The Nonhuman in African Philosophy Alena Rettova ´ Contents Introduction: African Humanism and the Nonhuman Turn ..................................... 2 The Nonhuman in African Thought: From Al-Inkishafi to Postcolonial African Texts ......... 7 Al-Inkishafi: A Nineteenth-Century Philosophical Primer ................................... 7 The World Is Worthless and Destructive ..................................................... 9 The World Is Impermanent and Deceptive ................................................... 13 Conclusion: The Nonhuman, Language, and Genre ............................................. 19 References ........................................................................................ 23 Abstract This chapter interrogates the conceptualizations of the nonhuman in African thought. To do this, it draws on a Swahili Sufi poem entitled Al-Inkishafi, by Sayyid Abdallah bin Ali Bin Nassir (1720–1820). The poem presents a distinct notion of the nonhuman as “the world”, constructed in opposition to the human understood as fundamentally antagonistic to humanity. The world is characterized as worthless, impermanent, deceptive, and destructive. Such a view of the world is not isolated in African cultures, but is indeed ubiquitous in regions with a strong influence of Sufi Islam, and even beyond these regions. Based on the philosophical assertion about “the world” in Al-Inkishafi, the chapter then traces the developments of this notion of “the world” in two postcolonial African texts: a Swahili novel by Euphrase Kezilahabi, Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo (1975), and a Wolof novel by Boubacar Boris Diop, Doomi Golo (2003). It suggests that reading these novels against the background of Al-Inkishafi’ s conceptualization of “the world” dramatically changes their interpretation. In the case of Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo, an intellectual continuity between Sufism, existentialism, and socialism makes it possible to attribute the failures of socialism in Tanzania to the A. Rettová (*) University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany e-mail: alena.rettova@uni-bayreuth.de © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Imafidon et al. (eds.), Handbook of African Philosophy , Handbooks in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77898-9_42-1 1