Selected Scholarly Papers

Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in the World

by Molefi Kete Asante

Africa has been betrayed by international commerce and trade.

Africa has been often betrayed by the new science of the genetics of food, and the unequal distribution of resources.

Africa has been betrayed by missionaries and imams who have called our own priests and priestesses false while holding up Africa’s enemies as our saviors.

Africa has been betrayed by education, the Academy, and the structure of knowledge imposed by the Western world

Africa has often been betrayed by its own leaders who have shown a talent for imitating the worst habits and behaviors of Europe.

Africa has often been betrayed by the ignorance of its own people of its past. Africans are, consequently, the most betrayed of contemporary humans.

People so often betrayed must take a serious look at their own approach to phenomena, to life, to existence, to knowledge. The betrayals do not have to continue, nor must we resign Africa to the trash heaps of history as some contemporary Africanists and non Africanists have claimed.

A continent and a people with such incredible potential can rise to meet any challenge, but our thoughts must become truly our own thoughts, separated from the enslaving thoughts of those who have sought racial domination. Of course, when I speak like this, I am speaking of Africa in the context and spirit of Marcus Garvey. I accept that the African world is not merely a geographical entity but a world entity whether by our own making or as is most probable by the making of the assaults and attacks and aggressions against African people. We are found in every continent and we occupy positions of influence in countries as widely separated as Brazil and the United Kingdom.

My aim is to help lay out a plan for the recovery of African place, respectability, accountability, and leadership.

The theme of this conference takes us to the very core of the future of human interaction by seeking to examine Western knowledge, its structure, its relationship to conquest and domination, and its prosecution as an instrument to retain a white racial hierarchy in the world.

We know that Africans have thought about the universe longer than any other people. The people of the world have been black longer than any other color.

In fact philosophy itself originated in Africa and the first philosophers in the world were Africans.

The African tradition is intertwined with the earliest thought.

Yet from the beginning of Europe’s interest in Africa the European writers referred to ancient African works as "Wisdom Literature," in an effort to negatively distinguish African thinking from European thinking. They could not conceive of Africans as having philosophy.

Philosophy was meant, in their minds, to indicate a kind of reflection that was possible only with the Greeks. They constructed a Greece that was miraculous, built on the foundation of a racial imagination that established a white European superiority in everything.

Since philosophy was seen during the neo-classical period of European history as the source of all other arts and sciences, philosophy was the chief discipline. They saw it in the context of Darwinism where even knowledge was structured hierarchically. Indeed, I still remember how in the southern United States, during my childhood, the whites prohibited Africans from operating large machinery because it was considered much too intellectual for blacks.

Numerous European writers glorified the achievements of the mind of the Greeks. A Greek stood at the door of every science in the European mind. There were no secrets that had not been discovered by the Greeks. They owed allegiances to no one. They were immaculate, without blemish, isolated from every other people as the standard by which the world was to be judged.

Whether in art or science, in sculptor or mathematics, in astronomy or literature, they had no equal and were without antecedents.

However, according to the tradition of Western thought, it was in philosophy that the Greeks excelled. As Theophile Obenga says, others may have had religion, stories, wise sayings, and wisdom literature but the Greeks had philosophy. This was the highest of all disciplines and it was only through the minds of whites that philosophy came to the world.

Yet we know that the word philosophy is not Greek, although it came through the Greeks to English and other European languages. Seba, wisdom, the ancient Mdw Ntr word is the earliest example of reflective thinking. In fact, on the tomb of Antef I, 2052 B.C. we see the first mention of wisdom.

The word sophia, wisdom in Greek, is derived from the more ancient word seba, the African word. To say in Greek "philo" is to say brother or lover. One normally says that a philosopher is "a lover of wisdom." But the ancient Africans had come to this understanding long before there was even a nation of Greeks.

Indeed the first serious thinkers or philosophers were not Greeks. This means that not only is the word philosophy not Greek, the practice of philosophy is not Greek, but African.

Thales who lived around 600 BC is usually thought of as the first Greek philosopher. Some claim that it was Pythagoras, who was a younger contemporary of Thales, but I claim, with most Greek scholars that it was Thales since he is said to have told a young Pythagoras "You must do as I have done and go to Egypt to learn philosophy from the Egyptians." Advice which Pythagoras followed and went to Egypt, spending twenty three years at the feet of such venerable African teachers as Wennofer.

There were several select places where various aspects of philosophy such as social ethics, natural laws, metaphysics, and medicine were taught. One could study at the Temple of Ptah at Men-nefer, at the Temple of Bast at Bubastis, at the Temple of Hatheru at Dendera, at the Ausarion at Abydos, at the Temple of Amen at Waset, at the Temple of Heru at Edfu, at the Temple of Ra at On, and the Temple of Auset at Philae. Indeed, scholars and others could assemble at scores of other sites from Siwa to Esna for intellectual discussion and discourse. No city,however, was as rich in temples and schools as Waset where the temples of Amenhotep III, Seti I, Nefertari, Hatshepsut, Tuthmoses III, Mentuhotep, and the Ramesseum were in full flourishing from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom period. Kemet, the ancient name of Egypt, was not without a considerable body of thought that had been amassed over many centuries. By the time the Greeks starting coming to Egypt as students in the 7th and 8th centuries the philosophers of Egypt had already created vast libraries of histories, science, politics, and religion.

Here along the Nile River Africans thought about the nature of the universe, the condition of good and evil, human relations, the administration of society, the character of the afterlife, the idea of beauty and the nature of the divine with intense reflection. I am not here interested on the impact Africa had on Europe or the influence that Kemet had on Greece. In fact I believe that it is time we wrest the study of early Africa from any comparison with Europe because Europe is not in the same league with its antiquity. We will become far more insightful about our own cultures as we gain deeper knowledge of our own societies in relationship to continuities, migrations, land tenure philosophy, family relationships, governance, writing styles and techniques, and the nature of morality in African terms.

Perhaps one day the names of the earliest philosophers will be as familiar to us as the names of the Greek philosophers are to us today. Why shouldn’t the world know the names of the philosophers who set the stage for human civilization?

Imhotep, 2700 BC, earliest personality recorded in history. Like the later personalities of Socrates and Jesus nothing of his writing remains, but we know that he understood volume and space, because he was the builder of the first pyramid, the Sakkara pyramid. He was the first philosopher, the first physician, the first architect, and the first counselor to a king recorded in history. The reports of his life and his work on the walls of temples and in papyri indicate the esteem in which he was held.

All these philosophers were hundreds of years before any Greek philosopher. Indeed, Homer, the first Greek to write something that was intelligible lived around 800 BC. But he was not a philosopher. He traveled and studied in Africa.

Now as an Afrocentrist I approach the construction of knowledge from the standpoint of Africans as agents in the world, actors, not simply the spectators to Europe. Since Afrocentricity constitutes a new way of examining data, a novel orientation to data, it carries with it assumptions about the current state of the African world. One assumes for example that Africans are frequently operating intellectually, philosophically, and culturally off of African terms and therefore are dislocated, detached, isolated, decentered, or disoriented. One assumes also that this state is useful economically and politically for the West and not so useful for Africa and Africans. There is, consequently, a difference in opinions about the value of Afrocentricity. Those who have kept us off center seek to improve their position on our intellectual and philosophical grounds by cutting the ground from under any movement that teaches Africans to view themselves as centered agents in the world, not marginals to Europe.

What are the issues that are so hotly debated by Stephen Howe in his book Afrocentrism or by the French reactionaries Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, Jean-Pierre Chretien and Claude-Helene Perrot in their attacks in the recently published Afrocentrismes. Of course, already I have responded to quite a lot of critics in my book, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism. But what is it that scares so many white scholars and many black white scholars? As a cultural configuration the Afrocentric idea is distinguished by five characteristics:

(1) an intense interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, motifs, rituals, and signs.

(2) a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any social, political, economic, or religious phenomenon with implications for questions of sex, gender, and class.

(3) a defense of African cultural elements as historically valid in the context of art, music, and literature.

(4) a celebration of "centeredness" and agency and a commitment to lexical refinement that eliminates pejoratives about Africans or other people.

(5) a powerful imperative from historical sources to revise the collective text of African people.

I am convinced that the constituent elements for our recentering are rooted in four general areas of inquiry:

But what are we up against in promoting a mature understanding of how knowledge is constructed in the West to encourage racism? Often we are up against strange and bleak careerists who are writing as if they are writing out of our experiences when, in fact, their aims are totally distinct from the recentering of Africans in a human place.

Periodically there appears a book that runs counter to the wisdom of experience in the African American community. Against Race by the sociologist Paul Gilroy is just such a book. Gilroy, a British scholar, who teaches at Yale University, made a reputation in the states with the postmodern work, The Black Atlantic. I see this book as a continuation of that work’s attempt to deconstruct the notion of African identity in the United States and elsewhere. Of course it runs squarely against the lived experiences of the African Americans. The history of discrimination against us in the West, whether the United States or the United Kingdom or other parts of the western world, is a history of assaulting our dignity because we are Africans or the descendants of Africans. This has little to do with whether or not we are on one side of the ocean or the other. Such false separations, particularly in the context of white racial hierarchy and domination, are nothing more than an acceptance of a white definition of blackness. I reject such a notion as an attempt to isolate Africans in the Americas from their brothers and sisters on the continent, and of course, to continue the separations of Africans in Britain from each other. It is as serious an assault and as misguided as the 1817 Philadelphia conference that argued that the blacks in the United States were not Africans but "colored Americans" and therefore should not return to Africa. To argue as Gilroy does that Africans in Britain and the United States are part of a "Black Atlantic" is to argue the "colored American" thesis all over again. It took us one hundred and fifty years to defeat the notion of the "colored American" in the United States and I will not stand idly by and see such misguided notion accepted as fact at this late date in our struggle to liberate our minds. We are victimized in the West by systems of thinking, structures of knowledge, ways of being, that take our Africanity as an indication of inferiority, something to be overcome. I see this position as questioning the humanity and the dignity of African people. Despite what looks like acceptance of Africans on a political level, it is racist at the core, because it is an acceptance of what whites find acceptable, that is, the idea that certain blacks are no longer Africans. The easiest and quickest way in the United States to assume that position is to say that "you never left anything in Africa" or "you are not an African nor a black but an American" or to say "Africa never did anything for me." You become immediately accepted as an honorary white.

It should be clear that Gilroy’s new book, Against Race is not a book against racism or racialism, as perhaps it ought to be, but a book against the idea of race as an organizing theme in human relations. It is somewhat like the idea offered a decade or more ago by the conservative critic, Anne Wortham in her reactionary work, The Other Side of Racism. Like Wortham, Gilroy argues that the African American spends too much time on collective events that constitute "race" consciousness and therefore participates in "militaristic" marches typified by the Million Man March and the Million Woman March, both of which were useless in his mind. The only person who could make such a statement had to be one who did not attend. Unable to see the awesome power of the collective construction of umoja within the context of a degenerate racist society, Gilroy prefers to stand on the sidelines and cast stones at the authentic players in the arena. This is a reactionary posture. So Against Race cannot be called an anti-racism book although it is anti-race, especially against the idea of black cultural identity whether constructed as race or as a collective national identity.

Let us be clear here, Against Race is not a book against all collective identities. There is no assault on Jewish identity, as a religious or cultural identity, nor is there an attack on French identity or Chinese identity as collective historical realities. There is no assault on the historically constructed identity of the Hindu Indian, nor on the white British. Nor should there be any such assault. But Gilroy, like others of this school, see the principal culprits as Afrocentrists who retain a complex love of African culture, consciousness of African ancestry, and belief in Pan Africanism. In Gilroy’s construction or lack of construction, there must be something wrong with African Americans because Africa remains in their minds as a place, a continent, a symbol, a reality of origin and source of the first step across the ocean when they are really not African. But Gilroy does not know what he is talking about here. This leads him to the wrong conclusions about the African American community. The relationship Africans in the Americas have with Africa is not of some mythical or a mystical place. We do not worship unabashedly at the doorsteps of the continent although we have an active engagement with all that it means. Are we always conscious of it? Of course not! You will not find all African Americans walking around the streets of Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles thinking about engaging Africa, yet we know almost instantly that when we are assaulted by police, denied venture capital or criticized for insisting on keeping Europe out of our consciousness without permission that Africa is at the center of our existential reality. We are most definitely African, though modern, contemporary, Africans domiciled in the West.

Actually Gilroy spends a considerable amount of time in this book explaining how race, a false concept, "is understood." He writes "Awareness of the indissoluble unity of all life at the level of genetic materials leads to a stronger sense of the particularity of our species as a whole, as well as to new anxieties that the character is being fundamentally and irrevocably altered" (p. 20). I do not know how Gilroy can move from this position to indict the African people as the carriers of this anxiety about "race," clearly a concept that was never promoted by African people in this country or on the continent. It is essentially an Anglo-Germanic notion, manufactured and disseminated to promote the distinctions between peoples and to establish a European hierarchy, as well as a hierarchy among Europeans themselves. We have no business with any kind of hierarchy; our business for this millennium is the recentering and reordering of the African world’s priorities based on a firm acceptance of Africa’s on role in securing the mutuality of the human destiny.

When a new generation looks upon us, may they look upon this generation of Africans with the pride that comes from knowing that there have been those who stood for truth and right when it was easier to melt into the crowd of turncoats. May that new generation take up the same battles and go from victory to victory until we wipe all forms of human degradation from the face of the earth.

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