Afrocentric Education

Afrocentricity as Foundational

Afrocentric education is grounded in and proceeds from the Afrocentric worldview, which includes beliefs regarding the fundamental questions on the existence and organization of the universe and socieites. These questions are central to education. J. A. Sofola, in African Culture and The African Personality, advanced several ideas about the optimum attributes of formal and informal Afrocentric education, including the following:

• 1.
  the family as the epicenter of African social existence, giving the individual family member his or her identity and frame of reference
• 2.
  a support system of love, care, responsibility, and justice for each individual from the rest of his or her family and the community at large
• 3.
  wholesome human relations providing each individual a stake in the community and balancing the individual's development with the development of the community
• 4.
  community land tenure and ownership, providing everyone access to land
• 5.
  the peaceful coexistence of different peoples through the philosophy of live and let live
• 6.
  respect for elders and the old as a common feature of governance
• 7.
  generosity and hospitality toward the “stranger,” the “visitor,” the “foreigner”
• 8.
  an optimistic disposition to life's mission

It can be said that restoration of the Afrocentric worldview exists as a project because African culture has been the target of systematic acts of destruction by proponents of Western European cultural imperialism and white nationalist supremacy. It must be added that national consciousness arises out of a people's culture.

Afrocentric Personal Transformation and Worldview Restoration

Afrocentric education proactively addresses the imposition of cultural alienation and the transformation processes associated with restoring African people to the center of their own story by means of the Afrocentric worldview. While the Afrocentric worldview has existed since antiquity, Afrocentrism has [Page 64]not. Afrocentrism is a concept that was constructed to enable Africans to use the strengths of enduring cultural unity as weapons for liberation and tools for building a new world order. The need for such a concept was created by African experiences with invasion, conquest, enslavement, colonization, and neocolonization. Concomitant with these acts of aggression and violence against African people, there have been systematic efforts to destroy African culture through the imposition of European culture on Africans everywhere. The three examples below illustrate how the methodology of Afrocentric worldview restoration as a process of personal transformation has been treated by contemporary scholars.

Afrocentricity is a transforming agent for the restoration of the Afrocentric worldview. The process by which this transformation is to be effected is guided by Afrology, a term coined by Asante to refer to a comprehensive Afrocentric philosophical statement with attendant possibilities for a new logic, science, and rhetoric. It is precisely this possibility of individual transformation that makes an Afrocentric collective consciousness viable.

The ideological function of Eurocentric culture can be understood through the systematic analysis of Western culture's deep structure and the uses of its logic. This essentially means learning how to demystify the universalistic claims of Western cultural imperialism by treating them as manifestations of ideology. When Western culture is made visible in this way, it is possible for Africans to transcend the Europeanization of thought and redefine their thinking in Africancentered terms. Deconstruction and reconstruction must thus occur in tandem. Given the extent of Western encroachment on African understandings, the employment of constructionist approaches is necessarily anteceded by deconstruction and reconstruction—a relationship between the three approaches that Daudi Azibo deems ideal in his work on African Psychology.

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