The Epistemically Excluded Young in Menkiti's Afro-Personhood

Abstract: In this article, I investigate the epistemically excluded young in Ifeanyi Menkiti's Afro-personhood, which has attracted a plethora of challenges, such as the epistemological requirement for being a person, but the epistemic exclusion of the young has not been adequately investigated due to conceptual failure regarding the term young . I argue that the young aged, say, eleven to eighteen are epistemically excluded from Menkiti's Afro-personhood. This exclusion would be clear if the young were adequately conceptualized. To conceptualize them, I discuss Afro-personhood, the epistemic grounding of Menkiti's version, the epistemically excluded young in that version, and the implication of such exclusion for political participation in contemporary African politics. I thereby show that a conception of Afro-personhood can enable and enhance our understanding of epistemic injustice against the young.