Afrocentricity

Europe's attempted occupation of practically all human space resulted in Africans being considerably removed from their own cultural base to be relegated to footnote status, to the periphery, the margin of the European experience and consciousness. This mental disenfranchisement is held responsible for Africans often not existing on their own cultural and historical terms but on borrowed European ones. Africans are dislocated and, having lost sight of themselves in the midst of social decay, find it exceedingly difficult to orient themselves in a positive and constructive manner, a most difficult plight. Relocation is the remedy suggested by Afrocentricity. Only when Africans become centered, that is, when they consciously and systematically adopt ways, attitudes, and behaviors that are germane to their own cultural traditions and historical reality, can they hope to achieve freedom. In other words, African freedom is predicated upon the conscious activation of one's Africanness, that is, ultimately, with the exercise by African people of their own agency.

Afrocentricity further stresses agency as an African cultural imperative. Indeed, in African culture, ancestral traditions must be preserved and transmitted out of respect for one's personal and collective ancestors. Asante therefore defines Afrocentricity as "a frame of reference" generated by Africans themselves, based on African cosmology, axiology, aesthetic, and epistemology: "Afrocentricity is the study of the ideas and events from the standpoint of Africans as the key players rather than victims. This theory becomes, by virtue of an authentic relationship to the centrality of our own reality, a fundamentally empirical project" (1991, p. 172). Asante further insists that while one may argue over the meaning of Africanness, one cannot argue, as an Afrocentrist, over "the centrality of African ideals and values" for African people (1990, p. 6), thus identifying the notion of cultural, and more specifically, epistemological centeredness as the Afrocentric organizing principle. In addition to this major principle, Afrocentricity includes a set of unquestioned propositions that it inherited from its intellectual and ideological antecedents, namely, Garveyism, the negritude movement, Fanonism, Kawaida, and Cheikh Anta Diop's historiography. Those propositions can be listed as follows: African people must be conceived as agents and victors; a Pan-African perspective is essential; a deep commitment to African people and Africa is necessary; there exists an African cultural matrix common to all African people with different surface manifestations; culture is primary and all-inclusive; Africans must reconnect with African culture for genuine African freedom to be; African cultural rebirth is necessary; the colonizer within the African psyche must be killed; and finally, Nile Valley civilizations (in particular, ancient Egypt, or Kemet) are the foundation of African culture and will serve as a model upon which to elaborate new bodies of thought and action relevant to African contemporary needs. Those principles, which are primary both chronologically and logically, function very much as Afrocentricity's premises.