Introduction

Step, this begins with a step. Or have I lost you already? Animism, it is a question of movement. In order to advance this, let us consider the following three excerpts that have been selected for a repeated scene of exposition. This scene is one of being in the dark and thence of divining something beyond what can be immediately sensed. The following extracts are taken from Aristotle’s Physics, and two African novels, Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1974) and Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (1913). The advantage of this unusual juxtaposition is that it dislodges the centrality given to colonialism in approaching African thought and culture as that which has the definitive power to separate ‘primitive’ African philosophies from the modernity of Western thought, a modernity that nonetheless extends back to classical Greek philosophy, at least. Here are the excerpts for consideration:

It is evident, then, that time is neither movement nor independent of movement.