Events

This lecture revisits the scholarship on Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first and only philosopher in early Enlightenment Europe born on the continent of Africa. It dwells on a selection of his network of interlocutors, mentors, and history of ideas that informed Amo’s life and thought. By returning to the worlds that shaped his intellectual journey, the lecture highlights source documents from archival research alongside anthropological inquiry in Axim and Shama in today’s Ghana, following Amo’s movements between Africa and Europe to illuminate his intellectual life. In doing so, it proposes new ways of un/knowing Amo, recovering lost biographies, forgotten conversations, and the possibility of memory beyond the margins of Enlightenment history.

Stefanie Bognitz is a social anthropologist. Her regional expertise, professional experience and theoretical concern cover aspects of legal, political, applied, public and critical anthropology spanning contexts in South Africa, Rwanda including the Great Lakes region of Africa and more recently Ghana and Germany. As an Individual Fellow at the Median Centre for Advanced Study in Africa, she works on a book manuscript entitled "Anton Wilhelm Amo: In-Between Lifeworlds".