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For the study of African culture and history, see African studies.  Afrocentrism, Afrocentricity, or Africentrism[1] is a world view which emphasizes the importance of African people, taken as a single group and often equated with "Black people", in culture, philosophy, and history.[2] 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 Proto-Indo-Europeans and their descendants.[3] Part of this reaction involved reviewing history to document the contributions that Black people made to world civilization.[4]
HistoryDuring 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,[5] 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.[6][7] 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. [8] According to US professor, Victor Oguejiofor Okafor, concepts of Afrocentricity lie at the core of disciplines such as African American studies.[9] EtymologyThe 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.[10] Afrocentric ScholarshipIn 2000, Molefi Kete Asante, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Temple University gave a lecture at the University of Liverpool entitled "Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium,"[11] in which he presented many of his ideas:
Asante also stated:
Similarly, Yaacov Shavit, in the preface to his book History in Black,[12] states:
Martin Bernal, Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, has published several works advancing Afrocentric ideas, 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 Lebanon). 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.[13] CriticismsAfrocentrism has prompted challenges and criticism. Some mainstream Western scholars have assessed some Afrocentric ideas as pseudohistorical. They find fault with such claims as that Ancient Egypt contributed directly to the development of Greek and Western culture (on the grounds that the times of development do not align) and that African civilizations were founding influences on such distant civilizations as the American Olmec and the Chinese Xia cultures.[14][15] Other critics contend that some Afrocentric historical research is grounded in identity politics and myth rather than scholarship.[16] In The Skeptic's Dictionary, philosophy professor Robert Todd Carroll labeled Afrocentrism "pseudohistorical". He argued that Afrocentrism's prime goal was to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride in order to effectively combat the destructive consequences of cultural and universal racism.[17][18] Similarly, African-American professor Clarence E. Walker, who teaches history at the University of California, Davis, has described Afrocentrism as "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, essentially therapeutic and is eurocentrism in black face."[19] Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, has rejected George James's theories about Egyptian contributions to Greek civilization as being faulty scholarship. She notes that his sources predated the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and that he failed to acknowledge that many of his theories were overturned by later findings. She contends that ancient Egyptian texts show 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. Because of such fundamental errors of fact, Lefkowitz has criticized Afrocentrism as "an excuse to teach myth as history."[16] A 2002 book review published by the American Historical Review notes that
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,[21] including:
Nathan Glazer writes that although Afrocentricity can mean many things, the popular press has generally given most attention to its most outlandish theories.[22] Glazer agrees with many of the findings and conclusions presented in Lefkowitz's book Not Out of Africa. Yet he also argues that Afrocentrism often presents legitimate and relevant scholarship.[22] Similarly, Owen Alik Shahadah defends the historical reactionary need for Afrocentric world view while also warning that "Continually viewing history through a modern racial lens distorts the historical timeline and creates academic anachronism."[23] Not all the claims of Afrocentrists are widely accepted within the African-American academic community,[citation needed] and some Afrocentrists reject those works which critics characterize as bad scholarship. But as Adisa A. Alkebulan notes, Afrocentric scholars are constantly hampered by the fact that critics use the claims of "a few non-Afrocentrists" as "an indictment against Afrocentricity."[24] "Eurocentrism" and the "American Cultural War"Stephen Howe understands the original "Hamitic Hypothesis" as “Eurocentric”. Howe starts part two of his book "Afrocentrism" with a summary of the Hamitic hypothesis. (p. 115) After he has summarized the hypothesis' development in the 19th and 20th century, he describes how some Afrocentric writers adopted 'their version' of it, and in this context he calls the original Hamitic hypothesis "Eurocentric". Howe also distinguishes 3 clusters of controversies surrounding ancient Egypt. About the third cluster he says, that these are "controversies which have been especially salient in relation to the United States, have interacted heavily with sensitive issues of current public policy, and involve questions both wide and fundamentally about the United States." (Howe, Afrocentrism, p. 2.) In the December 1996 issue of the Journal of American History:[25], August Meier describes "Not out of Africa: How Afrocentrism became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History" by Mary Lefkowitz as “Eurocentric”, because in his opinion Lefkowitz almost completely neglects the African-American literature of the 19th and 20th century. Meier believes she fails to take the African-American experiences into account, to the extent that she "fails to answer the question raised in this book's subtitle". Maghan Keita is more direct, and explains the controversy using the term cultural war. For Keita, there are certain "epistemologies" warring with each other, one of them is an "epistemology of blackness", which argues for the “responsibilities and potential of black peoples to function in and contribute to the progress of civilization.”[26] Eugene D. Genovese, in his work “The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War”,[27] states that the decadence within American society is not only the consequence of modern liberalism but its actual agenda, and that the cultural elites who control American campuses mean to destroy Western civilization (p. 132). Genovese attempts to demonstrate maltreatment of things and thoughts Southern by America’s cultural elite, and he links this to a concerted culture war of some sort. Radical AfrocentrismAccording 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 educationMain article: 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.[28] 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[2] 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.[29] Afrocentric theologyThe 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. "Africentric approaches" to Christian theology and Christian preaching have been more deliberate. Writers and thinkers emphasize "Black presence" in the Christian Bible, including the idea of a "Black Jesus".[30] "Africentric theology" is the cornerstone of the self-proclaimed identity of the Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, the former church of U.S. President Barack Obama. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor for more than 30 years, based his emphasis on James H. Cone's Black Theology & Black Power (1969).[31] Views on race and the Pan-African identitysee 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.[32] 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.[33] 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 [34] and Hassan [35] 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.[36] 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.[34] 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)[38] 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.[39] Some phenotypical similarities among Somalis and Eurasians exist at a higher structural level, such as orthognathism,[40] tooth size,[41] keen facial features and skull shape and size. According to anthropologist Loring Brace:
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.[43] 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 (or to some in recent years Turanians), and Europeans as Caucasians (or Aryans earlier in the 20th century). Afrocentrism has sometimes included Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean Hispanic peoples, although Latinos and Latin American culture is multiracial of European (Spanish) and indigenous American origins, in addition to the cultural African/Afro-Caribbean imprint. 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 Australia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. A few Afrocentrists claim that the Olmecs of Mexico were a hybrid society of Native American peoples and Africans, although mainstream historians of Mesoamerica reject that view with detailed rebuttals.[15] 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, indicating they are less closely related to each other than many groups considered to be separate races. 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.[citation needed] 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, as well as the fact that ultimately, all humans are descended from Africans. More qualified anthropologists, however, have contended modern man hasn't evolved solely in Africa, but the field goes by the oldest fossil remains from Africa. Pre-Columbian Africa-Americas contact theoriesMain article: 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. Van Sertima has been accused of "doctoring" and twisting data to fit his conclusions, inventing evidence, and ignoring the work of respected Central and South American scholars in the advance of his own theory,[15] and his claims are not taken seriously by mainstream scholars. Afrocentrism and Ancient EgyptMain article: Ancient Egyptian race controversy 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[44] such as the Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia.[45] 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. As noted above, many of these claims were refuted in the 1996 collection, Black Athena Revisited, edited by classical studies scholars Mary Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers.[13] DNA studies on modern Egyptians indicate significant gene in-flow from both sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, and 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. During the Dynastic period (3150 B.C.E. to 30 B.C.E.), Egyptians were significantly impacted by a series of major migrations into and out of Egypt. Libyans, Asiatics, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians and Greeks at various times conquered and intermingled with the Egyptian population. For much of the Dynastic period, Egyptian kings ruled Nubia, but in the 8th Century B.C.E. Nubian kings conquered most of Egypt and ruled it for almost a hundred years as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt.[46] Afrocentricists maintain that the color variation in Egypt is no different than that found in modern black or negroid people. As shown by a sacred text from Dynastic times called the Book of Gates (usually carved and/or painted inside tombs for the guidance of deceased souls), the Ancient Egyptians were themselves conscious of ethnicity and distinguished their race from others—including the Nubians to the south. The chapter dealing with the Fifth Division of the Tuat notes four different groups of men:[47][48][49] As the picture suggests, the Egyptians are themselves a dark skinned race, although not as dark as the Nubians. In this context, it is understandable to view them as one branch of a diverse background of black people, not much different than modern black people who also demonstrate a range of colors.
Human evolutionEvolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller states about Afrocentrism:
List of prominent authors
See also
Notes
References
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