Hair has significantly influenced the identity and oppression of black people throughout colonial history. Despite South Africa’s image as a “rainbow nation”, colonial structures continue to oppress black individuals, which is evident in schools. The goal of this article is to illustrate how the “rainbow nation” ideology in schools has perpetuated the oppression of blacks through the integration of the oppressed race into the school system of the oppressor. The article uses black consciousness as a theoretical lens in pointing out the racial injustices perpetuated by white beauty norms in (historically) white schools. Moreover, black consciousness helps us articulate the psyche and importance of black liberation within an anti-black space that structures the material conditions of these black girls. The purpose of this article is to provide an analysis of how school policies as mechanisms of white hegemony structure the material conditions of black girls, perpetuating self-negation. I start by examining the historical account of hair, followed by the analysis of school policies that oppress black beauty norms, and lastly, I explore the violence and shame one encounters either by conforming, or defying Western norms of beauty.

Although Rawls claims that his Law of Peoples inherits Kant’s ideas of the Pacific Federation in Perpetual Peace, this study demonstrates that Rawls deviates from Kant’s peace theory in three crucial dimensions: the original position, the basic structure and the substantive principles. First, Rawls’s basic structure in The Law of Peoples has a moral sense and is about the attitude of interactions among nations. In contrast, Kant’s international peace theory has a unique role for the basic global structure in a legal sense, which should be understood inseparably with concepts such as rights, laws and the vertical distribution of sovereignty. Second, Kant’s legal peace is rooted in moral universalism, constituting a justificatory device of the global original position. On the other hand, Rawls justifies the principles of the law of peoples to some collective entities in his device of the international original position. Lastly, Kant’s international project is a kind of legal peace theory, aiming for the juridification of international relationships, while Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is a modified form of democratic peace theory, focusing on the improvement of the domestic political system of sovereign countries.

This essay studies the work of Mabogo More, arguing that More is a philosopher of listening. The essay deals with More’s critique of white liberalism, arguing that More offers several varieties of critiques of being-a-white-philosopher-in-the-world.

Hardin’s seminal 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has generally been interpreted as advocating the enclosure or privatisation of the commons as the only means of conserving it. It will be argued that this interpretation with its exclusive emphasis on “the commons” fails to address what is actually at stake for Hardin – “the tragedy” of the recalcitrant belief in limitless economic growth. This article revisits Hardin’s essay and its critical reception to refocus our attention on its actual object of critique: the limitless growth incentive. If it is this capitalist logic that leads to ruin, as Hardin maintains, he could not have meant to advocate this same logic with its emphasis on property rights as a way to avert the tragedy. Nobel Laureate in Economics, Elinor Ostrom’s research refutes Hardin’s draconian pessimism by unearthing how numerous communities across the world had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries. She investigated collaborative management systems across the globe in which communities have successfully preserved a shared resource and provided for their members without relying on privatisation or top-down government control. More than merely providing empirical counter-evidence, Ostrom discovered that humans have a much more complex motivational structure and a far greater capacity to solve social dilemmas than posited in earlier rational-choice theory with its assumption of egoistic, self-interested individuals who maximise utility. Hence, rather than being diametrically opposed, it is argued that Ostrom discovered the solution to the problem that Hardin in part misdiagnosed.

Who should keep cultural artifacts looted from Africa by colonialists, and what arguments can be made in defence of the choice we make? Kwame Appiah invites us to see stolen cultural artifacts not as properties of the societies from which they were stolen, but as individual works of art that exude attributes of our shared humanity. Many of those works, he argues, are no less meaningful to their present locations than they are to people of their places of origin. He advanced the retention and custody of such artifacts in their present locations where, in his view, they best embody the normative idea of cosmopolitanism. I argue in this article that the cosmopolitan argument is an inadequate justification of the retention of stolen African artifacts in Western museums. I argue further that the view of European and American museums as sites of the sublime expression of cosmopolitan ideals speaks to the very need for its deconstruction as a Western idea that seeks the universalisation of a hegemonic culture. Decolonising the normative underpinning of the place of Western museums in the management of stolen African artifacts requires an appreciation of the African attitude to the history, meaning, significance and essences of looted artifacts under a reflexive framework that is multiple and inclusive. I further explicate the epistemic, historical and ethical basis for the reimagination of the idea of restitution and the inclusion of Africans in the management of stolen artifacts. The achievement of this requires a proper acknowledgement of theft, unethical profiteering and meaningful restitution. This approach, I conclude, represents a more ethical, inclusive and universal management of looted cultural artifacts.

More philosophical effort is spent articulating evolutionary rationales for the development of belief-like capacities than for precursors of desires or preferences. Nobody, though, seriously expects naturally evolved minds to be disinterested world-modellers. We agree that world-representing states will not pay their way without supporting capacities that prioritise from an organism’s available repertoire of activities in light of stored (and occurrent) information. Some concede that desire-like states would be one way of solving this problem. Taking preferences as my starting point instead of belief-like states, I defend two conclusions. First, psychologically real preference states, which approximately token expected utilities, have a quite general evolutionary rationale. They are a solution to the problem of efficiently allocating capacities with incompatible uses. This argument is a version of the environmental complexity thesis. Second, preferences can plausibly function and naturally evolve without belief-like states, even though the converse claim is incredible. Preferences, that is, can mediate between discriminations of occurrent states (whether “internal” or “external”) and the processes selecting activity without mediation by stored indicative representations. By tracking expected utilities of actions conditional on discriminated states, they can increase the rate at which the “right thing” is done at appropriate times, and they can do this without the support of belief-like, world-representing states. Preferences, even incomplete and noisy sets of them, are a fuel for success that will tend to be favoured when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when the organisms have complex behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs.

In Theoria 65(4), the editors of the special edition, Motsamai Molefe and Christopher Allsobrook, raised a cogent question on an issue that is neglected by the volume – that is, how to think of rights in and through the African thought scheme. As they put it: “What would it mean and imply to decolonise the discourse of rights?”. In this work, I offer a set of views that address this question. I apply the African thought scheme as a plausible instance of a decolonial thought scheme, and illustrate what rights mean in the African thought scheme. The work addresses the following questions: from a distinctly African point of view, how can it be held that the idea of rights is available in African thought? What are the specific principles that this idea of rights defends, and how can it be held to suggest additional gains to the advancement of the philosophy of rights? To achieve the aims of the study, I (i) provide a theoretical justification for the study. I then (ii) conduct a broad review of the extant literature on the meaning of rights and illustrate its colonial quality and how it depends on Western thought schemes. I then (iii) articulate the meaning of rights in the African thought scheme, and (iv) illustrate its wider implication for the philosophy of rights. The methods applied are textual reviews, critical analysis and intuitive deductions.