“Yacob is also more enlightened than his Enlightenment peers when it comes to slavery.”

But what happened in Ethiopia versus Europe? The Europeans ultimately ended slavery and the slave trade in Africa. Ethiopia had slavery until the Italians ended it in 1936. One person scribbling in the wilderness does not an enlightenment make. It takes a substantial literate population beyond the church, a lot of printed material, and some freedom of discourse and inquiry, all conditions that didn’t exist in Ethiopia until the 20th Century. Yacob’s writings are interesting, but they are not part of any movement in thought since neither the Ethiopian nor the European philosophers knew of each other’s work. If it is hard to find today, how many copies were around when Yacob was alive? The operating first printing press in Ethiopia was in 1863.