  The subsequent decades of debates (mid 1940 through the 1980s) regarding the possibility of African philosophy and disclosures of the long-developed rationality and humanity of African peoples were significant consequences for intellectual agendas and practices of revolutionary developments in political arenas manifested in anti-colonial struggles throughout the African continent, and in efforts to construct new political, economic, social, and cultural orders after the successes of those struggles. A significant number among new generations of African intellectuals—many of them educated in institutions in Africa, many of which were administered by persons of European descent; and more than a few of them educated further in the most elite institutions of the colonizing “Mother Country”—became radicalized in their opposition to racialized colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples and resources. A number of these engaged intellectuals regarded Tempels and similarly oriented European and Euro-American thinkers as allies in their struggles against the dehumanizing rationalizations that supported European colonialism. Some regarded Bantu Philosophy as a defense, even a vindication, of Africans as rational human beings quite capable of managing their own lives and therefore capable of independence from colonial rule. Others, however, thought Tempels’ claims, and similar offerings by others, were misguided and misleading candidates for proper instances of philosophical thought by Africans. For these dissenters such candidates were really more ethnological studies of African peoples than philosophical articulations by them, and that their proponents were more misguided in seeming to attribute unconscious, unwritten, and widely shared putative philosophical systems to all of the persons in the particular groups under discussion. These dissenters disparaged such accounts as “ethno-philosophy.”