Molefi Kete Asante

I come to Africa as a devotee of lessons of the ancestors and as a bringer of as much knowledge about the continent as I possibly can, given the inadequacy of my education in the West. Yet as one born in Georgia of Yoruba and Nubian heritage, as far as the DNA reports say, I am also fiercely committed to the rise of African people from the five hundred years of induced slumber derived from the mythic doctrines of white supremacy, Eurocentric political hegemony, economic exploitation, social degradation, and religious indoctrination.

Years of negative media about Africa’s chaos, HIV rates, ethnic wars, and political ineptitude have dampened the gleam of Africa for some people. I am not one of those people because I believe that in Africa we are at the seat of the future of the world. This is not bombast; this is a fair assessment of the material and human potential of the continent. As a descendant of enslaved Africans brought, like my brothers and sisters in Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Colombia, Brazil, and many other places in the Americas, I am convinced that the continent is on the verge of a renaissance.

Therefore, I am forced by my understandings to repeat with Anna Julia Cooper that “When and where I enter, my people enter with me.” This is the preamble to all of my theoretical, philosophical, and political aspirations. Thus, as an Afrocentrist, one committed to African agency and centeredness, I am always seeking the proper approach to unleashing the wealth of knowledge, history, and culture that comprise the repository of African people. I want the doors open so that the world can share in the grand flow of our history.

Africa is not a junior continent, and African people are not junior partners in the history of world. Although the Great Enslavement colored thinking and behavior in regard to African people, it was simply hell for a several centuries out of millennia of African history. Of course, our ancestors were shocked and stung by the severity of the oppression that accompanied the deadly doctrine of white racial domination from Europe, as we had been struck by the ferocity of Arab domination in the East, but our backs, even as they were forced to the wall, stiffened and kept us fighting against all forms of evil.

The 70 books that I have written during my career cover every aspect of African culture, from spirituality to economics, from society to religion, from politics to history, and always the deciding question is, “What role did Africans play in such and such phenomenon?” When I could not answer this question from the indoctrination that Europe had given to me as a student, I had to turn to the direction of African people themselves. It is here that I discovered, and others have now bitten off, the centrality of our own agency as the gateway to an answer. Whether it was medicine, architecture, mathematics, law, politics, philosophy, astronomy, poetry, religion, or the calendar, I could not escape the agency of African people. We were not on the margins of human history, but precisely in the center of it. Furthermore, and more importantly, we were our own agents and actors, not merely on the periphery of Europe.

Since I do not speak of Africa as an outsider but as one in the grand flow of its intellectual tradition I seek everywhere what the philosopher Ama Mazama refers to as the functionality of Afrocentricity. Only when Africans pay attention to their own interests will we be able to advance an ethical agenda rooted in the core of African wisdom and knowledge. The Afrocentrist is the most preeminent realist because it is only through the eyes of genuinely human people can we understand that Africans are no better and no worse than others, but that without our own eyes we are permanently blind to our past and future.

My book, The History of Africa, (Routledge, 2007), was the first comprehensive history of Africa written by an African person. The aim of this book was to tell an Afrocentric narrative, with African periods, on African terms. The reception of the book has been phenomenal worldwide because for the very first time the narrative of Africa is not told through the voice of Europe. It is an African book with African agency.

I am quite political; I am a Pan Africanist. I believe that it is necessary for African people in the Americas to overcome our Afrophobia. Our own psychological, social, and moral victories can only come when we reconnect ourselves to the African past, present, and future. You cannot forget your mother and hope to regain a sense of confidence in the future. My work in Africa, as leader of the U.S. Fesman Committee, as a Founding Member, Council of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora, and consultant to African Union, coincides with my work on the board of the National Council of Black Studies and as Editor, Journal of Black Studies, the preeminent journal in the field of African and African American Studies. Partnering with Africa must always be on equal terms and on mutual bases; this is the only true partnership.

Molefi Kete Asante is Professor of Africology at Temple University, Philadelphia. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the author of seventy books, including Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait (2010) and Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait (2007).

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