From Eurocentrism to Afrocentrism

Goals and Problems of African History and Scholarship

May 26, 2009

By the 19th Century, the nations of Europe had divided up Africa among their colonial empires. They took it upon themselves to write its histories.

In the 1800s the Italians, Germans and Belgians came late to the colonial stage, and descended voraciously, and often brutally, on the then-called ‘Dark Continent.’

Eurocentric Scholarship

Just as in Asia and the Americas before, they encountered new civilizations: the city of Great Zimbabwe or the Zulu and Bantu cultures in the south of the continent. However, time and again Africa was regarded as “no part of the historical globe; it is outside of history.” Scholars seemed motivated, at times almost desperately, to insist that black Africans had no culture, civilization, or history. The monuments of Nubia, Great Zimbabwe and especially Egypt, all had white European origins insisted on them: depictions of dark-skinned Africans paying homage to the relatively pale Egyptian Pharaohs were a long-standing rationalization for the inferior place black Africans were believed to occupy.

Perhaps because of the abolition of slavery in Britain and later America, some saw the need to reinforce the hierarchy to which they’d become accustomed, and which held up their empires.

Afrocentric Scholarship in Theory

With the advent of post-colonialism, elements of scholarship have attempted to compensate for these earlier shortcomings. Sympathetic histories like King Leopold’s Ghost show the true cost of colonialism, but do not always tell it from an African point of view. This has given rise to a school of history called ‘Afrocentrism.’

Its goal is to tell histories for Africa. On the face of it, a worthy pursuit and usually carried out just so; Edward Said, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Malinge Njeza are among those who want to bring the African continent up to the level of coverage and interest of other parts of the world and remove the continent from a ‘conceptual straitjacket.’

Problems in Practice

However, these moderate scholars have also had the challenging task of responding to those who take the opposite extreme: scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and Cheik Anta Diop prominently employ scholarship of dubious value.

In particular, the point of contention is Egypt. While European Imperial scholarship insisted on Egypt being a white kingdom lording over blacks in their home continent, most Afrocentrists cite Egypt as a symbol as ‘part of the continent of Africa…African pride and discourse.’ Extreme Afrocentrists, however, scholarship does precisely the opposite, insisting that Egyptians were black Africans (from such premises as their depiction of themselves as dark red simply a case of the difficulty of ‘capturing the colour of the negro in paint’) and were an Atlantis-esque ‘mother culture’ for the whole of Africa.

According to Njeza, the difficulty with Diop and his supporters is a continuing fixation with race: he still regards Africa as a distinct, long-oppressed ‘race.’ He even goes so far as to credit the Egyptians with the originators of the great philosophy of Greece, declaring the Greeks plagiarists.

His main thesis is that “there is a single African culture” which Njeza calls “preposterous,” and to elevate that culture at the expense of European history and culture, which Europeans, after all, lorded over Africa for over a century.

Goals and Implications

Sadly, this does little to disrupt the old Eurocentrism other than turn it on its head. Rather than bring Africa up to par with the rest of the world’s histories, Diop’s school of Afrocentrism is more a kind of revenge. Bringing appreciation of Africa’s own history to academia is laudable, but no excuse for poor scholarship.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, “Europe Upside Down.” TLS, February 12 (1993): 728-731.

Asante, Molefe Kete. The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism. New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1999.

Diamond, Jared. “Episode 3: Into the Tropics.” Guns Germs and Steel. DVD. Narrator: Peter Coyote. National Geographic Society, 2005.

Diop, Cheik Anta. The African Origins of Civilization. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1967.

Njeza, Malinge. “Fallacies of the New Afrocentrism,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 99, November (1997): 47-57.

The copyright of the article From Eurocentrism to Afrocentrism in Modern African History is owned by Alex Graham-Heggie. Permission to republish From Eurocentrism to Afrocentrism in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.