Afrocentrism
Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes

Stephen Howe

Afrocentric history is expounded by, amongst others, The Nation of Islam. It has been widely criticised by writers as diverse as Dinesh D'Souza, Robert Hughes and Arthur Schlesinger. But the literature itself, in all its rich absurdity, has rarely been examined. In his new book Afrocentrism, Stephen Howe fills a major gap


"If somebody uses tradition as a way of limiting your choices, in a way that's as racist as saying you have to sit at the back of the bus." - Anthony Davis

Over recent years issues concerning Afrocentrism have been raised with especial acuity in the USA. There, they have become central to the storm over multiculturalism and so-called Political Correctness in education, media, government policies and in the public sphere quite generally. Public controversy has centered particularly around the inroads Afrocentrism has made into school-level education in the USA. By 1991, it was reported, roughly 350 private schools or "Afrocentric academies" devoted to the approach had been established, educating more than 50,000 children. The number has continued to grow. Numerous public school authorities have also introduced Afrocentric curricula, including wholly "Afrocentric schools' in predominantly black districts, as Detroit, Baltimore and Milwaukee had dome. Elsewhere curriculum were, designed to introduce Afrocentric perspectives produced national-level public storms and political battles, as in New York and Washington, DC. A first generation of explicitly Afrocentric school textbooks has begun to appear.

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The disputes have given rise to a massive polemical literature, including such bestsellers as Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education and The End of Racism, Robert Hughes's Culture of Complaint and Arthur Schlesingers's The Disuniting of America. Yet US debate over everything from Frederick Douglass's autobiographies to rap lyrics has been persistently parochial, mistaking for American phenomena what are actually much wider ones. The "culture wars" of recent years in the USA have, to a quite astonishing degree, been almost exclusively focused around rival versions of Americanism; even, or perhaps especially, when some protagonists have been proclaiming their "Africanism." Advocacy and criticism of educational `multiculturalism' have rarely been about what they should be taught of the histories and beliefs of various social groups in the US's own population. It is the "We Are the World" syndrome, with a vengeance.

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An adequate and thorough investigation of Afrocentric views of history would have to trace their genealogies through a mass of nineteenth and early twentieth century black American writing about Africa, to take detailed note of such major protagonists as Marimba Ali, Molefi Asante, John G. Jackobs, Ron Karenga, Ivan Van Sertima and Chancellor Williams, and, perhaps above all, to look closely at the most influential and intellectually substantial of them all, Cheika Anta Diop. I attempt this in what follows