EKITI STATE UNIVERSITY, ADO-EKITI, NIGERIA

In Affiliation With
KWARA STATE COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, ILORIN

‘COURSE TITLE: PRACTICAL CRITICISM

COURSE CODE: ELS 423

LECTURER NAME: MR. GARUBA A. G

GROUP B

S/N NAMES MATRIC NUMBER DEPARTMENT

1. IMAM ALIAGAN ABDULRAHMAN EKSU/IL/R/18/0165 ENGLISH

2. ADAMU IDRIS IMAM EKSU/IL/R/18/0149 ENGLISH

3. USMAN HALIMAH EKSU/IL/R/19/0398 ENGLISH

4. MUHAMMED KAZEEM BASHIR EKSU/IL/R/18/0169 ENGLISH

QUESTION

WHAT AFROCENTRISM THEORY IS ALL ABOUT

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AFROCENTRISM THEORY, IT'S PROPONENTS, AND COMMENTS ON THE
THEORY

1. Afrocentricity is a collection of historical ideas that place people of african descents in the
center of a given historical event. It largely seeks to avoid placing africans and their descendants
in its subservient positions.

The terms Afrocentrism, Afrocology and Afrocentricity were coined in the 1980s by the african
american scholar and activist Molefi Asante. The study of african people from an african
centered prism has been referred to as Afrocentricity. The paradigm of studying Africa.
Afrocentrism is an approach to the study of world history that focuses on the history of recent
African descent. It is in some respects a response to Eurocentric attitudes about African people
and their historical contributions.

Historically speaking in essence with Afrocentrism, people of African descents are the primary
agents in the world history as opposed to objects or props and other people's story. Although the
term was used by du Bois in the 1960s and by black intellectuals in the 1970s. Molefi Asante a
professor of African American studies at Temple university is widely credited for coining the
term. Asante's book afrocentricity a theory of social change represents the first full fledged
attempt to clearly define the term and explore it's implications for the study of african people. In
the book Asante outlined a tradition of black intellectuals and activists that he built in order to
construct the idea. The lists includes: Booker T Washington, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther king
jr, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X and Maolana Karenga. Along with these figures, afrocentricity
was also built on the intellectual work of the Senegalese historian Sheikh Antijoke and the black
arts movement theorists and historians of Africa such as George James, John Henrik Clark,
Joseph Penchukanen, Ivan van cernema and chancellor Williams. For many people in Africa and
the diaspora, these men are intellectual pillars when it comes to Afrocentrism whether or not we
want to actually assign that title.

Why this study is important

African people were brought to the Americans and in the United States, African people were
there from 1619 actually before it was the United States of America, we were there from 1619 as
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indentured servants and then as enslaved people until 1865. We were in slave consequently 246
years. We have only been free technically for 151 years so we were enslaved almost a hundred
years longer than than we have been free but during the period of our enslavement, african
people were dislocated, dislocated psychologically, dislocated economically, dislocated
culturally, dislocated linguistically, we were in effect moved off of our own terms, we were
decentered, the narratives of our lives were not our narratives but they were the narratives of the
Europeans. There were the narratives of the white people. We participated in those narratives
because our own narratives have been basically destroyed, decentered, dislocated, confused and
so consequently the effect of this is confusion for the african population not only confusion for
the african population but after 1865, there were no people who came together and said okay
perhaps black people the four million Africans who are free maybe there should be some process
by which we look at what has happened, a debriefing of the 246 years some possible way of
examining what has happened to african people in terms of culture, in terms of history, in terms
of psychology, interms of spirituality. What has been the result of 246 years of this dislocation so
since we were not debriefed and since we didn't have anyone to process this for us, what
happened was a degree of insanity and this degree of insanity was best seen in the educational
system and the educational system was not designed for african people. The educational system
in America was designed for white people and it was designed essentially to create a situation
where those who bought into it bought into a european system of education.

What really spearheaded afrocentrism and popular culture was no doubt the topic of agent Egypt
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Afrocentricity gained main stream attention with its challenge
to classical European history, great controversy was caused by two arguments emerging from the
afrocentric school of thought. The first asserted that Egypt was the foundation of black world
culture and history just as Greece was the foundation of western civilization. The second
argument and the one that really caused more controversy asserted the idea that Egypt was a
black civilization that served as major philosophical intellectual and cultural foundation and
inspiration for greece. Various books by Martin Brunel, chiefly black Athena and Molefi
Asante's work chemit afrocentricity and knowledge stood at the very center of this debate.
Although Martin Brunel did not declare himself of course to be an afrocentrist, his work gave

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some ammunition needed for african and african americans and their participation in the debate
garnered them more attention in media.

Afrocentricity became a central aspect of the cultural wars and debates over multiculturalism that
range in all ares of American life especially in education in the 1980s and 1990s at the height of
the debate. Newsweek magazine featured a stone image of Cleopatra wearing a red black and
green African earing and the cover red Afrocentrism, was Cleopatra black, facts or fantasies, a
debate ranges over what to teach our kids about their roots. Interestingly enough, afrocentrism
has evolved as many of the old held ideas have changed concerning the identity of Cleopatra.
Some of the heading intellectuals that supported and developed afrocentric thought were molefi
Asante, Maolana Karengo, Assa Hillyard, Theophalo Benga and many more. Including some
women like professors Vivian Gordon and Clenora Weems. Some of the most popular
intellectuals who oppose afrocentralism was Mary Lefkowitz, Stephen Howie and Henry Lewis
Gates. Regardless of the opposition, it became very clear that afrocentrism was more than
historical position. It was a movement that sought to elevate and improve the social conditioning
of afro-descended people. Several afrocentric schools emerged in Philadelphia, Chicago, New
York, Los Angeles and other major American cities providing education for children from
elementary to high school. Some public schools adopted afrocentric themes or incorporated
black history into the state curriculum as was the case in Philadelphia and new jersey. Colleges
were apparently impacted the most as hundreds of black studies programs across the country
designed their curriculum to adhere to an afrocentric approach. Temple University established its
first doctoral program in black studies in 1987 under the leadership of molefi Asante. In the
political sphere, afrocentricity rode the wave off of the anti-apartheid movement and gained
currency with the development of Kwanzaa and the million man March led by the nation of
Islam in 1995. The idea also influenced hip-hop itself as afrocentric themes emerge in the lyrics
of various artists such as queen Latifah, Ice cube, and public enemy amongst many others.

Looking at the world from an African view point, many of our textbooks, the lectures conducted
from the university level are really based on the European classics with a very little mention of
what the Africa and the Africans have contributed to world civilization so it's merely telling the
truth about the development of world civilization. Africans played a tremendous part in the

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development of the world from Kemet which is known as Egypt the first universities, the temple
of Luxor was a university where the Greeks and others came to study and so many times we are
told that democracy was born in Greece. Well it's not quite true or that mathematics came from
Greece, well that's not true either. These black African scholars in Egypt were teaching 3,000
years ago, that was very Egyptians that we see in the textbook something not to Liz Taylor's of
the world and that's not represented, it's not a good presentation of the Egyptian life and culture.

3. Some proponents contributions towards Afrocentrism

Marcus Garvey was one of the most influential propagators of the ideology. The most influential
book advocating it was published in 1954. Mk Asante sees Garvey as one of the people who
most desired to see the rise of African people. He thinks it in a way Maolana Karenga's work in
either was a precursor because in the 1960s in the United States where lots of people were
talking about civil rights and some of the people were talking about political rights, he was
talking about political right, civil right and what he would consider human right. His whole idea
was that if you looked at the achievements of african people on the paces of our culture, what
you see is that most of the time we have a broken culture. Our culture is in fact distorted and is
distorted by living in the western world and we have to repair it. This is why Kwanzaa was part
of a restoration. If mature people have holidays then why don't we have holidays to celebrate
ourselves. So that is the key to Kwanza but that is not just Kwanza that he created, he always see
people whose names like Nia or Emani, these people came out of Karenga's movement. This was
his gift to us. You have to be centered in your own narrative, if you are not you'll never ever be
mature.

Molefi Kete Asante is a professor and a chair of the development of African American studies
actually now the development of Afrocology, an African American studies at Temple university.
He is also the founding editor of the journal of The black studies. Asante states that
Afrocentricity is a term coined by Sentgol to give substance to emate sizzaires, negritude and
African. Molefi views Afrocentricity as a paradigm that says that African people must view
themselves and be viewed as subjects of our own history and our own narrative, that we are
essentially mature and better off, if we see ourselves as agents of history rather than as marginals
to the European history or anybody's history. We are centered within our own history and we
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must use that centredness as a point of our own investigation and enquiry. To Dr Asante,
Afrocentricity means literally placing African ideas at the center of any analysis that involve
african culture and behaviour e g African dance.

It then proceeds in an even broader explanation in an article published on the theory of

education. It states that afrocentricity provides a frame of reference where in phenomena are few
from the perspective of the african person. The afrocentric approach seeks in every situation the
appropriate centrality of the african person in education. This means that the teachers provide
students the opportunity to study the world and it's people, concepts and history from an africa
world view. In afrocentric educational settings, teachers do not marginalize african american
children by causing them to question their own self worth because their people's story is seldom
told. Dr Asante also curtails that afrocentricity is a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that
previledges African agencies within the context of African history and culture transcontinentally
and transgenerationally and goes further to state that this means that the quality of location is
essential to any analysis that involves the African culture and behaviour whether literally or
economic whether political or cultural, central to the concept of afrocentricity is the notion of
margin and center.

The notion of Afrocentricity as a paradigm was first exposed by Ama Mazama in her work "The
Afrocentric Ideas" She stated in her book that as we seek to bring further classifications to what
afrocentricity entails from an academic standpoint which she likes to suggest as a first step that
afrocentricity within the academic context would best be understood as a paradigm.

To Maolana Karenga, the author of the kawegan theory. The kawedan theory came out of the
black struggling in the United States. One of the problems that the black struggle in the 60s was
that they had no cultural platform apart from advocating that black people should join white
people in their own way of conceiving safe society but it was partly in that, they found
themselves in the difficult situation that they were confronted. It was Malcolm a school first
challenged that view and said that african american should go back to their own school, should
go back to their own history, so out of that tradition came the black power movement and that
was an attempt to give black people their own culture. Maolana Karenga is from that school of
thought so his kawedan theory is based on the whole crisis of that period.
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The story of women was introduced as a means of providing their story and eradicating many of
the myths and destruction surrounding the likes of women. Hogue concurs by noting that in the
myth of the success of militant black anti racist work, feminist movement emerged. This same
history of struggle between lads and women and not provided women anticipation movement
with a unaimously accepted vision on how to conceptualize the objectives of their struggle.
Dulph a leading afrocentric female theory focus was on conceptualising and defining
racialization of the world through European domination/white supremacy. It was impossible to
ignore the specificity of the operation of african women living in male centered western society.
Dolph droves on the works of stone when God was a woman whose research is illuminated by
the female theory of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop which points out how women are
devalued and debased by Western patriarchy. A common example is the biblical story of creation
in which Eve is responsible for the fall of humanity from the grace of God. Sheikh further argued
that European patriarchy underlined western social inequalities that affect african women and
men in equally perverse ways. The implications of western patriarchy runs even deeper live into
cracks.

In this conceptualization, African womanist had threatened on a well trapled familiar ground
associated mainly on the issues of slavery and colonisation of anti slavery activist and black
leader Federich Douglas. George Williams knows that from the beginning, he had been a force in
a woman's suffrage movement realizing that he was a kindred cause to a negro freedom. David
has pointed out herself that truth was black and enslaved but she was no less of a woman than
any of the white sisters at the convention. It is therefore befitting that in an africana womanist
discussion, a relationship be made through the effort of Nigerian female activist Funmilayo Kuti
whose struggles went far beyond deliberation of women to impress that of her people. Funmilayo
Kuti was a Nigerian activist who fought very hard for independence of Nigeria. But apart from
that, she is most remarkable for organising women and fighting power structure in order to
preserve the rights of women. She was very militant and its not surprising that almost all her
children had been militant like Fela Kuti who was a musician. Based on power in this portrayal
has defines power as ability not just to tell the story of another person but to make it a definite
story.

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Ngugi Wa Thiogo takes the argument and steps further when he knows that over the last
400years the development in the west have not just been the result of internal social dynamics
but also the relationship with Africa Asia and South America.

Jean Woodson in 1933 wrote a book called the miseducation of the Negro because he understood
precisely what we understand as Afrocentric educators

COMMENTS ON AFROCENTRISM

Molefi Kete Asante has educated, he has worked with school districts many school districts all
across the country and he still works with school districts and trying to teach teachers how to
teach African American children and you teach african american children like you teach any
children normally and that is you start from where they are, you start with their own history, their
own culture, you go to Japan and you start talking about mathematics in Japan and you start with
Japanese students in their history and mathematics, if you start talking to them about history, you
start with them in their own history. But with African Americans we are the only people I think
where the educational experience doesn't begin with us. Our educational experience whatever it
is and we talk about literature normally as a start with the African lettered literary experience so
we've got to come back to that and that's why it's important to have afrocentic education because
we change the narrative, we make the african person the center of his/her own story. If we don't
do that we continue to teach a history and understanding of information and knowledge that
really puts African people on the outside of their own story and that is a very destructive force in
american society. If you ask an african person to start with anything in terms of knowledge and
history and culture, they normally would give you the European answer that Greeks started
everything well. We know that Greeks are very young in human history, if you start with the
800BC the period of Houma and the Odyssey and the Iliad then you are forgetting that 2000
years before Homer African people built the pyramids then you are starting with a limited
understanding of human history.

If you forget geometry, philosophy, architecture, theology, politics, all of these fields that were
started in Africa along the Nile valley with the Nile valley civilizations long before they were
even in Greece. We should always call for a recent array of information, if you talk about the

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constitutional convention, we should know what did the black people think who were serving in
the kitchen when Thomas Jefferson was in that room, what did they say about Mr Jefferson, what
did they over hear, I want to know the black people who built the white House and the U.S
capital building with their labor, I want to know the conversations you imagined they had when
they were doing this. I mean there are other unknown stories by the africans, the story of York
when you tell about Lewis and Clark, what did York say when he was thinking. We have some
of this information and the diaries that have been written and it's extremely important that we
never forget that afrocentric education is fundamental for us to have a true multicultural
education. If we don't have afrocentic education then all we do is to repeat white education.

Now we have the people in America that are the most advanced of course black people, yet they
really have no identity. They have not been accepted just this suffering segregation and you look
down, it affects even us here. They are the most advanced and here we are, wanting to be like
them. We should now start looking inwards at our native ways of doing things in it. We have to
earn that right to be considered not inferior anymore but even superior. And this won't come easy
if we become cheap. They still look down on us for the sake of our skin as inferior, for that to
change, will require not just a mental re orientation of our own people but for us to physically go
and earn it. That is why the culture is very important. We cannot earn it technologically, we
cannot earn it through engineering or architecture or whatever but that which we have which is
unique to us. You see the prostrations, the turning of our women when they need their chips, the
dance, the fashion, all of that, it is something we can actually use to drive this change that we
truly deserve. We need to be more nuanced to us. We have peculiarities and nuances that just are
Nigerians.

We have subconsciously or maybe even consciously adopted a mindset that all things western is
progressive and all things indigenous and even African is regressive. We are only beginning to
embrace the afrocentic look as you can see you know as chic and only just. Why does it matter
since we may assert that like fashion trends and culture and cyclical in evolution, a slight look
beneath the surface reveals to us that our very foundational thought are borrowed, a kind of cut
and paste from our own political systems to our business models even to those who set up vital
infastructure like our real systems, roads, telecommunication systems etc. We clearly don't trust

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ourselves and our national low self esteem comes at a cost. We are selling ourselves out this may
well be the reason our adopted systems don't seem to be working for us. A case of David when
he went up against Goliath and refused to take Saul's armor because he hadn't proved it yet. It
wasn't fit for purpose, we need to discover our own catapult to overcome our Goliath. I propose
we go back to the drawing board after all we have intelligent Nigerians both home and abroad
with original thoughts, we need to employ our best brains to come up with homegrown solutions
to our national problems. Solutions that show an understanding and appreciation of the real
native issues at state. Essentially, we need to appreciate the true cost of westernisation and be
ready to pay the price of true nationalism which involves painstaking, consultations and public
engagements. Apart from this, I'm convinced that we will not make real progress as a people.

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