  At the core of the controversy was the pressing question whether African persons were fully and sufficiently human and capable intellectually in comparison to the model human par excellence: the man of Europe, the White Man, the avatar for all White people and for humanity proper, whose defining characteristics were capacities for reasoning and articulate speech (logos). Consequently, the claim of Bantu Philosophy made by Placide Tempels, a Belgium priest engaged in missionary work in the then-called Belgian Congo, that Bantu Africans (related ethnic groups identified by the dominant language group, Bantu, spoken by the related groups) had an indigenous philosophy was a serious challenge to the racialized philosophical ontology-cum-anthropology that undergirded colonial domination and exploitation. However, Tempels tempered the unsettling implications of his claim by also claiming that Bantu Africans did not have conscious knowledge of their philosophy. Rather, he claimed, it was he who was able, using the tools at his disposal by virtue of his training in Philosophy, to engage in a hermeneutic of the practices and language of the Bantu and extract the constitutive epistemology and axiology structuring the operative, behavior-guiding philosophy at work in their linguistic practices and normative actions.