Dag Herbjørnsrud - The African Enlightenment
The highest ideals of Locke, Hume and Kant were first proposed more than a century earlier by an Ethiopian in a cave
The ideals of the
Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st
century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. In
fact, no other era compares with the Age of Enlightenment. Classical Antiquity
is inspiring, but a world away from our modern societies. The Middle Ages was
more reasonable than its reputation, but still medieval. The Renaissance was
glorious, but largely because of its result: the Enlightenment.
The Romantic
era was a reaction to the Age of Reason – but the ideals of today’s modern
states are seldom expressed in terms of romanticism and emotion. Immanuel
Kant’s argument in the essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ (1795) that ‘the human race’
should work for ‘a cosmopolitan constitution’ can be seen as a precursor for
the United Nations. As the story usually
goes, the Enlightenment began with René Descartes’s Discourse on the
Method (1637), continuing on through John Locke, Isaac Newton, David
Hume, Voltaire and Kant for around one and a half centuries, and ending with
the French Revolution of 1789, or perhaps with the Reign of Terror in 1793. By
the time that Thomas Paine published The Age of Reason in
1794, that era had reached its twilight. Napoleon was on the rise.
But what if this story
is wrong? What if the Enlightenment can be found in places and thinkers that we
often overlook? Such questions have haunted me since I stumbled upon the work
of the 17th-century Ethiopian philosopher Zera Yacob (1599-1692), also spelled
Zära Yaqob. Yacob was born on 28
August 1599 into a rather poor family on a farm outside Axum, the legendary
former capital in northern Ethiopia. At school he impressed his teachers, and
was sent to a new school to learn rhetoric (siwasiw in Geéz, the
local language), poetry and critical thinking (qiné) for four years.
Then he went to another school to study the Bible for 10 years, learning the
teachings of the Catholics and the Copts, as well as the country’s mainstream
Orthodox tradition. (Ethiopia has been Christian since the early 4th century,
rivalling Armenia as the world’s oldest Christian nation.)
In the 1620s, a
Portuguese Jesuit convinced King Susenyos to convert to Catholicism, which soon
became Ethiopia’s official religion. Persecution of free thinkers followed
suit, intensifying from 1630. Yacob, who was teaching in the Axum region, had
declared that no religion was more right than any other, and his enemies
brought charges against him to the king. Yacob fled at night,
taking with him only some gold and the Psalms of David. He headed south to the
region of Shewa, where he came upon the Tekezé River. There he found an
uninhabited area with a ‘beautiful cave’ at the foot of a valley. Yacob built a
fence of stones, and lived in the wilderness to ‘front only the essential facts
of life’, as Henry David Thoreau was to describe a similar solitary life a
couple of centuries later in Walden (1854).
For two years, until
the death of the king in September 1632, Yacob remained in the cave as a
hermit, visiting only the nearby market to get food. In the cave, he developed
his new, rationalist philosophy. He believed in the supremacy of reason, and
that all humans – male and female – are created equal. He argued against
slavery, critiqued all established religions and doctrines, and combined these
views with a personal belief in a theistic Creator, reasoning that the world’s
order makes that the most rational option.
In short: many of the
highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and
summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632. Yacob’s
reason-based philosophy is presented in his main work, Hatäta (meaning
‘the enquiry’). The book was written down in 1667 on the insistence of his
student, Walda Heywat, who himself wrote a more practically oriented Hatäta.
Today, 350 years later, it’s hard to find a copy of Yacob’s book. The only
translation into English was done in 1976, by the Canadian professor and priest
Claude Sumner. He published it as part of a five-volume work on Ethiopian
philosophy, with the far-from-commercial Commercial Printing Press in Addis
Ababa. The book has been translated into German, and last year into Norwegian,
but an English version is still basically unavailable... read more:
