Afrocentrism is a racialized worldview that is centered on the history of people of Black African descent or a view that favors it over non-African civilizations."Recent" here means in the last few thousand years, as opposed to in the Stone Age, for example 70,000 years ago It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people and their historical contributions. It seeks to counter what it sees as mistakes and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical underpinnings of Western academic disciplines as they developed during and since Europe's Early Renaissance as justifying rationales for the enslavement of other peoples, in order to enable more accurate accounts of not only African but all people's contributions to world history.CC Verharen, "Molefi Asante...", The Western Journal of Black Studies, (24)4, 2000, pp. 223–238 Afrocentricity deals primarily with self-determination and African agency and is a pan-African point of view for the study of culture, philosophy, and history.Asante on Afrocentricity .Gates, Henry Louis, and Kwame Anthony Appiah (eds), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Volume 1, p. 111, Oxford University Press. 2005.
What is today broadly called Afrocentrism evolved out of the work of African American intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but flowered into its modern form due to the activism of African American intellectuals in the U.S. civil rights movement and in the development of African American studies programs in universities. However, following the development of universities in African colonies in the 1950s, African scholars became major contributors to African historiography.General History of Africa, Vol 1, p41, UNESCO, 1981 A notable pioneer is the professor Kenneth Dike, who became chairman of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard in the 1970s. In strict terms Afrocentrism, as a distinct historiography, reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s. Today it is primarily associated with Cheikh Anta Diop, John Henrik Clarke, Ivan van Sertima and Molefi Kete Asante. Asante, however, describes his theories as Afrocentricity.Molefi Asante, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics, foreword by Maulana Karenga: "Molefi Asante, the founding and preeminent theorist of Afrocentricity, is one of the most important intellectuals at work today. This work continues his tradition of combining an extraordinary intellectual range with an impressive ability to identify and clarify central issues in the current discourse on Afrocentricity, multiculturalism, race, culture, ethnicity and related themes. Dr. Asante offers an insightful and valuable response to Eurocentric critics of the Afrocentric initiative while simultaneously addressing a wide range of issues critical to understanding this important intellectual enterprise, including African agency, location, orientation, centerdness, subject-place and cultural groundedness. The volume is thoughtful, multifaceted and rewarding, and yields a rich sense of the contours and complexity of the Afrocentric project." --Dr. Maulana Karenga, Chair, Department of Black Studies, California State University, Long Beach."
Proponents of Afrocentrism support the claim that the contributions of various Black African people have been downplayed or discredited as part of the legacy of colonialism and slavery's pathology of "writing Africans out of history".
Major critics of Afrocentrism include Mary Lefkowitz, who dismiss it as pseudohistory, reactive, and obstinately therapeutic. Others, such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, believe that Afrocentrism defeats its purpose of dismantling unipolar studies of world history by seeking to replace Eurocentricity with an equally ethnocentric and hierarchical curriculum, and negatively essentializes European culture and people of European descent. Clarence E. Walker claims it to be "Eurocentrism in blackface".
Terminology The term "Afrocentrism" dates to 1962. The adjective "Afrocentric" appears in a typescript proposal for an entry in Encyclopedia Africana, possibly due to W. E. B. Du Bois. The abstract noun "Afrocentricity" dates to the 1970s, and was popularized by Molefi Asante's Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980). Molefi Kete Asante's theory, Afrocentricity, has been one developed in academic settings and may incorporate the terms Afrocentric to describe scholarship and Afrocentrists to describe scholars, but does not use Afrocentrism. According to Asante, though the two terms are often confused to mean the same, Afrocentrists are not adherents of Afrocentrism. This has caused confusing notions about who is considered an Afrocentrist, as various scholars who may or may not be associated with Asante and his works have been erroneously given the title, even by other academics. Asante has written that Afrocentricity and Afrocentrism are not the same and neither do they share the same origin:
By way of distinction, Afrocentricity should not be confused with the variant Afrocentrism. The term "Afrocentrism" was first used by the opponents of Afrocentricity who in their zeal saw it as an obverse of Eurocentrism. The adjective "Afrocentric" in the academic literature always referred to "Afrocentricity." However, the use of "Afrocentrism" reflected a negation of the idea of Afrocentricity as a positive and progressive paradigm. The aim was to assign religious signification to the idea of African centeredness. However, it has come to refer to a broad cultural movement of the late twentieth century that has a set of philosophical, political, and artistic ideas which provides the basis for the musical, sartorial, and aesthetic dimensions of the African personality. On the other hand, Afrocentricity, as I have previously defined it, is a theory of agency, that is, the idea that African people must be viewed and view themselves as agents rather than spectators to historical revolution and change. To this end Afrocentricity seeks to examine every aspect of the subject place of Africans in historical, literary, architectural, ethical, philosophical, economic, and political life.
History
Afrocentrism has its origins in the work of African and African diaspora intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following social changes in the United States and Africa due both to the end of slavery and the decline of colonialism. Following the American Civil War, African Americans in the South gathered together in communities to evade white control, established their own church congregations, and worked hard to gain education. They increasingly took more active public roles despite severe racial discrimination and segregation.Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935; reprint New York: The Free Press, 1998. American and African intellectuals looked to the African past for a re-evaluation of what its civilizations had achieved and what they meant for contemporary people."Reconstruction". Accessed 19 November 2007. Archived 2009-10-31.
As a racist ideology and political movement, Afrocentrism had its beginnings in activism among black intellectuals, political figures, and historians in the context of the US American civil rights movement. According to U.S. professor Victor Oguejiofor Okafor, concepts of Afrocentricity lie at the core of disciplines such as African American studies.Victor Oguejiofor Okafor, "The Place of Africalogy in the University Curriculum", Journal of Black Studies, vol. 26 no. 6, July 1999, pp. 688–712. But Wilson J. Moses claims that Afrocentrism roots are not exclusively African:
Aspects of Afrocentricity and Afrocentrism
Afrocentricity (2000) by Molefi Kete Asante
In 2000, African American Studies professor Molefi Kete Asante, gave a lecture entitled "Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium,"Kete Asante, Molefi, "Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium", University of Liverpool, 2 August 2000, accessed 11 February 2009 . in which he presented 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 originated in Africa and the first philosophers in the world were Africans. Afrocentricity constitutes a new way of examining data, and 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." Afrocentricity can stand its ground among any ideology or religion: Marxism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism. Your Afrocentricity will emerge in the presence of these other ideologies because it is from you. Afrocentrism is the only ideology that can liberate African people.
Asante also stated:
Afrocentric education
Afrocentric education is education designed to empower peoples of the African diaspora. A central premise behind it is that many Africans have been subjugated by limiting their awareness of themselves and indoctrinating them with ideas that work against them.Woodson, Dr. Carter G. (1933). The Mis-Education of the Negro. Khalifah's Booksellers & Associates. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-determination in relationship to others.Akbar, Dr. Na'im (1998). Like educational leaders of other cultures, proponents assert that what educates one group of people does not necessarily educate and empower another group–so they assert educational priorities distinctly for the Africans in a given context.
Afrocentric theology
The black church in the United States developed out of the creolization of African spirituality and European-American Christianity; early members of the churches made certain stories their own. During the antebellum years, the idea of deliverance out of slavery, as in the story of Exodus, was especially important. After Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy, their hope was based on deliverance from segregation and other abuses. They found much to respond to in the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus, and shaped their churches by the growth of music and worship styles that related to African as well as European-American traditions.
Twentieth-century "Africentric approaches" to Christian theology and preaching have been more deliberate. Writers and thinkers emphasize "Black presence" in the Christian Bible, including the idea of a "Black Jesus".Peters, Ronald Edward (ed.), Africentric Approaches to Christian Ministry: Strengthening Urban Congregations in African American Communities, University Press of America (2006), .
Kwanzaa In 1966 Maulana Karenga of the black separatist US Organization created Kwanzaa; which became the first specifically African American holiday to be widely observed amongst African Americans. Karenga rejected liberation theology and considered the practice of Christianity anti-thetical to the creation of an African-American identity independent from white America.Karenga, Maulana (1967). "Religion". In Clyde Halisi, James Mtume. The Quotable Karenga. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. pp. 25. 23769.8. Karenga said his goal was to "give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society."
Race and Pan-African identity
Many Afrocentrists seek to challenge concepts such as white privilege, color-blind perspectives, and race-neutral pedagogies. There are strong ties between Afrocentricity and Critical race theory.Leonardo, Zeus (2005). Critical Pedagogy and Race, p. 129 .