Afrocentric

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Afrocentrism is an approach to the study of world history which stresses the distinctive identity and contributions of African cultures. Afrocentrists commonly argue that Eurocentrism has led to the neglect or denial of the contributions of African people and focused instead on a generally European-centered model of world civilization and history. Therefore, Afrocentrism aims to shift the focus from a European-centered history to an African-centered history. More broadly, Afrocentrism is concerned with distinguishing the influence of European peoples from African achievements.^[1]

Philosophically, Afrocentrism is often compared to Eurocentrism; however, the validity of this comparison is sometimes heavily debated.^[2]

History of Afrocentrism

A 1911 copy of the NAACP journal The Crisis depicting an Afrocentric artist's interpretation of "Ra-Maat-Neb, one of the kings of the Upper Nile"

The origins of Afrocentrism can be found in the work of African and African-diaspora intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Edward Wilmot Blyden acknowledged a change in perception taking place among Europeans towards Africans in his 1908 book African Life and Customs, which originated as a series of articles in the Sierra Leone Weekly News.^[3] In it, he puts forth the notion that Africans were beginning to be seen as different and not inferior, because of writers such as Mary Kingsley and Lady Lugard.^[4] Such an enlightened view was fundamental to refuting prevailing ideas of Africa and Africans. Blyden used that standpoint to show how the traditional social, industrial, and economic life of Africans untouched by "either European or Asiatic influence", is simply different.^[5] In a letter responding to the original series of articles, J.E. Casely Hayford commented "it is easy to see the men and women who walked the banks of the Nile" passing him on the streets of Kumasi.^[6] He further suggested the building of a University to preserve African identity and instincts. In that university, the history chair would teach

"...universal history, with particular reference to the part Ethiopia has played in the affairs of the world. I would lay stress upon the fact that while Ramses II was dedicating temples to "the God of gods, and secondly to his own glory", the God of the Hebrews had not yet appeared unto Moses in the burning bush; that Africa was the cradle of the world's systems and philosophies, and the nursing mother of its religions. In short, that Africa has nothing to be ashamed of in its place among the nations of the earth. I would make it possible for this seat of learning to be the means of revising erroneous current ideas regarding the African; of raising him in self-respect; and of making him an efficient co-worker in the uplifting of man to nobler effort."^[7]

The exchange of ideas between Blyden and Hayford embodied the fundamental concepts of Afrocentricism.

Publications such as The Crisis and the Journal of Negro History sought to counter the prevailing view in the West that Sub-Saharan Africa had contributed nothing of value to human history that was not the result of incursions by Europeans and Arabs.^[8] These journals put forth a view of Ancient Egyptian civilization as the culmination of events arising from the origin of the human race in Africa and investigated the history of Africa from that perspective.

In his early years, editor of The Crisis W.E.B. DuBois, researched West African culture and attempted to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. DuBois later envisioned and received funding from then Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah to produce an Encyclopedia Africana that would chronicle the history and cultures of Africa, however, he died before the work could be completed. Some aspects of DuBois's approach are evident in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, who identified a pan-African protolanguage and presented evidence that ancient Egyptians were, indeed, Africans.

Dubois inspired a number of authors including Drusilla Dunjee Houston. Upon reading his work The Negro (1915) she embarked upon writing her own Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire (1926). The book compiles the evidence regarding the historic origins of Cush and Ethiopia including their influences on Greece.

George James, a follower of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who emphasized the importance of Ethiopia as a great, "black civilization", was one of the first writers to argue that Black peoples should develop pride in African history. James's book, Stolen Legacy (1954) is often cited as one of the foundational texts of Afrocentrism. James claimed that Greek philosophy was "stolen" from ancient Egyptian traditions and that these had developed from distinctively "African" cultural roots. For James, the works of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers were, in fact, poor synopses of aspects of ancient Egyptian wisdom. According to James, the Greeks were a violent and quarrelsome people, unlike the Egyptians, and were not naturally capable of philosophy. James famously claimed in his book that Aristotle had physically "stolen" his ideas and works from an "African" Library of Alexandria, when, in fact, the Library of Alexandria was built by Greeks out of the collected scrolls of the Egyptian temples, during the Hellenistic period of Egypt, and well after Aristotle's death. African American activist Al Sharpton was quoted as saying at Kean College in 1994 that “White folks was in caves while we was building empires... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”[2]

These ideas were not wholly new. 18th-century Masonic texts referenced ancient writings that claimed Greek philosophers had studied in Egypt. The poet William Blake had also attacked "the stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero," asserting that they were copies of more ancient Semitic texts. Such views were associated with radical and Romantic thought that rejected classical Greco-Roman culture as the model for civilization. James's distinct contribution was to tie these claims to an opposition between white European and African identity, associating these alleged ancient appropriations of black wisdom with white, imperialist exploitation of African peoples and the theft of artifacts from African cultures. By claiming that the Greeks were barbaric and innately incapable of philosophy, he inverted normative imperialist racial hierarchies, which made the same claims about Africans.

James' approach has been copied by other writers. This led to claims that Africans originated intellectual or technological achievements that later were claimed by whites. Today, most of these writings are not considered serious scholarship, and modern "Afrocentricity" writers have abandoned James's more extreme claims to concentrate on the notion that modern Black peoples should center their understanding of culture and history on Africa.^{[citation needed]} Molefi Kete Asante's book Afrocentricity (1988) argues that African-Americans should look to African cultures "as a critical corrective to a displaced agency among Africans."

Afrocentric authors have argued James's assertion regarding Egyptian culture's influence on Greek culture has been underestimated. Among such authors, is Martin Bernal, whose three-volume series Black Athena presents evidence showing the influence of Afro-Asiatic and Semitic civilizations on Classical Greece.^{[citation needed]}

Nevertheless, there are Afrocentric writers focusing on study of indigenous African civilizations and peoples, with the aim of emphasizing African history unencumbered by European or Arab influence. Primary among them is Chancellor Williams, whose book The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D. set out to determine a "purely African body of principles, value systems (and) philosophy of life".^[9] These scholars see a need for historians to shift their attention away from European accomplishments and Europe-derived racist assumptions and, instead, emphasize the black origins of mankind and black contributions to world history. They maintain that such a paradigm shift would result in significant attitudinal modifications in the West and elsewhere. Indeed, many claim that a dramatic shift already has occurred.^{[citation needed]} As educational opportunities have broadened for peoples of color over the years, non-white scholars from many cultures increasingly have begun to examine anew the historical and archaeological record. Their findings challenge the "Eurocentric" view of world history. That view had been accepted for many centuries while it devalued and appropriated, or simply ignored achievements by blacks and other non-Europeans.^{[citation needed]}

Studies of African and African-diaspora cultures have also adopted a more positive approach to influence by African religious, linguistic and other traditions. For example Lorenzo Dow Turner's seminal 1949 study of the Gullah language, a dialect spoken by black communities in Georgia and South Carolina, demonstrated that its idiosyncrasies were not simply incompetent command of English, but incorporated West African linguistic characteristics in vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and semantic system. Likewise, religious movements such as Vodun are now less likely to be characterized as mere superstition, but identified in terms of links to African traditions.^{[citation needed]} Scholars who adopt such approaches may or may not see their work as Afrocentrist in orientation.

The debate over Afrocentrism

Critics counter that much historical Afrocentric research simply lacks scientific merit and that it actually seeks to supplant and counter one form of racism with another, rather than attempt to arrive at the truth. Among these critics, Mary Lefkowitz's Not out of Africa is regarded by some as the foremost critical work. In it, she contends Afrocentric historical claims are grounded in identity politics and myth rather than sound scholarship. Like most other mainstream scholars, she rejects James's views on the ground that his sources predate the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She contends that actual ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. She also contends that Bernal underestimates the distinctiveness of Greek intellectual culture. Asante and others, however, dispute her conclusions.^[10]

Race and Afrocentrism argument

Afrocentrism contends that race still exists as a social and political construct. It argues that racist Eurocentric ideas about history were adopted for centuries. They claim that according to these ideas, Blacks had no civilization, no written language, no culture, and no history of any note before coming into contact with Europeans. Further, European history commonly receives more attention within the academic community than the history of sub-Saharan African cultures or those of the many Pacific Island peoples. Afrocentrists contend it is important to divorce the historical record from past racism.^{[citation needed]}

Definitions of Pan-African identity

The indigenous Papuans of New Guinea have Australoid and Negroid physical characteristics and are considered black in some cultures despite being genetically closer to Southeast Asians than to Africans. ^[11][12]

The relationship among racial, cultural and continental identities is one of the more difficult problems in Afrocentic thought. In other instances, the concept of black racial identity has been used to include among "African" peoples populations generally thought of as non-Africans, such as the Australoid (sometimes called "Veddoid") peoples of Australia and New Guinea and the Dravidians of India and the people of the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Also included by some writers in the African diaspora are the "Negritos" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malaysia, and Cambodia); the "Africoid," aboriginal peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; some Afrocentrists also claim that the Olmecs of what is now Mexico came from Africa, though this is not a widespread view among historians of Mesoamerica.[3] Afrocentrists who adopt this approach contend that such peoples are African in a racial sense, just as the white inhabitants of modern Australia may be said to be European.

Criticism of the race theory

Critics argue that such peoples were not recent emigrants from Africa, and the entire population of the world might just as reasonably be considered part of an African race according to the Out of Africa model of human migration. Studies show that some members of these darker-skinned ethnic groups and "Mongoloid" East Asians are genetically closer to one another than they are to indigenous Africans. Afrocentrists argue that such genetic similarities are due to the fact that the aboriginal peoples of Asia were "Africoid" Negritos and Australoid types, who later miscegenated and developed in isolation with populations of the eventually more dominant Mongoloid phenotype over time. They contend these facts do not change the fundamental black racial identity of these peoples based on the traditional metrics of the classic "Negroid" phenotype, physical similarities with other peoples classified as Negroid, presumptive patterns of prehistoric migrations and, in some cases, what they contend are cultural similarities. Arguments advancing the notion of racial similarities between a Nubian and a Dravidian, both classified as Negroid, Afrocentrists contend, are far more credible than those of between, say, a Swede and a modern-day Turk, both classified as Caucasian.^{[citation needed]} Traditional racial classifications, after all, are not based on genetics, but on phenotype.^{[citation needed]} In such matters, Afrocentrists adopt the pan-Africanist perspective that such people of color are all "African people" or "diasporic Africans." As Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes, they are all part of the "global African community." This view, however, disregards how most "Mongoloid" East Asians identify themselves and the conclusions of geneticists about population relatedness.

Afrocentrism and academia

A primary concern of Afrocentrism has been to engage what they claim to be biased methods and approaches used by European scholars, and the European dominated intellectual community in relation to the African people, including Egypt. A seminal moment for Afrocentrism was the presentation of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, at the 1974 UNESCO symposium "The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Decipherment of Meroitic Script," ^[13]which attacked a long history of biased scholarship. In the words of one historian of Egypt, Jean Vercoutter, who attended:

- Jean Vercoutter ^[14]

As regards definitions, Afrocentrists allege that European scholars carefully define Black peoples as narrowly as possible, creating an extreme "true Negro" south of the Sahara, while allocating all else not meeting the extreme type to "Caucasoid" groupings, including Ethiopians, Egyptians and Nubians (C. G. Seligman's Races of Africa, 1966)^[15] French historian Jean Verncoutter (quoted above) argues that selective grouping is common among scholars where the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians is involved, with Negroid remains being routinely classified as "Mediterranean" even though they were recorded in substantial numbers by archaeological workers ( Vercoutter 1978- The Peopling of ancient Egypt)^[16] Afrocentrists also point of the work of Czech anthropologist Eugene Strouhal which describes both physical, cultural and material links of ancient Egypt with the peoples of Nubia and the Sahara, ( Strouhal (1968, 1971- Strouhal, E., ‘Evidence of the early penetration of Negroes into prehistoric Egypt)^[17], the analyses of Falkenburger (1947) which show a clear Negroid element, especially in the southern population and sometimes as predominating in the predynastic period^[18], and the research of archealogist Bruce Williams which argues for a Nubian influence on formation of the Egyptian kingships. ^[19] They also cite recent mainstream restudies which confirm the varied character of, and Nilotic influence on the Egyptian people.^[20]

Afrocentrists also allege that scholars have continued to use theories of white civilizers flowing into Africa to explain the civilizations there, being unwilling to attribute any elaborate developments to blacks. Ironically, prominent Afrocentric critic Mary Lefkowitz at times finds some common ground with Afrocentrists. In her "Not Out Of Africa"[12], Lefkowitz notes that a number of earlier historical theories suggesting Caucasians initially sweeping into ancient Egypt from the north have been rendered untenable by modern research, which suggests a movement of peoples from the South, up from the Sahara into the Nilotic zone.

"Recent work on skeletons and DNA suggests that the people who settled in the Nile valley, like all of humankind, came from somewhere south of the Sahara; they were not (as some nineteenth-century scholars had supposed) invaders from the North. See Bruce G. Trigger, "The Rise of Civilization in Egypt," Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol I, pp 489-90; S. O. Y. Keita, "Studies and Comments on Ancient Egyptian Biological Relationships," History in Africa 20 (1993) 129-54."

On the basis of this varied research, some Afrocentrists argue that the Egyptians could indeed be classified as "Black." Other writers however argue that while the Egyptians clearly showed a range of types, including dark-skinned individuals others, calling them "Black" was an application of the "one-drop" rule of American culture, which would have been alien to the ancient Egyptians.^[21] Afrocentrists reply that they are justified in doing so since historians routinely uses narrow definitions of Blacks, and uses subtle code for "Caucasoid" under such terms as "Mediterranean" or "Middle Eastern."^[22]

African as a race

Afrocentrists hold that Africans exhibit a range of types and physical characteristics, and that such elements as wavy hair or aquiline facial features are part of a continuum of African types that do not depend on admixture with Caucasian groups. They cite the nonracial approach of Hiernaux (1975)^[23] and Hassan (1988)^[24] which demonstrates that populations can vary based on microevolutionary principles (climate adaptation, drift, selection), and that this variation is present in both living and fossil Africans (AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 87:245-254 (1992))^[25]They condemn attempts to split African peoples into racial clusters as new versions of older, discredited theories such as the "Hamitic Hypothesis" and the Dynastic Race Theory that attempted to separate out African groups like Nubians, Ethiopians and Somalians into "Caucasoid" groups that entered Africa to bring civilization to the natives. They also charge a double standard at play in Western academia which has made little attempt to define a "true white", ^[26]but does not hesitate to define Blacks as narrowly as possibly, while allocating as much as possible to broad "Caucasoid" or other categories when it comes to Egypt or other African civilizations. Afrocentric writer C.A. Diop captures this belief in a double standard as follows:

"But it is only the most gratuitous theory which considers the Dinka, the Nouer and the Masai, among others, to be Caucasoids. What if an African ethnologist were to persist in recognising as white only the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians, and systematically refused membership to the remaining Europeans, and Mediterraneans in particular--the French, Italians, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese? Just as the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the Mediterranean countries must be considered as two extreme poles of the same anthropological reality, so should the Negroes of East and West Africa be considered as the two extremes in the reality of the Negro world. To say that a Shillouk, a Dinka, or a Nouer is a Caucasoid is for an African as devoid of sense and scientific interest as would be, to a European, an attitude which maintained that a Greek or a Latin were not of the same race." ^[27]

According to Neil Risch of Yale "East African groups, such as Ethiopians and Somalis, have great genetic resemblance to Caucasians and are clearly intermediate between sub-Saharan Africans and Caucasians" and "are clearly intermediate between sub-Saharan Africans and Caucasians".^[28] According to Loring Brace "when the nonadaptive aspects of craniofacial configuration are the basis for assessment, the Somalis cluster with Europeans before showing a tie with the people of West Africa or the Congo Basin".^[29]

Such results however, are generally misleading. Many scholars have noted the fallacies of typological thinking as it concerns indigenous eastern African populations. The inhabitants of East Africa right on the equator have appreciably longer, narrower, and higher noses than people in the Congo at the same latitude, features that are sometimes erroneously labeled "Caucasoid". However, such features have always been indigenous to Saharo-tropical African and many anthropologists point out that there's nothing to suggest that these populations are closely related to "Caucasoids" of Europe and western Asia.^[23] Indeed, genetic analyses have indicated that Somali people in particular, are overwhelmingly indigenous. The male Somali population is a branch of the East African population − closely related to the Oromos in Ethiopia and North Kenya − with predominant E3b1 cluster lineages that were introduced into the Somali population 4000−5000 years ago, and that the Somali male population has approximately 15% Y chromosomes from Eurasia and approximately 5% from other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, determining that Somalis and those in the Horn of Africa are of the Elongated African type.^[30] Similarly, Ethiopians are found to share maternal lineages in common with both sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia. Both Ethiopians and Yemenis contain an almost-equal proportion of Eurasian-specific M and N and African-specific lineages.^[31] However, even these results may prove misleading since a great number of geneticists cite M1 lineages as being native to and emerging in Ethiopia some 60,000 years ago.^[32]

Egypt and the argument of African cultural unity

The ancient pyramids of Egypt

One of the most common claims of afrocentrist historians is that dynastic Egypt was an indigenous African civilization. Although today, modern Egypt is geopolitically located in the Middle East, Egypt is geographically located in the African continent, and afrocentrist historians argue that Egypt should be understood, in historical terms, as an African state.^{[citation needed]}

The basis of this argument is the belief that the salient cultural characteristics of ancient Egypt are indigenous to Africa and that these features are present in other African civilizations.^[33] Critical of much of mainstream Egyptology, Afrocentrists are of the opinion that the study of ancient Egyptian culture artificially disconnects it from other early African civilizations, such as Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia — particularly in light of the fact that archaeological evidence clearly indicates a confluence among this cultural triad.^[34] This perspective, championed by the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, is known formally as the Cultural Unity Theory. This theory has proponents outside Afrocentric circles, among them Bruce Williams of the Oriental Institute, Chicago.^{[citation needed]} Afrocentrists also claim that these civilizations made significant contributions to ancient Greece and Rome during their formative periods.

The controversial and contested rendering of Tutankhamun exhibiting hazel eyes and a "mid-range" skin tone, as shown on the cover of National Geographic in 2005.

The more conventional belief among archaeologists and Egyptologists such as Frank J. Yurco and Fekri Hassan and historians is that the ancient Egyptian civilization was a unique mix of indigenous Nilotic peoples, related, in terms of culture and language, to the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken across northern Africa, Chad and the Horn of Africa and by the Beja of the Sudan.^[35] The conventional belief in a non-Negroid Egypt has been challenged by scholars who believe the cultural similarities between Egypt and the Levant are due to the exportation of cultural elements from the Nilotic civilizations, rather than the reverse.^{[citation needed]}

Afrocentrists claim a growing acceptance of Egypt as an African culture with its own unique elements, citing mainstream scholars like Bruce Trigger who decries many approaches of the past as 'marred by a confusion of race, language, and culture and by an accompanying racism'.^[36] and the approach of Egyptologist Frank Yurco, who sees the Egyptians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Somalians, etc as one localized Nile valley population, that need not be artificially clustered into racial percentages.^[37]

Egypt's Sphere of influence Debate

This Afrocentric view finds itself in direct opposition to the conclusions of Eurocentric scholars such as British historian Arnold Toynbee, who regarded the ancient Egyptian cultural sphere as having died out without leaving a successor, and who regarded as "myth" the idea that Egypt was the "origin of Western civilization." However, there are numerous accounts in the historical record dating back several centuries wherein scholars have written of an Egypt and its contributions to Mediterranean civilizations.^[38] However, these accounts were all written considerably after these contributions purportedly took place; some Greeks claimed knowledge or stories to have originated in Egypt when it was in fact a product of their own civilization to create the basis for an argument from authority.

Criticism of Afrocentrism

Afrocentrism is generally rejected in the academic community because it is generally not regarded as an academic theory or idea but rather a social and political one, teaching invented history for the sake of the individual and the political rather than the historical.

According to Robert Todd Carroll in his well-known Skeptic's Dictionary Afrocentrism is actually a pseudohistorical political approach to the study of world history.^[39] Afrocentrists themselves deny such charges and claim only to seek self-determination and a right to tell their own history.^[40] Carroll does not, however, define Eurocentrism in this dictionary.

One of Afrocentrism's most prominent critics, Mary Lefkowitz has characterized Afrocentricity as "an excuse to teach myth as history".^[41] Likewise, African-American History professor Clarence E. Walker has proclaimed it to be "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic".^[42]

According to an issue in Time Magazine, some Afrocentrists assert that blacks -- who indeed have more of the skin pigment than other peoples -- possess superior and supernatural traits that can be ascribed to the magical qualities of neuromelanin, a little-studied substance in the brain. Yet while neuromelanin is markedly different from the skin pigment, the Afrocentrists who make these claims often fail to differentiate between the two and ignore the fact that all humans have similar amounts of neuromelanin. According to the adherents to this theory, neuromelanin can convert light and magnetic fields to sound and back again, and can capture sunlight and hold it in a "memory mode." Furthermore, they say, melanin granules are minicomputers that can respond to and analyze stimuli without interacting with the brain. According to Prof. Barry Mehler, the supporters of the melanin theory "do not represent a majority of black opinion but they represent a significant minority." According to critics, the melanin theory is pseudoscientific and racist. Extremists also assert that the Ancient Egyptians could fly with gliders. They also invented electric batteries and discovered the principles of quantum mechanics. In the view of these extremists, the Egyptians' dark skin pigment, or melanin, not only made them more humane and superior to lighter-skinned people in body and mind but also provided such paranormal powers as ESP and psychokinesis.^[43] However, while these charges may be reported accurately, it is not usually incorporated into Afrocentric curriculum and is seen by many afrocentric academics as one of many trivial distractions to the central issue.^[44]

Book Cover The African origins of civilization

List of prominent Afrocentric authors

• Molefi Kete Asante, professor, author: Afrocentricity: The theory of Social Change; The Afrocentric Idea; The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten
• Ishakamusa Barashango, college professor and lecturer; founder, Temple of the Black Messiah, School of History and Religion; co-founder and creative director, Fourth Dynasty Publishing Company, Silver Spring, Maryland
• Hakim Bey, leader of the Moorish Science Temple, author of the "Journal of the Moorish Paradigm"
• Jacob Carruthers, Egyptologist; founding director of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization; founder and director of the Kemetic Institute, Chicago
• Cheikh Anta Diop [4],[5], author: The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality; Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology; Precolonial Black Africa; The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity; The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script
• H.B. ("Barry") Fell, Harvard professor, linguist, author: Saga America, 1980 [6]
• Drusilla Dunjee Houston, lecturer, syndicated columnist, author: Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, 1926.
• Yosef Ben-Jochannan, author: African Origins of Major "Western Religions"; Black Man of the Nile and His Family; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; New Dimensions in African History; The Myth of Exodus and Genesis and the Exclusion of Their African Origins; Africa: Mother of Western Civilization; Abu Simbel to Ghizeh: A Guide Book and Manual
• Runoko Rashidi [7], author: Introduction to African Civilizations; The global African community: The African presence in Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific
• J.A. Rogers, author: Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands : The Old World; Nature Knows No Color Line; Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas : The New World; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro
• Ivan van Sertima, author: They Came before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, African Presence in Early Europe ISBN 0887386644; Blacks in Science Ancient and Modern; African Presence in Early Asia; African Presence in Early America; Early America Revisited; Egypt Revisited: Journal of African Civilizations; Nile Valley Civilizations; Egypt: Child of Africa (Journal of African Civilizations, V. 12); The Golden Age of the Moor (Journal of African Civilizations, Vol. 11, Fall 1991); Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern; Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop[8]
• Chancellor Williams, author: The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
• Théophile Obenga, author: Ancient Egypt and Black Africa : a student's handbook for the study of Ancient Egypt in philosophy, linguistics, and gender relations
• Asa Hilliard, III, author: SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind; The Teachings of Ptahhotep

References

Bibliography

• Asante, Molefi Kete (1990). Kemet, Afrocentricity, and knowledge. Africa World Press. 
• Bailey, Randall C. (editor) (2003). Yet with a steady beat: contemporary U.S. Afrocentric biblical interpretation. Society of Biblical Literature. 
• Berlinerblau, Jacques (1999). Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals. Rutgers University Press. 
• Binder, Amy J. (2002). Contentious curricula: Afrocentrism and creationism in American public schools. Princeton University Press. 
• Browder, Anthony T. (1992). Nile Valley Contributions To Civilization: Exploding the Myths, Volume 1. Washington, DC: Institute of Karmic Guidance. 
• Crawford, Clinton (1996). Recasting Ancient Egypt In The African Context: Toward A Model Curriculum Using Art And Language. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. 
• Henderson, Errol Anthony (1995). Afrocentrism and world politics: towards a new paradigm. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. 
• Henke, Holger and Fred Reno (editors) (2003). Modern political culture in the Caribbean. University of the West Indies Press. 
• Howe, Stephen (1998). Afrocentrism: mythical pasts and imagined homes. London: Verso. 
• Houston, Drusilla Dunjee (1926). Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire. Oklahoma: Universal Publishing Company. 
• Kershaw, Terry (1992). ""Afrocentrism and the Afrocentric method." Western Journal of Black Studies" 16 (3): 160-168. 
• Konstan, David. "Inventing Ancient Greece: [Review article]", History and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2. (May, 1997), pp. 261–269.
• Lefkowitz, Mary R. (1996). Not out of Africa: how Afrocentrism became an excuse to teach myth as history. New York: BasicBooks. 
• Lefkowitz, Mary R. and Guy MacLean Rogers (editors) (1996). Black Athena Revisited. University of North Carolina Press. 
• Lewis, Martin W. (1997). The myth of continents: a critique of metageography. University of California Press. 
• Magida, Arthur J. (1996). Prophet of rage a life of Louis Farrakhan and his nation. New York: BasicBooks. 
• Morton, Eric. "Race and Racism in the Works of David Hume." Journal on African Philosophy. (2002) ISSN: 1533-1067. Africa Resource Center. Retrieved on 2006-11-06.
• Moses, Wilson Jeremiah (1998). Afrotopia: the roots of African American popular history. Cambridge University Press. 
• Sniderman, Paul M. and Thomas Piazza (2002). Black pride and black prejudice. Princeton University Press. 
• Spivey, Donald (2003). Fire from the soul: a history of the African-American struggle. Carolina Academic Press. 
• Walker, Clarence E. (2000). We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. Oxford University Press. 
• Wells, Spencer (2002). The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Princeton University Press. 
• Osei-Yaw, Emmanuel. D.(2006)
• Ani, Marimba (1994). Yurugu: An African-centered Critique of European Thought and Behavior. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. ISBN 0-86543-248-1. 
• Asante, Molefi Kete (1988). Afrocentricity, rev. ed., Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. ISBN 0-86543-067-5. 
• Asante, Molefi Kete (1990). Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. ISBN 0-86543-188-4. 
• Asante, Molefi Kete (1998). The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN 1-56639-594-1. 
• Karenga, Maulana (1993). Introduction to Black Studies, 2nd ed., Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. ISBN 0-943412-16-1. 

See also

• African philosophy
• African writing systems
• Afro-asiatic languages
• Axum
• Black Athena
• Cultural appropriation
• Egyptology
• Ethnocentrism
• Eurocentrism
• Great Zimbabwe
• Historiography
• History of ancient Egypt
• Kamau Kambon
• Kush
• Meroe
• Nilotic
• Nubia
• North Africa
• Sub-Saharan Africa
• Sun Ra
• Tutankhamun

External links

• "Return to Glory," The Freeman Institute
• Molefi Asante explaining his conception of "Afrocentricity"
• 'Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White' Biblical Archaeology Review for September – October, 1989. Frank Joseph Yurco's perpective on the race controversy of the ancient Egyptians
• Afrocentrism by Robert Todd Carroll, Skeptic's Dictionary
• Ancient Nubia & Egypt Summary of Cheikh Anta Diop's Work (in French) La Nubie et L'Egypte Ancienne dans leurs Contexte Naturel Negro-Africain
• Afrocentrism: The Argument We're Really Having by Ibrahim Sundiata
• Afrocentrism in Rastafari
• Afrocentrist multicultural pseudo-history by The Association for Rational Thought
• Building Bridges to Afrocentrism by Ann Macy Roth, for the University of Pennsylvania's African Studies Center
• "The Egyptians: Who Were They?"
• "Egyptology: Hanging in the Hair," by Anu M'bantu and Fari Supia, West Africa Magazine, July 8, 2001
• Ex Africa Lux? by T. A. Schmitz (PDF)
• Fallacies of Afrocentrism by Grover Furr, for the Montclair State University
• "The Global African Presence," by Runoko Rashidi
• "Negro History and The Myth of Ham's Curse," by Babu G. Ranganathan (an East Indian writes of the black identity of ancient Egypt, India, etc.)
• "Not Out Of Africa Excerpt," by Mary Lefkowitz
• Pride and prejudice By Dinesh D'Souza
• "Race in Antiquity: Truly Out of Africa," by Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, a critical assessment of Lefkowitz's Not Out of Africa.
• Racism and the Rediscovery of Ancient Nubia
• Safari Scholarship Reinvents History by Ilana Mercer
• UC Davis History Professor Clarence Walker's take on Afrocentrism
• Hubert Harrison
• THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY H I S T O R Y N O T E S
• AFROSTYLY : Kamit News (Black Community)

Pan-Africanism
Proponents	Molefi Kete Asante · Nnamdi Azikiwe · Steve Biko · Francis Ohanyido · Edward Wilmot Blyden · Amílcar Cabral · David Comissiong · Cheikh Anta Diop · W. E. B. Du Bois · Frantz Fanon · Muammar al-Gaddafi · Marcus Garvey · Yosef Ben-Jochannan · Sankofa Juba · Maulana Karenga · Kenneth Kaunda · Jomo Kenyatta · Akwatu Khenti · Patrice Lumumba · Bob Marley · Malcolm X · Thabo Mbeki · Zephania Mothopeng · Abdias do Nascimento · Kwame Nkrumah · Julius Nyerere · George Padmore · Dr Motsoko Pheko · John Nyathi Pokela · Runoko Rashidi · Walter Rodney · Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia · Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe · Burning Spear · Henry Sylvester-Williams · Ahmed Sékou Touré · Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) · I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson · Omali Yeshitela
Concepts	United States of Africa · Afrocentrism