Zera Yacob

I have learnt more while living alone in a cave than when I was living with scholars.

Zera Yacob was a seventeenth century (1599–1692) Ethiopian philosopher. His magnum opus, the Hatata, is often compared by scholars to Descartes’ Discours de la methode. Many of Yacob’s ideas, which center on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, independently coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, which also uses reason as it’s apparatus for understanding behavior and the world.

While Yacob is not explicitly Christian, he does believe in God. Even though he uses reason as his tool of understanding the world, a lot of his ideas have undertones of Christian ideologies. For example, he argues that it is reasonable to treat others as you wish to be treated. He presents this, and other Christian-like teachings as natural facts that all reasonable people should believe.

Refusing to adopt the Catholic faith of the emperor at the time, Yacob fled into exile with some gold and the Book of Psalms. He found a cave at the foot of the Tekezé River and lived in it as a hermit for two years, praying and developing his philosophy. He would later write that the time he spent in the cave was the most critical in developing his philosophy of thought. The idea of distancing oneself from society in order to critically analyze it was made popular by the Age of Enlightenment. Yet through Yacob we see many Enlightened ideas occurring elsewhere independently.

With regards to marriage and sex, Yacob rejected polygamy and would likely have rejected same-sex relations. He argues that because there are roughly the same number of women and men, “the law of creation orders one man to marry one woman.”

On the existence of evil, Yacob argues that God allows evil and temptation to exist so that we can develop morally. He asserts that an action’s morality is decided by whether it advances or degrades overall harmony in the world.

Yacob beat many iconic European Enlightenment philosophers to their ideas. The argument that most religions have miracles that prove their truth, and that we need to critically question miracle narratives prefigures Hume’s “Of Miracles” by over a century. Despite this, Hume’s work is the authority on the philosophy of miracles. The idea that God and the afterlife are essential to informing our understanding of morality is often attributed to Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” which Yacob also predates by over a century. It’s also interesting that Yacob explicitly argues against slavery and hierarchies of man. While these are simple ideas, the credit for them is often given to John Locke or the American Declaration of Independence. We of course know that neither Locke nor the writers of the Declaration really meant all men when they said that all men are created equal.

All men are equal in the presence of God; and all are intelligent, since they are his creatures; he did not assign one people for life, another for death, one for mercy, another for judgement. Our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist in the sight of God, who is perfect in all his works.

There is a complex history into why philosophers like Yacob are not taught in traditional philosophy curricular. Part of it is the fact that philosophers like Yacob wrote in languages that essentially lost out in history. The Hatata was originally written in Ge’ez, even today it is quite difficult to get copies of Yacob’s works in English. Yacob would not have had access to the same printing industry that some of his European counterparts had, which limited how much influence his teachings could have. This is also compounded by the fact that much of African history and philosophy is oral. Which means that when an elder dies, they take history with them. However, many of these factors are outweighed by the structure of curricular and the racism of history. The fact is that much of the Western World would not be what it is today, philosophically and materially, without the labor of Africans. To ignore African philosophy is to ignore the source of humanity.

I entreat any wise and inquisitive man who may come after I am dead to add his thoughts to mine. Behold, I have begun an inquiry such as has not been attempted before.