groundwork for another encounter of Greek philosophy with Christianity, this time with Scholasticism. It is now increasingly a commonplace that the primary transmitters of ancient Greek philosophy to the West were the Arabic Muslim scholars of Alexandria and Baghdad and elsewhere who translated and thereby preserved a significant number of basic texts. It is not infrequently the case that these Arabic translations can fill in lacunae owing to the disappearance or defective condition of Greek originals. But it is in the construction of an Islamic philosophical theology that a fruitful and challenging encounter of one religious tradition with ancient Greek philosophy can be found.

The expression ‘philosophy of history’ was coined by Voltaire, but in the eighteenth century it referred to a specific project that by no means exhausted the scope of philosophical interest in history during the period. We will do better to speak of a philosophical reflection on history, both because it is terminologically more appropriate and because this broader term will remind us that a philosophical interest in history affected almost all spheres of philosophy in the period. Philosophical stances on providential history, the stages of history, and the status of historical knowledge played a crucial but often overlooked role in the debates on the foundation of morals and politics, in efforts to produce a science of human nature, and in central epistemological discussions.

The rise of modern science, the impact of Cartesianism and scepticism, and the progress made by concrete historical research in the seventeenth century all helped to undermine any model of knowledge in which providential history could remain the frame of reference for all moral and empirical sciences. In fact the foundation of the different areas of knowledge was an open question, as was their place in the emerging ‘science of man’, or ‘science of human nature’. In that context, a common problem was how to provide a single account of both the factual and the normative sides of history. The challenge was to produce an account of history that revealed the origins of social life without counterfactual speculations. This was not easy, for the development of historical research (essentially the work of antiquarians and philologists) constantly threatened universal histories that wanted to preserve the normative function of history as a ‘teacher of life’.

Statistics tell a story. The newly formed United States of America included roughly 300,000 Protestant Christians in the year 1800. Yet by the year 1950, this number had grown to 43 million. This is a 143-fold increase, or a growth of 14,300 percent. The figure becomes more striking when one considers that the population of the nation, according to the United States Census, increased during the same period by the order of 28.4 times, from 5.3 million to 150.7 million. The increase in Protestant Christian affiliation during this period was 5.0 times the rate of the general population increase. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that “the most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.” The overall rate of religious adherence in the U.S. population steadily climbed from 17 percent in 1776, to 34 percent in 1850, 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.

One thing should be clear. It is a mistake to think that there was a Christian golden age in the United States during the colonial era, followed by a long gradual process of secularization and decline. Steadily increasing religious affiliation is the dominant pattern in the United States over the last two centuries. The period of lowest religious affiliation in American history occurred around 1800 when there were much lower levels of church membership than at the present.

PRELIMINARY ISSUES

The study of early Byzantine philosophy raises certain preliminary issues that one needs to bear in mind from the start, for they concern the very definition of this field of scholarly research. It is only sixty years ago, when Basil Tatakis’ La philosophie byzantine (1949) appeared as a supplement in Emile Bréhier’s Histoire de la philosophie, that Byzantine philosophy emerged as a subject matter worth investigating in the history of philosophy. There is no doubt that the attitude towards Byzantine philosophy and its different periods has in the meantime changed considerably, but it is still helpful to first investigate its credentials as a legitimate part of the history of philosophy, and thus to justify the inclusion of its early period at the end of a narrative on the philosophy of late antiquity. Let us, therefore, begin by commenting on the nature and status of our subject matter.

Is there Byzantine philosophy?

The question regarding the very existence of something that can be called ‘Byzantine philosophy’ is raised even in recent contributions, although not in the same terms as in Tatakis’ book. Sixty years ago the discussion was primarily focused on the possibility of and the conditions for the existence of a Christian philosophy, a more general issue that during the 1930s occupied principally the French historians of philosophy. The outcome of this discussion was to establish the study of a western medieval Christian philosophy, which had originated from the writings of the Christian Fathers and centred on the works of Thomas Aquinas.

American religious thought generally kept pace with the nation's continued social and cultural growth throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Prominent universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton supported thriving Protestant seminaries, enabling the nation to produce a steady stream of academically sophisticated theologians. Many of these were conversant with recent scientific writings in botany, chemistry, physics, and geology. They incorporated their scientific knowledge into a sophisticated natural theology built on the premise that nature contains clear, compelling evidence of God's existence and perfection.

Antebellum natural theology rested on two basic premises. First was the assumption that God created the natural universe, which therefore contains evidence of his creative design. Second was total certainty that God has also provided completely reliable information about himself in the Bible. Natural theology expressed American Protestantism's confidence that our universe had a sudden beginning as explained in Genesis, evidenced a divinely orchestrated development, and was heading toward a predetermined end, the salvation of the faithful and the establishment of the kingdom of God.

The natural theology developed in the first six decades of the nineteenth century was, however, destined to break apart after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Before 1860, theologians had been able to reconcile biblical faith and sciences such as botany or geology with relatively little difficulty.

The Arabic language is a rich and flexible tool that, over the centuries, has been shaped and molded by the many different peoples that came to express themselves in it. In Africa, Arabic spread with the advent of Islam. It became the official language throughout northern Africa, from the Sudan to the western Sahara, and as far south as Mauritania. The first Arabic works in Africa date from about the tenth century and are mostly religious treatises written by Muslim jurists. Creative writing in Arabic initially consisted of poetry, a genre much esteemed and perfected by Arabs since pre-Islamic times. Prose works continued to be scholarly and religious, right up to the end of the nineteenth century when genres new to Arabic literature, like the novel, the short story, and drama emerged.

The region now has a thriving national literature in Arabic. Egypt, in particular, has a rich tradition of Arabic creative writing, predating the emergence of modern Arabic literature elsewhere in Africa. The Maghreb countries, once under French rule, have a globally renowned francophone literature. It was only after independence that the Arabic creative writing of the Maghreb began to reach a wide readership in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world. In sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in West Africa, where Islam is the main religion, Arabic is a religious language, introduced by Muslim scholars. It spread with the establishment of centers of Arabic learning in several African cities. Some parts of sub-Saharan Africa have been prolific in the production of Arabic works.

The earliest books in English relating to Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are David Livingstone’s (1813–73) Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (1857) and Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries (1865). Although on both expeditions he entered present-day Zimbabwe only briefly, Livingstone’s books serve to introduce the literature of the region. He regarded mission and colony as the necessary transforming agents for Africa and he hoped through his writings to convince Britons that Africans should be encouraged “to cultivate for our markets, as the most effectual means, next to the Gospel, of their elevation” (1857: 675). His enormous influence inspired two generations of missionaries, who introduced literacy, commercial agents, and administrators who had been instrumental in establishing a network of protectorates and chartered company colonies that put the entire region under British political control. The imperial impact and its multiple consequences including resistance to British domination became and still remain the main concerns of the literature that we will discuss in this chapter. Initially all the writers are white and the benefits of empire are promoted; once British control has been established its consolidation becomes a priority. In Southern Rhodesia after 1923 the growth of white nationalism can be discerned in white writing, which becomes more vociferous in response to an articulate black resistance throughout the region. This first opposes settler privilege and then imperialism itself and soon produces its own literature. The themes of post-independence literature remain public and the principal concern of much black writing is the recovery of a cultural identity that colonialism has shattered and the exposure of the corruption and sometimes despotism of the new political and economic elite who have taken the place of the colonial rulers.

Liberal religion, as a discernible movement, was far more a product of the nineteenth century than of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “Liberalism,” like “secularism,” was a coinage of the nineteenth century, and the first group, the Unitarians, to self-describe as liberal Christians only took denominational shape in the 1820s and 1830s. Even in the case of the Unitarians, the label of “liberal Christian” was first pinned on them as a tag to mark their departure from the soundness of Calvinist orthodoxy, not as a proud party badge. Only in 1815 did William Ellery Channing formally embrace the appellation as an indicator of the Christian charity, broad-mindedness, and creedal flexibility – the disposition toward liberality – that he thought typified the nascent Unitarian movement. This essay, with British America its primary purview, necessarily details the background, not the foreground, of religious liberalism. It explores the intellectual and political frameworks out of which full-blown liberal religious movements and organizations – from Unitarianism to Reform Judaism to the Ethical Culture Society – subsequently emerged. It highlights the theological, political, cosmopolitan, and colonial roots of religious liberalism: the advent of deism and universalism, the development of church-state separation, and the process of liberal self-definition through conflict with religious opponents and through growing knowledge of the world's manifold religions.

A long prehistory brings the story of journals voicing and connecting the expressive cultures of Africa and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century through the twentieth, to Présence Africaine, a distinctive model and influential force by mid-century, and beyond. This chapter surveys their sources, examines some major texts, links these periodicals to the black world’s urgent public issues, and assesses the genre’s condition as the twenty-first century begins.

The early African precursors came from European mission churches that published oral narratives and some secular poetry and prose as adjuncts to religious texts. These were most notable from the Xhosa when a press opened at Lovedale in 1823 and the Yoruba as Samuel Crowther’s similar evangelism emerged in the 1840s and generated a print culture of some diversity. The next phase, more secular, included newspapers created by publishing writers like Edward Wilmot Blyden and John Tengo Jabavu. Then came twentieth-century works like Nigeria Magazine, regularly funded and produced by colonial authorities with a scholarly style, “finished” look, and commercial appeal; there were 40,000 copies of its 1960 independence issue.

“Independents,” however, dominated twentieth-century periodical literature. Secular and nonofficial reviews with creative and critical writing in diverse formats from small presses, these were started by individual or collaborating writers themselves, drawing on local practices and interests. Site by site, genre by genre, adding nonprint idioms, they privileged indigenous voices. Their composite role after the First World War (whether or not by conscious policy) was of great historic magnitude, spreading multi-ethnic, multinational, Negritude, and pan-African works, feeding and sometimes leading the politics of self-determination that emerged on the continent and in the diaspora by mid-century.

As fundamental and even venerable social institutions, religion and the family for centuries have enjoyed a close association. Both families and religions are approached with a special reverence; both offer to their members the possibility of merging selves and souls within a larger group; each harbors settings for important rituals of unity and continuity. Involvement in religions and in families can spawn similarly intense emotions; each can subdue or smother individual feelings and instead deposit the follower squarely in the swirl of ceremony – be it for a bar mitzvah or a betrothal, a baptism or a burial.

More than sixty years ago, Margaret Park Redfield insisted that, historically, families (and, she could have easily added, religions) provide for people

The reasons for such close relations are as obvious as they are numerous. Religion and the family occupy adjacent and overlapping spaces in the private realm of modern existence. Yet neither is totally isolated in that sphere.

As Chapter 23 showed, a number of seventeenth-century philosophers grappled with the question, What is the soul? But they also pursued some related questions: How much can we know about the soul, and how do we gain that knowledge? In particular, do we know – and if we do, how do we know – that the soul exists? If it exists, what can we know of its nature? And where does our knowledge of the soul stand in relation to the rest of our knowledge? The scholastic doctrine that there is nothing in the intellect – not even its knowledge of itself – that does not come by way of the senses (nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu) continued to play an important rôle in seventeenth-century thought, for it was accepted by the later-day schoolmen, who continued to be a dominant influence in the universities, as well as by some anti-scholastic philosophers, such as Hobbes and Gassendi, although it was rejected by Descartes and many other influential thinkers.

Accordingly, this chapter begins with an account of Saint Thomas Aquinas's views about our knowledge of the soul, for his doctrines provide the theoretical basis for the claim that even our knowledge of the soul must begin with our senses. Descartes's theory of self-knowledge is then traced in some detail, for his doctrinc, which departed radically from the Thomistic theory, provided a new framework within which much of the discussion of the topic was carried on during the rest of the century.