When the Roots Are Remembered: On Philosophy, Egypt, and the Grace of Unlearning

For much of my life, philosophy was my compass.

I studied it formally. Sat in lecture halls. Took notes. Engaged in debate. Internalized the frameworks, the questions, the big names. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—the “fathers” of philosophy. I was taught they were the beginning. That something new and unparalleled emerged with them in ancient Greece: the birth of rational thought, of inquiry, of what we now call philosophy.

Sure, there were mentions of the pre-Socratics. But even those thinkers—Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaximander—were folded into the same story. A story that began, and was rooted, in the Greek world.

What wasn’t said spoke louder than what was.

There was no Egypt.

No Nubia.

No Kemet.

No Africa.

I didn’t question it at the time. It was the water I swam in. The authority of the syllabus. The legitimacy of the degree. The unquestioned narrative of where wisdom came from and who we should thank for it.

Then, just yesterday, I learned something I should have been taught long ago:

That Plato studied in Egypt for over a decade.

That Pythagoras spent 22 years in Egyptian temples before formulating his famous theorems.

That Herodotus, considered the father of history, wrote about the philosophical and spiritual sophistication of Egypt.

That much of what we revere as “Greek” philosophy may, in fact, be a continuation of African thought, codified and rebranded under new names.

And I felt it.

The punch to the gut.

The ground underfoot shaking.

The bitter taste of betrayal.

Because in academia—especially in the West—we are taught that citing your sources is not just scholarly etiquette. It is sacred. It’s the very structure that holds up the integrity of knowledge. It’s the thing that separates intellectual inquiry from theft.

So how could something so central, so obvious, be omitted?

How could the entire African foundation of philosophy be erased, ignored, rewritten?

And why—still—after all these decades, do so many academic institutions fail to correct the record?

This moment cracked something open in me. I was furious. I felt robbed. I thought about how many hours I spent trying to find myself in those pages. How many women, Black and Indigenous students, seekers of wisdom from other traditions—how many of us have tried to contort ourselves into someone else's idea of what it means to be wise, to be thoughtful, to be credible?

I felt all of that.

And then I felt something else.

Humility.

Because the truth is, my academic experience is two decades old now. I don’t know how things are taught today. I’m making assumptions, speaking from the memory of my own education, not from what’s happening now in every institution, every classroom.

And that invites me into something deeper than outrage:

A return to grace.

A return to curiosity.

A return to inquiry.

So I ask myself:

What has changed?

Where are the truth-tellers and the scholars doing the work of reclamation?

What stories are being retold, restored, re-rooted in their rightful soil?

And what is my responsibility now that I’ve remembered this missing thread?

I don’t want to stop at outrage. I don’t want to just point fingers or reframe history in a new binary of victim and thief. Because this isn’t just about the past. This is about what we build from here. About how we repair. About how we honour wisdom wherever it lives.

When we erase the origins of thought, we create a fractured world. We build entire systems—of education, of spirituality, of science—on false foundations. And the harm isn’t abstract. It’s deeply personal.

We rob people of seeing themselves in the lineage of brilliance.

We teach children that civilization began in the West, and everything else was borrowed or backwards.

We turn deep rivers of ancestral knowledge into footnotes or fictions.

We diminish the interconnectedness that actually makes us whole.

But we can choose differently.

We can unlearn what was inherited uncritically.

We can seek out the scholars, the elders, the oral traditions, the buried texts.

We can remember that philosophy did not begin in Greece—it passed through Greece.

It flowed from older lands, darker skins, sacred temples, long before it reached parchment.

And in doing so, we honour all of who we are.

So yes, I’m still in the process. I still feel the sting of having not known. I still feel the weight of the systems that made this forgetting possible. But I also feel grateful.

Grateful to be waking up.

Grateful that my love of philosophy can now expand into truer soil.

Grateful that remembering doesn’t just belong to institutions—it belongs to us all.

Let us keep asking.

Let us keep unlearning.

Let us keep returning to the root.

Because truth, no matter how long it's been buried, has a way of finding the light.