At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again.

For it is no historical part of

the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in
it-that is in its northern part-belong to the Asiatic or European World. Carthage
displayed there an important transitionary phase of civilization; but, as a Phoenician
colony, it belongs to Asia. Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of
ssthe human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to
the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to
be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History
The essence of Hegels commentary on Africa can be extrapolated from the
aforementioned excerpt and the air of superiority it is shaded with. The commentary
under study explains the African continent by shining light upon the duality that
exists between The African conceptions of Being, Life and Political Constitution with
better understood and often further developed, European Ideas of the same.
Despite the Colonial shade to his writing, Hegel makes the effort of not grouping all
the sub-altern groups of Africa together and divides it into three parts; Africa Proper
or the Uplands, The Nile Region and European Africa, which can alternatively be
read as: Negroes and their unchartered territory, Egypt, and Conquered Africa. By
adopting this classification, Hegel skillfully skirts away from issues concerning the
latter two, and concerns himself exclusively with Africa Proper; or the land which
Hegel thinks has been more or less Iron-Clad against the documented trajectory of
Human History owing to its Geographical exclusion.
Hegel believes that the fundamental point of diversion between Africa Proper and
The rest of the world lies within the realization of substantial objective existence;
which he believes grounds the universal conception of ideas such as God and
society. These ideas, along with the distinction between the individual and the
universality of the essential being are ideas that the African people have not
grasped. Hegel is of the opinion that the Africans entirely lack the idea of a higher
being fundamentally because the acceptance of the idea of a higher being is
necessarily contingent of the admittance if the human being, universally and in
particular to be weaker or inferior to something or someone, which the Africans
cannot comprehend. This entails that the Africans consider themselves to be the
supreme being, who rather than being a part of nature are the ones who control
nature.
Hegel claims that this fundamental gap in understanding is the closest Africans
come to religion, wherein their conceptions of religion are not the same as European
conceptions of worshipping a Supreme Being to improve the conditions of their
existence. For the Negroes the concept of Religion does not include worship but
instead it entails what they term Magic, by which they manipulate Nature to
provide them with favorable outcomes. This Magic is performed by what the
Portuguese have termed as a Fetich who represents a form of objective existence,
who too is eventually under the control of the Negroes.
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