Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of Black Nationalism

On the streets of Harlem, in the alleys of Brixton, and on the red-earth sidewalks ribboning the thoroughfares of Accra, Afrocentrism persists today. Bookstands display volumes recounting how ancient Egyptians were Black and how the Hellenic world stole civilization from Africa. Historical chronicles by Chancellor Williams and Cheikh Anta Diop rest alongside the poetry of Aim'e C'esaire, essays by Kwame Nkrumah, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In these centers of the African diaspora, sidewalk practitioners cultivate a genealogy of Afrocentric thought.

Having developed since the 15th century both on the African continent and in the diaspora, Afrocentrism might be better understood as a political tradition than as a single organized movement Whereas the term Afrocentricity denotes a movement in the US academy in the 1980s to pursue liberation through African thought and practices, what we may call Afrocentrism refers to a long narrative tradition regarding history and Africa—one that has been a grassroots political language among Black communities for generations. Across continents and centuries, Afrocentrism has been characterized by two provocations: first, that racial revolution cannot occur outside a critique of history. All great world transformations, from the Haitian Revolution to Africa’s decolonization, demanded a simultaneous revolt against the conventions of universalist thinking. The second was that this critique must emerge from a uniquely African vantage, hence an “Afrocentrism” as opposed to Eurocentrism. Believing that the problem of race lies in the violent processes by which Africans were made into “Blacks,” Afrocentrism insists that returning to Africa is necessary to confront this racial mitosis.

Alongside the imperialist “invention” of Africa, there therefore emerged a second Africa—one that was imagined for, and constructed by, the slaves and the colonized themselves This Africa was not that of the European imaginaire. Against contemporary racial chauvinism, in its myriad disciplinary and pedagogical forms, communities of enslaved and colonized subjects spread subversive counter-histories. They whispered of an Ancient Egypt governed by Black pharaohs. They received Divine Providence in their insurrections as “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31). Despite being dispersed by desert and ocean, a pan-African ideology came to cohere in a language of history and prophecy, centered on the radical potency of the place called “Africa.”

In this sense, Afrocentrism belonged to a political tradition known as Black nationalism, having formed one of its earliest variations. Unlike in the European mold, the nation of Black nationalism did not emerge technocratically with the modern state Rather, on the collective level, Black nationalism has concerned the African’s dispossession of the self: an ontological alienation consequent of the continuous subordination of Black life to capital, whether through slavery, colonization, or apartheid. In the pursuit of self-repossession (self-sovereignty), Black nationalism seeks to infuse Blackness with meaning and personhood, with liberty and destiny. Afrocentrism locates Africa as the necessary starting point for this project. From Africa, a vitality lay in its uncovered histories, in its resilient rituals and material cultures which—despite all manners of repression—persevered on both sides of the Atlantic, uniting a people otherwise consolidated only through sheer violence. In the words of Archie Mafeje, Africanity thus constitutes “a combative ontology. Across a genealogy of struggle, extending from Pan-Africanism to Black Power, Black Consciousness, N'egritude, and Garveyism, Afrocentrism has shaped Black politics around Africa’s provocative place as a praxis for resistance.

In as much as Afrocentrism has participated in real insurrection, it has thus primarily concerned a way of “decolonizing the mind.” In the 1960s, as Black Studies entered the US academy and agitation mounted for real changes to higher education, Afrocentrism provided a model by which Black students embarked on new lines of inquiry What the historian Vincent Harding termed the “new Black history” in 1970 came to be characterized not only by broadening scholarly interest in Black life, but by a growing rejection of received narratives about modernity and the universal A certain telos substantiated how the West made the World, beginning with urbanism on the Nile, Athenian democracy, the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity. That Africa should have played no role in this process, except as physical terrain, coincided with contemporaneous Lamarckian racism that relegated Africans to the status of primitive non-agents—that, as V.Y. Mudimbe remarks, “Africa, the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as well as the people, represent … a frozen state in the evolution of humankind.

At its most insistent, the invocation of Black Studies in the 1960s not only demanded that Africans be included in history as equal participants. This assertion—based on still-contested claims of Africans’ humanity and agency—called into question the entire methodology on which world knowledge until that time had been built. From Black Studies, a radical strain of scholarship developed in response to the universal claims of Western thought. This work drew from the wellspring of Black narrative traditions while soberly interrogating the global facts of the past. It approached the study of Black culture with a pan-African expansiveness without in the least desacralizing Africa’s status as the central political homeland. Following the path-breaking publication, Afrocentricity: A Theory of Social Change by Molefi Kete Asante in 1980, this school of thought became known by its followers as “Afrocentricity”—or, by collaborators especially on the African continent, “Afrocentrism. Out of a long narrative tradition that had begun with the imperial encounter in the 15th century, Afrocentricity emerged as the scholarly frontier for this grassroots liberation language.

Its immediate discrediting in the American academy therefore marked a foreclosure, just at the moment that the doors of higher education opened to Black Studies. In the 1970s, White classicists like Mary Lefkowitz earned notoriety by refuting Afrocentric “lies. A Committee for the Defense of History was formed by Ivy League scholars, both Black and White, to suppress the movement’s growth To no small extent, reactions to Afrocentrism coincided with a moral panic around the rise of 1970s Black Power What was perceived as the “generous” offer of inclusion in the US nation and academy had been met by a stony refusal by a wing of Black nationalists who began to pursue methods seen as outright “defamatory.” Accounts such as Africans arriving in America before Columbus sought to “swap realism for mythology,” warned the pioneering African-American Studies scholar, John Blassingame The outcome, as Martin Kilson of Harvard remonstrated, was works of “black magic:” a scholarship defined only by “anti-intellectualism and antiachievement.

Confronted with additional accusations of what Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s referred to as “anti-racist racism,” serious intellectual consideration of Afrocentrism rapidly disappeared except among its followers. Whereas Wilson Jeremiah Moses has written a stunning pre-history of US Afrocentrism, today the only comprehensive monograph of the movement is by Stephen Howe who dismisses it as “mystical, essentialist, irrationalist, and … racist. As Patricia Hill Collins has remarked, the bitterness of Afrocentrism’s opposition in the 1990s—concerning its “fabricated” histories, gendered politics and avowed racialism—has made a durable discussion of the tradition especially difficult Imbibing a zeitgeist for post-Cold War millennial multiculturalism, a subsequent generation of scholars—notably including K.A. Appiah, Paul Gilroy, and Achille Mbembe—further averred that Black political practice no longer needed “nativist” chauvinism, but rather, an inclusive cosmopolitanism Implied was not only the practicality of racial integration as opposed to separatism, but the bigoted “irrationality” of refusing interracial cooperation. As Adam Ewing has written: “What is significant is that Black nationalism came under attack in a manner that achieved intellectual censure … They rendered those arguments outside of the boundaries of rational discourse.

My purpose in this essay is to place Afrocentrism at the center of the political genealogy that Cedric Robinson in 1981 termed The Black Radical Tradition. Over the past five centuries, Afrocentrism grew as a liberation language among oppressed communities dispersed by desert and ocean. In the 20th century, it animated the now-celebrated movements of Pan-Africanism, N'egritude, and Garveyism not merely as a macabre discourse, but as a direct assault against the intellectual firmament which underpinned the global imperial order. Believing in the interdependence of racism on all facets of “modern” knowledge—not in the least the scientific and humanist studies that buttressed slave economies—the critique of Black revolutionaries in the 20th century was that any great rearrangement of power required an equally immense shift in world thinking. For Afrocentrists, racial freedom could only begin by shattering universalism beyond recognition, a rupture akin to declaring that God was dead, that the King was mortal, that Jesus was Black, that Egypt was African. Like the French Revolution’s intimate debt to the Enlightenment, Afrocentrism foresaw an African revolution as the necessary consequence of a paradigm shift that began with, and centered on, Africa. In the course of this essay, I will explore this argument through two themes: the potency of history and the bankruptcy of universalism.

History is African

On the sands of the New World, bonded emigrants of African kingdoms underwent what can only be described as a radical racial fission. Unlike the Indian in the Caribbean who still remained “Indian,” unlike the Chinese worker lumped in as “Asiatic,” and unlike the indigene of the Americas who was recast as “Native Indian” or “Indian,” enslaved Africans became Black. Africa was already an invention. Blackness was its double. In an age where Africans became a global commodity in the form of enslaved labor, a silent partition occurred in the imperial imaginaire that facilitated this exploitation. No longer an African, the Black conveyed no ethnographic textuality, no bundle of stories or adverse cultural complexity. The erasure of humanity required a complete erasure of history

From this originary dispossession, the concept of Africanity could not help but to offer resistance. As the markers of humanity were razed from their bodies, enslaved communities found sustenance in approaching the continent as a place for self-reinvention. Memories of life before the Atlantic voyage persisted long after White scientists had presumed them to have died. They endured in non-textual ways—in cuisine, dance, art, song, medicinal practice, and martial knowledge—as much as they did in the oral accounts of enslaved societies themselves Upon this bedrock of memory, Africans sutured the knowledge that they furtively gleaned from all manners of places: the Bible, the Quran, commercial channels, eavesdropping, Enlightenment teachings projected from paper to pulpit. Africa was a bricolage from which the enslaved negotiated their new ontological positions But this did not come at the expense of authenticity. As itself an imperial invention, “Africa” pertained to the peculiar relationship of that place to the world writ large. The purpose of Blackness had been to sever that tie so as to render the African fully property, beholden to no one and nothing but the Master. The resuscitation of Africa as an alternate identity was, from the beginning, a counterinsurgency by the enslaved against their dispossession of themselves.

Afrocentrism developed as a narrative tradition regarding the place of Africa in Black resistance One principle tool for this form of expression was the Bible. From the rebellions of Denmark Vessey to John Chilembwe to Nat Turner to Gabriel in Virginia, Africans oppressed under slavery or subjected to colonialism found a dissident resource in Biblical allegory An important tradition was that of the “jeremiad.” So named after the prophet Jeremiah, who preached the second coming upon all those who had broken their covenant with the Lord, Jeremiah warned the unrighteous of impending apocalypse The appeal that “Ethiopia would soon raise her hand unto God” dovetailed with a prophetic tradition that threatened the White Man against his sins. The injustice of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt provided a revolutionary index for understanding African captivity by recasting the past as prophecy. “Biblical imagery was used because it was at hand,” has remarked Charles Long, but “it was adapted to, and invested in, the experience of the slave.

Across the Atlantic, early African converts of colonial missions developed a similar vocabulary of Biblical idiom, constituting an early pan-African language of racial revolution Afrocentrism began with powerful claims concerning the rise of Ethiopia, the emancipation of the Israelites, the race of Ancient Egyptians, Jesus and the inventors of science and mathematics. As Cedric Robinson notes in Black Marxism, in contrast to how bloody revenge had so long characterized European paranoia of Black revolt, rarely did even the most impressive slave uprisings result in the death of more than a dozen Whites. What Robinson called the “Black Radical Tradition” emerged not as a practice of violent insurrection. “Its focus was on the structures of the mind,” Robinson writes, “Its epistemology granted supremacy to metaphysics, not the material.

The emergence of Afrocentrism among enslaved and colonized communities marked a narrative self-styling that considered Africanity not so much as an identity as a calling. From the tradition’s inception, Africa’s status as a homeland spurred numerous spiritual and political movements, the most enduring of which was the “Back to Africa” project among diaspora. From Prince Hall’s delegation in Massachusetts in 1787 to the interwar rise of global Garveyism, “returnist” ideology concerned a profoundly positivist belief in Africa’s restorative power: that not only would the homeland rehabilitate the Black from denigration, but that if all diaspora were so restored, Africa would rise as she had in the epochal time of Ancient Egypt Returnism thus recalled a prophetic tradition sprung from Africa’s hallowed past. As Maria Stewart, a speaker to the African Masonic Hall, professed in 1833: “Though we are looked upon as things, yet we sprang from a scientific people … Poor despised Africa was once the resort of sages and legislators of other nations … The most illustrious men in Greece flocked thither for instruction.

Early pioneers of African recolonization saw themselves as contributing to the restoration of Africa’s great civilization. In the 19th century, Back-to-Africa organizations like the African Civilization Society sent missionaries to Sierra Leone and Liberia, preaching the responsibility of Afro-diaspora to develop their kingdom. This “civilizationism” imbibed two frameworks, each staunchly universalist: one was British schemas of social evolution, which juxtaposed civilization to savagery on the basis of political economy and societal complexity—in other words, a call for the diaspora to help develop Africa. The second was the German Romantic tradition, which claimed that every culture had its own gifts and will to power with which to contribute to a greater whole. Such was a bid, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, for Africans to become “coworkers in the kingdom of culture:” to develop a peculiar Black genius, whose gift was both for the Black and for the world at large

From this tradition emerged some of the first scholarly works that interrogated African history as a blueprint for prophecy. Edward Wilmot Blyden, a missionary from Saint Thomas who became a leading educationalist in colonial West Africa, considered history important not so much for correcting the world record as reframing the fate of the African character. Across his manuscripts, Blyden emphasized Africa’s intimate interconnectivity to the globe. He writes:

Africa is no vast island, separated by an immense ocean from other portions of the globe, and cut off through the ages from the men who have made and influenced the destinies of mankind. She has been closely connected, both as source and nourisher, with some of the most potent influences which have affected for good the history of the world … The greatest religious reforms the world has ever seen—Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan—originating in Asia, have obtained consolidation in Africa … It is to these people, and to their country, that the Psalmist refers, when he says, ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hand unto God.

Branding the Sahara a bustling highway and emphasizing the cross-fertilization of African and Asian cultures, Blyden implied that, insofar as Africa had never been isolated, it was unjust for her people to be ontologically separated from humanity. Furthermore, he contested the notion that African civilization could be progressively re-cultivated through the spread of Western education as well as adhering to a distinctly African ethos: a deep sense of indigenous history, the use of Islam as opposed to Christianity, and polygamy over monogamy.

It is not a coincidence that the word “Afrocentric” likely first emerged from the writings of the influential African-American sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois, regarding Africa’s intimate role in world history. Describing in 1962 his ambitious project to write a complete account of the African peoples, Du Bois had remarked that the Encyclopedia Africana would be “unashamedly Afro-Centric, but not indifferent to the impact of the outside world upon Africa or to the impact of Africa upon the outside world. Initially, the book had not meant to concern “the vague subject of race … but the people’s inhabiting the continent of Africa. However, before his death, Du Bois expanded the project to include both Africans and Afro-diaspora, making the Encyclopedia Africana one of the first truly Pan-African history projects of the 20th century. As Nahum Chandler has most recently impressed, Du Bois’s later fascination with Africa, even to the exclusion of diaspora, did not constitute a passing hobby For Du Bois, Africa had the power to overturn all prevailing architectures of racial identity.

It is from this long intellectual shadow, constituted not only by formalist scholars such as Blyden and Du Bois but by cross-Atlantic generations of African communities engaged in selfcraft and historical discovery, that the distinct school of thought known as Afrocentricity emerged in the mid-20th century. Early chronicles, such as African Origins of Civilization (1967) by Cheikh Anta Diop and The Destruction of Black Civilization (1971) by Chancellor Williams, demonstrate the magnitude of Afrocentricity’s project from the beginning. Like in Blyden’s scholarship, Afrocentricity marked a forensic interrogation of Africa’s past as an access point to the future. Its thinkers took for granted Africa’s coexistence with the world until the coming of imperialism. Investigations into the past therefore required integrating tools and insights from across areas and disciplines. As Williams writes: “Believing that the history of the race could not be understood if studied in isolation, I began a slow and deliberately unrushed review of European history, ancient and modern, and the history of Arabs and Islamic people. I say ‘review’ because by 1950 I had already studied and taught in the three fields of American, European and Arabic history. Diop likewise combined nephrology, art history, geology and archeology to write an account of Ancient Egypt as a civilization founded by Black Africans.

In the 1980s, the term “Afrocentrism” came to represent this school of inquiry following the 1980 publication of Afrocentricity by African-American scholar, Molefi Kete Asante Born as Arthur Lee Smith, Asante adopted an African name in 1976 in place of his Anglo-American appellation—a ritual undertaken by thousands of Afrocentric practitioners, including Ron Everett (Maulana Karenga) and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) “The choosing of an African name [is] participatory, inasmuch as it contributes to the total rise of consciousness,” writes Asante in Afrocentricity According to the text, Afrocentricity constituted “a philosophical perspective associated with the discovery, location, and actualizing of African agency within the context of history and culture. It located Africa’s past as a necessary starting point for political and social freedom, not in the least because it provided the foundation for conceptualizing a free Africa as a prophetic horizon. Afrocentricity also emphasized the importance of cultural self-styling as a political practice. Re-adopting an African identity restored the protection of heritage and the burden of history to Black communities whose dehumanization, in the form of sale and commoditization, had demanded the disavowal of any essence beyond objecthood.

In this manner, Afrocentrists approached Africanity as a historical consciousness requiring specific embodied practices. Asante’s Njia (“the way”) outlined methods for diaspora to achieve full awareness as African actors. These efforts were closely paralleled by Maulana Karenga’s Nguzo Saba, a “communitarian African philosophy” providing practical principles for building a free African lifestyle Believing that racial freedom was untenable so long as Africans continued to think in the parameters of their oppressor, Afrocentricity preached the importance of mental decolonization as the starting point for revolution. As Manning Marable has argued, Afrocentricity arose in the late 20th century as an individualist alternative to the institutional politics of the Civil Rights movement and the militant partyism of Black Power Whether in the form of Asante’s Njia or Karenga’s philosophy of Kawaida (Kiswahili: “tradition/reason”), Afrocentricity made Africa the necessary basis for interrogating an epistemic approach that did not capitulate to Eurocentric molds It relocated revolution to the hands of Black persons as revelations that they had to make on a personal identitarian basis.

From the 1960s-90s, Afrocentric teachings spread through grassroots political channels on the community level but remained closely tied to academic institutions. The arrival of Black Studies on American campuses transformed curricula into sites of controversy, indicted for the myriad ways that racial supremacy remained reified in their “objectivist” knowledge. Black Studies programs, especially in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, became vocal progenitors of a new African history built as a Eurocentric counterforce. Monographs of Afrocentrism were printed on all-Black presses based in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Oakland, written mainly for nonacademic audiences In the 1990s, Afrocentrism also spurred the successful campaign for separate Afrocentric high schools, with proponents arguing that teaching Afrocentric curricula would be no different than Christian schools with creationism

On a mainstream cultural level, probably Afrocentricity’s most famous hallmark remains the holiday of Kwanzaa. Initiated by Karanga in 1966 as an important component of Kawaida, African-American households across the US began embracing Kwanzaa an African holiday, as opposed to Christmas, thereby providing a material touchstone for a lifestyle outside of European hegemony At this time, African fashions such as kente and dashikis began to be sold in neighborhoods. Afrocentricity thus became a cultural movement engaging Africa’s past as a mode of liberation

Some ideological restraints, however, remained. Despite noting the exclusionary space that the academy posed to racial minorities, Afrocentrists of the 1960s-90s made little attempts at including women into their folds. Their brand of nationalism was accused of patriarchal character In identifying race as the paramount form of oppression, Afrocentrists gave little attention to the intersectional ways that categories like gender and class changed experiences of discrimination For black nationalists of this era, the principle project at hand was epistemological. African history provided what Afrocentrists argued was the necessary premise to liberation: a direct epistemic confrontation against European norms. In so doing, it presented the past as an ever-present problem. In encouraging Black diaspora to adopt an African identity—as constituted by African dress, affect, names and symbols—Afrocentrists underscored the fact that the U.S. was a country full of Africans. Afrocentricity denaturalized Black diaspora citizenry by stressing the African in America, as slave, as an unresolved ethical dilemma.

Over the five centuries that Afrocentrism developed as a narrative tradition among Africans and the diaspora, its ambition therefore had never been—as with the challenge that Jean-Paul Sartre had laid before the N'egritude movement—to dissolve race The aim was more capacious: how could Blackness be reborn to make its very existence in Western society an unresolved ethical problem? How could the fission between Blackness and Africa, so crucial to the engineering of the slave, be reunited as one? How could African identity come to re-signify the worldly interconnection which had always laid at the bedrock of African history, thereby re-assigning the value of the African as one of belonging? Afrocentrists found a resource in the past. They believed that the truth about the continent would necessitate a crisis to Western identity. Why else would the history of a continent whose people were so global still remain such a secret?

Afrocentric “multiverse”

We have just seen how Afrocentrism persisted as a narrative tradition among Africans and diaspora concerning the political potency of history. Afrocentricity emerged from this genealogy as a distinct school of thought, tied to the development of Black Studies and to a shift in racial politics away from formalist party activities and toward personal spiritual liberation. In this turn, however, a strong political statement was made: no longer concerned with Africa’s contribution to the universal—in becoming “coworkers in the kingdom of culture”—the proponents of Afrocentricity seized Africa as the bedrock for an alternate universe, one for Africans alone, based on a refusal to belong to any other grand master narrative. This was a separatist approach to political liberation, in what Harold Cruse famously defined as the separatist-integrationist dyad in African American struggle

Across the Atlantic, Africa’s decolonization from the 1940s-70s witnessed the same will toward the “multiverse” as Afrocentricity had marked in the late 20th century. In the aftermath of WWI, separatism emerged at the forefront of Black nationalist politics out of a growing belief in the bankruptcy of the promise of the universal. Emancipation from slavery in the Americas had reproduced bondage in phantom forms, not the least of which was Jim Crow. Although the League of Nations supposedly affirmed a right to nationalist self-determination, such liberties, as pertaining to the human being, were judged irrelevant to the colonized African. Thus there emerged a Black radicalism in the 20th century that approached freedom as a question of epistemology. Ontological markers in the fulcrum of world order had cast the Black outside the globe, outside the human, a status unconditionally buttressed by the “objective” verdicts of science, history, and so on. Afrocentrism was a battle cry against this conspiracy of global proportions. From 1940 onward, it hypostatized in a concerted project to build an epistemic “Afro-center:” an orientation that provided a countervailing force to “Eurocentric” hegemony.

Of the various collective responses to the persistence of a global imperial order at the dawn of the postcolony, among the most imaginative was the pan-African project pursued by the continent’s first state leaders. One can appreciate the immensity of their challenge. Postcolonial Africa entered a global economy Everest-like in opposition, founded on a centuries-long sedimentation of imperial exploitation. Intensifying this trial was the force of the rhetoric recounting that the Black was not equal, was not capable, could not govern his or herself. In both ideological and profoundly material ways, Africa’s states had to answer questions that set the terms for their interaction with the global community. How could one be African and independent in the world? How could a people be freely Black?

The project that coalesced in the 1960s-70s between the free states of Africa and global Black rights movements upheld the necessity of developing an Afrocenter as a starting point for these negotiations. On the international level, this dream hypostatized in the creation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963, which coordinated pan-African administration, trade and diplomacy to collectively address Africa’s global position By contrast, on the domestic level, negotiating from an “Afro-center” meant solving contemporary problems in practices drawn from African vernaculars. “Re-Africanization” campaigns of the independent states, with their socialist programs like Nyerere’s Ujamaa and Nkrumahist selfhelp projects, affirmed that a free African state not only had to preserve indigenous customs, but had to willingly suture solutions to contemporary problems from the cloth of African culture

Above all, building the “Afro-center” required a concerted program for mental decolonization, which African leaders embarked upon in diverse manners. From revised school curricula to philosophy clubs to daily radio and news propaganda, the fact that an African civilization really existed—that it was coming into coherence, finally rising again—pervaded the expectations of the youth raised in this generation. “During my childhood in Guinea, S'ekou Tour'e had often said that Guinea’s independence was but the beginning of the United States of Africa,” recounts Manthia Diawara. “The Pan-Africanists had been looking for an Africa without frontiers, one that would be competitive with the rest of the world.

The concept of “Africa” which cohered in this pan-African civilization combined two elements: Africa’s persistence as a material culture independent of imperialism, at least in the colorful character by which its rituals and languages revealed themselves to the world; and the undeniable existence of Africa as an identity born in resistance to the oppressions that its people faced, both on the continent and abroad. For Aim'e C'esaire, whose concept of N'egritude became crucial to this generation, “Africa” had implicitly existed through the frictions of encounter which likewise consolidated “Europe” as a discrete material entity Certain worldwide events were responsible for placing Blacks into common status: slavery, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid. Africanity coincided with C'esaire’s explanation of N'egritude, in that:

[N'egritude] is a way of living history within history; the history of a community whose experience appears to be … unique, with its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered culture. How can we not believe all this which has its own coherence, constitutes a heritage

From Frantz Fanon to Amilcar Cabral, Afro-revolutionaries of the decolonizing years asserted that Africa existed as a heritage of resistance that evolved with its people through their worldly relations, inhering especially in grassroots politics, historiography and legend

The project of building an “Afro-center” therefore required not only asserting Africa as a living entity, but placing it at the center of a new epistemological plain. For Kwame Nkrumah, African consciencism—what he described as “a philosophy and ideology for decolonization”—required triggering a paradigm shift in broader world thinking For Nkrumah, all revolutions, from 18th century France to Grecian antiquity, had been indissociably tied to a rupture in how people understood the basic elements of time, space, and materiality. Beginning with Thales in the 7th century BC, Nkrumah painstakingly demonstrated how ancient understandings of the world—for example, that all people and plants consisted only of water—justified uneven distributions of power, including the entrenchment of an enslaving society. Similarly, during the Enlightenment, Descartes’ principle that the Earth could be mastered by anyone because it existed under an observable set of rules, affirmed the capacity of the individual as sovereign, the fraud of the King as sacred, and a world that should be governed by right reason, hypostatized in the free movement of markets. Such beliefs, as Nkrumah demonstrates, precipitated in the avid republicanism of the French Revolution. The achievement of an African Revolution, then, could not just mean independence for Black nations; it would have to emerge from a rupture in world thinking.

Africa provided this possibility so long as the vital elements of an African consciousness were fully tethered to a historical interrogation of the world. “It was said that whereas other continents had shaped history, and determined its course, Africa had stood still, held down by inertia,” wrote Nkrumah, explaining: “Such disparaging accounts had been given of African society and culture as to appear to justify slavery, and slavery, posed against these accounts, seemed a positive deliverance of our ancestors. The confabulation of Africa as a historical dead zone had given Europe its confidence as conqueror. That the majority of territories should still lay under this ideological shadow persuaded Nkrumah of the need to begin knowledge again, to develop an epistemology from what tenets of African learning still remained untrammeled by colonists. “In the new African renaissance, we place great emphasis on the presentation of history,” wrote Nkrumah. What he called the “African personality”— defined as “the cluster of humanist principles which underlie the traditional African society”—provided a basis for reconstructing a global epistemology, beginning with principles like Africans’ belief in the visible versus invisible world

Thus, the resurrection of Africa, defined on its own terms and with claims to an unbroken history of global interconnection, might provide the deliverance needed to shake faith in Europe’s claim to hegemony. The revelation that the King was mortal, which felled the monarchy, or that God was dead, thereby surrendering the propulsion of history to the machinations of man, met its equal in the implosive power of Africa’s restoration to History. “For an African to assert the African fact that ancient Egypt was a black civilization shakes the very foundation of the doctrine of white supremacy,” writes Molefi Kete Asante As Manthia Diawara recounts:

The idea that Negritude was bigger even than Africa, that we were part of an international moment which held the promise of universal emancipation, that our destiny coincided with the universal freedom of workers and colonized people worldwide—all this gave us a bigger and more important identity than the ones previously available to us through kinship, ethnicity and race

Afrocentrism in the ideology of postcolonial Africa marked an attempt at total global revolution through a direct and originary assault on the principles of Eurocentrism.

Across the African world, this assault came in varying forms. In the United States, by reshaping Black culture along African lines, Afrocentrists in the 1960s underscored that America was a country full of Africans. The history of the US was inseparable from the history of Africa as well. But only by confronting that fact, as an everyday revelation, could either the country or the world have a hope of reconciling to its violent history. Revolution had to be conceived of as a historical problem in order for justice to mean a transformation of the kind that would change the meaning of “Blackness” forever.

Afrocentrism was a narrative tradition that took the separation of “Blackness” from “Africa” as the problem for thought. Its saw slavery and colonialism as the progenitors of a great crisis in language—a holocaust in all thought but that of the European. Yet the crisis was not hopeless. The fact that Africa’s people possessed real cultures, traditions, and practices meant that neither “Africa” nor “Black” could be either empty signs or false starting points. Rather, they had to be recognized as part of a historical process that nonetheless had configured Africans into a world of racial domination. The power of Afrocentrism was its capacity to present this unethical relationship to the past as a matter of unacceptable truth.

As Nahum Chandler has suggested, the concept of “the Negro” as a figure of unacceptable truth was pivotal to Du Bois, both in his conception of African history and in his emancipatory thought. Nowhere was this clearer than in Du Bois’s biography of John Brown, the militant white abolitionist, with whom Du Bois grappled with the extraordinary puzzle of a “social being … belonging simply and purely to a ‘White’ race who yet came to recognize himself as configured within the movement of an unsettled question … the ‘Negro question.’ To Du Bois, Brown represented the best of what America had to offer: its future. But he owed that to the Negro. The best of America owed itself to the Negro. This incredible fact defined, for Du Bois, not only the promise of the color line as the problem of the 20th century, but the role that African history would play in world transformation

Afrocentrism viewed history as a weapon whose resurrection meant an alwaysexplosive threat of encounter. The slave’s genesis within Blackness presupposed the capacity of abstracting an Africa without a past—something that the tradition of Afrocentrism rejected. But to locate the birth of modernity within Africa meant an implosion of the originary thread of history itself. The restitution of the Black as the African, in other words, could not help but indict the world at large. This political practice became exceedingly important in the 20th century when prospects of integrating into White society—whether the Black diaspora in the US or African states into the international community—appeared chimerical and separatism became the provocative alternative for political life. Afrocentrism represented the largest-scale attempt to formulate a dissident Afro-center in response. As opposed to earlier generations of pan-African activists, the new generation of Afrocentrists underscored “return” to Africa as a frame of mind. It shifted the frontier of Black nationalism to a question of epistemology. Historical reckoning became a program of everyday revolution.

Conclusion: Unsettling “the other”

Sixty years since Afrocentrism fell like lightning on the doors of the academy, let us reflect on the reception of this tradition vis-'a-vis what is called the Black political genealogy. Without a doubt, Afrocentrism remains in many chambers of the Western scholarly imaginaire a type of “farce.” Branded a sinister doppelganger, a perjurer, a specter who must be ousted at the faintest glimmer of proto-nationalism, Afrocentrism has been quarantined from orthodox Black thought as “antiintellectual.” Made up instead of raw emotional decrees, its intrusion on any aspect of soulful scholarly pursuit is considered, de facto, “abrasive.”

What elicits this sensitivity on the part of the Western scholar, so closely resembling fear? How can one explain this collective reaction of enormous proportions? Is it possible that Afrocentrism’s methodological questioning touches not on lies and fabulations, but on something perturbingly real? Put another way, does the potency of Afrocentrism reside in the very reason that it still provokes silence and censure?

These questions must form the crux of any methodology to write Afrocentrism into the Black Radical Tradition, examining it in its rightfully central role. At the commencement of the slave trade, the African’s debasement occurred by way of Blackness; the Black was the invention of a Master who desired a slave with no history, no familial context, no culture which could provoke confusion or fear. What set the slave apart from the African on the homeland was the asymmetry of the White man’s power in that foreign land. In the forests ruled by Black “magics,” the White man was always at a loss. Blackness was the innovation which compensated for what the White did not understand. “When nations meet on terms of independence and equality, they tend to stress the need for communication in the language of the other,” writes Ngu-gī wa Thiong’o. “But when they meet as oppressor and oppressed, as for instance under imperialism, then their languages cannot experience a genuinely democratic encounter.

Afrocentrism returned the baggage of culture and the significance of history to the Black, for whom this ethnographic texture formed a kind of protection. The presumption of Eurocentrism was its universalism: not only that its sciences were correct in every way, but that they already included everything that could be known. The invention of the Black was Eurocentrism’s attempt to make the African knowable by stripping away the past. Afrocentrism restored what was not understood, and which therefore appeared unnatural and perturbing.

But what would it mean to confront Afrocentrism at its word? What would it require to face the fearful possibility that not everything is already known, that the place from whence the wealth of the world has sprung has never, not once, been understood? What would it take to demand that the West confront the Black without the presumption of knowledge that has already consigned them to an obliterated past, to a being of nothingness? Would this unsettling moment provide the possible beginning to what Ngu-gī called a “genuinely democratic encounter?”