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Afrocentrism As the once outcast Rastafari movement increasingly becomes mainstream, the rise of another radical, ultra-nationalist Ethiopianist movement is ruffling feathers in the rarefied world of Egyptology and Western academia. Afrocentrism is an academic, philosophical and historical approach to the study of world history. It maintains that Eurocentrism has led to the neglect and denial of classical Africa’s contribution to world history. The growth of Afrocentric enterprise in the United States, Brazil, France and Africa reflects its growing popularity and importance among ordinary black people from Harlem and Brixton to Cape Town. Afrocentric study largely focuses on Africa’s ancient, north-eastern civilisations Kemet (Egypt), Nubia, Aksum and Meroe. But many leading white scholars and several African-American social critics say Afrocentric Egyptology is not real and want impressionable young black minds snatched from its clutches. They say the credibility of many of the kente and mud cloth-clad authors whose work is being used in Afrocentric study is suspect. And they have penned several scholarly tomes to bring Afrocentrism to book. Among them is Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Has Become an Excuse to Teach Myth as History by the American academic, Mary Lefkowitz. She says any idea of an ancient “Egyptian mystery system” from which the Greeks stole their philosophy is blatantly untrue. Stephen Howe, a politics tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford (UK), also says in his book, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, that Afrocentrism is a symptom rather than a cure for desperate political and economic problems. He claims that Afrocentrism mostly offers a fictional history of Africa and its diaspora centred on bizarre ideas about Ancient Egypt. But those working on the frontline of Afrocentric study disagree. They assert that Africans need to see themselves through black eyes, as agents of history, not merely subjects of other people’s investigation. “As our history has basically been smashed and hidden, we need to analyse what our people did that was great spiritually and culturally and reclaim them, whether they are from ancient Kemet or Ghana,” says Ammitai Lumumba who teaches ancient African history to black children in a Saturday school in London. “We want to integrate these positive elements and create a new spiritual order

For those looking for Afrocentric books, this is but one example

which will help Africans move forward,” she says. “We want to take out European and Arabic infusions and other people’s cultural practices and ideas that have come into our lives and replace them with African positives. We need to go back and help our people rebuild Mama Africa. The way to start this is by reclaiming our culture.” The part-time teacher, who lives in London but was born in Jamaica, Africanised her name to honour the assassinated Congolese leader, Patrice Lumumba. She has since bought a plot of land in Ghana and plans to relocate there to help with Africa’s regeneration. Ammitai asserts that research by leading black scholars, including Cheikh Anta Diop, backs up the Afrocentric material she uses in her African history classes. Diop, who died in 1986, is widely acknowledged as the father of Afrocentric education. His book, The African Origin of Civilisation: Myth or Reality, published in 1974, asserts that archaeological and anthropological evidence prove that Ancient Egypt was a black African civilisation and culture. In 2003, some of Diop’s theories were supported by an exciting archaeological discovery when a team, led by a Swiss archaeologist, Prof Charles Bonnet, discovered seven massive, magnificently sculpted, black granite statues and monuments in a pit at a site in Kerma, near the Nile in northern Sudan. The statues portray five black African pharaonic rulers, including Taharqa and Tanutamun, from modern-day Sudan. The discovery is recorded in The Nubian Pharaohs: Black Kings of the Nile by Prof Bonnet and Dominique Valbelle, published in early 2007.

The black pharaohs ruled over a mighty Nubian empire, referred to as Kush, which stretched along the Nile valley 2,500 years ago and was one of Africa’s earliest civilisations. Kush, whose first capital was Kerma, rivalled classical Egypt in wealth, power and cultural development. Later, the small mountain region, Jebel Barkal, and Napata, a town that grew up around it, served as ancient Nubia’s spiritual centre. The mountain was also considered a holy site by neighbouring Egypt, whose pharaohs plundered and tyrannised Nubia for 400 years. In the 8th century BC, Nubia turned the tables on its former colonisers when its armies marched 700 miles north from Jebel Barkal to Thebes, Egypt’s spiritual capital.There, the Nubian king Piye became the first of a succession of five black pharaohs who ruled Egypt for six decades with the blessing of Egypt’s priesthood. Some of the statues and monuments unearthed in the pit at Kerma had been savagely destroyed – they had smashed heads and broken feet.

Africa’s contributions As the Ethiopianist movements grow from strength to strength, they are striking an emotional chord with many black people who rightly want to see Africa’s contributions to world history acknowledged. They are tired of Africa being used as a blank screen for other people to project their prejudices. In a world where race, discrimination and exploitation remain an issue, modern-day Ethiopianists are reclaiming their ancestral history in a bid to shape their own identity and destiny. Further archaeological digs will undoubtedly reveal more wonders and mysteries from Africa’s ancient world which may support more Afrocentric theories. Ongoing excavations by American archaeologists, Roderick and Susan McIntosh of Rice University, Texas, and their Malian colleagues at the Institut des Sciences et Humanitéés show that Jenne, a historically significant trading city in Mali, is almost 1,000 years older than previously thought by scholars. Prior to the dig, it was generally accepted that the Malian metropolis had developed simultaneously with Timbuktu which was founded around the 13th century as a result of the trans-Saharan trade that is credited with bringing urbanisation to West Africa.

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84n NEW AFRICAN February 2008