LOOKING THROUGH PHILOSOPHY IN BLACK, memoirs

283pp., illus., paperback, London & Lanham, 2019

Mabogo Percy More writes about what it meant to be a black philosopher in apartheid South Africa. Includes three philosophical essays from More's intellectual career.

"Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a compelling story of one man’s struggle for philosophy against the odds, willed by the author’s determination to think freedom under the heel of apartheid South Africa. Buoyed by the Black Consciousness Movement — the author was a classmate of the murdered student leader Abram Onkgopotse Tiro — Mabogo Percy More became a philosopher. Recognized today as one of the most important interlocutors of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness philosophy, More challenges us to reflect on 'Being-Black-in-an-Anti-Black-World' — the ontological impossibility of being Black and being a philosopher — as he engages Africana philosophies born of struggle. Looking Through Philosophy in Black is a remarkable and engaging story of life and the human condition. Doggedly resisting philosophy’s epistemic apartheid, its racism and its colored-blindness, More asks us to contest the absurd mediocrity, downright incompetency and paucity of thinking in higher education and by extension in civil society." Nigel Gibson, Associate Professor, Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson College

Mabogo Percy More, formerly Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Limpopo. He is the author of Biko: philosophy, identity and liberation. He was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award by the Caribbean Philosophical Association in 2015.