Afrocentricity/Afrocentrism

Background

Afrocentricity/Afrocentrism is relatively recent nomenclature. The precursor to stake a modern literary claim recognizing a distinct cultural identity of African Americans can be found in the pioneering work of W. E. B. Du Bois in 1913, The Souls of Black Folk. Indirectly anchored in African-centered thought, Du Bois articulated a paradoxical condition of being an African in America. Du Bois's concept of “double consciousness” is a historical reference point for acknowledging an alternative worldview at conflict with the hegemonic Eurocentric worldview in America. Contemporary African-centered anthropologists, social scientists, and psychologists have articulated an authentic African worldview for such concepts as personality, identity, and optimal health and behavior.

African-Centered Worldview

Based on the pioneering scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop and G. G. James in 1954, Afrocentricity/Afrocentrism postulates that an African-centered world-view places African cultural unity, history, and philosophy as the central perspective for which the world is experienced, interpreted, and engaged. Contemporary scholars such as Marimba Ani, Molefi Kete Asante, Asa Hillard, Maulana Karenga, and John Mbiti have stated that the African worldview provides a method and process of analysis that reflects the historical continuity, collective consciousness, and cultural unity of ethnocultural groups on the continent of precolonial Africa. Afrocentricity/Afrocentrism, although similar to Pan-Africanism or Black Nationalism, is not a political ideology but a cultural consciousness.

Some themes of an African worldview are ancestor veneration, social collectivity, and spiritual basis of existence. Ancestor veneration in Africa is the belief that ancestors are deities, much like saints and prophets in other traditions, and they are very much part of the cosmology and influence daily living. They are respected and celebrated but not worshipped. In a therapeutic setting ancestors play an important role in the healing process. Social collectivity by clan groupings influences the distribution of wealth and labor. Social roles are flexible to meet the needs of the collective. Research investigating African Americans must include the impact on the community or other systems that are connected to their lives. The spiritual basis of existence refers to the belief that all things are spiritually manifested. Spirit is the essence of existence. There is only one God, a Divine energy that flows through all things and thus creates our interdependence. Truth is revealed through signs, the rhythm of nature, symbolic imagery, the cosmos, and the human being. This value introduces the notion and acceptance of phenomena, which are critical to the analysis of human behavior from an African-centered worldview. In essence the African worldview takes a teleological orientation.

African-Centered Psychology

African-centered psychology is concerned with defining African psychological experiences from an African-centered worldview. According to Na'im Akbar, Kobi K. K. Kambon, and Wade Nobles, an African-centered worldview assumes a philosophical premise that utilizes an affective inclusive metaphysical epistemology and that employs an axiology that is based on a member-to-member values orientation, an ontology that is di-unital (the attraction of opposites or curricular thought), and a cosmology that acknowledges the interdependence of all things seen and unseen, which is the essence of the Divine Spirit. In essence African-centered psychology is conscious and unconscious.

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