Afrocentrism
[3][4] Afrocentrism is a scholarly movement that seeks to conduct research and education on global history subjects, from the perspective of historical African peoples and polities.
However, it has come to refer to a broad cultural movement of the late twentieth century that has a set of philosophical, political, and artistic ideas which provides the basis for the musical, sartorial, and aesthetic dimensions of the African personality.
To this end Afrocentricity seeks to examine every aspect of the subject place of Africans in historical, literary, architectural, ethical, philosophical, economic, and political life.
[25] But Wilson J. Moses claims that Afrocentrism roots are not exclusively African: Despite the fulminations of ethno-chauvinists and other prejudiced persons, it remains a fact that the contributions of white scholars, like Boas, Malinowski, and Herskovits, were fundamental to that complex of ideas that we designate to days as Afrocentrism...Students of African and African American history have long appreciated the irony that much of what we now call Afrocentrism was developed during the 1930s by the Jewish American scholar Melville Herskovits[citation needed]In 1987, Martin Bernal published his Black Athena, in which he claims that ancient Greece was colonized by northern invaders mixing with a colony established by Phoenicia (modern Lebanon).
They found much to respond to in the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus, and shaped their churches by the growth of music and worship styles that related to African as well as European-American traditions.
They cite work by Hiernaux[35][page needed] and Hassan[36] that they believe demonstrates that populations could vary based on micro-evolutionary principles (climate adaptation, drift, selection), and that such variations existed in both living and fossil Africans.
These theories, they contend, attempted to identify certain African ethnicities, such as Nubians, Ethiopians and Somalis, as "Caucasoid" groups that entered Africa to bring civilization to the natives.
Afrocentrists also believe strongly in the work of certain anthropologists who have suggested that there is little evidence to support that the first North African populations were closely related to "Caucasoids" of Europe and western Asia.
[35] In 1964 Afrocentric scholar Cheikh Anta Diop expressed a belief in such a double standard: But it is only the most gratuitous theory that considers the Dinka, the Nouer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids.
What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognising as white only the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular—the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese?
To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nouer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude that maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race.
Some Afrocentric writers include in the African diaspora the Dravidians of India, "Negritos" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia); and the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia.
Van Sertima has been accused of "doctoring" and twisting data to fit his conclusions, inventing evidence, and ignoring the work of respected Central and South American scholars to advance his own theory.
[42] Scholars who have held this view include Marcus Garvey, George James, Martin Bernal, Ivan van Sertima, John Henrik Clarke, and Molefi Kete Asante as well as the Afrocentrist writers Cheikh Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams.
[43][page needed] Examining this view, Egyptologist Stuart Tyson Smith, wrote that "Any characterization of race of the ancient Egyptians depends on modern cultural definitions, not on scientific study.
Smith, however, expressed criticism of Egyptologists and Afrocentrists that defined ancient Egyptians "as members of an essentialist racial category" with perceived "Caucasoid" or "Negroid/Africoid" phenotypes".
[44] As historian Ronald H. Fritze argued, mainstream Egyptologists and other scholars strongly object to Afrocentric Egyptology, viewing it as "theurapetic mythology" for black people, since it fails to provide sufficient evidence or persuasive interpretations to back up its claims.
[45] Stephen Howe, professor in the history and cultures of colonialism at Bristol University,[46] writes that contrary to "Afrocentric speculation, depending on undocumented assertions that the relatively light-skinned people of the lower Nile today descend from Arab conquerors rather than earlier residents".
Howe also cited a 1995 publication which stated "the latest major synthetic work on African populations is firmly of the opinion that "It was not the Arabs physically displaced Egyptians.
[52] Several other academics, including Christopher Ehret, Fekri Hassan, Bruce Williams, Frank Yurco, Molefi Kete Asante, Lanny Bell and A.J.
However, Diop's chapter was credited as a "painstakingly researched contribution"[55] in the general conclusion of the symposium report by the International Scientific Committee's Rapporteur, Professor Jean Devisse,[56] which nevertheless lead to a "real lack of balance" in the discussion among participants.
[57] The ancient world did not employ racial categories such as "Black" or "White" as they had no conception of "race", but rather labeled groups according to their land of origin and cultural traits.
[citation needed] In 2008, Stuart Tyson Smith expressed criticism of a facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun as "very light-skinned" which reflected "bias" and "predictably and justifiably, it has provoked protests from Afrocentrists" as "Egyptologists have been strangely reluctant to admit that the ancient Egyptians were rather dark-skinned Africans, especially the farther south one goes".
[61] In 2011, Stephen Quirke, professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology argued that the UNESCO-sponsored conference on the General History of Africa in 1974 "did not change the Eurocentric climate of research" and of the need to incorporate both African-centred studies and White European, academic perspectives.
Users often erroneously claim that it derives from the Arabic for 'Land of the Blacks' (in reality Bilad as-Sudan), or alternatively that it comes from one or more indigenous African languages and means 'Garden of Life' or 'Motherland'.
In the 20th century it was popularized by Yosef Ben-Jochannan, though this is sometimes incorrectly credited to Cheikh Anta Diop in a non-existent book called “The Kemetic History of Afrika”.
The result is a new reconstruction of world history: it is a universal history.Other critics, such as Mary Lefkowitz, contend that the Afrocentric historical approach is entrenched in myth and fantasy.
He argued that Afrocentrism's prime goal was to encourage black nationalism and ethnic pride in order to effectively combat the destructive consequences of cultural and universal racism.
"[77] Mary Lefkowitz in 1997 whilst criticising elements of Afrocentrism had acknowledged that the origins of the ancient Egyptians were more clear due to the "recent evidence on skeletons and DNA [which] suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North.
During the 1970s, Molefi Kete Asante appropriated the term, insisting that he was the only person equipped to define it, and asserting that even the holy archangels Du Bois and Cheikh Anta Diop had an imperfect and immature grasp of a concept that finds ultimate expression in his own pontifications.
