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Afrocentrism is a worldview or perspective that is centered on Africa and blacks. Afrocentric scholars typically claim that Western accounts of world history and civilization have neglected or systematically denied the contributions of indigenous, black African peoples. The term "Afrocentrism" thus implies a perspective which is in diametric opposition to that of Eurocentrism. However, it also often functions to distinguish the influence in Africa of Arab, European and Asian peoples from indigenous African achievements. This particular emphasis on Africa is historically tied to black civil rights movements and anti-imperialist ideologies in America and the Caribbean. In modern America, it is associated with African-centred education policies that purport to be anti-racist.

Central to Afrocentrism is the fundamental reorientation of historical scholarship. Afrocentrism shifts the study and evaluation of world history and civilization from a traditionally Western, Eurocentric paradigm — that is, one which treats primarily white or European contributions and posits Greco-Roman beginnings of Western civilization — to one that treats primarily black Africa and black contributions and posits black Egyptian beginnings of Western civilization.

Egypt and the argument of African cultural unity

Afrocentrists claim that early dynastic Egypt was a black civilization. Geopolitical issues generally have caused Egypt to be considered part of the Middle East; however, geographically, the majority of dynastic Egypt, as is the modern-day nation, was located within the African continent. Afrocentrists argue that salient cultural characteristics of ancient dynastic Egypt are indigenous to Africa and that these features are present in other African civilizations. In addition, they believe the study of ancient Egyptian culture should emphasise connections to other early African civilizations such as Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia, as archaeology clearly indicates the interrelatedness of Nilotic cultures with dynastic Egypt. This is discussed at great length by Dr. Cheik Anta Diop and is identified as the cultural unity theory. Afrocentrists claim that these made important contributions to ancient Greek and Roman civilizations that traditionally have been either overlooked or appropriated by the West. The more common belief, however, is that ancient Egyptian civilization is more closely associated with the civilizations of the Mediterranean region and Fertile Crescent than with the rest of Africa.

Afrocentrism finds itself in direct opposition to the views of mainstream scholars such as British historian Arnold Toynbee, who regarded the ancient Egyptian cultural sphere as having died out without leaving a successor and who derided as a "myth" the idea that Egypt was the "origin of Western civilization." However, there are numerous accounts in the historical record dating back several centuries wherein scholars have written of Egypt's contributions to Mediterranean civilizations and of black-skinned, "Negroid" Egyptians. More recently, Afrocentrism has found sympathetic readings from mainstream scholars such as Martin Bernal.

Afrocentrism has been charged by one prominent critic as being "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic." Afrocentrists, however, level similar charges at what they perceive as a pronounced Eurocentrism in mainstream historical works, countering that the Afrocentrist approach merely attempts to set the historical record straight by overturning a false paradigm, the basis of which is scholarship often slanted by conscious or unconscious racist attitudes.

History of Afrocentrism

The beginnings of Afrocentric scholarship can be found in the work of African-American and Caribbean intellectuals early in the twentieth century. Publications such as The Crisis and the Journal of Negro History sought to counter the prevailing view in the West that Africa had contributed nothing to human cultural history that was not the result of incursions by Europeans and Arabs. These journals sought to stress the blackness of some Egyptian pharaohs and to investigate Sub-Saharan African history. The editor of The Crisis W.E.B. DuBois went on to research West African culture and to attempt to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. DuBois later became editor of the Encyclopedia Africana. Some aspects of DuBois's approach is evidenced in the work of the Senegalese anthopologist Cheikh Anta Diop, who claimed to have identified a pan-African language and to have proved that ancient Egyptians were indeed black-skinned.

However, Diop also drew on the ideas of George M. James, a follower of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who emphasised the importance of Ethiopia as a great black civilization and who argued that black peoples should develop pride in African history. James's book Stolen Legacy (1954) is often cited as one of the foundational texts of modern Afrocentrism. James claimed that Greek philosophy was "stolen" from Ancient Egyptian mystery traditions and that these had developed from distinctively African cultural roots. For James, the works of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers were in fact poor synopses of some aspects of Ancient Egyptian wisdom. The Greeks were violent and quarrelsome people, unlike the Egyptians, and were not naturally capable of philosophy.

These ideas were not wholly new, but date back to eighteenth century Masonic texts that drew on ancient writings that claimed Greek thinkers studied in Egypt. The poet William Blake had also attacked "the stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero," asserting that they were copies of more ancient Semitic wisdom. Such views were associated with radical and Romantic thought that rejected classical Greco-Roman culture as the model for civilization. James's distinct contribution was to tie these claims to an opposition between white European and black African identity, associating these alleged ancient appropriations of black wisdom with white imperialist exploitation of black peoples and thefts of artifacts from black African cultures. By claiming that the Greeks were barbaric and were innately incapable of philosophy, he also inverted normative imperialist racial hierarchies, which made the same claims about black Africans.

James's approach was copied by a number of other writers and has had an influence on many books that claim to prove that black Africans originated intellectual or technological achievements that were later claimed by whites. Some of these books are not considered to be serious scholarship. However, several later writers have abandoned James's more extreme claims to concentrate on the notion that modern black peoples should center their understanding of culture and history on Africa. Molefi Kete Asante's book Afrocentricity (1988) directly connected Afrocentrism to radical black civil-rights politics, arguing that African Americans should look to African cultures "as a critical corrective to a displaced agency among Africans."

Other authors have adapted James's assertion that Egyptian culture's influence on the Greeks has been underestimated. Among such scholars the most influential is Martin Bernal, whose book Black Athena stressed influence of what he called Afroasiatic and Semitic civilizations on the classical ones. Yet other writers have abandoned the claim that Europeans stole African culture, but concentrate on the study of indigenous African civilizations and peoples as a corrective to emphasis on European and Arab influence on the continent. Such Afrocentric scholars maintain that a paradigm shift from a view of world history centered around European accomplishments and racist assumptions about other peoples and cultures to one that emphasizes the black beginnings of humankind and black contributions to world history, would result in significant attitudinal shifts in the West and elsewhere. Indeed, many claim that a dramatic shift has already occurred. This, then, they argue, challenges the Eurocentric view of world history which for so many centuries devalued and appropriated, or simply ignored achievements by blacks.

Criticisms of Afrocentrism

Critics of Afrocentrism counter that much historical Afrocentric research simply lacks scientific merit and that it actually seeks to supplant and counter one form of racism with another, rather than attempt to arrive at the truth. Among scholarly critics, Mary Lefkowitz's Not out of Africa is widely regarded as the foremost critical work. In it, she contends Afrocentric historical claims are grounded in identity politics and myth rather than sound scholarship. Like most other classical scholars, she rejects James's views on the ground that his sources predate the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Actual ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. She also contends that Bernal underestimates the distinctiveness of Greek intellectual culture. Asante, however, disputes her conclusions.

Afrocentrists tend to emphasise the racial and cultural unity of Africa as a whole as the home of black, or Africoid, peoples. However, critics assert that Afrocentrism relies on a projection of modern racial and geographical categories onto ancient cultures in which they simply did not exist. It is argued that in ancient Western culture, the distinction between Europe and Africa was not as important as the notion that civilized peoples encircled the Mediterranean sea. The farther from the Mediterranean they were, the more alien they were considered to be. This applied to all peoples. The equation of "African" with black identity has also been criticized, partly because movement of populations around the Mediterranean in ancient times makes any rigid distinctions among North African, Asian, and European peoples of the area problematic; and partly because the notion of a unified "black" or Negroid race is itself considered to be unsustainable by many modern geneticists. Further, Diop's claim to have discovered a pan-African proto-language is rejected by almost all linguists.

People think of themselves as belonging to races defined by skin color and physiognomy and link this to their ancestry. One of the impacts of this is that historical achievements are ascribed to races with which modern peoples identify themselves. Others insist that this approach violates the fundamental demand of history as a discipline, which should aspire to understand events as they occurred, not as they affect the self-esteem of modern people.

Afrocentrists, however, contend that race as a social and political construct still exists. They argue that the racist untruths propounded for centuries– that blacks had no civilization, no written language, no culture and no history of any note before coming into contact with Europeans– make the racial identity of ancient Egypt an important issue. Further, such lies have been applied to a particular, broad category of humanity based on the same "racial" phenotype and lineages used by Afrocentrists in refuting such myths. However artificial and discredited a construct, the matter of race became an important and enduring issue, Afrocentrists argue, when whites and others pronounced an entire segment of humanity inherently inferior on the basis of it. Further, such biases persist today. As a result, Afrocentrists contend, it is important to set the historical record straight within the context in which the history of human civilizations heretofore has been framed, taught and studied— and that is the context of race.

Crucial to this aspect of the debate are arguments about whether the ancient Egyptians reasonably can be considered to have been black and the extent of significant cultural or racial links between sub-Saharan and nonblack North African peoples.

Egypt and black identity

Many Afrocentrists insist that ancient Egyptians were black African peoples, often emphasising that this black identity was strongest in early Egyptian history, but waxed and waned over time.

This issue is very controversial and is covered in Controversy over race of Ancient Egyptians

Black-centered history and Africa

The relationship among racial, cultural and continental identities is one of the more difficult problems in Afrocentic thought. Despite the problems with a Eurocentric approach to history, there has been a common European cultural identity for many centuries. It is more difficult to make the same claim for Africa, in which diverse cultures often were unaware of one another's existence. For this reason, some Afrocentrists have been accused of manufacturing "African" cultural values by cherry-picking from wholly different peoples.

In other instances, the concept of black racial identity has been used to include among "African" peoples populations generally thought of as non-Africans, such as the Australoid (sometimes called "Veddoid") peoples of Australia and New Guinea and the Tamils (also called Dravidians) of India and the people of the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Also included in the African diaspora are the "Negritos") of the Far East (Thailand, Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia); the Africoid, aboriginal peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia andPolynesia; and, speculatively, the Olmecs of what is now Mexico. Afrocentrists who adopt this approach contend that such peoples are African in a racial sense, just as the white inhabitants of Australia may be said to be European. Critics would argue that such peoples were not recent emigrants from Africa, and the entire population of the world might just as reasonably be considered part of an African race according to the Out of Africa model of human migration. Studies show that these darker-skinned ethic groups— with the exception, of course, of the Olmecs— and "Mongoloid" East Asians are genetically closer to one another than they are to indigenous Africans. However, Afrocentrists point out that such genetic similarities are due to the fact that the aboriginal peoples of Asia were Africoid Negritos and Australoid types, who later mixed and developed in isolation with populations of the eventually more dominant Mongoloid phenotype over time. This fact, they contend, does not change the fundamental black racial identity of these peoples based on the traditional metrics of the classic "Negroid" phenotype, physical similarities with other peoples classified as Negroid and presumptive patterns of prehistoric migrations. In such matters, Afrocentrists adopt the pan-Africanist perspective that such peoples are all "African people" or "diasporic Africans." As Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes, they are all part of the "global African community."

In 2002, geneticist Spencer Wells completed a study of human out-migrations from Africa utilizing the DNA of San Bushmen of the Kalahari who, according to Wells, have the oldest human DNA on earth. Wells concluded from analysis of DNA specimens that the earliest human emigration from Africa of which there is definitive proof was that of San Bushmen to southern India (the modern Tamils, also known as "Dravidians") and then along coastal routes to Australia (the Aborigines), while shortly afterwards a second migration from Africa, also by San Bushmen, reached Central Asia, and thence covered most of the Eurasian continent.

The single origin hypothesis (also known as the "Out of Africa" hypothesis) posits that the Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, later migrating and populating other continents, out-competing other related species such as that exemplified by Java man. The details of this migration remain open to study. Other hypotheses suggest more complicated patterns of migration, evolution, and interbreeding of various subspecies. In all currently accepted scientific models, Africa plays a major role in the biological evolution and peopling of the world.

A different world-view

Afrocentrists argue that the approaches of mainstream scholars and historians, as well as what they consider to be the attendant appropriation or "whitewashing" of black history, make the study of world history with new eyes an important undertaking. It is in this sense that the Afrocentrist paradigm legitimately may be considered to be "therapeutic." That is not to say, however, that it is necessarily, as Lefkowitz has charged, "an excuse to teach myth as history."

While their findings may be sometimes tentative and often controversial, Afrocentrist scholars do not approach Afrocentrism as artful storytelling or pseudo-social science. It is neither fiction nor mere sophistry. In their eyes, Afrocentrism is a critical, historiographical approach to history, based on a weltanschauung which is fundamentally and radically different from that of many of their relatively recent, mainstream predecessors; but which harkens back to an earlier view of the history of world civilizations. It is the examination and analysis of existing scholarship, as well as the study of the original historical record itself, grounded in scholarly inquiry and rigorous research.

List of notable Afrocentric historians

• Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, professor, author: Afrocentricity: The theory of Social Change; The Afrocentric Idea; The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten
• Dr. Ishakamusa Barashango, college professor and lecturer; founder, Temple of the Black Messiah, School of History and Religion; co-founder and creative director, Fourth Dynasty Publishing Company, Silver Spring, Maryland
• Dr. Jacob Carruthers, Egyptologist; founding director of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization; founder and director of the Kemetic Institute, Chicago
• Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop,, author: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology; Precolonial Black Africa; The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity; The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script
• Dr. H.B. ("Barry") Fell, Harvard professor, linguist, author: Saga America, 1980
• Drusilla Dunjee Houston, lecturer, syndicated columnist, author: Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, 1926.
• Dr. Yosef Ben-Jochannan, author: African Origins of Major "Western Religions"; Black Man of the Nile and His Family; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; New Dimensions in African History; The Myth of Exodus and Genesis and the Exclusion of Their African Origins; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; Abu Simbel to Ghizeh: A Guide Book and Manual
• Dr. Runoko Rashidi, author: Introduction to African Civilizations; The global African community: The African presence in Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific
• J.A. Rogers, author: Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands : The Old World; Nature Knows No Color Line; Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas : The New World; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro
• Dr. Ivan van Sertima, author: They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient Amerca, African Presence in Early Europe; Blacks in Science Acient and Modern; African Presence in Early Asia; African Presence in Early America; Early America Revisited; Egypt Revisited: Journal of African Civilizations; Nile Valley Civilizations; Egypt: Child of Africa (Journal of African Civilizations, V. 12); The Golden Age of the Moor (Journal of African Civilizations, Vol. 11, Fall 1991); Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern; Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop
• Dr. Chancellor Williams, author: The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
• Dr. Théophile Obenga, author: Ancient Egypt and Black Africa : a student's handbook for the study of Ancient Egypt in philosophy, linguistics, and gender relations
• Dr. Asa Hilliard, III, author: SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind; The Teachings of Ptahhotep

Related topics

• Afro-asiatic languages
• Afrocentricity
• Axum
• Black Athena
• Cultural appropriation
• Egyptology
• Eurocentrism
• Great Zimbabwe
• Historiography
• History of Ancient Egypt
• Kush
• Meroe
• Nilotic
• Nubia
• Tutankhamun

External links

• African by Nature Presents Your Eyes, an examination of black African identity vs. Europeanized images of Egypt
• Afrocentrism from The Skeptic's Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll
• Ancient Nubia & Egypt Summary of Cheikh Anta Diop's Work (in French) La Nubie et L'Egypte Ancienne dans leurs Contexte Naturel Negro-Africain
• Afrocentrism: The Argument We're Really Having by Ibrahim Sundiata
• Afrocentrism in Rastafari
• Afrocentrist multicultural pseudo-history by The Association for Rational Thought
• Building Bridges to Afrocentrism by Ann Macy Roth, for the University of Pennsylvania's African Studies Center
• "The Egyptians: Who Were They?"
• "Egyptology: Hanging in the Hair," by Anu M'bantu and Fari Supia, West Africa Magazine, July 8, 2001
• Ex Africa Lux? by T. A. Schmitz (PDF)
• Fallacies of Afrocentrism by Grover Furr, for the Montclair State University
• "The Global African Presence," by Runoko Rashidi
• "Negro History and The Myth of Ham's Curse," by Babu G. Ranganathan (an East Indian writes of the black identity of ancient Egypt, India, etc.)
• "Not Out Of Africa Excerpt," by Mary Lefkowitz
• Pride and prejudice By Dinesh D'Souza
• "Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa," by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, a critical assessment of Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa.
• Racism and the Rediscovery of Ancient Nubia
• "Return to Glory," The Freeman Institute
• Safari Scholarship Reinvents History by Ilana Mercer
• UC Davis History Professor Clarence Walker's take on Afrocentrism

References

• Asante, Molefi Kete. Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge. Africa World Press, 1990).

• Bailey, Randall C (ed.). Yet with a steady beat: contemporary U.S. Afrocentric biblical interpretation (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003).

• Berlinerblau, Jacques. Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (Rutgers University Press, 1999)

• Binder, Amy J. Contentious curricula : Afrocentrism and creationism in American public schools (Princeton University Press, 2002).

• Browder, Anthony T. Nile Valley Contributions To Civilization: Exploding the Myths, Volume 1. (Washington, DC: Institute of Karmic Guidance, 1992).

• Crawford, Clinton. Recasting Ancient Egypt In The African Context: Toward A Model Curriculum Using Art And Language. (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1996.

• Henderson, Errol Anthony. Afrocentrism and world politics: towards a new paradigm (Praeger, Westport, Conn., 1995).

• Henke, Holger and Reno, Fred (eds.). Modern political culture in the Caribbean (University of the West Indies Press, 2003).

• Howe, Stephen. Afrocentrism: mythical pasts and imagined homes (Verso, London, 1998).

• Houston, Drusilla Dunjee. Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (Universal Publishing Co.: Oklahoma City, 1926).

• Kershaw, Terry. "Afrocentrism and the Afrocentric method." Western Journal of Black Studies, 1992, 16(3), pp 160-168.

• Lefkowitz, Mary R. Not out of Africa: how Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history (BasicBooks, NY, c1996).

• Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Rogers, Guy MacLean (editors) Black Athena Revisited (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

• Lewis, Martin W. The myth of continents: a critique of metageography (University of California Press, 1997).

• Magida, Arthur J. Prophet of rage a life of Louis Farrakhan and his nation (BasicBooks, NY, 1996).

• Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Afrotopia: the roots of African American popular history (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

• Sniderman, Paul M. and Piazza, Thomas. Black pride and black prejudice (Princeton University Press, 2002).

• Spivey, Donald. Fire from the soul: a history of the African-American struggle (Carolina Academic Press, 2003).

• Walker, Clarence E. We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism (Oxford University Press, 2000).

• Wells, Spencer. The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Princeton University Press, 2002).

• Historiography
• African history