An Afrocentric Manifesto E-Book

Molefi Kete Asante

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 380

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Molefi Kete Asante's Afrocentric philosophy has become one of the most persistent influences in the social sciences and humanities over the past three decades. It strives to create new forms of discourse about Africa and the African Diaspora, impact on education through expanding curricula to be more inclusive, change the language of social institutions to reflect a more holistic universe, and revitalize conversations in Africa, Europe, and America, about an African renaissance based on commitment to fundamental ideas of agency, centeredness, and cultural location.

In An Afrocentric Manifesto, Molefi Kete Asante examines and explores the cultural perspective closest to the existential reality of African people in order to present an innovative interpretation on the modern issues confronting contemporary society.

Thus, this book engages the major critiques of Afrocentricity, defends the necessity for African people to view themselves as agents instead of as objects on the fringes of Europe, and proposes a more democratic framework for human relationships.

An Afrocentric Manifesto completes Asante's quartet on Afrocentric theory. It is at the cutting edge of this new paradigm with implications for all disciplines and fields of study. It will be essential reading for urban studies, philosophy, African and African American Studies, social work, sociology, political science, and communication.

Leseprobe

An Afrocentric Manifesto

An Afrocentric Manifesto

Toward an African Renaissance

MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

polity

Copyright © Molefi Kete Asante 2007

The right of Molefi Kete Asante to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2007 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5498-0

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Contents

  1  Introduction

  2  Ama Mazama and Paradigmatic Discourse

  3  Afrocentricity: Notes on a Disciplinary Position

  4  In Search of an Afrocentric Historiography

  5  Kemetic Bases: The Africanness of Ancient Egypt

  6  The Afrocentric Idea in Education

  7  Sustaining a Relationship to Black Studies

  8  Afrocentricity and History

  9  The Black Nationalist Question

10  Race, Brutality, and Hegemony

11  Blackness as an Ethical Trope: Toward a Post-Western Manifesto

References

Index

1

Introduction

An overview

The African people of Georgia tell the story of a mother eagle that was flying low over a chicken yard holding her newly born baby eagle in her claws as she joined a large flock of eagles. A gust of wind forced the young eagle out of the mother’s claws and it fell into the chicken yard. Although she looked for the baby eagle she could not find it. All she could see when she looked into the chicken yard were chickens. So after a long and exhaustive search, she reluctantly left the baby eagle and flew away with the large flock of eagles.

As the baby eagle grew in the chicken yard, it began to see itself as a chicken. Surrounded as it was by chickens, the little eagle received a chicken education, wore chicken clothes, ate chicken food, and attempted to imitate the walk and mannerisms of the chickens. Every day the little eagle practiced its chicken education. Its curriculum was a strictly chicken curriculum, one made expressly for chickens, to assist chickens in living in the chicken yard as good chickens. When the little eagle spoke, it spoke chicken language because it did not know eagle language. It carried its head like the chickens because it had only a faint knowledge, elementary knowledge, of what an eagle style or fashion or idea might have been. All traces of its earlier eagle training had been forgotten. In everything, the little eagle acted like a chicken until one day it started to think of itself as a chicken.

It tried to mimic the chickens. Whatever the chickens did, it did. If the chickens laughed, it laughed. If the chickens said, “It is a good day outside,” the eagle said, “It is a good day outside.” In everything that mattered the eagle saw itself as a chicken. It did not recognize itself as an eagle. In fact, all eagle consciousness was lost. Although it questioned why it looked different from the rest of the chickens, it just thought it was a funny-looking chicken. Soon it never thought of itself as anything but a chicken, strange-looking and all. There were physical characteristics it did not like because they were not the characteristics appreciated by the chickens. It never saw itself in the light of its eagle history; it was simply a chicken.

One sunny day an old eagle flew over the chicken yard. It had no special mission and was not looking for anything in particular. However, as it was leisurely flying over the chicken yard, something caught its attention. It looked down and saw what it thought was an eagle. It flew closer and looked with keener sight and saw what it was sure was an eagle. It then flew to a tree just next to the chicken yard and it called out to the bird that looked like an eagle. “Come up here and talk with me, young eagle,” the old eagle said. The eagle in the chicken yard ignored the old eagle because it knew it was not the eagle that was being called because it was a chicken. But the old eagle persisted and at last the eagle in the chicken yard recognized that he was being called. Whereupon the eagle in the yard turned and said to the old eagle, “I’m not an eagle, I’m a chicken.” The old eagle, with knowledge that stretched back through generations of eagles, said “I know an eagle when I see one. You’re an eagle. Open your wings and fly up here to this tree and let us talk.” The young eagle in the chicken yard said, “I cannot fly because I am a chicken.” After the old eagle had asked it several times, the young eagle stretched its wings and flapped them and flew up to the tree. It looked down at the chicken yard and said, “I did not know that I could do that.” The old eagle asked the young eagle to fly and they flew effortlessly toward the setting sun.

Pinpointing the issue

I am a child of seven generations of Africans who have lived in America. My entire life, including career, struggle against oppression, search for ways to overturn hegemony, political outlook, fortunes and misfortunes, friends and detractors, has been impacted by my Africanness. It is an essential reality of an African living in America. Sometimes one has to learn what it is to be and this learning is how something seemingly essential can be translated into culture.

Afrocentricity is a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture transcontinentally and trans-generationally. This means that the quality of location is essential to any analysis that involves African culture and behavior whether literary or economic, whether political or cultural. In this regard it is the crystallization of a critical perspective on facts (Asante, 1998). I do not present Afrocentricity as a settled corpus of ideas, as a worldview or as a closed system of beliefs. It remains important that we hold back any reductive misunderstanding of the nature of human interaction and the creation of reality. The vast academic corporate grab for uniformity, rooted in the tradition of the assertive American reach for hegemony in thought, leads to the inevitable confrontation between Afrocentrists and those who would like to subsume all new ideas under one form or the other of Eurocentrism (Keita, 2000). What is now plain to see is that some scholars are nervous about the possibility of a perspective on data, that is, a locative thesis, which does not adapt to the overarching ideas of a European hegemony. At this moment in intellectual history there is a critical reading and an assessment of Afrocentricity in all disciplines. Every one has something to say and normally what they have to say is critical of the fact that Afrocentricity appears “outside” the mainstream. What is meant by this notion of being “outside” is that Afrocentricity traces its theoretical heritage to African ideas and African authors. It is not a Eurocentric idea because, for it to be, it would mean that Europe would be assaulting its own patriarchy and sense of superiority in language, content, and structure. Clarence Walker, a leading Eurocentrist, who happens to be black in color, writes in his book, We Can’t Go Home Again (Walker, 2001, p. xviii), something quite naive and nonsensical when he says: “Although some of its advocates may claim that Afrocentrism is history, the methods by which its proponents reach their conclusions are not historically rigorous.” The naïveté occurs because Walker knows no Afrocentrist who claims that Afrocentricity is history. What is nonsensical about this charge is that any conclusion reached by Afrocentrists is usually based on the best arguments in the literature or orature. Clearly what would have been useful here is for Walker to cite some reference, some argument made by Afrocentrists, which suggested the lack of rigor. I accept the fact that he could not produce such an argument and therefore resorted to the most incredible example of the lack of rigor: the assertion without proof.

Walker’s unfortunate intervention is built around two themes: (1) if everybody was a king, who built the pyramids? Afrocentrism and Black American History; (2) All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man, or Not All Knowledge is Power. With these two shadow pillars, Walker constructs a myth without foundation in the literature. He seeks to rewrite the intellectual history of African thought and to recast the Afrocentric movement in a negative light. For example, he claims that “Afrocentrism is a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic” (Walker, 2001, p. 3). While it is true that Afrocentricity is centered on the lived experiences of a particular group of people, namely Africans, it is not a mythology that is racist or reactionary. On the other hand it might serve as therapy to some people, and that is alright, so long as the therapeutic nature of the intellectual activity of Afrocentricity does not stand in the way of advancing science. I think where Walker and I part company is on the question of white privilege in intellectual matters. It is difficult it seems for Walker to accept the possibility that a theoretical idea, based on African traditions and concepts, could exist apart from the European experience. He would probably come to the same conclusion about Asian ideas and traditions as well. The work of the Asiacentric theorist Yoshitaka Miike has advanced an Asian critique of humanity, culture, and communication that must challenge Walker’s own self dislocation (Miike, 2004, pp. 69–81). Nevertheless I am willing to give Walker the benefit of any doubt in this area and to consider some of his other points. He assumes a position closely resembling mythomania when he tries to “steal” the Afrocentrist’s core in order to divest it of any relationship to what he is calling history. It is a devious and ingenious statement to say “good history should give its actors agency, show the contingency of events, and examine the deployment of power” (Walker, 2001, p. 4) when he knows or should know that one of the strongest arguments for Afrocentricity is African agency (Asante, 1998, p. 177). Is Walker really trying to argue that Afrocentricity has demonstrated what good history ought to be or is he seeking to muddy the waters? I think that it is the latter course that he professes because he is unable to discover any significant philosophical error in the Afrocentric construction. Regardless of Walker’s program for good history, the Afrocentric scholars have maintained that in all experiences where African people are discussed we look for African agency. In the book, The Afrocentric Paradigm, Ama Mazama discusses agency in connection with the philosophy and activism of Marcus Garvey (Mazama, 2003a, pp. 10–14).

The principal weakness in Walker’s critique of Afrocentricity is that he engages a discourse that was put to bed several years earlier by my book, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism (Asante, 1999). This discourse was based on the reaction to Afrocentricity written by Mary Lefkowitz in a book called Not Out of Africa (1996). As I will show in a later chapter, it was Lefkowitz’s objective to reassert the idea that Greece did not receive substantial contributions from Africa through Egypt. Furthermore, it was her purpose to challenge the blackness of the ancient people of Egypt. These are the same arguments that Walker reiterates in his book.

Lefkowitz was put to rest after several biting rebukes of her book and numerous debates (three or four with me) over her ideas. Walker has avoided this discussion until now and it will be important to show how he differs from Lefkowitz. My comment regarding Lefkowitz’s book could be applied to Walker’s when I said, “tragically, the idea that Europeans have some different intellectual or scientific ability is accepted doctrine and some scholars will go to any lengths to try to uphold it” (Asante, 1999, p. 53). But they always commit four fundametal flaws:

1  They attack insignificant or trivial issues to obscure the main points in a discourse.

2  They will make assertions and offer their own interpretations as evidence.

3  They will undermine writers they previously supported in order to maintain the fiction of a Greek miracle.

4  They will announce that both sides of an issue are correct, then move to uphold only the side that supports European triumphalism.

A serious reading of Walker demonstrates that he is a victim of these flaws. What is more frightening is that Walker’s argument calls for a special category for those Africans who are victims of self-hatred. He writes that “Afrocentrism is not a record of the black past, but a therapeutic mythology based on the belief that there is an essential blackness in black people” (Walker, 2001, p. 23). This is a strange statement because there are no Afrocentrists who claim that Afrocentricity is a record of the black past. There are those who claim that it is a quality of thought (Karenga), a paradigm (Mazama), a perspective (Asante), or a metatheory (Modupe), but no theorist has claimed that it is a record of the black past (Mazama, 2003a). There is no one who claims that it is a therapeutic mythology based on the belief that there is an essential blackness in black people. This is unreal. In the first place, many events, activities, behaviors, programs, and philosophies might be therapeutic. I can find no fault in therapy, if one needs it. But this is not the Afrocentric Manifesto. I do not call for therapy, although I have often seen the need for it, and I am confused by a historian’s use of the phrase “essential blackness in black people” because I think he has different axes to grind than literary theorists. It appears to me that we do not speak of the essential brownness in brown people or the essential whiteness in white people. Alas, self-hatred is a particular orientation of African people, or any people, who have been so destabilized by being “off-center” and “out of location” within their own culture that they have lost all sense of direction. I think that the ordinary African person on the streets of London, Philadelphia, or Paris will have a fairly good idea what it means to be an African in the Western world. They may not articulate it the same way that an Afrocentrist would with theoretical concepts but they would definitely speak to the uniqueness of the black person in a white-dominated environment. The fact that Walker cannot see this may be a reflection of the environment he has created for himself; it is certainly not the case with the majority of African people.

There are some ludicrous arguments made by Walker that indicate he has rarely read any Afrocentrist or, if he has, he has not read reflectively. For example, he claims without proof that Afrocentricity is Eurocentrism in black face (Walker, 2001, p. 4). This is certainly an insult because Afrocentricity is not the reverse of Eurocentrism; neither is it a counter to Eurocentrism. Even if Eurocentrism never existed, there would be a need for African people to operate from their own sense of agency. With other options one might want to assume an Asian identity and Asian agency or, in the distant future, a Martian or alien agency. This would also be an escape from African agency. One does not have to pose Afrocentricity as a counter to Eurocentrism since the dislocation of Africans is a fact that should be corrected at any rate. While it is true that the cultural and intellectual dislocation of Africans has a lot to do with the fact that Europe colonized and enslaved Africans, it must be understood that for the African to assert his or her own agency is not a racist act, but a profoundly anti-racist act because it liberates the African from the dislocation that may have been created by Europeans and undermines any sense of European hegemony.

To render Afrocentricity more meaningful it might be useful to discuss what the options are if Africans particularly, and those who are studying Africa specifically, seek to resolve the intellectual issues surrounding the acquisition of knowledge. In the late 1970s, I wrote on Afrocentricity as a way of conceptualizing what we had called in the 1960s’ Black Power Movement “the black perspective.” The convergence of two influences worked to produce the idea that the “black perspective” needed a fuller, rounder theoretical construction. The first influence was the critical insight of the philosopher Harold Cruse who suggested that it was critical for the African community in the United States to articulate a political, social, cultural, and economic idea consistent with its own history (Cruse, 2005 [1967]). The second influence was that of Kwame Nkrumah who had argued in his book Consciencism (1964) that Africa itself had to come to terms with its own personality and create a scientific response to national and international issues based on the interest of Africa. I will examine how Cruse and Nkrumah contributed to the maturing of Afrocentricity in later chapters.

Of course, it should be observed that I was not the only person thinking along this line in the late 1970s. In many respects the Kawaida Movement founded by Maulana Karenga had articulated a vision based on the twin ideas of tradition and reason grounded in the African experience during the 1960s. Karenga’s political essays and philosophical works, particularly around the importance of culture in true liberation of the mind, became useful guides in the evolution of my own theory of Afrocentricity.

I have written elsewhere, namely in The Afrocentric Idea (1998), of the struggle over definitions. Thus, it came as no great surprise to me that the Oxford dictionary defined “Afrocentric” as believing “that black culture was pre-eminent” (New American Oxford Dictionary, 2005). Needless to say, this is precisely the kind of distortion that led to the creation of the Afrocentric School of Thought in the first place. Many definitions of African people and their ideas appear to be either outright distortions or deliberate negations. For example, nowhere in the corpus of works called “Afrocentric” is the statement ever made that “black culture is pre-eminent,” and the Oxford consultant who claimed such as the case misread the evidence and usage of the word. However, this is not unique and is quite representative of the way African ideas are discussed and defined by European and American writers. On the other hand, Eurocentric is defined by the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999) as “focusing on Europe or its people, institutions, and cultures, sometimes in an arrogant way.”

As we shall see in following chapters, the sociolinguistics of racism and cultural imperialism have to be challenged and neutralized in order to produce an arena of respect where Africans assume more than a marginal role in their own discourses. Conversely, Europeans will see that respect cannot be created from aggressive linguistic adventures that seek to define and determine the boundaries of non-European experiences and ideas. Humility, often lacking in intellectual work, is the necessary trait of the person who would reach toward a reasonable arena of respect.

I think that it will become clearer as we proceed that a multiplicity of dislocations, disorientations, and distortions are at the foundation of the generative and productive system that demonstrates the strain of an imperialistic and triumphalist vision of the world. Afrocentricity, if anything, is a shout out for rationality in the midst of confusion, order in the presence of chaos, and respect for cultures in a world that tramples on both the rights and the definitions of the rights of humans.

Out of an experience of great inquietude over the past 500 years, Africans have now put into place, with great resistance as we shall see, the elements necessary for a truly African renaissance founded on African principles and the centrality of African interests. What is at stake is clear. Either the African people will escape the intellectual plantation that has paraded as universal or will be stifled in every attempt to express their own sense of culture.

Other centric expressions

The original work of Yoshitaka Miike on Asiocentric communication is instructive. Miike, alongside Jing Yin, has articulated a view of Asian culture that seeks to liberate the discourse around Asian communication ideas and rhetorical concepts away from being forced into the straitjacket of Western ideas. This is a remarkable undertaking that will have far-reaching effect on the course of social science and humanities discussions about culture.

My aim is to examine the relevance of Afrocentricity in a time when many intellectuals and activists are clients of two overlapping prisons of vision. While the dominant attitude that imprisons most of us may be called a Eurocentric worldview that gives rise to the spread of a particularism as if it were universal, we are also constrained by the infrastructures, by which I mean the maintenance systems, of dominance and privilege. They represent ideas such as globalization, postmodernism, modernism, structuralism, feminism, cultural materialism, and cosmopolitanism. Although this list does not exhaust the numerous manifestations, it should be a demonstration of the kinds of ideas that have served to enrich particularism as a universal value. I mean one does not have to be a genius to understand that the experience of Europe intellectually may not be the experience of Asians or Africans. Notice I said “may not” because I recognize the insidious nature of cultural ideas in a world where the control, as Samuel Huntington says in The Clash of Civilizations (1996), of almost all critical areas of power is in the hands of Europeans, whether in America or on the continent of Europe itself.

My intention has been to pinpoint the issue that we will return to in the following chapters. From here on out, it will be important to discuss the conceptual idea of Afrocentricity, place it in its own historical and philosophical context within African thought, and demonstrate how it operates in relationship to pedagogical, sociolinguistic, historical, multicultural, and gendered discourse. This means that I will have to discuss education, identity, class, and economics, and the meaning of blackness as a new construction for a human manifesto. But I am unable to do any of this without attention to the arguments for and against Afrocentricity. I shall try to deal with all arguments with equanimity, but I shall be especially careful to quote those who have taken an anti-Afrocentric view. In the end, what The Afrocentric Manifesto intends is to provide the reader with a clear, coherent, and persuasive argument for a reconceptualization of the way Africans view themselves and the way others have viewed Africans.

2

Ama Mazama and Paradigmatic Discourse

In her book, The Afrocentric Paradigm, Ama Mazama explains that Afrocentricity is not merely a worldview nor even a theory as such, but rather it is a paradigm that results in the reconceptualization of the social and historical reality of African people (Mazama, 2003a). Actually, what she suggests is that the Afrocentric paradigm is a revolutionary shift in thinking proposed as a constructural adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency.

Ama Mazama is an African who was born a French citizen in Guadeloupe, educated at the Academy of the Antilles in Guadeloupe, Bordeaux and La Sorbonne, where she obtained a PhD with highest distinction in linguistics. She became a professor in African American Studies at Temple University after making professorial stops at the University of Texas in Austin, Howard, Georgetown, and the Pennsylvania State University. Growing up as she did in the intellectual environment of French philosophical and linguistic studies but with the political and social radicalization of the Guadeloupean and Martinican campaigners for autonomy, Mazama reacted to colonial indoctrination that suggested the superiority of European culture over African culture. No one could convince her that the language of the black people of Guadeloupe was simply bad French nor could they influence her to believe that the Congo-based language of the people was inferior to any other language. In Langue et Identité, she establishes in a sustained argument the point that the Guadeloupeans were not merely imitators of French nor were they trying to speak French; they were speaking a language that had its roots deep in the continent. They were not creoles and there was no real creole identity. Maryse Conde, also a Guadeloupean, had argued a view that elevated and privileged creole status. In rejecting this formulation, Mazama was laying the foundation for her future work in Afrocentric theory. Already by the time she was getting her first Master’s degree at Bordeaux, she had begun to see the damage that was done to the psyche of black people in Guadeloupe by the insidious work of the cultural elitists. By the time she arrived in the United States to teach linguistics at the University of Texas, Ama Mazama had developed a clear plan for overturning the reigning paradigm in so-called Creole Studies. It was with deftness that Mazama established a formidable array of intellectual weaponry with books, monographs, and articles that attacked the very construction of creolization. In challenging creolization she was challenging the idea of white racial supremacy.

This work was soon followed up by lecture tours each year in Guadeloupe, interviews on the radio and television, and speeches to community groups. The masses of people were thirsty for the information, particularly the African connection that Mazama was now prepared to give them from her own travels and studies in Africa. But it was her philosophical and theoretical orientation, more than anything else, which grounded her in the tradition of Cheikh Anta Diop, Amilcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Anna Julia Cooper, and others who have always believed that African people were not white people in color. Mazama knew that the horrendous situation of black people in Africa and in the Americas was not just a political and economic crisis, but a crisis of culture, theory, and philosophy. Of course, the French authorities would soon ban her from appearing on television in the land of her birth, but her videotapes and audiotapes would be played and used by the people to raise the consciousness of their children. While Mazama found the small island of Guadeloupe more and more difficult to navigate in terms of access, she found ample opportunity in France itself and also in Africa for her intellectual ideas. Her works soon became popular in France, Canada, Guyane, Benin, and other Francophone countries. Yet it is in the United States, as a leading theorist of the Afrocentric School, that she has made her greatest impact on students and colleagues. Because she understands the intersections as well as the centers and margins in the discourse around hegemony and domination, she has become one of the most prominent theorists.

Mazama’s argument for Afrocentricity is therefore grounded in practical and intellectual experiences. Since she has both philosophical and linguistic training, her approach to the same general problem of African dislocation will be slightly different from my own. I am much more stilted, if not structural, in my approach to the phenomenological problem of agency.

Let us see if we can outline Mazama’s principal argument. Although colonization of Africans has ended, Africans are still mentally subjugated. The reason for this sad mental state is that we have been fighting against the evil of colonization as an economic and political problem rather than a total conceptual distortion leading to confusion. Mazama further contends that colonization “must be analyzed within the broader context of the European cultural ethos that generated the economic exploitation and political suppression” in the first place (Mazama, 2003a, p. 4).

The tension between the colonizer and the colonized is explicitly reiterated in Mazama’s work in much the same way as Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon had done earlier. A hyper-valorized dominating culture and a “systematically denigrated” oppressed or colonized community is the standard formulation for the mental confusion of the dominated. This ontological reduction of colonized people was a necessary part of the process of bankrupting the intellectual and cultural space of the colonized.

Mazama contends that there is another aspect of the process of colonization that is more significant than ontological reduction that has gone relatively unrecognized because the leading critiques of colonization have been by those who operated within the framework of European thinking. For example, Fanon was a Marxist and accepted the idea of evolutionary change which led him to believe, along with Europeans, that Africans needed “development.” Because neither Fanon nor his countryman, Aime Césaire, constructed European development as problematic they never questioned the use of language such as “normal,” “natural,” and “universal,” all terms that Europeans had constructed to relate to themselves as normative. Mazama understands this phenomenon and insists that the “Afrocentric idea rests on the assertion of the primacy of the African experience for African people” (Mazama, 2003a, p. 5).

In a riveting critique of authors who have misappropriated the term “Afrocentricity,” Mazama highlights the obvious mischaracterizations in the literature. For example, Patricia Hill Collins, as early as 1991, misunderstood the idea of Afrocentricity as having “core African values.” This leads immediately to a misunderstanding that creates bad conclusions. There is a difference, as Mazama explains, between Africanity, which is what Hill Collins must have been writing about, and Afrocentricity. Africanity refers to the traditions, customs, and values of African people. But Afrocentricity is a much more self-conscious approach to the agency of African people within the context of their own history.

The special contribution that Mazama makes to the advancement of Afrocentricity has to do with the application and extension of the Kuhnian notion of paradigm. She argues that “Afrocentricity, within the academic context, will best be understood as a paradigm” (Mazama, 2003a, p. 7). She takes the idea of the cognitive and structural elements of a paradigm and applies them to Afrocentricity. Under the cognitive aspect of a paradigm are three constituents: metaphysical, sociological, and exemplary. Of course the Kuhnian idea was not complete in Mazama’s construction because it did not have a functional aspect. However, it is impossible Afrocentrically to conceive of a paradigm that would not have a functional aspect and it is clear that “a paradigm must activate our consciousness to be of any use to us” (Mazama, 2003a, p. 8). To be engaged in the process of liberation one must not assume that activities are for the sake of activity; they must be for the sake of achieving liberation.

Mazama claims that Marcus Garvey, a deeply spiritual man who was committed to the ancestors, was seeking to develop a civil religion. In fact, taking her lead from other scholars who have made this case, she argues that Garvey’s emphasis on agency was “largely predicated upon his conception of God as one who had made all people equal and masters of their destiny; a God who would be content only if his children lived up to their divine origin and exercised fully their will in determining their life conditions” (Mazama, 2003a, p. 11). It was Garvey, she contends, who first saw that the black man must be hero and subject in his own history.

Mazama is critical of Frantz Fanon. She argues that Fanon understood that the fundamental characteristic of colonization was violence. It was a process of dehumanization that was pursued with rationality to confer inferiority to the colonized. For Fanon, the white man was the purveyor of violence and all the violence on the globe could be traced to some white man. It would take the end of whiteness to destroy the idea of violence against other people because the construction of whiteness and blackness was a creation of whites to exploit blacks. To assert humanity, the colonized must kill his oppressor. What Mazama discovers is that while Fanon is correct on some aspects of his analysis, he is woefully lacking in his re-humanization project because he has a limited role for African culture. She writes “It is clear from reading Fanon that he believed that the role of culture was to be minimal” (Mazama, 2003a, p. 14). One could claim, however, that Fanon did not seek to eliminate culture, only to place it in a position where it was seen as a resource for dealing with the materiality of racism. Yet it was Fanon’s belief that the recovered culture could only be a caricature because culture is to be lived not exhibited. He argued that he would not be a man of the past and would not exalt his past, or any past. Mazama brilliantly points out that Fanon was struggling with his own dislocation. Inevitably, because he did not exalt his own past, he participated in the past of Europe. One cannot divest himself of the past, and if a person seeks to divest himself of his own past or if that past has become distorted in his mind, then he will participate in the past of another. This was one of Fanon’s problems. To be sure, it must be asserted, as Lewis Gordon has understood, that Fanon problematized development and normality and did not accept either without criticism. Fanon had argued in The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961) that development was imposed on the African communities rather than emerging from the organic nature of those communities.

This was not the case with either the Negritude or the Kawaida movements, as Mazama found. Both movements engaged the intellectual and cultural ideas that had been formulated by those who had written and acted before. They were not stuck in the past; they were able, however, to use the past as a resource.

What Ama Mazama envisions is an Afrocentricity that is free to pursue the total liberation of African people from the degradation of Europe. Léopold Senghor, Aime Césaire, and Leon Damas were struck by the overwhelming nature of French culture. They had been raised in colonized nations and had imbibed French culture. By the time they were university students they were exhausted with French culture, so they erected their defense by projecting what was their own from their ancestors. They were liberated from the strictures of European culture when they embraced themselves and saw themselves as beautiful, something wonderful to behold. But they were unable to carry this project through to completion and often found themselves back in the bosom of whiteness. They wanted, as Mazama notes, to retrieve a precolonial consciousness, a true Negritude (Mazama, 2003a, p. 17). She would discover that Kawaida brought other gifts to the table. Maulana Karenga sought to reconstruct African culture and Kwanzaa, an international holiday, represents a concrete activity brought into being by the persistent teaching of Maulana Karenga that Africans needed to revisit the cultural question since Europe had deliberately destroyed and distorted much of that culture.

Mazama’s critique of Kawaida is that it was not sufficiently robust to deal with the Pan African issues confronting the interactive networks of Africans. In fact, she writes that Karenga’s focus was on the New African, Afro-Americans (Mazama, 2003a, p. 20). There is no doubt, however, that Kawaida and Negritude were influences on Afrocentricity.

No other author exemplifies the paradigmatic shift more than Cheikh Anta Diop (Diop, 1974). Mazama places him in the context of the Hegelian notion that Africa was outside history because the African people did not have, according to Hegel, a historical consciousness. What she saw in Diop was “a conscious elaboration of a paradigm whose main principle is the reclaiming of ancient Egypt, Kemet, for Africa,” p. 20). It was this main principle that agitated the West and created an avalanche of criticism for Afrocentricity (Mazama, 2003a). It was as if a great horse had broken free of its captors and was now on a mission to remain free and to expose the captors.

In the writings of Clenora Hudson-Weems and Nah Dove, Mazama finds new instruments and ideas that undergird her thesis on relationships which could best be understood as complementarity between women and men. Therefore, she reports favorably on Hudson-Weems’s claim that for women to be against men is to endanger the African community. “African women do not apprehend African men as our enemies,” she writes (Mazama, 2003a, p. 27). Hudson-Weems was the first theorist to call for Africana Womanism in place of feminism which is so badly tainted in the African American world with the idea that women are against men. Although Mazama believes that discrimination against women is pervasive in the Western society, she also knows that the controls of the West are in the hands of white men. To be against black men is a short-term solution to a much larger narrative of relationship.

Nah Dove, a brilliant analyst and Africana Womanist, argues that all discourse on relationships between men and women must be examined through the prism of the doctrine of white racial supremacy. If one fails to see that this is the dominant thrust of Western culture, then there will be no understanding of the cultural underpinnings of relationships between black men and black women. Dove’s work converges with the insights that Mazama makes in her own analyses of relationships, culture, and identity.

In fact, Mazama makes two general scientific advances in the development of theory: (1) she launches the paradigmatic shift in the discourse on Afrocentricity and shows how it is a revolutionary concept for the African world, and (2) she infuses the older ideas of Afrocentricity with a functional, actionable, practical component that energizes the concept. These two achievements are central to an understanding of the Afrocentric idea.

The mission of Mazama’s essay on the Afrocentric Paradigm is straightforward and clear. She weaves a tapestry of exuberant intellectual ideas that span the most abstract theories in the Afrocentric paradigm to the concrete educational proposals of Asa Hilliard. But the ultimate objective of the essay is to suggest that the liberation of the mind of the African person must precede any other type of liberation. One is convinced by Mazama’s construction of the argument for a paradigm shift because to carry on as usual would be to enthrone white supremacy indefinitely. The only way to break the chains and to claim victory is to strike the blow for freedom that comes when African intellectuals say that they are no longer willing to ride the slow train to mental death any more; we are truly, then, on our own. By taking this course of action, Mazama is proposing not an evolution but a revolution in our thinking.

Afrocentricity is revolutionary because it casts ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic processes in the context of black people as subjects and not as objects, basing all knowledge on the authentic interrogation of location. One might contend that it elevates the cultural and historical location of the African and uses that as a source for surveying knowledge. Because of Afrocentricity it is possible to ask, “Where is the sistah coming from?” or “Where is the brotha at?” or “Are you down with overcoming oppression?”

An intellectual djed

One can claim that the revolutionary idea of Afrocentricity creates what the ancient Egyptians referred to as a djed, and the ancient Greeks as a stasis, meaning in both cases a strong place to stand. It is a paradigm in the Mazamian sense because it enthrones the centrality of African agency, thus creating an acceptance of African values and ideals as expressed in the highest forms of culture while terminating always in a creative function bent toward mental liberation. As such it activates our consciousness as a functional aspect of any revolutionary approach to phenomena. The cognitive and structural aspects of a paradigm are incomplete without the functional aspect (Mazama, 2003a, p. 31). There is something more than knowing from the Afrocentric perspective; there is also doing. Only in this functional aspect does one wrest the idea from “shallow discursive spaces” to place it in a proper revolutionary context to change the actual lives of the oppressed.

One of the chief arenas for doing in contemporary society is the educational system. It is the locus of all definitions that maintain the society and the institutions, commercial, religious, or social, that are used to sustain the society. But, of course, the Afrocentrist understands that all definitions are autobiographical. It should come as no surprise that this is a djedian position given the fact that education in a Western sense is the largest and most effective institution for creating group thought.

But it is not only education that announces a pattern of group thinking in the Western world; it is a factor in every aspect of the societies of the West. For example, there is a reason for Europeans to claim that permanent architecture is one of the principal keys to societies having culture because they have built buildings that have lasted for generations. How would this definition fit in the lives of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico? Would we have to conclude that they did not have culture or civilization because they did not build a St Peter’s basilica or Notre Dame? Furthermore, what goes for functional architecture in one society may be different from that in another. One can see the Golden Temple in Bangkok and claim that its elaborateness is unlike anything in Western culture, but one cannot say that it is better or not; this is really a question of difference, not of good or bad. Civilization, like other terms, is a victim of Western particularist expansiveness.

For now it is critical for us to see that Afrocentricity assumes that all relationships are based on the interplay of centers and margins and the distances from either the center or the margins. When Africans, continental or diasporan, view themselves as centered and central in their own history then they see themselves as agents, actors, and participants rather than as marginals on the periphery of the political or economic experience of Europe. To be an African is to be a part of a community, in contemporary terms, that was historically enslaved, exploited, and colonized because of skin color, and a community that lost some of the control of the intellectual, social, philosophical, and religious ideas it had inherited. To establish a new intellectual djed is an act of revolution, as Mazama understands, because by its very existence it critiques and unsettles five hundred years of mental enslavement prosecuted through language (Mazama, 2003a, p. 210).

Using this paradigm, human beings have discovered that all phenomena are expressed in the fundamental categories of space and time. Furthermore, it is then understood that relationships develop and knowledge increases to the extent that we are able to appreciate the issues of space and time. Now this leads us to the very edge of discovery: what is the meaning of Afrocentricity itself ?

I have defined Afrocentricty as a consciousness, a quality of thought, and an analytical process based on Africans viewing themselves as subjects, that is, agents in the world, but with the intervention of Mazama it now becomes clear that there has to be a functional component to the concept. Afrocentricity is therefore a consciousness, quality of thought, mode of analysis, and an actionable perspective where Africans seek, from agency, to assert subject place within the context of African history. All other explanations or elaborations of the Afrocentric idea begin with this foundation; there is no Afrocentricity without an emphasis on African agency in the context of African history.

One is allowed to make a number of commentaries about the Afrocentric paradigm based on the scope of the preceding definition. For example, it is possible to say Afrocentricity is the quality of viewing phenomena from the perspective of the African person as an agent of history, not as an object of European creation. But it is also the quality of seeking in every situation involving Africans the appropriate centrality of the African person (Asante, 1998).

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