Afrocentrism

Origins

The origin of the term Afrocentrism is unknown. African American historian William Jeremiah Moses credited W. E. B. Du Bois as probably the first writer to have used the concept of “Afrocentrism” as early as 1961 in a paper proposal, “Proposed plans for an Encyclopaedia Africana,” whose objective was to be “unashamedly Afro-Centric, but not indifferent to the impact of the outside world.” Nonetheless, the cultural critic and most influential Afrocentrist scholar today, Molefi Asante of Temple University, would popularize Afrocentrism as a distinctive worldview in numerous path-breaking studies including Afrocentricity, the Theory of Social Change (1980), The Afrocentric Idea (1987), Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (1990). Asante defines Afrocentricity as a philosophy and program for social change. In Kemet, he writes:

Asante's objective is to inspire proponents of this school of thought “to put African ideals and values at the center of inquiry.” Afrocentrists employ rigorously the African cultural image as a tool to increase the self-esteem and consciousness of the people of African ancestry in the United States and in the African diaspora.

Egyptocentrism

The Afrocentric ideology can be traced in the writings of black and nonblack writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. To various degrees, the works of these writers exhibit both Afrocentric and Egyptocentric themes and ideologies. While the discourse of Afrocentrism seeks to link the cultural traditions and civilization of ancient black Egypt to those of continental black Africa and the black diaspora, the discourse of Egyptocentrism puts forth the idea that ancient Egypt was geographically and culturally African and that the flourishing civilization of Egypt was unquestionably Negroid.

The debate over the black genesis of civilization and over the character of ancient Egypt and the idea that ancient Greece had borrowed both cultural and intellectual resources from the black people of Egypt has also appeared in several controversial texts, such as George G. M. James's Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy (1954), Yosef Ben-Jochanan's African Origins of the Major “Western Religions” (1970), and Ivan Van Sertima's Nile Valley Civilization (1980). It is noteworthy to underscore here it was the three-volume magisterial work of the white British and Cornell University historian Martin Bernal, under the provocative title Black Athena, that has gained the academic attention of the Afrocentric movement in the United States. The multivolume work (1991, 1991, and 2006), as the author states, was “essentially concerned with the Egyptian and Semitic roles in the formation of Greece in the Middle and Late Bronze Age.” In this historical revisionism project, Bernal also sought to boost the African American self-esteem in the United States and affirm black agency in world history.

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