Yacob and Amo: African precursors to Enlightenment thinkers
&gt;In short: many of the highest ideals of the later European Enlightenment had been conceived and summarised by one man, working in an Ethiopian cave from 1630 to 1632.<p>All of the highest ideals of the European enlightenment had been conceived by dozens of people all throughout human history. I fail to see what makes Yacob special in this regard.  
For example:<p>&gt;He believed in the supremacy of reason<p>So did Aristotle. So did Socrates. So did most major Greek philosophers.<p>Also the supremacy of reason was part of the problem with the Athenian school of philosophical thought - Aristotle reasoned the octopus was a stupid animal because it was extremely curious, and he reasoned women had fewer teeth than men did, and he reasoned many things that were flatly wrong. <i>Empericism</i> is what changed the world, with rationalism as a supporting pillar, not pure logic itself divorced from evidence and experiment.<p>&gt;In this way, Yacob opens up an enlightened discourse on the subjectivity of religion, while still believing in some kind of universal Creator.<p>Again, why does this make him special? Socrates was famously made to drink hemlock for his incessant questioning of the gods and the validity of religion.<p>&gt;Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery. In chapter five, he argues against the idea that one can ‘go and buy a man as if he were an animal’.<p>&quot;He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating &amp; carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought &amp; sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.&quot;<p>-Thomas Jefferson, clause from first draft of the Declaration of Independence, removed due to Southern opposition (note: Jefferson owned a <i>lot</i> of slaves, and kept them his whole life)<p>Englithenment thinkers did not condone slavery, they were just willing to profit off it. Which is a cowardly and immoral thing to do, but again Yacob&#x27;s thinking is not unique here.<p>&gt;Within the discipline of history, new studies have shown that the most successful revolution to spring from the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity was in Haiti rather than in France.<p>&#x27;Most successful&#x27; here meaning it ended in ethnic cleansing, frequent atrocity (including a castle &quot;built on the bones of children&quot;), and centuries of misery and death that continues to the present day while France....is one of the most prosperous nations on Earth.<p>At the risk of being reductionist, this article strikes me as being in a similar vein to &quot;Ancient Egyptians were black!&quot;. That is, an attempt to elevate a modern minority group to higher prestige by attributing to them historical achievements they didn&#x27;t really have any part in.