Across the continent, students still learn philosophy from a curriculum built elsewhere, for a world that did not imagine them as equals. At its center stands a European canon whose stars often mix real brilliance with open racism.

Many of us never chose this curriculum. We inherited it.

Hume, Kant, Montesquieu, and Voltaire helped build modern ethics and politics. They also wrote that Africans and Indigenous peoples were childish, lazy, and closer to animals. These were not stray insults; they fit a world of empires, plantations, and racial “science.” Teaching these authors as if their universality floats above that history is not education; it is amnesia.

We are trained to defend this setup automatically. We are told to separate the ideas from the man, that “it was normal back then,” that we cannot cancel great thinkers. I used to believe that. Skim the genius, bracket the rest.

But the “rest” does not stay in brackets. The same texts that teach some students to handle nuance teach others to talk calmly of “civilizational gaps” and “primitive minds,” treating Europe as Reason’s natural home. Many students absorb a quieter message: you arrive in philosophy at the bottom of an invisible ladder.

That ladder is built into the syllabus. In China, India, or Iran, a student’s intellectual foundation usually begins at home; European thinkers appear as one voice among others. Yet in many of our institutions, the European canon is imported whole and presented as the sole voice of Reason. Local traditions; with their own flaws and hierarchies; are pushed to the margins, treated as commentary on a conversation where the center is already fixed.

This is not normal. It is conditioning.

The point is not to burn the canon, but to stop kneeling to it. Teach these thinkers for what they were: European authors shaped by empire and ambition, not neutral vessels of the universal. And do not let them speak alone.

Place Kant’s morality next to Zera Yacob or contemporary African ethicists. Read Hegel on history alongside Ibn Khaldun, Cheikh Anta Diop, or Malek Bennabi. Once you do that, it becomes obvious that the great questions were never the property of a single continent.

When the racism in the canon stays unnamed, it doesn’t disappear; it sinks in. Keeping these authors at the center while muting their exclusions is not neutrality. It is consent.

This is not an attack on Europe. It is a refusal to treat European thought as the sun and everyone else as orbiting debris. If their universalism did not include us, why should our education still revolve around them?

If we read them, let’s read them whole: insight and insult together. A curriculum is more than a list of books; it is the quiet answer to the question of who counts as fully human.

The task is not endless complaint, but construction. We must teach the alternatives, and we must teach them as equals.