Idea of Africa

The notion that there is no racial essence that characterizes Africa and Africans because identities are socially constructed or invented and constantly changing has been the central message of scholars using postcolonial theory. V. Y. Mudimbe's seminal work has sought to map out this discursive process. In The Invention of Africa (1988), he interrogates the construction of Africa through Eurocentric categories and conceptual systems, from anthropology and missionary discourses to philosophy, an order of knowledge constituted in the sociohistorical context of colonialism, which produced enduring dichotomies between Europe and Africa, investing the latter's societies, cultures, and bodies with the representational marginalities or even pathologies of alterity (otherness).

In The Idea of Africa (1994), he seeks to demonstrate that conquering Western narratives, beginning with Greek stories about Africa, through the colonial library to contemporary postmodernist discourses, have radically silenced or converted African discourses. African intellectuals, he argues, have been reacting to this ethnocentric epistemological order, itself subject to the mutations of Western material, methodological, and moral grids, with varying degrees of epistemic domestication and defiance, in the process of which Africa's identity and difference have been affirmed, denied, inverted, and reconstituted.

For some thinkers one of the most important aspects of Africa's representation lies not in its invention per se, a phenomenon that is by no means confined to the continent, but in the fact that Africa is always represented and performed as a reality or a fiction in relation to something else, mostly Europe (white); Africa is always the Dark Continent (black). The question is precisely what makes the representation of Africa so distinctive and different from the representation of other continents: it is that Africa is always represented and imagined, in ways that Asia, for example, is not necessarily, in relation to master references—Europe, whiteness, Christianity, literacy, development, technology (the comparative and colonizing tropes mutate continuously)—mirrors that reflect, indeed refract Africa in peculiar ways, reducing the continent to particular (negative) images of "lack" and "becoming," lacking and becoming "Europe." In short, Africa more than any other continent is the quintessential representational other of Europe; from the moment (historically understood) that the two continents became entangled with each other, the grammar of their self-definitions became distorted mirror images of the other.

From this angle it can be seen why Eurocentric and Afrocentric representations of Africa are so deeply implicated with each other, why the inclusion or exclusion of North Africa is so crucial to both of them, why their discursive possessiveness centers on Egypt. At stake is the civilizing authority and antiquity of Africa. The contemporary debate about the Africanness, and for some the "blackness," of ancient Egypt was launched by Cheikh Anta Diop's provocative book, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1974). Afrocentric scholars in the United States led by African American scholar Molefi Asante, who coined the term Afrocentricity, picked up and popularized Diop's ideas.

But it was not until a European American scholar, Martin Bernal, published his tome Black Athena (1987, 1991), affirming the "blackness" of the ancient Egyptians and their enormous contributions to Greek civilization—the cradle of Western civilization—that Afrocentric claims received attention in the mainstream American and international academic media. Among those who were outraged was the classicist Mary Lefkowitz who vehemently attacked Bernal and the Afrocentric movement as a whole for its alleged "myths."

For many African scholars the debate about the race of the ancient Egyptians seemed rooted more in American preoccupations with race than African history as such. To some of them blackness is less about race and more about representation, a sign not of submission to the Hegelian and colonialist schema of inferior difference, but of subversion and struggle against it. They see black identity as the result of political, social, and cultural negotiations, cooperation, transactions, differences between self and the other that goes beyond skin color; it is about the common experience of pain, exploitation, and suffering shared by an oppressed people and is deployed as a powerful symbol of subversion, struggle, and self-affirmation. It was in this sense that the term black was extended to "coloreds" (people of mixed race, Indians, and people of Asian descent) in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, and used to refer to people of African and Asian descent in Britain.

Others denounce the use of race altogether as a biological determinism that should have no place in Africanist scholarship while affirming the possibilities of (forging) a common African identity. Kwame Anthony Appiah is perhaps the most renowned proponent of this critique in his book In My Father's House (1992). Appiah is unsparing in his attack on the dangerous fictions of race and racialist thinking and takes direct aim at some of the icons of Pan-Africanism, including W. E. B. Dubois (1868–1963). He seeks to demolish essentialist conceptions of Africa and demonstrate that Africa is not a primordial fixture, but an invented reality, and Africans are not molded from the same clay of racial and cultural homogeneity. This is a celebration of the diversity, complexity, richness, hybridity, and contingency of African identities and social and cultural life, mounted to challenge the totalizing narratives of both African nationalism and European imperialism with their dualistic and polarized representations of Africa and African identities and culture.

Critics of Appiah and Mudimbe and other postcolonial and postmodern African scholars such as Achille Mbembe, who also dismiss "nationalist" or what they sometimes refer to as "nativist" definitions of African identities, have pointed out that despite these writers' celebratory analyses of the plurality and social construction of African identities, their work is not always sufficiently historicized and is trapped in the "colonial library"—Western episteme—and virtually ignores the "Islamic library"—African writings in Arabic and Arabic script—which would radically shift their conceptions of African thought and ideas of self-representation.

These shortcomings are readily evident in Appiah's book, for example, when he compares the different roles of religion and the modes of thought in what he calls the traditional oral cultures of Africa and the industrialized literate cultures of the West. The comparisons drip with a fundamental tension rooted in a binary conception of African "orality" and European "literacy." This is a problematic formulation, not only because he draws his African examples largely from one culture, Asante, but the conflation of orality with Africa and literacy with Europe is simply false if the "Islamic library" is taken into account. Also, the framing of "traditional" Africa versus "modern" Europe locks both Africa and Europe in a temporal binary that effectively dehistoricizes each. The irony, then, is that despite his best intentions Appiah ends up with an essentialized Africa with an ontological essence—lacking the supposedly European attributes of literacy—and a racialized one as well in that his analysis is confined to sub-Saharan Africa.