The pathway to the creation of the first doctorate program in African American Studies at Temple University was not straightforward, direct, or immediate from conceptualization to execution. It had begun as an idea, an idea only, while I was sitting in either Boniface Obichere’s, Ronald Takaki’s or Gary Nash’s history class at the University of California, Los Angeles, nearly twenty years earlier, listening to lectures on the nature of the African presence in America.  What if there could be an entire department devoted to the study of this phenomenon?  What if a university could create a school that would explore every facet of the  African story of civilization, from the earliest of times to the present?  These were questions for daydreaming, but what was not a question for dreams was the telling of the African story in America. I always believed and knew that such a story would have to be told from the African perspective because if people told it from any other perspective it would not be the African’s story.  At that time, the late l960s it was difficult to hear the authentic voice of the most numerically significant ethnic presence in America. This was prior to the creation of Black Studies departments and most African American history classes. The idea was a kernel of energizing agency in my mind. Studying the colonial history of America in preparation for my dissertation and asking where are the Africans had catapulted me forward. 

Molefi Kete Asante   

Molefi Kete Asante   

Encarta Africana 2000 is an improved version of the project undertaken by Professors Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah to capture African American history and culture. Encarta Africana 2000 reflects substantive changes to content, design and format and represents a remarkable advance in conceptualizing the African and African American experience . 

Yesterday I participated as Nana Okru Asante Peasah, the Kyidomhene of Tafo, in the awesome celebration of the New Yams in the sacred grove of the Birim River. Now it is the morning of another day and the dull gray sky of the rainy season covers the beautiful hill city of Kumasi like a warm humid blanket. Here in the African rain forest I am reading for the third time Manthia Diawara's In Search of Africa. Diawara is a gifted technician in the postmodern sense and the book keeps my attention though, as he admits, the organization is challenging. Quite frankly there are entire sections that could have been edited out like the piece on Superfly and Shaft without any loss to the main points in the book.  

There are certain premises and positions that have become untenable by virtue of the Afrocentric intervention into social sciences and humanities. Afrocentrists have opened doors to historical research that have been long held shut by Eurocentric orientations to phenomena. For instance, in ancient historiography few scholars are now willing to take ancient Egypt out of Africa as Hegel, Breasted, and Maspero tried to do in the l9th and early part of the 20th century.[1] No serious researcher would claim, as Toynbee did, that Africa produced no civilizations.[2] Almost no one would argue the positions advanced by Fage concerning African people.[3]  While a few whites can still be found who preach the inferiority of Africans, almost no scholar would be foolhardy enough to suggest that whites are biologically superior to blacks. In fact, I have witnessed a remarkable change in attitude on the part of many white scholars who are now following the tradition of Afrocentrists in their examination of phenomena by taking into greater consideration oral traditions, centered analysis, human similarities, and locational analysis, spheres previously examined mainly by Afrocentrists. 

Molefi Kete Asante   

We have finally arrived at a cultural junction where several critical avenues present themselves to the serious textual reader. Any fair estimate of the road that got us to this point must conclude that it has been a difficult one, filled with intellectual potholes and myopic cultural roadblocks, but at last there is an Afrocentric viewpoint on texts. This view has been developed on the basis of works by scholars such as Houston Baker, Abu Abarry, Carol Aisha Blackshire, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Trudier Harris in recent years. There seems to be a growing number of writers who have abandoned or are attempting to abandon the staid domains of an encapsulated theory. 

Molefi Kete Asante  

The general revolution that brought into the world reality the capitalist mode of thinking and the concomitant Western triumphalism created, inter alia, a racialist location of almost every institution. Any quick reading of the past five hundred years will demonstrate to the most uninformed reader that the accumulation of wealth by the West and the concomitant commodification of everything from sex to religion has left the world spiritually poorer. Actually the West has also commodified its own color so that whiteness is bought and sold as a property. In Brazil, for a long time the soccer hero Pele was considered white and in the previous regime of South Africa, a person of Japanese background or a visiting African American serving the United States government could also be white. The only reason for this situation was the investing of whiteness with the inauthentic significance of better than or superior to. Of course, this had neither reality in history nor in fact, it was simply a fictionalized version of self glorification.  

Molefi Kete Asante  

We have all been there before, it is too much a part of the history of this country that politics and racism cause a temporary loss of balance. The mad dash of the Republican majority to send articles of impeachment to the full House of Representatives for a vote and the eventual vote by the Senate, for or against President Bill Clinton, is reminiscent of too many periods in African American history where similar hysteria caused African Americans to lose freedom and indeed lives.  

Professor Molefi Kete Asante  
"THE ROUTE OF THE SLAVES"   
Sponsored by UNESCO, LISBON, PORTUGAL   
DECEMBER 9-12 1998  

Mr. President M'Bow, Dr. Doudou Diene, Madame Coordinator Henriques, permit me in the name of my ancestors and by the spirit of their legacies to simply say that it is not racial difference that has been a problem in discovering the ideological basis of the enslavement of Africans, but rather the idea of racial hierarchy, developed, refined and disseminated by Europeans who prosecuted the slave trade for three centuries. All of us here are aware that the magnitude of the European forced migration of enslaved Africans has no peer in history (Haywood, l985). In its extraordinary reach into another continent and its equally overcoming of horrendous obstacles on land and the high seas, the European enterprise dwarfed all other examples of similar social and economic constructions. The sea, more daunting in ways, than the desert, made the journey far more perilous than any other forced migration of peoples. Yet it is also true that the magnitude of the so-called "trade" must be measured in terms of the multiplicity of legacies, historical and contemporary, that it created. In the wake of the most mammoth forced movement of people over a period of centuries we see the very beginnings of the modern world, and indeed, the post modern world, is in effect, a creation of the same legacies (Tracy, l990).  

In one instance the spread of Africans and Europeans to continents other than Europe and Africa helped to produce a world order that has reigned supreme in technology, science, economics, law, and sociology for five hundred years. It was, however, a racist construction created out of stolen land, broken treaties, stolen labor and broken backs. Any interpretation of the post modern views of the present world has to take into consideration that the entire discourse on the fluidity of cultures, the notion of subjective identities, the instability of social and cultural space, and the interaction and interpenetration of peoples is a direct result of the most massive forced movement of people the world has ever known (Cohen, l982). It becomes impossible to speak of the Americas or Caribbean without Africans or indeed Europe without Africa. One cannot speak intelligently about Portugal and its history without Brazil or without Angola and Mozambique; this is an incredibly interconnected historical moment.  

---

 

---

---

main page | books | new releases | reviews | articles | enstoolment | tafo | ankh | tours | products | news | links 

---

RALPH ELLISON AND CULTURAL KNOWLEDGE 

Molefi Kete Asante  

I have often reflected on how I came to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man while I was in high school at Nashville Christian Institute. It was about the same time my Aunt Georgia gave me Dickens' stories as a Christmas gift that I found in our little library Ellison's big book. What fascinated me about the book was its size, after all, I had never seen a book written by a black person. I did not read the book in its entirety at that time, I must have been fourteen or so when I came to the book. Later, I would read it and read it again; such was the power of Ellison's prose.  

Molefi Kete Asante  

African Americans constitute the largest non-European racial group in the United States of America. Africans came to the area which became the United States in the 16^th century with the Spaniards. However, the first appearance of groups of Africans in the English colonies of America occurred in 1619 when twenty Africans were brought as indentured servants to Jamestown, Virginia. Subsequent importations of Africans from Western Africa stretching from Morocco on the north to Angola on the south over a period of two hundred years greatly increased the African population in the United States. By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the population of Africans in the United States had reached four and a half million.  

Molefi Kete Asante  

There is a unique situation that now confronts South Africa in the educational arena, one that should never return to confront any society. Institutions that were based on white supremacy, not simple the separation of races, are being challenged to find relevance within a free, democratic South Africa. It is particularly important that educational officials in South Africa raise the fundamental questions of culture, perspective, worldview, and interpretation in the discussion of facts. While all of these ideas are difficult to track in a multifaceted world and in a pluralistic society one thing must be clear and that is the demand for relevance in education is not so much a demand for fitting people to jobs as it is for fitting them to life. Given the latter opportunity people will create their own jobs and find their way in the larger world based on their solid foundation in their own culture, perspective, or worldview. I am interested in this essay in the university because at the level of the university one does not only find training going on but also the production of knowledge, the creation of concepts, the promotion of ideas, and the institutionalization of worldviews. The implications for an educational system that has depended upon the white supremacist political structure for its sustenance intellectually and economically are great. In the first place there will be resistance to change particularly if it is change that will create a more open university and bring ideas and information from other parts of the world. Obviously the South African whites were confident that they could create an educational system that isolated them from the rest of the world in terms of human knowledge while at the same time further isolating the black majority from interactions with other African cultures, the African diaspora, the African past, and the revolutionary movements of the world. The university, normally an institution of intellectual and artistic contact, became a bastion of the same white privilege that cloaked the rest of the nation. 

Molefi Kete Asante  

Human changes are not only suggested in association with freedom, they are essential to all of our liberty. Freedom is indivisible. If we want it for ourselves then we must treasure it for others. In this way we protect freedom for all. Whereever in the earth enslavement exists it must be eradicated, that must be our cry as we look towards an earth free of intolerance, prejudice, racism, and ethnic animosities.  

We are increasingly confronted with two problems: (1) assuring self determination and (2) protecting minority rights. Both of these problems are solvable within the framework of classical African cultures. There is no reason for a person or a group of people, that is, ethnic group or national group to assume that the society is exclusively theirs. 

Molefi Kete Asante  

In the Afrocentric view the problem of cultural location takes precedence over the topic or the data under consideration. The argument is that Africans have been moved off of social, political, philosophical, and economic terms for half a millenium.  Consequently it becomes necessary to examine all data from the standpoint of Africans as subjects, human agents, rather than as objects in a European frame of reference. Of course, this means that Afrocentricity has implications for intellectual, social, and artistic fields as different as dance, architecture, social work, literature, politics, and psychology. Here the motifs of locations and constituents of centeredness or de-centeredness become important. The architect who understand the significance of having buildings or homes constructed on the basis of African culture and behavior. 

Molefi Kete Asante  

As we move to the turn of the century and the next millenium we have turned our attention to questions of diversity, pluralism, difference, differance, ethnicity, gender, and cultural location as never before. Ethnic, racial, and cultural consciousness have flooded the plains of our social life. We are victims of the new awareness. This has led some individuals to proclaim that there is a new tribalization. This is, of course, an exxageration but it does suggest apprehension, alarm, and fear. The rise of hostility, aggressive language, and epithets has produced a rush for explanation. 

Molefi Kete Asante  

I am appalled at the level of ignorance, particularly historical ignorance, that often sits at the very door of the minds of critics like Appiah. The ancient Egyptians were African and black-skinned people, full stop. The evidence for this claim is overwhelming and one has to have accepted the entire corpus of Eurocentric writing without question to dispute it. But alas, to debate Appiah on this question is rather useless since he is not interested in the area of scholarship that would enlighten him on this subject. Let it be said simply, that the evidence of the blackness of the ancient Egyptians has been proven by science, linguistics, and literature.

Molefi Kete Asante  

Afro-Germans must confront the problem of color and the problem of blood. Social dislocation is sometimes experienced by Afro-Germans because of their color and historical origin. Often because they are easy to identify by their complexion the Afro-Germans are marginalized socially if not discriminated against outright as the African American might be in the United States. However, in the German society and in German literature it is the fact of the presence of African blood that makes the Afro-German not-German. How can a person who is not `totally German' be German? This becomes the issue with the majority of German people. To ask such a question in the context of the United States of America would take an entirely different direction. Indeed, one would have to deal with a different set of historical and territorial facts. You could not get very far with an analysis in the United States by asking, How can a person who is not `totally American' be American? The reason for this resides in the fact that the nationality of American does not reside in blood, but in national allegiance. Even those persons born into an American citizenship but whose cultural or biological origins may be Chinese or Japanese or Yoruba or English are not linked to other Americans by blood or genes but by common acceptance of the citizenship bestowed by virtue of one's birth or allegiance. All Americans, other than the indigenous people, are relative newcomers to this land and can claim no special privileges based on anteriority. In no way, therefore, can the idea of Americanism be applied to the situation of the Afro-German and Germanism. 

Molefi Kete Asante  

Harold Cruse ia arguably one of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century. Among African American intellectuals he is almost in a class by himself, centered in his own cultural history, steeped in the traditions of activism, and committed to social, economic, and cultural justice. His insights into the dilemmas of African Americans in this country are so fluid as to be one with the best interests of the African American community. Perhaps in our history no social critic, and that is what he called himself, could ever be more organic to the conditions of the people than Cruse.

Molefi Kete Asante  

The fact that the white media once again has glorified a book that is the direct results of the impact of white supremacy on an erstwhile victim shows the bizarre nature of racism in America. A black journalist, Keith Richburg, has written a book, Out of America, which is a sad testimony of an individual who is caught in the spiral of psychic pain produced by what Frantz Fanon and Robert C. Smith call "internal inferiorization." Richburg sees Africans as his enemies and this is the beginning of his problem.

Molefi Kete Asante  

In the end I have asked myself, what is Professor Lefkowitz' point, why does she see the need to challenge Bernal, James, Diop, or to question my integrity? She states very clearly that her project is about sustaining the American myth of European triumphalism.

Molefi Kete Asante  

So, in the end, I would say, yes, whites can teach African American history but a more acute question is, are whites willing to make the necessary commitment to teach accurately and Afrocentrically? Only when we are able to answer in the affirmative to the preceding question can we really answer the question of "should" whites teach African American history.

Molefi Kete Asante  

Mr. President:  

On this day June 30, 1997 I end my stint, a fairly long one, as Chair of the Department of African American Studies and I thought it useful for me to address this end of term report to you since it was my meeting with you that convinced me that I should come to Temple. I have never regretted my appointment to the faculty here and I intend to remain active in every aspect of the campus.