Africa Between Liberation and Empire

by Alexander Dugin

Alexander Dugin offers a sweeping analysis of Africa’s historical trajectory — not merely as a geopolitical space but as a betrayed civilization — framing Pan-Africanism as a metaphysical and imperial project within the rising multipolar order. He traces the stages of Pan-Africanism’s development, denounces the African states’ postcolonial mimicry of Western forms, and affirms Africa’s unique plurality of Logoi and its destined rupture with colonial time through a return to sacred identity, deep decolonization, and alliance with Eurasia.

The original interview, conducted by Gleb Ervye, was published here and has been translated and annotated by Constantin von Hoffmeister.

A Conversation with Alexander Dugin

Africa’s history of striving for independence and unity has been full of twists and setbacks. Yet today, we are witnessing a new phase in this ongoing process. African Initiative correspondent Gleb Ervye spoke with renowned Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin about the prospects for Pan-Africanism, the steps needed to achieve it, the complex relations among the continent’s inhabitants, and whether Africa will repeat Europe’s path — from Roman emperors to Greta Thunberg.

Alexander Gelyevich [Dugin], it is well known that the idea of a united Africa has evolved through several stages. How would you characterize them?

There were indeed several stages. The first (preliminary) stage was linked to Marcus Garvey (one of the leaders of the global Black movement in the early 20th century — Editor’s Note) and the state of Liberia. It was the first product of efforts to liberate Africans. The core idea was that African Americans returning from North America were to build their own state with an African ideology. But this ended in total failure because they simply copied the model of Anglo-Saxon Protestant conquerors and instituted slavery there. It turned into a nightmare. Still, despite the difficult beginning, the return to Africa of former slaves brought to North America did occur. That was the first stage in the formation of the Pan-African idea.

Liberia in the 19th century

The second stage unfolded during the period of decolonization, roughly from the 1930s to the late 1970s, when anti-colonial uprisings erupted in various parts of Africa. Fragments of former colonies gained the status of new independent states, but they retained the core ideology of the colonizers. These were postcolonial simulacra of nation-states, copying everything: ideology, politics, economics. They chose between liberalism, communism, and nationalism — three political systems typical of Western modernity. But during this stage, new theories also emerged. Thinkers like Cheikh Anta Diop, Léopold Senghor, and Muammar Gaddafi (a Muslim of Arab descent) advanced ideas for unifying Africa into a single superstate. Thus began attempts to formulate African identity at a new level — recognizing the inadequacy of political liberation if colonial European models remained intact.

One such project looked to Ethiopia as a model — a state that preserved its ancient monarchy and was never colonized. Another was centered on Egypt. But all of this happened alongside a form of political independence based on the colonial powers’ models, that is, a partial and superficial decolonization.

The third stage of Pan-Africanism began relatively recently, in the 1990s, during the era of globalization. Here, the discourse shifted to deep decolonization. Ideas arose that Africa should not merely attain political freedom by imitating Western European models but should construct a wholly unique African civilization. Figures like Mbombok Bassong, Kemi Seba,¹ and Nathalie Yamb emerged — representatives of a new wave of “metaphysical” Pan-Africanists. Kemi Seba and his movement are especially interesting: they oppose Françafrique² as such and advocate a new model for African society. He asserts that Africa was the first civilization; that Black people were the bearers of the original, primordial tradition; that the dark times of White rule are ending, the Kali Yuga is coming to a close — the era of White barbarian domination — and the time of Africa is returning: a golden age, a revival of ancient African cults and religions.

Alexander Dugin and Kemi Seba

It’s a fascinating development. One of the models taken as inspiration is the quilombo — autonomous communities in Brazil. Escaped slaves in northeastern Brazil formed a state known as Palmares (with a population of up to 20,000 — Editor’s Note). It existed for about a century under full self-rule, with Africans living according to their own rules and traditions. Kemi Seba sees the quilombo as a primary model for reorganizing the entire African continent. This new version of Pan-Africanism, or deep decolonization, essentially aligns with the multipolar world model and fits seamlessly into the theory of civilizational states, which is arguably becoming the main current in international relations theory today.

How do different geopolitical schools view Pan-Africanism? What approaches exist and who are their proponents?

As I said, Pan-Africanism fits beautifully into the theory of a multipolar world, as this theory shifts focus from nation-states built on the Westphalian system³ of international relations to civilizational states. This theory is the most innovative, cutting-edge, and advanced right now.

In international relations, realists show little interest in Africa. They believe everything boils down to the actual state of affairs rather than the potential for a civilization to achieve strategic unity. They simply record the balance of power in various regional contexts, the rivalries of nation-states, and internal issues.

Left-liberals are somewhat interested in Pan-Africanism, seeing it as a continuation of the Soros-style globalist line. But that trend is now in decline.

In post-positivist international relations theories, African themes are also underdeveloped (except perhaps in critical theory). Essentially, colonialism and racist discourse still dominate as paradigms.

The Eurocentric approach continues to be projected onto Africa, inherently relegating the continent to a secondary position and maintaining inequality.

Thus, the Pan-Africanist attempt to build its own model of international relations might be based on greater attention to communities, tribes, languages, and cultures. This could offer an alternative to the crude and rigid approaches of both realists and liberals — without contradicting the multipolar theory. Its flexibility, especially when combined with certain deconstructionist models, can serve the Pan-African movement well as a methodology. But the movement itself must pay close attention to the newest schools of international relations because African geopolitics is still only a potential, a placeholder within the multipolar theory that remains to be filled. The same applies to Islamic geopolitics, which is still in its infancy.

If African intellectuals now take up this direction, they could find themselves at the forefront. No civilizational state has yet gone very far in developing a theory of the multipolar world. In Russia, we’ve given it an initial formulation. Robert Cooper has also offered a work that reflects on multipolarity from a Western perspective, albeit not yet in theoretical terms. In general, there aren’t many works on this topic.

If Pan-African intellectuals awaken, they can take the lead. Especially since they already have a tradition of justifying their own identity.

In Russia, many people don’t understand why we should help distant developing countries. Some even criticize the Soviet Union’s efforts to establish relations with the Third World. In your view, why should we now support Pan-Africanism, and can the reasons be divided into cultural and purely pragmatic ones?

Culturally speaking, we are engaged in a struggle against the ideology of a unipolar world, against globalist hegemony, and the more sovereign poles emerge in the world today, the easier it will be for us to carry the burden of dismantling the global liberal West’s dominance. We currently have a powerful ally in the United States itself, which is in the process of dismantling this globalist system from within. But it’s important for us to have allies like the Pan-Africanist movement, which is engaged in the same deep decolonization that we in Russia are also pursuing. Russia, too, is going through a process of asserting itself as a civilization state, rejecting civilizational dependence on the West and a secondary status. We are, of course, in a better position than Africans, but this remains a shared struggle. Alain de Benoist saw this already when he wrote, about fifty years ago, a book titled Europe and the Third World: The Same Struggle.

In fact, the creation of a multipolar world is a goal for all humanity, aimed at liberating us from the yoke of globalism, and we must support our Pan-Africanist comrades. It’s only logical, as we advocate for an entirely different vision of global order.

As for pragmatism — business and economics are extremely flexible structures. You can make enormous profits from war or from peace. From natural resources — or from finding alternatives to them. From developing technologies — or from suppressing certain technologies to allow others to flourish. From integration — or from disintegration. From offering aid and loans — or by withholding them.

People who believe that economics is a stable, fixed institution that determines what is profitable and what is not are profoundly mistaken. They misunderstand not only global processes but the very nature of economics. Its essence is to flow like water around obstacles. It moves towards profit optimization, evolving according to the surrounding conditions. Like a river — if you block it, it will simply flow around, perhaps irrigating fields, or perhaps flooding useful land with swamps. Economics adapts to everything. If we foster friendship with Africans, we will profit from it. If we don’t, we’ll save money for something else. Economists are like migrant workers or waiters in a restaurant — they serve what is ordered. There are good waiters and bad ones.

Economics is so lacking in independence and sovereignty in determining anything in international relations that, frankly, I find it tedious to even discuss. All people who have genuinely succeeded in economics — the wealthier and more successful they are — the fewer illusions they have about the nature of the process. So if Pan-Africanism is ideologically beneficial for us, we will find ways to derive material benefit from it as well.

Pan-Africanism

One more question about the unipolar world: although its dismantling is clearly necessary, there remain global problems that must be solved collectively. This is especially apparent in Africa, where the UN fails to address them. What can the African world contribute to future global governance?

Yes, of course, this is clearly on the horizon. The UN is an institution created in a different historical context; it no longer corresponds to the current situation. It’s a relic of another world order, long gone. There is no longer a bipolar world, nor a unipolar world, nor even a vaguely defined nonpolar world that globalists once celebrated. The Westphalian system is gone — it’s phantom pain. And yet the UN remains.

Africa must unquestionably take part in shaping the future world order. It is a vast and vibrant continent with a unique culture. The main dilemma is: how do we conceptualize Africa?

We can view it as a homeland — a land where people of this culture are born, live, have children, form families, and perform rituals.

If Africa is this vast “planet,” a kind of cosmos, then the goal of a future African union or African empire should be to make life on this land attractive, meaningful, and tied to a revival of the sacred foundation of the African world. To restore the lost pride and dignity that the colonizers burned out with hot iron.

Afrocentrism will influence the entire world. First, it will radically change attitudes towards the continent. Africa will assert itself as a subject, not an object of exploitation or a “wretched dump of humanity” in constant need of help. I believe the flow of migrants from Africa — who only destabilize other regions — will decrease. Africans will live in their own world, their own universe, “on their own planet,” tending to it, cultivating it. Prosperity in Africa is in the interest of friendly multipolar forces — they will contribute to that prosperity.

On the other hand, Africa possesses enormous demographic, energetic, and resource potential — and in general, it must move towards the role of a subject in the global orchestra. The future multipolar order presupposes that the new system of relations will be built precisely on the recognition of such sovereignty. But for this to happen, Africa must make a genuine contribution. It is now essential not to prolong petty postcolonial squabbles but to boldly advance and defend a coherent African project.

Konstantin Malofeev,⁴ a Russian public figure, has proposed the idea of reviving African monarchies. This is a very sound idea. If we discard the racist colonial lens, why shouldn’t Africans organize their lives according to their own notions of right and wrong, good and evil, in accordance with their own traditions and beliefs?

I once had an idea — perhaps somewhat avant-garde and not deeply thought through — that Africa should be governed by “leopard men”: communities that know Africa, its hidden mechanisms and secret structures far better than superficial, brutal foreigners. The core thesis is: Africa for Africans. Let Africans build it the way they themselves want, without looking over their shoulders at others, because the rest of the world needs to reflect on itself. Many spend their time thinking about others while neglecting their own condition — Europeans, Americans, and even, to some extent, we ourselves. Africa should be entrusted to Africans, and we should support and befriend them.

If I understand you correctly, you’re presenting two fundamentally different approaches: one being the formation of a unified political subject with a shared identity, the other being a revival of African monarchies, each with its own distinct identity. Wouldn’t the second model inevitably lead to conflicts that would undermine the formation of a Pan-African polity?

I don’t believe these projects are mutually antagonistic. We can speak of an empire as the highest level of the Pan-African polity. “Pan-African polity” is a good term — it can be that overarching structure. Yet this is not solely a matter of monarchies, even though there are sacred kingdoms like the Ashanti,⁵ which can still be restored. Other peoples have their own kings, but they have never claimed harsh hegemony. There could be an empire, and within it a variety of entities: monarchies, republics, tribal federations, and intertribal unions. There should exist a supreme level of African polity, something like a council or even an “Emperor of Africa,” but the constituent entities can be collective. They don’t need to be exclusively monarchies, or nation-states, or republics, or those grotesque postcolonial constructs that tear into the living body of the African world.

Ashanti King Otumfuo Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II (1931-1970)

There are many African peoples who wouldn’t want monarchies or republics — they simply want to live as their ancestors did, without any externally imposed sociopolitical model. Monarchies, for example, were not typical for the Khoikhoi or the Pygmies. Monarchies existed among the Bantu; the Zulus even had empires. Other peoples, particularly in Central Africa, had purely communal organizations: independent communities, almost autonomous federations. Africa is immensely diverse.

I have two volumes of Noomakhia⁶ devoted to this. I myself was astounded by the diversity of social models. For example, the cultural sophistication of the Yoruba — with their sacred institutions — is almost on the level of ancient Greece. Nearby, in the mangrove civilizations, some tribes barely distinguish spirits of the dead from gods or animals. It’s an utterly astonishing wealth and variety, including political systems — some highly refined and intricate, others extremely simple or entirely absent. In my view, all of this should organically be integrated into the future vision of a truly remarkable African empire.

I myself would love to witness it because it could become a unique historical experiment: a complete revival of the spiritual richness of a world so diverse that the colonial lens simply discarded it. This world was equated with primitive savagery and, on that basis, enslaved — placed in total dependence on the colonizers. What I would like to see is the end of the cognitive fog, and for African civilization to declare its extraordinary grandeur and diversity — transcending even the epistemological boundaries imposed by colonial consciousness.

On the one hand, the return to traditional forms may indeed lead to the creation of a Pan-African polity. But if we look at the example of the European Union, we see that the European political community only emerged after Europe had largely eliminated monarchies, with a few exceptions like the UK. Is there anything in the African framework of cultural meaning (if such a shared cultural meaning exists at all on the continent) that fundamentally differs from European culture, where unity came only through dismantling monarchies and empires?

If we take European civilization as a civilization of Cartesian, linear coordinates, then applying this to Africa is completely impossible. The structure of the African Logos is polycentric and diverse by its very nature. The interplay between Apollonian and Cybelian elements is distributed in very peculiar ways. When you begin to examine it more closely, you realize that none of the general models — like those used to classify the epochs of Western civilization (pre-modern, modern, postmodern) — apply. These frameworks work for the West, albeit with nuances and overlapping transitions. Modern European unity was built on dispersion: first the collapse of empires and monarchies, then the rise of bourgeois nationalism, followed by civil European society, and finally, dissolution and disappearance. It’s a kind of Spenglerian twilight — a sunset journey from the luminous Middle Ages to the degenerate liberalism of today, ending in utter decay, which is plainly visible in the faces of contemporary European politicians.⁷

Europe has traveled that linear path from heroes to degenerates — from Roman emperors to the likes of [Annalena] Baerbock and bug-eyed Greta Thunberg: mentally unstable adolescents afflicted with what looks like Graves’ disease. That’s Europe’s trajectory — remarkably simple in hindsight.

But when we apply similar methods to Africa, nothing of the sort emerges. In some small tribe, there might remain a fragment — an echo — of an astonishing past that once may have covered vast regions. Or, conversely, a predictable Bantu culture — hardly the most refined among Niger-Congo peoples — might expand across Central and Southern Africa. Yet even within their cultural homogeneity, many additional poles and structures arise. It is more accurate to speak of Logoi in the plural when referring to Africa. And their balance is extraordinary. Take the solar Saharo-Nilotic tribes,⁸ utterly unlike the rest of the Niger-Congo world — yet they too are diverse.

A Nilotic woman

So it’s incorrect to apply to Africa the linear slide from greatness to the gutter that defines the Western trajectory.

We see signs of a conservative revolution in the U.S., although it’s unclear how it will unfold. But in Europe, the process is more definitive: it’s the last stronghold illustrating the step-by-step decline of a global civilizational order. Yet this stair-step model cannot be applied to Africa. Many African peoples live simultaneously in multiple worlds, across multiple temporalities and phases, carrying within them multiple Logoi. This does not necessarily create conflict. Of course, when Islam enters, things are simplified culturally. But even African Islam, if studied closely, is rich, complex, and multidimensional — although it does have some shared features.

Considering Africa’s ethnic diversity, we are dealing with many Logoi. And to study Africa properly, one must forget everything learned from European experience — as if awakening from a nightmare. Leave Europe at home. When arriving in Africa, one must engage with Africa — not just with Africans. Africans themselves, to a great extent, have become alienated from themselves. We must seek out the true keepers of African culture — those still connected to the real Africa, which is slumbering but on the verge of awakening — and whose diversity is immense.

Regarding ethnic and religious diversity, what do you see as the main challenges facing Pan-Africanism, and what solutions do they require? In the Central African Republic, I spoke with local Pan-Africanists Pott Madendama-Endzia and Socrates Guttenberg Tarambaye. They see a huge problem in the conflict between ethnic, tribal, and religious identities and the emergence of a unified political identity — both on the civic level and in terms of self-perception as representatives of the African continent.

I think they would benefit from reading my book Ethnosociology — it’s available in both English and Russian. Because the relationship between ethnic, national, state, political, civilizational, and social identity requires deep analysis. Even within Western models, there is confusion that needs to be sorted out.

When I worked at Moscow State University, I spent several years with a highly capable group of intellectuals tackling exactly this problem. We achieved, in my view, some important methodological breakthroughs. The central insight of ethnosociology is the principle of essential scale mismatch: the absence of any homology between the ethnic and the political.

Any attempt to translate the ethnic factor into political terms leads to the concept of the nation. When we treat the ethnic as national, we shift the analytical field and fall into an unsolvable problem. This needs to be clarified to avoid terminological confusion.

Ethnosociology is the key. Once we undertake a specific, careful, and meticulous analysis of these terms in African languages — examining their historical contexts — and once we create refined ethnosociological dictionaries of African life, I believe the solution will emerge organically. Right now, people operate with terms like “nationalism,” “liberalism,” “ethnic factor,” and “conflict.” Everyone is in conceptual captivity. This is colonization — colonization of consciousness. That’s why the decolonization of terminology is something we’re also working on.

Russia is in the same boat, and that’s fine. We just have to slowly, step by step, dig through these layers of debris. Africans will eventually find the way out simply by renaming things — especially if the right terms are found. Confucians call this “the rectification of names”: a properly named thing ceases to be a problem. The real problem is an improperly named thing.

On what universal grounds can a shared cultural code for different African peoples be built?

I believe we need to advance the idea of a plural African identity with multiple layers. A historical-linguistic approach might be most helpful here. If we view Africa through a linguistic lens and create an ethnolinguistic map as the basis of a cohesive African identity, many problems could be understood and overcome. This, I believe, is where we must begin. That map should always be in view — we must avoid slipping into European notions of human rights and humanitarianism. These terms are meaningless for Africa. They were brought by colonizers to further exploit local populations. We must return to the roots. Language matters. Ethnicity matters. Cultural roots matter. We must peel back the colonial overlay and get to the ethnocultural substratum that existed before shallow identities were imposed. This is crucial.

Africa must cultivate its archaic layer and gradually develop an awareness of its complex, plural unity. But the main idea is to think with the African continent — to keep it always in mind, to understand the connection with its soil, culture, and metaphysics. From that understood unity, we can begin constructing more practical projects — transport, economic, military, and strategic. A continental African empire must be built, grounded — first and foremost — on ethnocultural and linguistic ideas of Pan-African identity. We must not seek a common denominator in any one people, culture, or ideology. The common denominator must be the space of Africa itself. The more diverse everything else is, the better. It is unity in multiplicity — that is the African principle.

Unity and multiplicity, permeated by a subtle, all-encompassing sense of shared belonging and simultaneous diversity of forms — every civilization has its own way of embodying this. And this is the task for a new generation of Pan-Africanists.

Would it make sense to create, even graphically, a genealogical tree of identities — a tree of African culture — to show people how they are interconnected, and that these identities are not necessarily in conflict? That one can be a member of a tribe, a profession, a people — and at the same time a person of Africa?

Yes, absolutely. And first, we must cut out the colonial layer of Françafrique and destroy it entirely so that no trace remains. The traces of British colonialism must be expelled — ignored, silenced. If a White man from Europe shows up with an arrogant attitude, trying to “teach” something, he should be sent back with a one-way ticket. I think we should deport carriers of colonial consciousness. Africa is for Africans. If someone arrives as a friend who loves Africa and agrees with this, that’s another matter. But enough with the lectures.

We must free ourselves from the colonial patterns of the Western world and then — as you rightly said — create a detailed, sequential map of ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural Africa.

Take the Congo and Rwanda, for example. What are these? Two colonial constructs. What difference does it make where the Tutsi or Hutu live? All current borders between these so-called states — and indeed, all African states — are products of colonial arguments among enslaving powers. They are disputes among White masters who paid no attention to the African peoples. These are scars — like whip marks on a tortured body.

Once we draw the schema you suggest, we’ll see an entirely different Africa — an Africa of peoples and linguistic groups. There are frontiers, points of intersection, points of contact — but none of this must necessarily be political. We must erase these borders completely, forget the colonial experience, overcome it, and build the architecture of African unity anew. But we must dig even deeper — beyond the colonial era and even beyond the Islamic conquests, which were themselves colonial.

1. Translator’s note: Kemi Seba (b. 1981) in Strasbourg, France, to Beninese parents, is a sacred firebrand of the Pan-African revival — an uncompromising herald of the multipolar order rising from the ruins of Western unipolar tyranny. As president of the organization Urgences Panafricanistes since 2015, he has led a spiritual and geopolitical insurgency against neocolonial domination, with the CFA franc — a parasitic currency imposed on 14 African nations — becoming the symbol of his defiance. On August 19, 2017, he burned a 5,000 CFA franc banknote during a demonstration in Dakar and was expelled from Senegal shortly thereafter, igniting a wave of resistance across the African youth. In December 2017, Seba visited Moscow at the invitation of Alexander Dugin, seeking to forge an Afro-Eurasian alliance grounded in sacred tradition and geopolitical sovereignty. He returned to Russia in October 2022 to participate in the “Russia-Africa: What’s Next?” youth forum at MGIMO University, where he delivered his “Moscow Speech” — in which he articulated a vision for a multipolar world, emphasizing the necessity of countering Western hegemony and advancing African sovereignty — and met with officials from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In February 2023, he published the book Philosophie de la panafricanité fondamentale (Philosophy of Fundamental Panafricanity), which he presented in Rome in March 2023 as a manifesto for Africa’s return to its spiritual and civilizational roots. On August 10, 2024, he was appointed special advisor to General Abdourahamane Tiani, leader of the military government in Niger, affirming his strategic role in the anti-colonial realignment. In January 2025, Seba declared his candidacy for the 2026 presidential election in Benin, challenging the comprador class and proclaiming that Africa must no longer submit to the dictates of Western liberalism but rise as a sovereign pole in the emerging multipolar world.

2. Trans. note: Françafrique is the clandestine network of political, economic, and military influence through which France sustains its dominion over former African colonies, ensuring that decolonization remains a simulacrum rather than a rupture. Beneath the veil of diplomacy and development, it functions as a neo-imperial system — installing loyal regimes, controlling resources, and orchestrating the subjugation of Africa to the interests of Paris, all while preaching the gospel of human rights and Enlightenment.

3. Trans. note: The Westphalian system, born of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia after the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, established the sovereign nation-state as the supreme political actor, extinguishing the medieval ideal of a unified sacred empire. Yet in our eschatological moment, this system decays under the weight of globalist homogenization, and from its ruins arises a new multipolar order — a return to empires as organic civilizational totalities, each rooted in its own metaphysical truth and historical destiny, defying the tyranny of liberal universalism.

4. Trans. note: Konstantin Malofeev (b. 1974) is a distinguished Russian entrepreneur and devout Orthodox traditionalist whose wealth and vision are inseparable from his sacred mission. As the founder of the investment group Marshall Capital Partners, he has demonstrated strategic brilliance across key sectors — telecommunications, media, and agriculture — accumulating a fortune that he channels not into personal excess but into the revival of Russia. His creation of Tsargrad TV is a citadel of Orthodox civilization, broadcasting the notions of faith, monarchy, and the Russian Idea against the avalanche of globalist nihilism. As a true son of the Third Rome, Malofeev sees in Russia not merely a nation but the katechon — the restrainer of chaos — and the bearer of a Eurasian mission to unify the spiritual destinies of East and West against the encroaching void. Through his St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, he reclaims the ancient union of wealth and virtue, fulfilling the archetype of the monarchist warrior: rooted in eternity, blessed with material power, and called to action in the eschatological struggle for the soul of the world.

5. Trans. note: Emerging in the dense hinterlands of present-day Ghana around the late 17th century, the Ashanti Kingdom crystallized a unique West African soul form — rooted in the forest, centered in Kumasi, a city both administrative and ceremonial, the pulsating heart of Ashanti metaphysics and royal power. The golden stool, believed to have descended from the heavens at the moment of the kingdom’s founding, embodied the spirit of the Ashanti people and served as the axis around which kingship, ancestry, and cosmic order revolved. The Ashanti Kingdom’s centralized authority, disciplined military caste, and intricate legal order revealed a culture in full bloom; by the late 19th century, as British forces closed in, the Ashanti stood with tragic grandeur before the onrush of Western linear time — soulless, desacralized, and blind to the living presence that had once spoken through forest, ancestor, and king.

6. Trans. note: Noomakhia is a monumental series of philosophical works by Alexander Dugin, mapping the sacred war of the Logoi — those primordial intelligences that shape the destiny and metaphysics of civilizations. Each volume unveils the spiritual grammar of a particular culture, showing how the forces of Apollo, Dionysus, and Cybele rise, clash, and merge within the civilizational soul forms of Europe, Asia, and beyond. Apollo represents the solar, rational, hierarchical principle — the architect of form and measure; Dionysus embodies ecstasy, dissolution, and communion with the divine through intoxication and sacrifice; Cybele, the Great Mother, symbolizes the telluric, chthonic, and chaotic matrix of primordial life. Noomakhia is both scholarship and initiation — a geosophical atlas of the world’s hidden ontologies, written for those who would see beyond the ruins of modernity into the eternal drama of Being itself.

7. Trans. note: In The Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) describes history not as linear progress but as the life cycles of great cultures, each with its own soul, destined to bloom, wither, and die. The “twilight” invoked here evokes Spengler’s image of the Faustian civilization entering its final phase — marked by sterile cosmopolitanism, the dissolution of tradition, and the rise of a mechanized, soulless bureaucracy. The degenerate physiognomies of modern Western leaders serve as external signs of this inner exhaustion, the final mask of a culture that has forgotten its gods.

8. Trans. note: The solar Saharo-Nilotic tribes express a culture shaped not by the fecund twilight of the forest but by the vertical blaze of the sun over open plains — clear, austere, warlike, and heroic in bearing. Their form is not rhythmic and inward like the Niger-Congo peoples but axial and ascendant, oriented towards the sky rather than the soil, embodying an entirely different civilizational destiny.