Afrocentrism

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Afrocentrism is an academic, historical approach to the study of world history introduced by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante. Afrocentrism holds that Eurocentrism has led to the neglect or denial of the contributions of Africa's original peoples and focused instead on a generally European-centered model of world civilization and history. Therefore, Afrocentrism aims to shift the focus from a European-centered history to an Africa-centered history. More broadly, Afrocentrism is concerned with distinguishing the influence of European and Oriental peoples from indigenous African achievements. Many Afrocentrists in America consider the African identity of African Americans to be more important than their American nationality.

Afrocentrism also has connections to black civil rights movements and anti-imperialist ideologies in the United States and the Caribbean.

Afrocentrists typically focus on indigenous Africa and black contributions and posit black, Nilotic origins for Western civilization. Philosophically, Afrocentrism is often compared to Eurocentrism; the validity of this comparison is heavily debated.

1 Egypt and the argument of African cultural unity
2 History of Afrocentrism
3 The debate over Afrocentrism
4 Egypt and black identity
5 African-centered history and Africa
6 List of notable Afrocentric historians
7 References
8 Bibliography
9 See also
10 External links

[edit] Egypt and the argument of African cultural unity

Main article: Racial characteristics of ancient Egyptians

Afrocentricity essentially makes the claim that early dynastic Egypt was an indigenous African civilization, though the claim had already been made by some historians and Africanists for a century or more.^{[citation needed]} Modern geopolitics generally place Egypt in the Middle East; however, geographically, the modern-day nation (except for the Sinai peninsula) falls within the African continent.

Afrocentricity argues that the salient, cultural characteristics of ancient Egypt are indigenous to Africa and that these features are present in other African civilizations.^{[citation needed]} Critical of much of mainstream Egyptology, Afrocentrists are of the opinion that the study of ancient Egyptian culture artificially disconnects it from other early African civilizations, such as Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia—particularly in light of the fact that archaeological evidence clearly indicates a confluence among this cultural triad. This perspective, championed by the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, is known formally as the Cultural Unity Theory. This theory has proponents outside Afrocentric circles, among them Bruce Williams of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Afrocentrists claim that these civilizations made significant contributions to ancient Greece and Rome during their formative periods.

The more conventional belief among mainstream archaeologists and Egyptologists such as Frank J. Yurco and Fekri Hassan and historians is that the ancient Egyptian civilization was related, in terms of culture and language, to the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken across northern Africa, Chad and the Horn of Africa and by the Beja of the Sudan.^{[citation needed]} Mainstream scholars readily acknowledge that the earliest speakers of Tamazight, the language of the Maghreb Berbers of North Africa, originated among the black Berbers of Northeastern Africa and the Sahel; and the Beja are themselves an "Africoid" people.^[1] The conventional belief in a non-Negroid Egypt has been challenged by scholars who believe the cultural similarities between Egypt and the Levant are due to the exportation of cultural elements from the Nilotic civilizations, rather than the reverse.

This Afrocentric view finds itself in direct opposition to the conclusions of mainstream, Eurocentric scholars such as British historian Arnold Toynbee, who regarded the ancient Egyptian cultural sphere as having died out without leaving a successor, and who derided as "myth" the idea that Egypt was the "origin of Western civilization." However, there are numerous accounts in the historical record dating back several centuries wherein scholars have written of an Egypt and its contributions to Mediterranean civilizations. The Greek historian Herodotus described the ancient Egyptians as "swarthy with woolly hair" (Histories Book 2:104). Also, the European to earn the status of the first European philosopher, Thales, who hailed from then Miletus, present day Turkey, was known to have calculated the height of the Egyptian Pyramid by its shadows, a proof that European philosophers went to Egypt to study. Francois Champollion described in his book L'Egypte the characteristics of the Egyptian people and their similarities to Nubians. In addition, Afrocentricity has growing popular support in academia. Increasingly, American colleges are treating Afrocentrism as a rigorous discipline of study open to peer review. However, Egyptian frescoes frequently show sub-Saharan Africans as distinct from themselves.

One of Afrocentricity's most prominent critics, Mary Lefkowitz defending the mainstream view, has characterized Afrocentricity as "an excuse to teach myth as history." Likewise, African-American History professor Clarence E. Walker has proclaimed it to be "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic." Afrocentrists, however, level similar charges at what they charge is a pronounced Eurocentrism in mainstream historical scholarship, and argue that the Afrocentrist approach merely attempts to set the historical record straight by overturning a false, racially skewed paradigm.

[edit] History of Afrocentrism

A 1911 copy of the NAACP journal The Crisis depicting "Ra-Maat-Neb, one of the black kings of the Upper Nile."

The origins of Afrocentrism can be found in the work of African-American and Caribbean intellectuals early in the twentieth century. Publications such as The Crisis and the Journal of Negro History sought to counter the prevailing view in the West that Africa had contributed nothing of value to human history that was not the result of incursions by Europeans and Arabs.^[2] These journals asserted the fundamental blackness of ancient Egypt and investigated the history of black Africa. Editor of The Crisis W.E.B. DuBois researched West African culture and attempted to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. DuBois later envisioned and received funding from then Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah to produce an Encyclopedia Africana that would chronicle the history and cultures of black Africa, but he died before the work could be completed. Some aspects of DuBois's approach are evident in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, who claimed to have identified a pan-African protolanguage and to have proven that ancient Egyptians were, indeed, black Africans.

Diop also drew from the ideas of George M. James, a follower of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who emphasized the importance of Ethiopia as a great, black civilization, and who argued that black peoples should develop pride in African history. James' book, Stolen Legacy (1954) is often cited as one of the foundational texts of Afrocentrism. James claimed that Greek philosophy was "stolen" from ancient Egyptian traditions and that these had developed from distinctively African cultural roots. For James, the works of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers were, in fact, poor synopses of aspects of ancient Egyptian wisdom. According to James, the Greeks were a violent and quarrelsome people, unlike the Egyptians, and were not naturally capable of philosophy. James famously claimed in his book that Aristotle had physically "stolen" his ideas and works from a "black African" Library of Alexandria, when, in fact, the Library of Alexandria was built by Greeks, during the Hellenistic period of Egypt, and after Aristotle's death.

These ideas were not wholly new. 18th-century Masonic texts referenced ancient writings that claimed Greek philosophers had studied in Egypt. The poet William Blake had also attacked "the stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero," asserting that they were copies of more ancient Semitic texts. Such views were associated with radical and Romantic thought that rejected classical Greco-Roman culture as the model for civilization. James' distinct contribution was to tie these claims to an opposition between white European and black African identity, associating these alleged ancient appropriations of black wisdom with white, imperialist exploitation of black peoples and the theft of artifacts from black African cultures. By claiming that the Greeks were barbaric and innately incapable of philosophy, he inverted normative imperialist racial hierarchies, which made the same claims about black Africans.

Other writers copied James' approach, which led to claims that black Africans originated intellectual or technological achievements that later were claimed by whites. Today, most of these writings are not considered serious scholarship, and modern Afrocentricity writers have abandoned James' more extreme claims to concentrate on the notion that modern black peoples should center their understanding of culture and history on Africa. Molefi Kete Asante's book Afrocentricity (1988) argues that African-Americans should look to African cultures "as a critical corrective to a displaced agency among Africans."

Other authors have adapted James' assertion that Egyptian culture's influence on the Greeks has been underestimated. Among such scholars, the most influential is Martin Bernal, whose book Black Athena stressed influence of Afro-Asiatic and Semitic civilizations on Classical Greece. Other writers simply have focused on the study of indigenous African civilizations and peoples, with the aim of counteracting the emphasis placed on European and Arab influence on the continent. These Afrocentric scholars believe that historians must shift their attention away from European accomplishments and Europe-derived racist assumptions and, instead, emphasize the black origins of mankind and black contributions to world history. They maintain that such a paradigm shift would result in significant attitudinal shifts in the West and elsewhere. Indeed, many claim that a dramatic shift already has occurred. As educational opportunities have broadened for peoples of color over the years, non-white scholars from many cultures increasingly have begun to examine anew the historical and archaeological record. Some of their findings challenge the Eurocentric view of world history which for so many centuries devalued and appropriated, or simply ignored achievements by blacks and other non-Europeans.

[edit] The debate over Afrocentrism

Critics counter that much historical Afrocentric research simply lacks scientific merit and that it actually seeks to supplant and counter one form of racism with another, rather than attempt to arrive at the truth. Among these critics, Mary Lefkowitz's Not out of Africa is regarded by some as the foremost critical work. In it, she contends Afrocentric historical claims are grounded in identity politics and myth rather than sound scholarship. Like most other mainstream scholars, she rejects James' views on the ground that his sources predate the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She contends that actual ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. She also contends that Bernal underestimates the distinctiveness of Greek intellectual culture. Asante, however, disputes her conclusions.

Afrocentricity tends to emphasize the racial and cultural unity of Africa as a whole as the home of black, or "Africoid," peoples. However, mainstream scholars assert that Afrocentricity relies on a projection of modern racial and geographical categories onto ancient cultures in which they simply did not exist. It is argued that in ancient Western culture, the distinction between Europe and Africa was not as important as the notion that civilized peoples encircled the Mediterranean sea. The farther from the Mediterranean they were, the more alien they were considered to be. This applied to all peoples. The equation of "African" with black identity has also been criticized, partly because movement of populations around the Mediterranean in ancient times makes any rigid distinctions among North African, Asian, and European peoples of the area problematic; and partly because the notion of a unified "black" or Negroid race is itself considered to be unsustainable by many modern geneticists. Further, Diop's claim to have discovered a pan-African proto-language is rejected by almost all mainstream linguists. Although the Bantu language theory is still considered valid, if not in agreement with Diop's own, it describes the movement of a language family from the western African Sahel south and east into southern Africa, and would not include languages of northern or Mediterranean Africa, nor those of the Ethiopian region and east African coast. Scholarship summarized in eg. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel points out that, to the extent that Bantu languages are pan-sub-Saharan-African languages, it appears to be because the Bantu people displaced or absorbed other African peoples within the last few thousand years, not because the Bantu language family is representative of some shared pan-African culture.

However, the concept of race is not based on genetics, which is a far more modern discipline, but on phenotypes. Caucasians range from Iceland to India and from red, blond, brown, to black straight, wavy, or curly hair and from fair to dark skin. Black people range from West Africa, to Australia and Melanesia, with a range of brown and wavy haired people to the darkest skinned people with the curliest hair. Similarly, the Afrocentric concept of a "global African community" has been reinforced by the findings of numerous anthropologists, historians and others, who claim the blacks of New Guinea, Melanesia,and Southeast Asia are no less "Negroid" than the blacks of North and sub-Saharan Africa. ^{[citation needed]} Again, work summarized by Diamond indicates that this claim is incorrect; the peoples of New Guinea and Australia appear to be derived from peoples originally native to Taiwan, and certain extremely important technological developments, such as the domestication of crops, originated in New Guinea independent of the rest of the world, and well before crop domestication occurred in sub-Saharan Africa.

The issue with the more respected mainstream viewpoint is that the definition of a Negroid phenotype begins to take a back seat to the genetic origins of those having negroid features. In addition, those people who fall in the extreme range of Caucasian, furthest from the blond, and who also fall in the extreme range of black, furthest from the darkest, are contentiously placed in either one group or another. Afrocentrists contend, by pointing out that white society excluded mixed people from being Caucasian, that whites should not therefore lay historical claims to those who in history share identical phenotypes and mixture with modern black people, especially when they live within the continent of Africa, and routinely intermarried with the darker skinned and more overtly black people of the region. Therefore for the Afrocentrists, the Ancient Egyptian would socially fit within the black sphere. Non-Afrocentric scholarship might reply that this, again, is projecting modern racial categories on ancient peoples; blond hair and blue eyes would not have been normative for ancient Mediterranean societies.

People generally think of themselves and others as belonging to races defined by skin colour and physiognomy and link this to ancestry. One of the impacts of this is that historical achievements are ascribed to races with which modern peoples identify themselves (and not necessarily as the historical people would have identified themselves). Some insist that this approach violates the fundamental demand of history as a discipline, which should aspire to understand events as they occurred, not as they affect the self-esteem of modern people.

Afrocentricity, however, contends that race still exists as a social and political construct. They argue that racist conventions propounded for centuries– that blacks had no civilization, no written language, no culture, and no history of any note before coming into contact with Europeans– make the racial identity of ancient Egypt an important issue. Moreover, they point out that these misconceptions have been consistently applied to a particular, broad category of humanity based on the same "racial" phenotype and lineages. Most modern scholarship, Afrocentric or not, however, at least nominally rejects the old racist ideas that black people had no culture or history independent of whites; however, European history commonly receives more attention within the academy than the history of sub-Saharan African cultures or those of the many Pacific Island peoples.

However, the matter of race became an important and enduring issue, Afrocentrism argues, when whites and others pronounced an entire segment of humanity inherently inferior. Further, such biases persist today. As a result, Afrocentricity contends, it is important to set the historical record straight within the context in which the history of human civilizations heretofore has been framed, taught and studied— and that is the context of race.

Crucial to this aspect of the debate are arguments about whether the ancient Egyptians reasonably can be considered to have been black and the extent of significant cultural links between the blacks of sub-Saharan and North Africa. Even more central is the question of whether the record can be set straight by allowing present-day preferences, attitudes and politics justify a potentially distorted view of history, regardless of the obvious distortions produced by the Eurocentric viewpoint in the prior two centuries.

[edit] Egypt and black identity

Main article: Controversy over racial characteristics of ancient Egyptians

Many Afrocentrics insist that ancient Egyptians were black African peoples, often emphasizing that this black identity was strongest in early Egyptian history, before the arrival of other people from Asia. The majority of anthropologists and geneticists disagree with this claim and contend that black Africans are part of a separate branch of humans than ancient Egyptians, who shared more culturally, genetically and historically with other groups bordering the Mediterranean Sea.^{[citation needed]}

Ironically, prominent Afrocentric critic Mary Lefkowitz at times finds some common ground with Afrocentrists. In her "Not Out Of Africa"[12], Lefkowitz notes that a number of earlier historical theories suggesting Caucasians initially sweeping into ancient Egypt from the north have been rendered untenable by modern research, which suggests a movement of peoples from the South, up from the Sahara into the Nilotic zone.

"Recent work on skeletons and DNA suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North. See Bruce G. Trigger, "The Rise of Civilization in Egypt," Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol I, pp 489-90; S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54."

[edit] African-centered history and Africa

The relationship among racial, cultural and continental identities is one of the more difficult problems in Afrocentic thought. In other instances, the concept of black racial identity has been used to include among "African" peoples populations generally thought of as non-Africans, such as the Australoid (sometimes called "Veddoid") peoples of Australia and New Guinea and the Tamils (also called Dravidians) of India and the people of the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Also included by some writers in the African diaspora are the "Negritos" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia); the "Africoid," aboriginal peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; some Afrocentrists also claim that the Olmecs of what is now Mexico came from Africa, though this is not a widespread view among historians of Mesoamerica.[2] Afrocentrics who adopt this approach contend that such peoples are African in a racial sense, just as the white inhabitants of Australia may be said to be European. Critics would argue that such peoples were not recent emigrants from Africa, and the entire population of the world might just as reasonably be considered part of an African race according to the Out of Africa model of human migration. Studies show that some members of these darker-skinned ethnic groups and "Mongoloid" East Asians are genetically closer to one another than they are to indigenous Africans. However, some Afrocentrists argue that such genetic similarities are due to the fact that the aboriginal peoples of Asia were "Africoid" Negritos and Australoid types, who later miscegenated and developed in isolation with populations of the eventually more dominant Mongoloid phenotype over time. This fact, they contend, does not change the fundamental black racial identity of these peoples based on the traditional metrics of the classic "Negroid" phenotype, physical similarities with other peoples classified as Negroid, presumptive patterns of prehistoric migrations and, in some cases, what they contend are cultural similarities. Arguments advancing the notion of racial similarities between a Nubian and a Dravidian, both classified as Negroid, Afrocentrists contend, are far more credible than those of between, say, a Swede and a modern-day Turk, both classified as Caucasian. Traditional racial classifications, after all, are not based on genetics, but on phenotype. In such matters, Afrocentrists adopt the pan-Africanist perspective that such people of color are all "African people" or "diasporic Africans." As Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes, they are all part of the "global African community." This view, however, rudely disregards how most "Mongoloid" East Asians identify themselves and the conclusions of geneticists about population relatedness.

In 2002, geneticist Spencer Wells completed a study of human out-migrations from Africa utilizing the DNA of San Bushmen of the Kalahari who, according to Wells, have the oldest distinctive DNA lineage on earth. Wells concluded from analysis of DNA specimens that the earliest human emigration from Africa of which there is definitive proof was that of ancestors of the San Bushmen to southern India (the modern Tamils, also known as "Dravidians") and then along coastal routes to Australia (the Aborigines), while shortly afterwards a second migration from Africa, also by ancestors of San Bushmen, reached Central Asia, and thence covered most of the Eurasian continent.

The single origin hypothesis (also known as the "Out of Africa" hypothesis) posits that the Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, later migrating and populating other continents, out-competing other related species such as that exemplified by Java man.

[edit] List of notable Afrocentric historians

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 [3],[4], 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, linguist, author: Saga America, 1980 [5]
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 [6], 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, African Presence in Early Europe; 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[7]
Chancellor Williams, author: The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
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

[edit] References

^ [1]
^ The African Origin of the Grecian Civilisation, Journal of Negro History, 1917, pp.334-344

[edit] Bibliography

Asante, Molefi Kete (1990). Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge. Africa World Press.
Bailey, Randall C. (editor) (2003). Yet with a steady beat: contemporary U.S. Afrocentric biblical interpretation. Society of Biblical Literature.
Berlinerblau, Jacques (1999). Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. Rutgers University Press.
Binder, Amy J. (2002). Contentious curricula: Afrocentrism and creationism in American public schools. Princeton University Press.
Browder, Anthony T. (1992). Nile Valley Contributions To Civilization: Exploding the Myths, Volume 1. Washington, DC: Institute of Karmic Guidance.
Crawford, Clinton (1996). Recasting Ancient Egypt In The African Context: Toward A Model Curriculum Using Art And Language. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press.
Henderson, Errol Anthony (1995). Afrocentrism and world politics: towards a new paradigm. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
Henke, Holger and Fred Reno (editors) (2003). Modern political culture in the Caribbean. University of the West Indies Press.
Howe, Stephen (1998). Afrocentrism: mythical pasts and imagined homes. London: Verso.
Houston, Drusilla Dunjee (1926). Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire. Oklahoma: Universal Publishing Company.
Kershaw, Terry (1992). ""Afrocentrism and the Afrocentric method." Western Journal of Black Studies" 16 (3): 160-168.
Konstan, David. "Inventing Ancient Greece: [Review article]", History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2. (May, 1997), pp. 261–269.
Lefkowitz, Mary R. (1996). Not out of Africa: how Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history. New York: BasicBooks.
Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Guy MacLean Rogers (editors) (1996). Black Athena Revisited. University of North Carolina Press.
Lewis, Martin W. (1997). The myth of continents: a critique of metageography. University of California Press.
Magida, Arthur J. (1996). Prophet of rage a life of Louis Farrakhan and his nation. New York: BasicBooks.
Morton, Eric. "Race and Racism in the Works of David Hume." Journal on African Philosophy. (2002) ISSN: 1533-1067. Africa Resource Center. Retrieved on 2006-11-06.
Moses, Wilson Jeremiah (1998). Afrotopia: the roots of African American popular history. Cambridge University Press.
Sniderman, Paul M. and Thomas Piazza (2002). Black pride and black prejudice. Princeton University Press.
Spivey, Donald (2003). Fire from the soul: a history of the African-American struggle. Carolina Academic Press.
Walker, Clarence E. (2000). We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. Oxford University Press.
Wells, Spencer (2002). The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Princeton University Press.
Osei-Yaw, Emmanuel.D.(2006)