Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

The kidnapped African boy who became a German philosopher: Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer

#1
C C Offline
https://lithub.com/on-the-kidnapped-afri...ilosopher/

EXCERPT: In 1707, a boy no more than five years old left Axim, on the African Gold Coast, for Amsterdam, aboard a ship belonging to the Dutch West India Company. [...] He then had to travel another few hundred miles to Wolfenbüttel, the home of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Anton Ulrich was a major patron of the European Enlightenment. His librarian was Gottfried Leibniz, one of the leading philosophers, mathematicians, and inventors of his era, and co-creator, with Isaac Newton, of calculus; and the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel housed one of the most magnificent book collections in the world.

[...] the duke, who, in turn, handed the boy on to his son, August Wilhelm; and we first hear of him as a member of August Wilhelm’s household. From his baptism until 1735, the boy continued to receive the patronage of the dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel [...] And, as a child, he would no doubt have met Leibniz, who lived, as he did, under their patronage.

We don’t know what the African boy’s status was: Had he been enslaved? Was he sent by missionaries for a Christian education? What we do know is that Anton Ulrich took a special interest in him, arranging for his education, and giving him, at his baptism, both his own Christian name and his son’s middle name: so the young man came to be known as Anton Wilhelm. The dukes had apparently taken the occasion of the gift of an African child to conduct one of those famous Enlightenment experiments, aiming to explore whether an African could absorb and contribute to modern scholarship. The ducal family might have been aware of a similar experiment, which began a few years earlier, when Tsar Peter the Great of Russia took an African slave as his godson, naming him Hannibal. He went on to be a successful Russian general, and was the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature.

[...In...] later life he often called himself Anton Wilhelm Amo Afer, using the word for African in Latin [...] So he wanted to be known as Amo the African.[...] The experiment with the young African has to be accounted a success. [...] he went on to the nearby university at Helmstedt [...] he earned the right to go on, in 1727, to study law at the University of Halle [...] He was awarded a master’s degree for his legal thesis at Halle—which dealt, aptly enough, with the European law of slavery—and then went on to study at the University of Wittenberg [...] becoming the first black African to earn a European doctoral degree in philosophy. [...] Along the way, Amo added knowledge of medicine and astronomy to his philosophical and legal training. [...] His Wittenberg thesis, which was published in 1734 under the title, *On the Apatheia of the Human Mind*, makes important criticisms of Descartes’s views of sensation.

Amo, who came to know [...several languages, and...] went on to teach at Halle and Jena, publishing, in 1738, a book entitled *The Art of Sober and Accurate Philosophizing*, which discussed issues in almost every area of the subject. He won eminent admirers.

[...] Amo, as we saw, was referred to as a Moor in his baptismal records [...] The great contemporaneous encyclopedia the Zedler, in its definition of the word “Moor,” treats it as equivalent to Ethiopian or Abyssinian, but continues, “this name is also given to all blacks, like the Negroes, and other African peoples of this color.” “Afer,” in classical Latin, referred to a people—the Afri—who lived around ancient Carthage. But gradually it came to mean a person from Rome’s African colonies, and, finally, anyone from the whole continent. Still, it is clear that Amo’s black skin linked him in the minds of his German contemporaries not just with all black people but also with other inhabitants of the African continent. These are not, however, as they knew as well as we do, the same thing.

When Johann Gottfried Kraus, the Rector of Wittenberg, complimented Dr. Amo on his successful defense of his dissertation, he began by talking about his African background, mentioning some of the most famous African writers from Antiquity, including the Roman playwright Terence—who, like Amo, had given himself the last name Afer—and Tertullian and St. Augustine, along with other Fathers of the Church born in North Africa. He mentioned the Moors who conquered Spain from Africa. All of these people, as Kraus surely knew, were of Berber or Phoenician or Roman ancestry. None of them would have had dark skin or tightly curled black hair like Amo’s. [...]

So, if the dukes who supported him were interested in whether an African could be a brilliant intellectual, they already knew the answer: [...it had been...] long ago proved that they could. Presumably, they were interested in a question not about Africans but about black people, about Negroes. Yet what would you learn from a single experiment with one black man? Did Anton Ulrich and his friends conclude that any black child, taken at random and given Amo’s education, would have ended up as a professor of philosophy? And if Amo had not passed the exams, would they have concluded that this showed something about every black person?

At some point, Amo Afer put aside his own pen. Reaching middle age, he decided that it was time to go home, and, in 1747 he made his way back to the Gold Coast, to the Nzema villages of his birth. It was a bold move. [...] We know a little more of what happened to him. [...He was...] described as “a great sage,” had “acquired the reputation of a soothsayer.”...

MORE: https://lithub.com/on-the-kidnapped-afri...ilosopher/
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  How feminist philosopher Helene Stöcker canonised Nietzsche C C 1 61 Mar 5, 2024 10:36 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  Article Philosopher chatbot: LucretiusGPT + Ancient philosophers & cosmology C C 0 75 Jan 26, 2024 11:41 PM
Last Post: C C
  Article Philosopher who survived 10 suicide attempts explains "How Not to Kill Yourself" C C 1 95 Apr 7, 2023 09:08 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  The computerized philosopher: Can you distinguish Daniel Dennett from a computer? C C 0 64 Jul 13, 2022 12:37 AM
Last Post: C C
  Gamification of philosophy: how the profession became hoop-jumpers for top journals C C 0 49 Apr 8, 2022 07:11 PM
Last Post: C C
  Postmortal interview with Wilhelm Dilthey C C 1 77 Jan 30, 2022 02:28 PM
Last Post: confused2
  Why philosopher Henri Bergson rejected the word “time” C C 0 76 Oct 10, 2021 04:15 AM
Last Post: C C
  Philosopher Peter Boghossian Resigns from Portland State Yazata 3 132 Sep 9, 2021 12:12 AM
Last Post: Syne
  Philosopher questioned "strange" free will measure in science paper + Lee McIntyre C C 16 329 Jul 26, 2021 04:00 PM
Last Post: Ostronomos
  What is it like to be a philosopher in Japan? C C 0 120 Jun 1, 2021 03:48 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)