[OPNION] Molefi Asante’s Africa: The ideology to understand the past

Historians construct a people’s past with an intention to understand the peculiarity of the worldview that shapes their identity in the way it appears. This is hinged on an understanding that the people’s history provides the materials for living their world and getting to know why they decide to choose a line of philosophy which they have been identified with from time.

Historians push such frontiers because they believe that without understanding a people’s historical foundation, it would strictly be difficult to understand why they have continued in a direction that they are known for. There is, therefore, an assumption within the historical scholarship that when a people are disconnected from their history, they stand the possibility of losing their identity and eventually their respect in the community of people because not only would they have been dispossessed of their spiritual and moral principles, they would also have embraced a different historical material that contests the originality of theirs, and eventually, subsumes their identity in the end.

Curiously, Africa has become one of the continents in the world whose history is either deliberately or maybe systematically taken away from them for reasons that are not unconnected to the attempt by the orchestrators to keep them suppressed. 

Meanwhile, the African intellectual geography identified these problems from its incubating period and they recognize almost immediately that the most potent way to challenge such destructive move by their identity predators is to embrace their own cultural traditions unapologetically. Among these intelligent minds is Professor Molefi Kente Asante whose advocacy for indigenous Africa epistemic revival has reached the rooftop in recent academic engagements. Throughout the 20th century, this critical mind has continuously served as a front-liner in the activism of historical and cultural regeneration of Africa. In spite of the impressive contributions that he has made in this case, his light of intellectualism did not go down in the 21st century either, because for he has championed the course of African mental freedom through the historical reconstruction of African past. His intimidating stature in academic history cannot be overemphasized. So, when I asked him in one of the recent Toyin Falola Interview Series about what he considered as his intellectual legacy, I was not trying to claim ignorance to his wide-ranging intellectual potentials, I was only interested in him restating it for revalidation before the international audience in the virtual meeting. Laden in that question is the attempt to excavate the ideology that can be used to understand the African past. 

You can tell from the introductory expressions of this timeless sage that the knowledge of African past blossoms in his entire career and life too. In the habit of traditional Africans, he began with the acknowledgement of African ancestors, recognizing their trajectory of efforts that has brought about the excellence which he, and other scholars of his network, represent. Beyond the honor that he accorded to his ancestors is the epistemic exposition that Africans believe in the successive knowledge production where a generation makes efforts to preserve the wisdom and understanding of the ancient people and, under the same energy, transfer the inherited legacies to the generations that would succeed them. Considered superficially, one could think that such perception reveals an occultic hallucination about their ancestral sources, but when considered deeply, one would see that such mindset developed from the awareness of every individual’s uniqueness in making knowledge and transforming them into something useful and eventful for the society. In other words, everyone in the pre-colonial African society is a potential knowledge curator and they are known to spread this knowledge at every given opportunity. So, the intellectual legacy of Molefi Asante is something linkable to what the African ancestors have accomplished. It is continuation of it obviously. 

In all of things this man has rolled out for African future generations, one thing stands out, and that is the project of creating an autobiography of discipline which he has obviously committed his lifetime attention, resources and energy to. Creating such academic discipline is great for many reasons, chief of which are its capacity to reorient the African people about their history, and as such, recalibrate their minds towards the acceptance of their identity which has faced centuries of mindlessly callous derogation by the Euro-American imperialists.

The need for such indigenous knowledge production process is consolidated by the argument that African mental and identity dislocation is a product of ceaseless disarticulation of their cultural heritages and spiritual value for at least a period of 500 years. It is an irrefutable confession that a people who experienced such level of psychological re-engineering appearing in form of rhetoric of condescension, and in some other cases the strategic disqualification of their thought processes that basically informed their identity carving, cannot but experience the level of self-hate that exists in areas of Black community across the world, either in Africa or in Black America. Molefi Asante believes, and so do every Afrocentric scholar, that the problems facing Africans in contemporary time are socially constructed, and as such, can be surmounted by social re-engineering. 

It should therefore come as no surprise, Molefi fired, that Africans of the contemporary time have lost their sense of direction. This conclusion is informed by the observation of their engagement in the current time which indicates that they are generally consuming ideas from every other race of people but themselves because they do not produce theirs, as their ancestors uniquely did. Africans in modern times indulge in activities of the Europeans, drag their African neighbours into it, and sometimes actively get involved in the promotion of the economic system that such European establishments have created. While they do this with no modicum of awareness, they become the targets of all other people because of the implicit conclusion they have made from African behaviour that they are a people who undermine what their ancestral identity can give them.

Meanwhile, all these things happen because Africans have been miseducated about themselves, reoriented about their history, and socially mis-engineered to favour everyone but themselves. From all directions, the people have become a stockpile of disrespect and a statue of dishonour. Molefi Asante has the confidence that the restoration of the lost dignity can be achieved when institutions like the discipline he jointly created with others get the attention of people who think in similar directions. 

It is not unreasonable therefore to expect that a man who has this lofty ambition about Africa is showcasing beyond words his commitment to such engagement. This explains why Molefi Asante was asked by one of the interviewers about his memoir and also some other writings. Asante’s memoir had been named As I Run Toward Africa, which even from the title shows a thematic focus that seeks to validate the transcendental essence of the African continent and the people. In his response, he conceded that knowing Africa in the totality has been his ambition and there cannot be a contention that it involves a circle of process which requires dedication, determination, and commitment. It is a process where one would be faced with a body of challenges that would want to douse the spirit of the ones doing this metaphorical running to their ancestral sources. It entails getting fabricated responses that would justify the identity of the Europeans which has been imposed on the Black people. However, one’s level of discernment would assist in debunking materials that are aimed towards the deracination of the African identity, because not only are there many of these stuffs, but they are also capable of making individuals to doubt what they were told to be their true history. Imagine a situation where people have a warped sense of an aspect of their culture, they would have internalized these values because they have been fed only with them. 

Seeking knowledge generally is an arduous task and more challenging is seeking one’s identity in a world that is provocatively averse to such redemptive engagement. It is therefore expected that people would come up with dramatic reactions to the ideas and philosophies which the intellectual has dedicated his time and resources to. This informs the question that I threw to the Professor that how does he respond to the critics of Afrocentric agenda, especially those who are excessively combative of anything that challenges the supremacy they have created in their mind. In responding to this question, the Professor opened another can of discursive engagement which exposes a very interesting debate line. He mentioned that the first waves of criticism directed to Afrocentrism came in the early 1980s after the publication of the first work he did on the topic. Coming from a Marxist camp, they questioned the silence of the book on Black’s economic system and status which, to them, forms a solid foundation for the promotion of racial discrimination and prejudices against them. The readied way by which Asante felt he could absorb this pressure was to reply to them that he did not particularly produce the work to serve as an expository essay for African economic systems and statuses in the political order of the world. He argued that it was meant to reinterpret the reality of the African world. 

In spite of its silence about the economic structure and culture as conceived by the Western society, the book did not, Asante explained, fail to express the African notion of economic growth which he confessed stands on the principle of economic relations with people based of what they can share together not necessarily in terms of material possessions. The underlying issue in this economic orientation is that the people are considered as participants and not ordinary things in the economic engagement and system of their immediate society. Since it is based on the relationship between people, the fundamental concentration lies in the values of individual regardless of their material worth, as emphasized by the Western Marxist ideologues. Criticism from the Marxist School would however be a tip of the iceberg, as several others were coming from different angles. One of such angles is from the white conservatives who immediately became engrossed in the fear that Afrocentrism seeks to promote black nationalist agenda, and which they believe would challenge their racial superiority and technically reduce their privileges that come with it in the American society. It cannot be overemphasized that Black nationalism is a factor in the American society, and also a strong instrument of emancipation among the Black community. However, the academic revolutionary which Afrocentrism sought to serve was to announce itself as a cultural transformation which seeks to find lasting solutions to African problems. 

This discussion definitely leads us to another interesting dimension of intellectual exchange that fueled the topic of Afrocentrism. Professor Molefi Kente Asante, in his interest about the African history and culture has written quite a number of books on Africa, and it is logical to ask him of his motivation to do this. When asked, he once again held the audience spellbound with his very educative insights. The Professor provides a rough-hewn view about the reason for the continued undervaluation of the African people. He stated that he was struck by the discovery that several books which were written about Africans were authored by the white educators and intellectuals which confirms the assumption that there is a systematic effort for the marginalization, suppression and the oppression of these people or their deliberate underdevelopment through the production of knowledge that undermine their African identity. It is believed that when the materials about the African people are authored by the white, it would enable them to continue with their discriminatory and exploitative agenda and by the time an African is engrossed in such materials, they would have been wrongly designed to stand at variance to their own ancestral values. This would inevitably create a self-hatred to their epistemic and spiritual beginning. 

These textbooks were obviously racist in making. In fact, they make absolutely essential efforts for the dislocation of the African history because the authors were aware of the immeasurable danger it would mean to white supremacist people if it is discovered that Africa was truly the economic stronghold of the American and other European societies. In recent years, there have been discoveries that expose the Western world of their complicity in the erosion of African worth and values. To the extent that the narrative shared in many of these books have baseless historical foundation, no replicable archeological engagement and obviously no reliable evidence to corroborate their wild assertions made. The awareness of this therefore is an enough motivation for the decision to embark on a research engagement that would help him make findings about the people he shares genetic (in)formation with. It would help in the provision of alternative perspective, albeit a revolutionary one, for the people who have hitherto been fed with fallacies that exist only in the imaginative world of the writers. Such writing would elevate and then animate the values of the African people, their cultural traditions, their arts, their knowledge production and even their philosophical history. 

To achieve a feat such as this, there is bound to be some level of resistance from different angles. Such resistance would have emerged for various reasons. One, it would be difficult for an American society that has successfully created the impression that the African people had no history or anything worthy of academic exploration to embrace an idea that contradicts this position. They would most likely violently rise against such campaign because it would challenge the superstructure of the West founded on a foundation that the African people were devoid of past and records to assuage themselves of the character assassination that already follows them around. These are the initial challenges that confronted the establishment of a transcendental foundation that will help in the promotion of African history in any respect. In essence, the recognition of the African historical scholarship and discipline in the American society is creditable to the ceaseless and endless demands by the African-American student populace who remained intransigent about their determination to include the Africa history into their curriculum. Irrespective of contentions and controversies that this struck, their commitment to this ambition helped in the facilitation of Africology and Black Studies, till date. 

In all of these, members of the African diaspora are usually confronted with the dilemma of tracing their cultural traditions and ancestral sources to a particular ethnic group, and also challenging the extremely racial American environment where they found themselves. Because of this identity quandary, it is of essence that we know the contribution that genetics trace could make in the enhancement of their soul-searching expedition. When asked about the possibility of disconnection between an African in the diaspora, especially those who have survived hundreds of years of oppression, marginalization and suppression, Professor Molefi Asante answered that it should not generate the heat which has been attributed to it in the recent years. He mentioned that although the people who are descendants of enslaved Africans are usually caught in the web of identity crisis with them being stuck in the frenzy of finding their genetic beginning. However, people in this category should be informed that the fact of their common experience in the diaspora has been the very foundation for the uniqueness of their Black identity. 

Meanwhile when ideas are set in motion, they continue to generate conversations that lurk themselves around matters of relatable values. Therefore, while the quest for Afrocentrism came to the zenith, there erupted the idea of decolonization, and it is important to understand how the scholars of Afrocentrism relate to this intellectual experience, hence the question posed by me to the versatile Professor. It appears that there is a fundamental dissimilarity that exists between the two concepts, that is, Afrocentrism and Decoloniality, even when there are areas of convergence. Asante maintained that while they seek to achieve almost similar aims and objectives, they somehow differ in their approach to getting the job done. According to him, the term decolonization has a way of placing Europe at the center of African history, making the issues concerning their past, values, culture and political ideas revolve around European politics of imperialism. Sadly, this creates some challenges for the identity of Africans because it shows them as though their history began with the European penetration of their continent. Such strict concentration limits and then hinders their prospects of discovering their true identity. 

The problem is multifaceted on many grounds because even when you, for example, decolonize successfully, there is an aftermath discovery that the individual still battles with the vestiges of colonization either symbolically or ideologically. For instance, a decolonized African person has the capacity to demonstrate their zeal for colonial system even unconsciously, that is why they are in most cases bound to repeat the activities of their colonial masters in different but somehow complementary ways. Looking at the beautiful fabric of Afrocentric agenda, it is apparent that they are out to achieve more than the mere destruction of the European civilization and or history which was imposed by the colonial experience. They are on the campaign to challenge the systematic racism that undermined the African knowledge production and cultural beauty for the same reason that their forebears were enslaved. In other words, they seek to advance the question of domination and subjugation and make efforts for the rejuvenation of the African identity through their questioning of the structure that silence their identity. To them, Africa is the center of their protest, and the ambition was that it must be brought back to its deserved position in the scheme of things. This therefore means, as Asante implies, that when the decolonialist scholars complete their expeditions, they would still need to be Afrocentric in order to replace the destroyed civilizations by Europe that have undermined and undervalued theirs for long. 

(This is the first report on the interview with Molefi Asante on September 19, 2021.  For the transcript, see  YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNMT3q-Psqc

and on Facebook. https://fb.watch/87kf9tlYA5/)