Afrocentricity is a paradigm based on the idea that African people should re-assert a sense of agency in order to achieve sanity. During the l960s a group of African American intellectuals in the newly-formed Black Studies departments at universities began to formulate novel ways of analyzing information. In some cases, these new ways were called looking at information from “a black perspective” a
s opposed to what had been considered the “white perspective” of most information in the American academy. In the late l970s Molefi Kete Asante began speaking of the need for an Afrocentric orientation to data. By l980 he had published a book, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, which launched the first full discussion of the concept. Although the word existed before Asante’s book and had been used by many people, including Asante in the l970s, and Kwame Nkrumah in the l960s, the intellectual idea did not have substance as a philosophical concept until l980. The Afrocentric paradigm is a revolutionary shift in thinking proposed as a constructural adjustment to black disorientation, decenteredness, and lack of agency. The Afrocentrist asks the question, “What would African people do if there were no white people?” In other words, what natural responses would occur in the relationships, attitudes toward the environment, kinship patterns, preferences for colors, type of religion, and historical referent points for African people if there had not been any intervention of colonialism or enslavement? Afrocentricity answers this question by asserting the central role of the African subject within the context of African history, thereby removing Europe from the center of the African reality. In this way, Afrocentricity becomes a revolutionary idea because it studies ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic processes from a standpoint of black people as subjects and not as objects, basing all knowledge on the authentic interrogation of location. So that it becomes legitmate to ask, “Where is the sistah coming from?” or “Where is the brotha at?” “Are you down with overcoming oppression?” These are assessment and evaluative questions that allow the interrogator to accurately pinpoint the responder’s location, whether it be a cultural or psychological location. As a paradigm Afrocentricity enthrones the centrality of the African, that is, black ideals and values, as expressed in the highest forms of African culture, and activates consciousness as a functional aspect of any revolutionary approach to phenomena. The cognitive and structural aspects of a paradigm are incomplete without the functional aspect. There is something more than knowing in the Afrocentric sense; there is also doing. Afrocentricity holds that all definitions are autobiographical. One of the key assumptions of the Afrocentrist is that all relationships are based on centers and margins and the distances from either the center or the margin. When black people view themselves as centered and central in their own history then they see themselves as agents, actors, and participants rather than as marginals on the periphery of political or economic experience. Using this paradigm, human beings have discovered that all phenomena are expressed in the fundamental categories of space and time. Furthermore, it is then understood that relationships develop and knowledge increases to the extent we are able to appreciate the issues of space and time. The Afrocentric scholar or practitioner knows that one way to express Afrocentricity is called marking. Whenever a person delineates a cultural boundary around a particular cultural space in human time, this is called marking. It might be done with the announcement of a certain symbol, the creation of a special bonding, or the citing of personal heroes of African history and culture. Beyond citing the revolutionary thinkers in our history, that is, beyond Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X and Nkrumah, we must be prepared to act upon our interpretation of what is in the best interest of black people, that is, black people as an historically oppressed population. This is the fundamental necessity for advancing the political process. Afrocentricity is the substance of our regeneration because it is in line with what contemporary philosophers Haki Madhubuti and Maulana Karenga, among others, have articulated as in the best image and interest of African people. What is any better than operating and acting out of our own collective interest? What resonates more with people than understanding that we are central to our history, not someone else’s? If we can, in the process of materializing our consciousness, claim space as agents of progressive change, then we can change our condition and change the world.
