The Afrocentric Paradigm

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-