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Afrocentrism
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Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity is a world view that emphasizes the importance of African people in culture, philosophy, and history. The roots of Afrocentrism lay in a reaction to the repression of Black people throughout the Western world in the 19th century and as a backlash against the scientific racism of the period, which tended to attribute any advanced civilization to the immigration of Indo-Europeans.
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Afrocentrism or Afrocentricity is a world view that emphasizes the importance of African people in culture, philosophy, and history. The roots of Afrocentrism lay in a reaction to the repression of Black people throughout the Western world in the 19th century and as a backlash against the scientific racism of the period, which tended to attribute any advanced civilization to the immigration of Indo-Europeans. Part of this reaction involved reviewing history to document the contributions that Black people made to world civilization.
History
During the Colonial period Europeans encountered Africans in Africa living with relatively elementary technology. Based on their self-appraisal of the value of technology, industrialization, Western-type infrastructure and Western-type culture, these European nations assumed themselves to be superior to the peoples and cultures they encountered in Africa. Afrocentrists commonly contend that this initial Eurocentrism has led to the subsequent neglect or denial of the contributions of African people.
Modern Afrocentricity has its origins in the work of African and African diaspora intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following social changes in the United States and Africa due both to the end of slavery and the decline of colonialism. Wanting to further establish their own identities and distinguish African achievements apart from the influence of European peoples, African Americans gathered together in communities, established their own church congregations, emphasised the importance of education and increasingly took more active public roles despite severe discrimination and segregation.
As an ideology and political movement, Afrocentrism has its beginnings in activism among Black intellectuals, political figures and historians in the context of the US American civil rights movement.
Some contemporary Afrocentrists may view the movement as multicultural rather than ethnocentric. The leader of this concept is Francis Ohanyido, an African philosopher and poet whose concerns are more on quality leadership and developmental issues. According to US professor, Victor Oguejiofor Okafor, concepts of Afrocentricity lie at the core of disciplines such as African American studies.
Etymology
The origins of the term "Afrocentrism" date to 1961 or 1962. The term "Afrocentric" appears in a typescript proposal for an Encyclopedia Africana. W.E.B. Du Bois may have been responsible for inserting the word.
Afrocentric Scholarship
Molefi Kete Asante is currently chairman of the Department of African American Studies at Temple University. In a lecture at the University of Liverpool in 2000, entitled “Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium,” Asante stated many of his ideas:
- Africa has been betrayed by international commerce, by missionaries and imams, by the structure of knowledge imposed by the Western world, by its own leaders, and by the ignorance of its own people of its past.
- Philosophy itself originated in Africa and the first philosophers in the world were Africans.
- Afrocentricity constitutes a new way of examining data, a novel orientation to data, it carries with it assumptions about the current state of the African world.
- His aim is “to help lay out a plan for the recovery of African place, respectability, accountability, and leadership.”
Asante also stated that, “As a cultural configuration, the Afrocentric idea is distinguished by five characteristics:
- an intense interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, motifs, rituals, and signs.
- a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any social, political, economic, or religious phenomenon with implications for questions of sex, gender, and class.
- a defence of African cultural elements as historically valid in the context of art, music, and literature.
- a celebration of centeredness and agency and a commitment to lexical refinement that eliminates pejoratives about Africans or other people.
- a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective text of African people."
Another author whose ideas are considered by some to be radical is Yaacov Shavit. In the preface to his book History in Black, Shavit states:
Martin Bernal is a Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He has published several works, including a three-volume work entitled collectively Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. According to Bernal, ancient Greece was colonized by northern invaders mixing with a colony established by Phoenicia (modern Palestine). A major theme of the work is the alleged denial by Western academia of the African and (western) Asiatic influence on ancient Greek culture.
The claims made in Black Athena were refuted in Black Athena Revisited (1996), a collection of essays edited by Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and her colleague Guy MacLean Rogers.
Criticisms
The Afrocentrism viewpoint has prompted challenges and criticism. Some Western mainstream scholars have assessed some Afrocentric ideas as pseudohistorical. They especially find fault with claims that Ancient Egypt contributed directly to the development of Greek and Western culture, because in fact, the times of development do not align.
Other critics contend that some Afrocentric historical research lacks merit. They suggest that Afrocentrism is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship.
In The Skeptic's Dictionary, philosophy professor Robert Todd Carroll referred to Afrocentrism as "pseudohistorical". He argued that the prime goal of Afrocentrism was to encourage black nationalism as well as ethnic pride in order to effectively combat the destructive consequences of cultural and universal racism.
African-American professor , who teaches history at the University of California, Davis, has stated that Afrocentrism is:
a mythology that is racist, reactionary, essentially therapeutic and is eurocentrism in black face.
Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has rejected George G. M. James's theories about Egypt contributing to Greek civilization because they are based on faulty scholarship. She notes that his sources predated the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and that his theories supported by those sources were overturned by later findings, which he did not acknowledge. She contends that actual ancient Egyptian texts showed little similarity to Greek philosophy. Lefkowitz also pointed out that Aristotle could not have stolen his ideas from the great Library at Alexandria as James suggested, because the library was founded after Aristotle's death, by his pupil Alexander the Great. Because of such fundamental errors of fact, Lefkowitz has criticized Afrocentricity as "an excuse to teach myth as history."
Cain Hope Felder, a Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Howard University and supporter of Afrocentric ideas, has warned Afrocentrists to avoid certain pitfalls. These include:
- Demonizing categorically all white people, without careful differentiation between persons of goodwill and those who consciously perpetuate racism.
- Adopting multiculturalism as a curricular alternative that eliminates, marginalizes, or vilifies European heritage to the point that Europe epitomizes all the evil in the world.
- Gross over-generalizations and using factually or incorrect material is bad history and bad scholarship.
Nathan Glazer writes that although Afrocentricity can mean many things, the popular press has generally given most attention to its most outlandish theories. Glazer agrees with many of the findings and conclusions by Mary Lefkowitz in her book Not Out of Africa. He also recognizes that Afrocentricity may, at times, take the form of legitimate and relevant scholarship.
Not all the claims of Afrocentrists are widely accepted within the African-American academic community. Some Afrocentrists also reject work which critics of Afrocentricity have characterized as bad scholarship. But, Adisa A. Alkebulan writes that critics have used claims of what he calls "a few non-Afrocentrists" as "an indictment against Afrocentricity."
Radical Afrocentrism
According to Radical Afrocentrism, Africans were responsible for many of the great innovations in ancient philosophy, science, and technology, which were later stolen by European peoples.
Some of the scholars who are considered to be radical are Yaacov Shavit and Leonard Jeffries.
In its most radical form, Radical Afrocentrism is associated with Black Supremacy.
African-centered education
The premise behind African-Centered Education is the notion that human beings can be subjugated and made servile by limiting their consciousness of themselves and by imposing certain selective aspects of alien knowledge on them. Afrocentrists claim that what educates one group of people does not necessarily educate and empower another group of people.
The term "mis-education" was coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson to describe the process of systematically depriving African Americans of their knowledge of self. Dr. Woodson believed that mis-education was the root of the problems of the masses of the African-American community and that if the masses of the African American-community had been given the correct knowledge and education from the beginning, they would not be in the situation that they find themselves in today. The problem concerning formal education is seen by Afrocentrists to be that African-American students are taught to perceive the world through the eyes of another culture, and unconsciously learn to see themselves as an insignificant part of their world. An Afrocentric education does not necessarily wish to isolate Africans from a Eurocentric education system. It wishes to assert the autonomy of Africans and encompass the cultural uniqueness of all learners. A school based on African values, it is believed, would eliminate the patterns of rejection and alienation that engulf so many African-American school children, especially males. The movement for African-centered education is based on the assumption that a school immersed in African traditions, rituals, values, and symbols will provide a learning environment that is more congruent with the lifestyles and values of African-American families.
In recent years Africana Studies or Africology departments at many major universities have grown out of the Afrocentric "Black Studies" departments formed in the 1970s. Rather than focusing on black topics in the African diaspora (often exclusively African American topics), these reformed departments aim to expand the field to encompass all of the African diaspora. They also seek to better align themselves with other University departments and find continuity and compromise between the radical Afrocentricity of the past decades and the multicultural scholarship found in many fields today.
Views on race and the Pan-African identity
see also Race (classification of human beings)
Afrocentricity contends that race exists primarily as a social and political construct - that is, that race is important because of its cultural rather than its biological significance. Many Afrocentrists seek to challenge concepts such as white privilege, so-called color-blind perspectives, and race-neutral pedagogies. There are strong ties between Afrocentricity and Critical race theory.
Afrocentrists hold that Africans exhibit a range of types and physical characteristics, and that such elements as wavy hair or aquiline facial features are part of a continuum of African types that do not depend on admixture with Caucasian groups. They cite work by Hiernaux and Hassan which they believe demonstrates that populations could vary based on micro-evolutionary principles (climate adaptation, drift, selection), and that such variations existed in both living and fossil Africans.
Afrocentrists have condemned what they consider to be attempts at dividing African peoples into racial clusters as new versions of what they deem older, discredited theories, such as the "Hamitic Hypothesis" and the Dynastic Race Theory. These theories, they contend, attempted to identify certain African ethnicities, such as Nubians, Ethiopians and Somalis, as "Caucasoid" groups that entered Africa to bring civilization to the natives. They believe that Western academics have traditionally limited the peoples they defined as "Black" Africans, but used broader "Caucasoid" or related categories to classify peoples of Egypt or certain other African ethnicities. Afrocentrists also believe strongly in the work of certain anthropologists who have suggested that there is little evidence to support that these populations are closely related to "Caucasoids" of Europe and western Asia.
Afrocentric scholar Cheikh Anta Diop expressed a belief in a double standard as follows in 1964:
French historian Jean Vercoutter has claimed that archaeological workers routinely classified Negroid remains as Mediterranean, even though they found such remains in substantial numbers with ancient artefacts. (Vercoutter 1978—The Peopling of ancient Egypt)
More recent work by geneticists, however, provides evidence that Eurasians likely are descended from populations that migrated north and east out of the Horn of Africa. Hence, certain shared genetic and phenotypical characteristics exist among Eurasians and Northeast African groups such as Ethiopians and Somalis. Some phenotypical similarities among Somalis and Eurasians exist at a higher structural level, such as orthognathism, tooth size, keen facial features and skull shape and size. According to anthropologist Loring Brace: When the non-adaptive aspects of craniofacial configuration are the basis for assessment, the Somalis cluster with Europeans before showing a tie with the people of West Africa or the Congo Basin.
Genetic analyses of male DNA in the 21st century have also indicated that Somalis carry considerable E1b1b, a Y chromosome haplogroup characteristic of Northeast African, Berber, Arab, Jewish, Mediterranean and Balkan populations. See also Archaeogenetics of the Near East.
Afrocentrists argue against the classification of people they deem indigenous "Black" Africans as Caucasoid. They advocate use of the term Africoid to encompass the varying phenotypes of both Negroid and proto-Caucasoid African populations, as well as phenotypically Negroid Australasian populations. They contend that it is more appropriate to name Africans in a manner which reflects their geographical origin, as are Asians as Mongoloids, and Europeans as Caucasians.
Some Afrocentrists have adopted a pan-Africanist perspective that people of color are all "African people" or "diasporic Africans," citing physical characteristics they exhibit in common with Black Africans. Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes that they are all part of the "global African community." Some Afrocentric writers include in the African diaspora the Dravidians of India, the people of the rest of the Indian subcontinent, "Negritos" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia; and the Africoid, aboriginal peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.
A few Afrocentrists claim that the Olmecs of Mexico were a hybrid society comprised of Native American peoples and Africans, although mainstream historians of Mesoamerica reject that view with detailed rebuttals.
In 2003, geneticist Spencer Wells' findings confirmed a clear DNA link between indigenous Africans and the Australoid peoples of India, Australia and Southeast Asia, tracing the DNA of San bushmen from southeast Africa to India and on to Australia. However Wells' work indicates that the ancestors of Southeast Asian and Melanesian peoples migrated out of Africa before the ancestors of modern Europeans did. Earlier studies had shown that some of these darker-skinned ethnic groups cluster genetically more closely with neighboring East Asians than with indigenous Africans, due to millennia of intermingling with one another in relative isolation.
Critics of Afrocentrism note that the Afrocentric designation of Southeast Asians and Melanesians as "African diaspora" is also made without reference to the self-identities of the peoples in question, who may not generally consider themselves African.
Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theories
In the 1970s, Van Sertima advanced the theory that the complex civilizations of the Americas were the result of trans-oceanic influence from the Egyptians or other African civilizations. Such a claim is his primary thesis in They Came Before Columbus, published in 1978. The few hyper-diffusionist writers seek to establish that the Olmec people, who built the first highly complex civilization in Mesoamerica and are considered by some to be the mother civilization for all other civilizations of Mesoamerica, were deeply influenced by Africans. Van Sertima said that the Olmec civilization was a hybrid one of Africans and Native Americans. His theory of pre-Columbian American-African contact has since met with considerable and detailed opposition by scholars of Mesoamerica. Some have charged Van Sertima with "doctoring" and twisting data to fit his conclusions, with inventing evidence, and with ignoring the work of respected Central and South American scholars in the advance of his own theory.
Afrocentrism and Ancient Egypt
Several Afrocentrists have claimed that important cultural characteristics of ancient Egypt were indigenous to Africa and that these features were present in other early African civilizations such as the Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia. Scholars who have held this view include Marcus Garvey, George James, Cheikh Anta Diop, Martin Bernal, Ivan van Sertima, John Henrik Clarke, Chancellor Williams, Molefi Kete Asante and Yaacov Shavit.
In Black Athena Revisited (1996), a collection of essays edited by Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and her colleague Guy MacLean Rogers, a number of Afrocentric claims are examined and criticised.
During the Dynastic period, which runs from 3150 B.C. to 30 B.C. there were several major migrations into and out of Egypt that had significant impacts on the Egyptian population. Libyans, Asiatics, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians and Greeks at various times conquored Egypt, and their people intermingled with the resident population. A number of DNA studies on modern Egyptians indicate that there has been significant gene in-flow from both sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. For much of the Dynastic period Egyptian kings ruled Nubia, but in the 8th Century BC Nubian kings conquered most of Egypt and ruled it for almost a hundred years as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt. Several studies involving human remains have concluded that Egypt has been a heterogeneous population from pre-dynastic times, consisting of both Negroid and non-Negroid populations.
There are a number of surviving copies of a sacred text from Dynastic times called the Book of Gates. These were usually carved and/or painted inside tombs, for the guidance of the soul of the deceased. These inscriptions clearly show that the Ancient Egyptians themselves were conscious of ethnicity, and that they saw fit to distinguish their race from the other races they knew - including the Nubians to the south of Egypt. In the chapter dealing with the Fifth Division of the Tuat, the work notes four different groups of men (translation by E.A. Wallis Budge):
The first are RETH, the second are AAMU, the third are NEHESU, and the fourth are THEMEHU. The RETH are Egyptians, the AAMU are dwellers in the deserts to the east and north-east of Egypt, the NEHESU are the black races, and the THEMEHU are the fair-skinned Libyans.
Human evolution
Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller states about Afrocentrism:
It should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: all of the significant evolution in our species occurred in populations with brown and black skins living in Africa. When language, music, and art evolved, they evolved in Africans. Lighter skins evolved in some European and Asian populations long after the human mind evolved its present capacities.
The skin color of our ancestors does not have much scientific importance. But it does have a political importance given the persistence of anti-black racism. I think that a powerful antidote to such racism is the realization that the human mind is a product of black African females favoring intelligence, kindness, creativity, and articulate language in black African males, and vice versa. Afrocentrism is an appropriate attitude to take when we are thinking about human evolution.
List of prominent authors
- Molefi Kete Asante, professor, author: Afrocentricity: The theory of Social Change; The Afrocentric Idea; The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten
- Ishakamusa Barashango, college professor and lecturer; founder, Temple of the Black Messiah, School of History and Religion; co-founder and creative director, Fourth Dynasty Publishing Company, Silver Spring, Maryland
- Hakim Bey, leader of the Moorish Science Temple, author of the "Journal of the Moorish Paradigm"
- Jacob Carruthers, Egyptologist; founding director of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization; founder and director of the Kemetic Institute, Chicago
- Cheikh Anta Diop ,, author: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology; Precolonial Black Africa; The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity; The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script
- H. B. ("Barry") Fell, Harvard professor, biologist, author: Saga America, 1980
- Charles S. Finch, medical doctor and author: Echoes of the Old Darkland: Themes from the African Eden (1991), Africa and the Birth of Science and Technology (1991), The Star of Deep Beginnings (1998), Biblio Africana: An Annotated Reader's Guide to African Cultural History and Related Subjects (1999), The African Background to Medical Science: Essays on African History, Science & Civilizations (2000), The Afrikan Origins of the Major World Religions (with Yosef Ben-Jochannan and Modupe Oduyoye) (1987)
- Drusilla Dunjee Houston, lecturer, syndicated columnist, author: Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, 1926.
- Yosef Ben-Jochannan, author: African Origins of Major "Western Religions"; Black Man of the Nile and His Family; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; New Dimensions in African History; The Myth of Exodus and Genesis and the Exclusion of Their African Origins; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; Abu Simbel to Ghizeh: A Guide Book and Manual
- Runoko Rashidi , author: Introduction to African Civilizations; The global African community: The African presence in Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific
- J.A. Rogers, author: Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands: The Old World; Nature Knows No Color Line; Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas: The New World; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro
- Ivan van Sertima, author: They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, ISBN 0887386644; Blacks in Science Ancient and Modern; African Presence in Early Asia; African Presence in Early America; Early America Revisited; Egypt Revisited: Journal of African Civilizations; Nile Valley Civilizations; Egypt: Child of Africa (Journal of African Civilizations, V. 12); The Golden Age of the Moor (Journal of African Civilizations, Vol. 11, Fall 1991); Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern; Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop
- Chancellor Williams, author: The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
- Bekeh Ukelina Utietiang, author: "Afridentity: Essays on Africa" Silver Spring: Africa Reads Books, 2007.
- Théophile Obenga, author: Ancient Egypt and Black Africa: a student's handbook for the study of Ancient Egypt in philosophy, linguistics, and gender relations
- Asa Hilliard, III, author: SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind; The Teachings of Ptahhotep
See also
External links
Afrocentric websites
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