In recent years, Hannah Arendt has been criticized for the way she characterized the people of sub-Saharan Africa as they faced invasion and occupation by European imperial powers. Such criticism has become more frequent, even as her “boomerang” thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) – the idea that the European imperial experience in Africa was among the main factors contributing to the emergence of totalitarianism in Europe – has received renewed attention, even from academic historians. Thus her critique of imperialism places her among the forerunners of anticolonial thought and of postcolonial studies, while her attitude toward sub-Saharan African cultures makes her sound eerily like the very European settler population she was condemning.

Some defend Arendt by suggesting that what she did was to capture the racist mentality of the white settlers in southern Africa through an act of narrative ventriloquism. By entering into the consciousness of the early Boer settlers and Europeans generally, she revealed, according to Seyla Benhabib, the “temptation of regression to a condition in which everything is possible.” Yet even before Chapter 7 (“Race and Bureaucracy”) in Origins, where Arendt took up this topic directly, she wrote that the eighteenth-century European “enthusiasm for the diversity in which the all-present identical nature of man and reason could find expression” met a stern test when it was “faced with tribes which, as far as we know, never had found by themselves any adequate expression of human reason or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular customs, and which had developed human institutions only to a very low level.” Her view here clearly characterized sub-Saharan Africans not as in- or subhuman but as culturally underdeveloped. In the words Sankar Muthu has used to describe the capacity that anti-imperialist European thinkers variously attributed to non-European peoples, Arendt denied much, if any, “cultural agency” to black Africans.