Ethnophilosophy and nationalism

Historians of African philosophy date its systematic study from the 1920s, when academic training, writing and publishing began to address African conditions. In its first period, African thinkers responded to colonial claims that Africans had no history or philosophy of their own by trying to recover and rebuild an African identity. Two schools thrived: ethnophilosophy, which described the shared world-view of a people, and the nationalist or ideological school of independence leaders.