[3] The term "miseducation" was coined by Carter G. Woodson to describe the process of systematically depriving African Americans of their knowledge of self.
[4] In it, he proposed that Africans were beginning to be seen simply as different and not as inferior, in part because of the work of English writers such as Mary Kingsley and Lady Lugard, who traveled and studied in Africa.
Blyden used that standpoint to show how the traditional social, industrial, and economic life of Africans untouched by "either European or Asiatic influence", was different and complete in itself, with its own organic wholeness.
[6] In a letter responding to Blyden's original series of articles, Fante journalist and politician J. E. Casely Hayford commented, "It is easy to see the men and women who walked the banks of the Nile" passing him on the streets of Kumasi.
Leaders included bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, who devoted his life to collecting literature, art, slave narratives, and other artifacts of the African diaspora.
The value of Schomburg's personal collection was recognized, and it was purchased by the New York Public Library in 1926 with the aid of a Carnegie Corporation grant.
[10] Historians began to theorize that Ancient Egyptian civilization was the culmination of events arising from the origin of the human race in Africa.
In March 1925, Schomburg published an essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past" in an issue of the Survey Graphic devoted to Harlem's intellectual life.
In the 1950s Du Bois envisioned and received funding from Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah to produce an Encyclopedia Africana to chronicle the history and cultures of Africa.
—Chinua Achebe, 1965[14]In this context, ethnocentric Afrocentrism was not intended to be essential or permanent, but was a consciously fashioned strategy of resistance to the Eurocentrism of the time.
[12] Afrocentric scholars adopted two approaches: a deconstructive rebuttal of what they called "the whole archive of European ideological racism" and a reconstructive act of writing new self-constructed histories.
[16] In the 1980s and 1990s, Afrocentrism increasingly became seen as a tool for addressing social ills and a means of grounding community efforts toward self-determination and political and economic empowerment.
In his (1992) article "Eurocentrism vs. Afrocentrism", US anthropologist Linus A. Hoskins wrote: The vital necessity for African people to use the weapons of education and history to extricate themselves from this psychological dependency complex/syndrome as a necessary precondition for liberation.
[18] For some Afrocentrists, the contemporary problems of the ghetto stemmed not from race and class inequality, but rather from a failure to inculcate Black youth with Afrocentric values.
But hearing the voice of African American culture with all of its attendant parts is one way of creating a more sane society and one model for a more humane world.
[21] Today, Afrocentricity takes many forms, including striving for a more multicultural and balanced approach to the study of history and sociology.
Some Afrocentrists believe that the burden of Afrocentricity is to define and develop African agency in the midst of the cultural wars debate.
Queeneth Mkabela writes in 2005 that the Afrocentric perspective provides new insights for understanding African indigenous culture, in a multicultural context.
They also seek to better align themselves with other University departments and find continuity and compromise between the radical Afrocentricity of the past decades and the multicultural scholarship found in many fields today.