What is African philosophy and the history of Africa?

One of the principal sources of African ethnophilosophy was the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857–1939). Levy-Bruhl taught at the Sorbonne from 1896 to 1927 and was one of the leading ethnologists of his era. He argued that the primary concepts, causal relationships, and modes of reasoning used by non-European people were not the result of scripts developed through academic exercises to conform to the laws of Aristotelian logic. Rather, they were “collective representations” inculcated during rites and rituals as a result of intense affective and psychomotor experiences. The concepts of non-European people were felt rather than understood, mystical rather intellectual, and mediated relationships between both physical and nonphysical modes of being. Every event had not only a physical but a “mystical” significance, and the connections between physical and mystical realities were governed by “laws of participation” that transcended the laws of logic that structured thought in European cultures. In contrast to the law of the excluded middle and the law of noncontradiction, these “laws of participation” allowed things to be both themselves and something else, to be “here” and not here, and to exist both in the present and in the future. Medicine, magic, witchcraft, divination, and communication with the dead were made possible through mystical forces apprehended through “laws of participation” that could not be reduced to “rational explanations” structured by the laws of logic.