Special Issue on Mabogo Percy More

Sarah Setlaelo, a 2024–2025 Harvard South African Fellow, conducted a portion of this research during her fellowship tenure. Now serving as the guest editor of the current issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy, she has overseen the publication of the work. Her contributions include the Editorial Introduction, Peer‑reviewed article, and Book reviews (on 3 books written by the subject of the special issue).

Abstract: Mabogo Percy More is a South African scholar of Africana philosophy, black existentialism, black consciousness philosophy and African phenomenology. This issue honours his fifty-year career as a philosopher and theorist – his thought a gift, his intelligibility an intellectual product. A recipient of the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, More’s work stands tall as a lighthouse in the dark waters of existential crisis. His is a generative project that can be synthesised by employing the hyphenated phrase he coined – “being-black in-an-antiblack-world” – to facilitate studying his thought on each distinct constitutive element. Drawing on Heidegger’s (1962) seminal concept, “being-in-the-world”, which he filters through Chabani Noel Manganyi’s (1973) critique, “being-black-in-the-world” that adds the ontological implications of “blackness” to Heidegger’s concept, More subsequently situates this discourse in an “antiblack-world” – rife with the traumatic legacies of slavery, imperialsm, colonialism and contemporary racism. The common thread running through More’s work is the pervasive problem of antiblack racism and its connection to embodiment. The problem is both ontological and political in his view. A problem he defines as the “politics of being”, which describes what-is and makes a case for what-ought-to-be morally, ethically and politically.