The Afrocentric Paradigm

Abstract

It has been 20 years since Molefi Asante (1980) published Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. This book, along with The Afrocentric Idea (Asante, 1987) and Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (Asante, 1990), introduced fundamental referential changes in the African community. Today, Afrocentricity is widely discussed in the United States, of course, but also in Africa, Europe, South and Central America, and the Caribbean. In short, it has become a formidable Pan-African force that must be reckoned with. The reason for its appeal lies both in the disturbing conditions of African people and the remedy that Afrocentricity suggests.Afrocentricity contends that our main problem as African people is our usually unconscious adoption of the Western worldview and perspective and their attendant conceptual frameworks. The list of those ideas and theories that have invaded our lives as normal, natural, or even worse, ideal is infinite. How many of us have really paused to seriously examine and challenge such ideas as development, planning, progress, the need for democracy, and the nation-state as the best form of political and social organization, to name only a few? Our failure to recognize the roots of such ideas in the European cultural ethos has led us, willingly or unwillingly, to agree to footnote status in the White man's book. We thus find ourselves relegated to the periphery, the margin, of the European experience, to use Molefi Asante's terms-spectators of a show that defines us from without. In other words, and to use Afrocentric terminology again, we do not exist on our own terms but on borrowed, European ones. We are dislocated, and having lost sight of our-

Epistemology, African Scholarship in Human and Social Sciences and demands from African Societies

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The Search for School Safety and the African American Homeschooling Experience

“…American schools largely continue to focus on Europe, the supposedly "natural" norm for all. European culture and thought are implicitly presented as universal, and Europe as the only place from which great ideas and discoveries originated (Mazama, 2003). Such an experience is far from ideal for African American students, whose culture and history are rendered largely invisible and insignificant.…”

Say It Loud: An Action Research Project Examining the Afrivisual and Africology, Looking for Alternative African American Community College Teaching Strategies

“…An important aspect of Diop's scholarship for Afrocentrics , is it sheds light upon the false notion that African history began with the age of European "discovery" (Mazama, 2003). Africans and modern day African descendants as "active subjects" in historical inquiry instead of "passive victims" as the Eurocentric record has portrayed them .…”

“…In the 1960s, "language planning" emerged as a way to address "language problems" in former colonized places in the world such as Africa. Mazama (2003) cited three concerns about "language planning" processes within an Afrocentric perspective. She revealed, (1) it is filled with Eurocentric interpretations that seek to dominate its subjects,…”

“…The central argument here is that where African cultural tenets are concerned, the planning structures that support Eurocentric language do not work within the Afrocentric paradigm. The Eurocentric frameworks do not provide the needed "Location Theory" in the ontological, epistemological, and axiological study of African peoples (Mazama, 2003).…”