Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) has cast a long shadow over decolonial thought which has fastened onto particular elements, concepts, figures of thought and interpretations of his lectures and more systematic works. While Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of history (Hegel [1837] 2001) in particular have had a bad press, his thinking on freedom realised through a dialectical process of attaining self-consciousness in history became formative for decolonial theorising. This divergence, previously taken up and sharpened in one way or another by Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, variously structures the reception of Hegel in Black Consciousness and Africana existentialism. It can be seen to indicate fault lines within the tectonics of Hegel's philosophical system itself, and tensions in the interpretations of his work between theo-logico-metaphysical speculation on the one hand, and inquiries into philosophical-historical and societal conditions of reason on the other. Yet these fault lines and tensions do not impinge on Hegel's reception in decolonial thought.

As if to hold Hegel's dialectics to its own precepts drawn together, decolonial thought instates his philosophy in the role of a vanishing mediator. Three elements, in particular, are brought to a convergence in the process: the much-vaunted ‘master–slave dialectic’ attributed to Hegel; his infamous statements on Africa and Africans in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History; and the structure of the dialectic, historically and politically understood. Concepts and figures of thought drawn from these sources have been productive, in turn, for describing and explaining the existential reality of being black in an antiblack world constituted by slavery, colonialism and racism (see for instance More 2017, p. 43). A particular reading of the master–slave dialectic, and Hegel's placement of Africa and Africans in World History, with Africa as the location of slavery (that is, unfreedom), are combined to explain how a historical legacy becomes ontologically and existentially constitutive in the form of ‘slave consciousness’, manifested in ‘the colonial consciousness of the colonised’ (see More 2017, pp. 43–44).