Additionally there is a perceived hypocrisy where there is none. Nowhere did I state that all European states are elevated to a status. This is no apples to oranges, this is comparing the concept of a state with what exists irl. That’s what truth is, the agreement of concept/subject with object.

The only comparison happening is with the concept employed and what is found in reality. Is it untrue that African Kingdoms didn’t have a concept of universally applicable laws to all free subjects? If you want to actually criticize the concept being employed, go ahead. But you have not done so.

Everyone operates practically with "making stuff up" and "true". To act oblivious to this ground, with which you can make statements at all, does not solve the problem.

One can only make this comment if they are ignorant of the project of philosophy. The project of philosophy is the most grounded of all disciplines, since its subject matter is how we can know things at all. What IS grounding? How do we distinguish making stuff up from truth at all?

That's right, many forms of "European" (as far as Europe existed) government did not meet this standard. I don't think I have erased or ignored genocides or the TAST here, either. They happened, and it's up to critics to evaluate how exactly this effects systems of thought by the relevant thinkers.

This is not to excuse any of the racist comments made by Hegel, of course. He was wrong on many of the empirical matters. But as far as the conceptual development goes and the analysis of these states to the concept, he is right.

Sorry, the laws*. The laws not being universal to all subjects and not dependent on the tribes or groups is the main sticking point. Governments existed, sure. But again, what's important is this aspect of universality.

Not at all. He arrives at his conception of the state deductively, it quite literally cannot be tainted by empirical matters. The fact that the forms of governance in Africa didn't apply universally to all subjects is just a fact of their respective systems.

African kingdoms had laws + governance, but what's important is self-conscious universality where freedom is law and law is freedom, embodied in the rational state. African Kingdoms were concrete and particular, not to be applied to all individuals as agents.

The very existence of concepts like Ubuntu, which articulates a conception of mutual recognition, demonstrates that many African civilizations already contain, at least implicitly, the seeds of universality. What's lacking is full actualization through the form of a rational state and codified law.

Every human on earth is self-conscious and relates objectively to others within a group. But for a people to come together and form a state- one that recursively enforces and mediates universal principles of right, requires the collective recognition of freedom as law and law as freedom.