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A New Pan-African Column
By Molefi Kete Asante
(First Published in City Press, April, 2004)
Afrocentricity means taking yourself
seriously as a factor in history. You really are somebody. Every
moment of your life is a moment in history. Often we cannot see
the making of our own history because we are in the story. We are
too close to it. Sometimes it takes years for people to look back
and say, “Thami or Siziwe made a difference in the community.”
Yet what is necessary is for every
African person to assume responsibility. Prior to the coming of
the whites to Africa, no black people waited for whites to do anything.
Every man and woman assumed his or her role and went about doing
the things that were necessary to establish and maintain community.
We may have been temporarily pushed off of our family and cultural
positions, but de-centeredness is not a permanent condition. The
fact that people can shove you off a tree stump does not mean that
you have to remain off. You can certainly regain your place.
We have never been less capable
than any other people although that has been the propaganda that
has stunted too much of our growth.
What would be the reason for the
incessant propaganda against Africa? Could it be that there was
fear on the part of Europe to expose readers to the truth about
world history? After all, human beings originated on this continent
and civilization spread from here to other continents. Indeed, human
civilization, emerging when the first humans decided what was proper
to eat and what was not, how to live in society without killing
each other, and how to shelter humans from the environment. It is
an African legacy. This is not a gloat; it is merely a historical
fact.
It was unlikely that people who
had enslaved Africans from the 15th to the 19th century, who had
sought to capture an entire continent in the name of their god,
and who had constantly looked down upon African achievements, would
become preachers of goodwill for African culture and history. It
would be something that we would have to do ourselves.
So now in the 21st century when Africans are no longer colonized
on the continent or enslaved in the Americas or Caribbean and when
we are free to explore and interrogate all of our history, the good
and the bad, the beautiful and the unseemly, we find that the legacies
of old are far deeper than we were led to believe by those who poisoned
our minds against the elders.
Our inheritance is rich, powerful,
and magnificent, in material and spiritual terms. The first books
of mathematics were produced right here on the African continent,
not in America, Asia, or Europe.
The Rhind papyrus, an African mathematical
scroll of 6 meters length and 1/3 meter wide, is unfortunately named
after Alexander Henry Rhind who purchased it in Egypt in 1858. It
is more properly the Ahmes papyrus, in honour of the Egyptian scribe
who copied it from another papyrus that was written around 2000
years before Christ.
It should never have been called
the Rhind papyrus, but neither should Musi wa Tunya have been called
Victoria Falls. Now kept in the British Museum, the Ahmes papyrus
is the oldest mathematical document ever found. The papyrus contains
a series of numerical tables and 84 mathematical problems and their
solutions.
The papyrus and other old mathematical
documents are important to us as they allow present day mathematicians
to build on what Africans were doing centuries ago. African mathematicians
should always honour the early mathematicians who figured out how
to build pyramids centuries before the existence of a Greek civilization.
Because Europe colonized information
about African history many people in South Africa cannot see that
they are on the same continent occupied by ancient Egyptians. The
ancient Egyptians were Africans. They were not Asians. They were
not Europeans. They were not Americans. They lived like other Africans
along the banks of the river Nile and did African things everyday,
including calculating the rate at which the river would rise. They
had to do this in order to prevent catastrophic damage from flooding.
No people on any continent have
been any nobler than Africans. The extent of the contributions and
achievements of Africans at home and abroad has been mind-boggling.
One aim of the old, failed education
policy was to keep us ignorant of our own history. We know so well
now that slaves are not born, they are made.
The way to make a slave is to first
steal a person’s memory so that he does not have any thought
of ancestors, philosophies, remedies, methods, and attitudes of
the past. It is like going into someone backyard and taking their
best vegetables or most delicious fruits and then asking them to
explain why they do not have any fruits or vegetables to cook.
Africa was robbed. This was not
just a robbery of land, though there was lots of that going on all
over the continent. The fact of the matter is that Europe robbed
Africans of their minds. Professor Ama Mazama, the Sorbonne-trained
Afrocentrist from Guadeloupe, who teaches at Temple University in
Philadelphia, often says, “They stole our lands and then turned
around and stole information about our lands.” Do you ever
wonder why a European is often cited as the authority on this or
that African ethnic group? Wait a minute, how did he come to learn
what he knows about Africans without Africans telling him? Who are
these Africans? Where are their names in the history books?
I hope to introduce you to South
African and African figures in history as a way to encourage discourse
around our own accountability to our history. A famous German professor
named Hegel once said to his European counterparts, “Let us
forget Africa, never to return to it.” However, we will neither
forget Africa nor our ancestors on the pages of “Afro-central.”
This column will put you and Africa right in the middle of everything,
just as it happened.
Think of it, if you are an agent,
that is, an actor rather than a spectator in your own history, you
will want to learn as much as you can about yourself and African
history. Take your time and read these pages, discuss them with
your friends and family, and write letters to the editor about issues
you would like for me to write about in future columns, but for
now, go out and live Afrocentrically.
Molefi Kete Asante is one of the
most published contemporary scholars, having written more than fifty
books and three hundred articles.
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