Black Liberation Philosophy: Shaykh Musa Kamara and the Fate of the Humanities

In May of 1924, Kamara sent hundreds of unbound manuscript pages to be reviewed, edited, and translated for publication. After years of consulting Arabic manuscripts and collecting oral testimonies from griots, village chiefs, and others, Kamara hoped to see his reconstruction of West African history in print. He never would. The evolution of colonial knowledge would render his work illegible to much academic scholarship. Based on close reading, archival research in Senegal, and interviews with Kamara’s descendants, this presentation also develops a theory of Black Liberation Philology as a method for global Black studies.