Souls

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

ISSN: 1099-9949 (Print) 1548-3843 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20

Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of

Black Nationalism

Sarah Balakrishnan

To cite this article: Sarah Balakrishnan (2020) Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of
Black Nationalism, Souls, 22:1, 71-88, DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566

Published online: 08 Feb 2021.

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Souls
Vol. 22, No. 1, January–March 2020, pp. 71–88

Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the

Philosophy of Black Nationalism
Sarah Balakrishnan

In the 1990s, the political tradition of Afrocentrism came under attack in the
Western academy, resulting in its glaring omission from most genealogies of Black
thought today. This is despite the fact that Afrocentrism had roots dating back to the
15th century, shaping movements like Pan-Africanism and N
egritude. It is also des-
pite the fact that the tradition resulted in important cornerstones of Black American
life: the holiday of Kwanzaa, the discipline of Black Studies, and independent
Afrocentric schools. This essay revisits Afrocentrism as a foundation for the Black
Radical Tradition. It argues that Afrocentrism presupposed the relationship between
Blackness and Africa to be the central problem for emancipatory thought. Re-embrac-
ing Africa not only meant resistance; it targeted the originary thread of political mod-
ernity itself–that is, the separation of Blackness from Africa.

Keywords: Afrocentrism, Pan-Africanism, Black, Nationalism, black radical tradition,

Decolonization, History

On the streets of Harlem, in the alleys of Brixton, and on the red-earth sidewalks
ribboning the thoroughfares of Accra, Afrocentrism persists today. Bookstands
display volumes recounting how ancient Egyptians were Black and how the
Hellenic world stole civilization from Africa. Historical chronicles by Chancellor
Williams and Cheikh Anta Diop rest alongside the poetry of Aim
e C
esaire,
essays by Kwame Nkrumah, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In these cen-
ters of the African diaspora, sidewalk practitioners cultivate a genealogy of
Afrocentric thought.
Having developed since the 15th century both on the African continent and in
the diaspora, Afrocentrism might be better understood as a political tradition than
as a single organized movement.1 Whereas the term Afrocentricity denotes a move-
ment in the US academy in the 1980s to pursue liberation through African
thought and practices, what we may call Afrocentrism refers to a long narrative
tradition regarding history and Africa—one that has been a grassroots political

ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online # 2021 University of Illinois at Chicago

DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566
72 Souls January–March 2020
language among Black communities for generations. Across continents and centu-
ries, Afrocentrism has been characterized by two provocations: first, that racial
revolution cannot occur outside a critique of history. All great world transforma-
tions, from the Haitian Revolution to Africa’s decolonization, demanded a simul-
taneous revolt against the conventions of universalist thinking. The second was
that this critique must emerge from a uniquely African vantage, hence an
“Afrocentrism” as opposed to Eurocentrism. Believing that the problem of race
lies in the violent processes by which Africans were made into “Blacks,”
Afrocentrism insists that returning to Africa is necessary to confront this
racial mitosis.
Alongside the imperialist “invention” of Africa, there therefore emerged a
second Africa—one that was imagined for, and constructed by, the slaves and the
colonized themselves.2 This Africa was not that of the European imaginaire.
Against contemporary racial chauvinism, in its myriad disciplinary and peda-
gogical forms, communities of enslaved and colonized subjects spread subversive
counter-histories. They whispered of an Ancient Egypt governed by Black phar-
aohs. They received Divine Providence in their insurrections as “Princes shall
come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms
68:31). Despite being dispersed by desert and ocean, a pan-African ideology came
to cohere in a language of history and prophecy, centered on the radical potency
of the place called “Africa.”
In this sense, Afrocentrism belonged to a political tradition known as Black
nationalism, having formed one of its earliest variations. Unlike in the European
mold, the nation of Black nationalism did not emerge technocratically with the
modern state.3 Rather, on the collective level, Black nationalism has concerned the
African’s dispossession of the self: an ontological alienation consequent of the con-
tinuous subordination of Black life to capital, whether through slavery, coloniza-
tion, or apartheid. In the pursuit of self-repossession (self-sovereignty), Black
nationalism seeks to infuse Blackness with meaning and personhood, with liberty
and destiny. Afrocentrism locates Africa as the necessary starting point for this
project. From Africa, a vitality lay in its uncovered histories, in its resilient rituals
and material cultures which—despite all manners of repression—persevered on
both sides of the Atlantic, uniting a people otherwise consolidated only through
sheer violence. In the words of Archie Mafeje, Africanity thus constitutes “a com-
bative ontology.”4 Across a genealogy of struggle, extending from Pan-Africanism
to Black Power, Black Consciousness, N
egritude, and Garveyism, Afrocentrism has
shaped Black politics around Africa’s provocative place as a praxis for resistance.
In as much as Afrocentrism has participated in real insurrection, it has thus pri-
marily concerned a way of “decolonizing the mind.” In the 1960s, as Black Studies
entered the US academy and agitation mounted for real changes to higher educa-
tion, Afrocentrism provided a model by which Black students embarked on new
lines of inquiry.5 What the historian Vincent Harding termed the “new Black his-
tory” in 1970 came to be characterized not only by broadening scholarly interest
 Inheriting Black Studies 73
in Black life, but by a growing rejection of received narratives about modernity
and the universal.6 A certain telos substantiated how the West made the World,
beginning with urbanism on the Nile, Athenian democracy, the Roman Empire
and the spread of Christianity. That Africa should have played no role in this pro-
cess, except as physical terrain, coincided with contemporaneous Lamarckian
racism that relegated Africans to the status of primitive non-agents—that, as V.Y.
Mudimbe remarks, “Africa, the physical environment, the flora and fauna, as well
as the people, represent … a frozen state in the evolution of humankind.”7
At its most insistent, the invocation of Black Studies in the 1960s not only
demanded that Africans be included in history as equal participants. This asser-
tion—based on still-contested claims of Africans’ humanity and agency—called
into question the entire methodology on which world knowledge until that time
had been built. From Black Studies, a radical strain of scholarship developed in
response to the universal claims of Western thought. This work drew from the
wellspring of Black narrative traditions while soberly interrogating the global
facts of the past. It approached the study of Black culture with a pan-African
expansiveness without in the least desacralizing Africa’s status as the central pol-
itical homeland. Following the path-breaking publication, Afrocentricity: A
Theory of Social Change by Molefi Kete Asante in 1980, this school of thought
became known by its followers as “Afrocentricity”—or, by collaborators espe-
cially on the African continent, “Afrocentrism.”8 Out of a long narrative trad-
ition that had begun with the imperial encounter in the 15th century,
Afrocentricity emerged as the scholarly frontier for this grassroots liber-
ation language.
Its immediate discrediting in the American academy therefore marked a fore-
closure, just at the moment that the doors of higher education opened to Black
Studies. In the 1970s, White classicists like Mary Lefkowitz earned notoriety by
refuting Afrocentric “lies.”9 A Committee for the Defense of History was formed
by Ivy League scholars, both Black and White, to suppress the movement’s
growth.10 To no small extent, reactions to Afrocentrism coincided with a moral
panic around the rise of 1970s Black Power. 11 What was perceived as the
“generous” offer of inclusion in the US nation and academy had been met by a
stony refusal by a wing of Black nationalists who began to pursue methods seen as
outright “defamatory.” Accounts such as Africans arriving in America before
Columbus sought to “swap realism for mythology,” warned the pioneering
African-American Studies scholar, John Blassingame.12 The outcome, as Martin
Kilson of Harvard remonstrated, was works of “black magic:” a scholarship defined
only by “anti-intellectualism and antiachievement.”13
Confronted with additional accusations of what Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s
referred to as “anti-racist racism,” serious intellectual consideration of Afrocentrism
rapidly disappeared except among its followers. Whereas Wilson Jeremiah Moses has
written a stunning pre-history of US Afrocentrism, today the only comprehensive
monograph of the movement is by Stephen Howe who dismisses it as “mystical,
74 Souls January–March 2020
essentialist, irrationalist, and … racist.”14 As Patricia Hill Collins has remarked, the
bitterness of Afrocentrism’s opposition in the 1990s—concerning its “fabricated” his-
tories, gendered politics and avowed racialism—has made a durable discussion of the
tradition especially difficult.15 Imbibing a zeitgeist for post-Cold War millennial multi-
culturalism, a subsequent generation of scholars—notably including K.A. Appiah, Paul
Gilroy, and Achille Mbembe—further averred that Black political practice no longer
needed “nativist” chauvinism, but rather, an inclusive cosmopolitanism.16 Implied was
not only the practicality of racial integration as opposed to separatism, but the bigoted
“irrationality” of refusing interracial cooperation. As Adam Ewing has written: “What
is significant is that Black nationalism came under attack in a manner that achieved
intellectual censure … They rendered those arguments outside of the boundaries of
rational discourse.”17
My purpose in this essay is to place Afrocentrism at the center of the political
genealogy that Cedric Robinson in 1981 termed The Black Radical Tradition. Over
the past five centuries, Afrocentrism grew as a liberation language among
oppressed communities dispersed by desert and ocean. In the 20th century, it ani-
mated the now-celebrated movements of Pan-Africanism, N
egritude, and
Garveyism not merely as a macabre discourse, but as a direct assault against the
intellectual firmament which underpinned the global imperial order. Believing in
the interdependence of racism on all facets of “modern” knowledge—not in the
least the scientific and humanist studies that buttressed slave economies—the cri-
tique of Black revolutionaries in the 20th century was that any great rearrange-
ment of power required an equally immense shift in world thinking. For
Afrocentrists, racial freedom could only begin by shattering universalism beyond
recognition, a rupture akin to declaring that God was dead, that the King was
mortal, that Jesus was Black, that Egypt was African. Like the French Revolution’s
intimate debt to the Enlightenment, Afrocentrism foresaw an African revolution as
the necessary consequence of a paradigm shift that began with, and centered on,
Africa. In the course of this essay, I will explore this argument through two
themes: the potency of history and the bankruptcy of universalism.

History is African
On the sands of the New World, bonded emigrants of African kingdoms under-
went what can only be described as a radical racial fission. Unlike the Indian in
the Caribbean who still remained “Indian,” unlike the Chinese worker lumped in
as “Asiatic,” and unlike the indigene of the Americas who was recast as “Native
Indian” or “Indian,” enslaved Africans became Black. Africa was already an inven-
tion. Blackness was its double. In an age where Africans became a global commod-
ity in the form of enslaved labor, a silent partition occurred in the imperial
imaginaire that facilitated this exploitation. No longer an African, the Black con-
veyed no ethnographic textuality, no bundle of stories or adverse cultural complex-
ity. The erasure of humanity required a complete erasure of history.18
 Inheriting Black Studies 75
From this originary dispossession, the concept of Africanity could not help but
to offer resistance. As the markers of humanity were razed from their bodies,
enslaved communities found sustenance in approaching the continent as a place
for self-reinvention. Memories of life before the Atlantic voyage persisted long
after White scientists had presumed them to have died. They endured in non-text-
ual ways—in cuisine, dance, art, song, medicinal practice, and martial know-
ledge—as much as they did in the oral accounts of enslaved societies themselves.19
Upon this bedrock of memory, Africans sutured the knowledge that they furtively
gleaned from all manners of places: the Bible, the Quran, commercial channels,
eavesdropping, Enlightenment teachings projected from paper to pulpit. Africa
was a bricolage from which the enslaved negotiated their new ontological posi-
tions.20 But this did not come at the expense of authenticity. As itself an imperial
invention, “Africa” pertained to the peculiar relationship of that place to the world
writ large. The purpose of Blackness had been to sever that tie so as to render the
African fully property, beholden to no one and nothing but the Master. The resus-
citation of Africa as an alternate identity was, from the beginning, a counterinsur-
gency by the enslaved against their dispossession of themselves.
Afrocentrism developed as a narrative tradition regarding the place of Africa in
Black resistance.21 One principle tool for this form of expression was the Bible.
From the rebellions of Denmark Vessey to John Chilembwe to Nat Turner to
Gabriel in Virginia, Africans oppressed under slavery or subjected to colonialism
found a dissident resource in Biblical allegory. 22 An important tradition was that
of the “jeremiad.” So named after the prophet Jeremiah, who preached the second
coming upon all those who had broken their covenant with the Lord, Jeremiah
warned the unrighteous of impending apocalypse.23 The appeal that “Ethiopia
would soon raise her hand unto God” dovetailed with a prophetic tradition that
threatened the White Man against his sins. The injustice of the Israelites enslaved
in Egypt provided a revolutionary index for understanding African captivity by
recasting the past as prophecy. “Biblical imagery was used because it was at hand,”
has remarked Charles Long, but “it was adapted to, and invested in, the experience
of the slave.”24
Across the Atlantic, early African converts of colonial missions developed a
similar vocabulary of Biblical idiom, constituting an early pan-African language of
racial revolution.25 Afrocentrism began with powerful claims concerning the rise
of Ethiopia, the emancipation of the Israelites, the race of Ancient Egyptians, Jesus
and the inventors of science and mathematics. As Cedric Robinson notes in Black
Marxism, in contrast to how bloody revenge had so long characterized European
paranoia of Black revolt, rarely did even the most impressive slave uprisings result
in the death of more than a dozen Whites. What Robinson called the “Black
Radical Tradition” emerged not as a practice of violent insurrection. “Its focus was
on the structures of the mind,” Robinson writes, “Its epistemology granted
supremacy to metaphysics, not the material.”26
76 Souls January–March 2020
The emergence of Afrocentrism among enslaved and colonized communities
marked a narrative self-styling that considered Africanity not so much as an iden-
tity as a calling. From the tradition’s inception, Africa’s status as a homeland
spurred numerous spiritual and political movements, the most enduring of which
was the “Back to Africa” project among diaspora. From Prince Hall’s delegation in
Massachusetts in 1787 to the interwar rise of global Garveyism, “returnist” ideol-
ogy concerned a profoundly positivist belief in Africa’s restorative power: that not
only would the homeland rehabilitate the Black from denigration, but that if all
diaspora were so restored, Africa would rise as she had in the epochal time of
Ancient Egypt.27 Returnism thus recalled a prophetic tradition sprung from
Africa’s hallowed past. As Maria Stewart, a speaker to the African Masonic Hall,
professed in 1833: “Though we are looked upon as things, yet we sprang from a
scientific people … Poor despised Africa was once the resort of sages and legisla-
tors of other nations … The most illustrious men in Greece flocked thither for
instruction.”28
Early pioneers of African recolonization saw themselves as contributing to the
restoration of Africa’s great civilization. In the 19th century, Back-to-Africa organi-
zations like the African Civilization Society sent missionaries to Sierra Leone and
Liberia, preaching the responsibility of Afro-diaspora to develop their kingdom.
This “civilizationism” imbibed two frameworks, each staunchly universalist: one
was British schemas of social evolution, which juxtaposed civilization to savagery
on the basis of political economy and societal complexity—in other words, a call
for the diaspora to help develop Africa. The second was the German Romantic
tradition, which claimed that every culture had its own gifts and will to power
with which to contribute to a greater whole. Such was a bid, in the words of
W.E.B. Du Bois, for Africans to become “coworkers in the kingdom of culture:” to
develop a peculiar Black genius, whose gift was both for the Black and for the
world at large.29
From this tradition emerged some of the first scholarly works that interrogated
African history as a blueprint for prophecy. Edward Wilmot Blyden, a missionary
from Saint Thomas who became a leading educationalist in colonial West Africa,
considered history important not so much for correcting the world record as
reframing the fate of the African character. Across his manuscripts, Blyden
emphasized Africa’s intimate interconnectivity to the globe. He writes:
Africa is no vast island, separated by an immense ocean from other portions of
the globe, and cut off through the ages from the men who have made and
influenced the destinies of mankind. She has been closely connected, both as
source and nourisher, with some of the most potent influences which have
affected for good the history of the world … The greatest religious reforms
the world has ever seen—Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan—originating in
Asia, have obtained consolidation in Africa … It is to these people, and to
their country, that the Psalmist refers, when he says, ‘Ethiopia shall soon
stretch out her hand unto God.’30
 Inheriting Black Studies 77
Branding the Sahara a bustling highway and emphasizing the cross-fertilization
of African and Asian cultures, Blyden implied that, insofar as Africa had never
been isolated, it was unjust for her people to be ontologically separated from
humanity. Furthermore, he contested the notion that African civilization could be
progressively re-cultivated through the spread of Western education as well as
adhering to a distinctly African ethos: a deep sense of indigenous history, the use
of Islam as opposed to Christianity, and polygamy over monogamy.
It is not a coincidence that the word “Afrocentric” likely first emerged from the
writings of the influential African-American sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois, regarding
Africa’s intimate role in world history. Describing in 1962 his ambitious project to
write a complete account of the African peoples, Du Bois had remarked that the
Encyclopedia Africana would be “unashamedly Afro-Centric, but not indifferent to
the impact of the outside world upon Africa or to the impact of Africa upon the
outside world.”31 Initially, the book had not meant to concern “the vague subject
of race … but the people’s inhabiting the continent of Africa.”32 However, before
his death, Du Bois expanded the project to include both Africans and Afro-dias-
pora, making the Encyclopedia Africana one of the first truly Pan-African history
projects of the 20th century. As Nahum Chandler has most recently impressed, Du
Bois’s later fascination with Africa, even to the exclusion of diaspora, did not con-
stitute a passing hobby.33 For Du Bois, Africa had the power to overturn all pre-
vailing architectures of racial identity.
It is from this long intellectual shadow, constituted not only by formalist schol-
ars such as Blyden and Du Bois but by cross-Atlantic generations of African com-
munities engaged in selfcraft and historical discovery, that the distinct school of
thought known as Afrocentricity emerged in the mid-20th century. Early
chronicles, such as African Origins of Civilization (1967) by Cheikh Anta Diop and
The Destruction of Black Civilization (1971) by Chancellor Williams, demonstrate
the magnitude of Afrocentricity’s project from the beginning. Like in Blyden’s
scholarship, Afrocentricity marked a forensic interrogation of Africa’s past as an
access point to the future. Its thinkers took for granted Africa’s coexistence with
the world until the coming of imperialism. Investigations into the past therefore
required integrating tools and insights from across areas and disciplines. As
Williams writes: “Believing that the history of the race could not be understood if
studied in isolation, I began a slow and deliberately unrushed review of European
history, ancient and modern, and the history of Arabs and Islamic people. I say
‘review’ because by 1950 I had already studied and taught in the three fields of
American, European and Arabic history.”34 Diop likewise combined nephrology,
art history, geology and archeology to write an account of Ancient Egypt as a civil-
ization founded by Black Africans.
In the 1980s, the term “Afrocentrism” came to represent this school of inquiry
following the 1980 publication of Afrocentricity by African-American scholar,
Molefi Kete Asante.35 Born as Arthur Lee Smith, Asante adopted an African name
in 1976 in place of his Anglo-American appellation—a ritual undertaken by
78 Souls January–March 2020
thousands of Afrocentric practitioners, including Ron Everett (Maulana Karenga)
and Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka).36 “The choosing of an African name [is] partici-
patory, inasmuch as it contributes to the total rise of consciousness,” writes Asante
in Afrocentricity.37 According to the text, Afrocentricity constituted “a philosoph-
ical perspective associated with the discovery, location, and actualizing of African
agency within the context of history and culture.”38 It located Africa’s past as a
necessary starting point for political and social freedom, not in the least because it
provided the foundation for conceptualizing a free Africa as a prophetic horizon.
Afrocentricity also emphasized the importance of cultural self-styling as a political
practice. Re-adopting an African identity restored the protection of heritage and
the burden of history to Black communities whose dehumanization, in the form of
sale and commoditization, had demanded the disavowal of any essence
beyond objecthood.
In this manner, Afrocentrists approached Africanity as a historical conscious-
ness requiring specific embodied practices. Asante’s Njia (“the way”) outlined
methods for diaspora to achieve full awareness as African actors. These efforts
were closely paralleled by Maulana Karenga’s Nguzo Saba, a “communitarian
African philosophy” providing practical principles for building a free African life-
style.39 Believing that racial freedom was untenable so long as Africans continued
to think in the parameters of their oppressor, Afrocentricity preached the import-
ance of mental decolonization as the starting point for revolution. As Manning
Marable has argued, Afrocentricity arose in the late 20th century as an individualist
alternative to the institutional politics of the Civil Rights movement and the mili-
tant partyism of Black Power.40 Whether in the form of Asante’s Njia or Karenga’s
philosophy of Kawaida (Kiswahili: “tradition/reason”), Afrocentricity made Africa
the necessary basis for interrogating an epistemic approach that did not capitulate
to Eurocentric molds.41 It relocated revolution to the hands of Black persons as
revelations that they had to make on a personal identitarian basis.
From the 1960s-90s, Afrocentric teachings spread through grassroots political
channels on the community level but remained closely tied to academic institu-
tions. The arrival of Black Studies on American campuses transformed curricula
into sites of controversy, indicted for the myriad ways that racial supremacy
remained reified in their “objectivist” knowledge. Black Studies programs, espe-
cially in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, became vocal progenitors of a new African
history built as a Eurocentric counterforce. Monographs of Afrocentrism were
printed on all-Black presses based in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Oakland, written
mainly for nonacademic audiences.42 In the 1990s, Afrocentrism also spurred the
successful campaign for separate Afrocentric high schools, with proponents argu-
ing that teaching Afrocentric curricula would be no different than Christian
schools with creationism.43
On a mainstream cultural level, probably Afrocentricity’s most famous hallmark
remains the holiday of Kwanzaa. Initiated by Karanga in 1966 as an important
component of Kawaida, African-American households across the US began
 Inheriting Black Studies 79
embracing Kwanzaa an African holiday, as opposed to Christmas, thereby provid-
ing a material touchstone for a lifestyle outside of European hegemony.44 At this
time, African fashions such as kente and dashikis began to be sold in neighbor-
hoods. Afrocentricity thus became a cultural movement engaging Africa’s past as a
mode of liberation.45
Some ideological restraints, however, remained. Despite noting the exclusionary
space that the academy posed to racial minorities, Afrocentrists of the 1960s-90s
made little attempts at including women into their folds. Their brand of national-
ism was accused of patriarchal character.46 In identifying race as the paramount
form of oppression, Afrocentrists gave little attention to the intersectional ways
that categories like gender and class changed experiences of discrimination.47 For
black nationalists of this era, the principle project at hand was epistemological.
African history provided what Afrocentrists argued was the necessary premise to
liberation: a direct epistemic confrontation against European norms. In so doing,
it presented the past as an ever-present problem. In encouraging Black diaspora to
adopt an African identity—as constituted by African dress, affect, names and sym-
bols—Afrocentrists underscored the fact that the U.S. was a country full of
Africans. Afrocentricity denaturalized Black diaspora citizenry by stressing the
African in America, as slave, as an unresolved ethical dilemma.
Over the five centuries that Afrocentrism developed as a narrative tradition
among Africans and the diaspora, its ambition therefore had never been—as with
the challenge that Jean-Paul Sartre had laid before the N
egritude movement—to
dissolve race.48 The aim was more capacious: how could Blackness be reborn to
make its very existence in Western society an unresolved ethical problem? How
could the fission between Blackness and Africa, so crucial to the engineering of
the slave, be reunited as one? How could African identity come to re-signify the
worldly interconnection which had always laid at the bedrock of African history,
thereby re-assigning the value of the African as one of belonging? Afrocentrists
found a resource in the past. They believed that the truth about the continent
would necessitate a crisis to Western identity. Why else would the history of a
continent whose people were so global still remain such a secret?

Afrocentric “multiverse”
We have just seen how Afrocentrism persisted as a narrative tradition among
Africans and diaspora concerning the political potency of history. Afrocentricity
emerged from this genealogy as a distinct school of thought, tied to the develop-
ment of Black Studies and to a shift in racial politics away from formalist party
activities and toward personal spiritual liberation. In this turn, however, a strong
political statement was made: no longer concerned with Africa’s contribution to
the universal—in becoming “coworkers in the kingdom of culture”—the propo-
nents of Afrocentricity seized Africa as the bedrock for an alternate universe, one
for Africans alone, based on a refusal to belong to any other grand master
80 Souls January–March 2020
narrative. This was a separatist approach to political liberation, in what Harold
Cruse famously defined as the separatist-integrationist dyad in African-
American struggle.49
Across the Atlantic, Africa’s decolonization from the 1940s-70s witnessed the
same will toward the “multiverse” as Afrocentricity had marked in the late 20th
century. In the aftermath of WWI, separatism emerged at the forefront of Black
nationalist politics out of a growing belief in the bankruptcy of the promise of the
universal. Emancipation from slavery in the Americas had reproduced bondage in
phantom forms, not the least of which was Jim Crow. Although the League of
Nations supposedly affirmed a right to nationalist self-determination, such liber-
ties, as pertaining to the human being, were judged irrelevant to the colonized
African. Thus there emerged a Black radicalism in the 20th century that
approached freedom as a question of epistemology. Ontological markers in the ful-
crum of world order had cast the Black outside the globe, outside the human, a
status unconditionally buttressed by the “objective” verdicts of science, history,
and so on. Afrocentrism was a battle cry against this conspiracy of global propor-
tions. From 1940 onward, it hypostatized in a concerted project to build an epi-
stemic “Afro-center:” an orientation that provided a countervailing force to
“Eurocentric” hegemony.
Of the various collective responses to the persistence of a global imperial order
at the dawn of the postcolony, among the most imaginative was the pan-African
project pursued by the continent’s first state leaders. One can appreciate the
immensity of their challenge. Postcolonial Africa entered a global economy
Everest-like in opposition, founded on a centuries-long sedimentation of imperial
exploitation. Intensifying this trial was the force of the rhetoric recounting that the
Black was not equal, was not capable, could not govern his or herself. In both
ideological and profoundly material ways, Africa’s states had to answer questions
that set the terms for their interaction with the global community. How could one
be African and independent in the world? How could a people be freely Black?
The project that coalesced in the 1960s-70s between the free states of Africa
and global Black rights movements upheld the necessity of developing an Afro-
center as a starting point for these negotiations. On the international level, this
dream hypostatized in the creation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963,
which coordinated pan-African administration, trade and diplomacy to collectively
address Africa’s global position.50 By contrast, on the domestic level, negotiating
from an “Afro-center” meant solving contemporary problems in practices drawn
from African vernaculars. “Re-Africanization” campaigns of the independent
states, with their socialist programs like Nyerere’s Ujamaa and Nkrumahist self-
help projects, affirmed that a free African state not only had to preserve indigen-
ous customs, but had to willingly suture solutions to contemporary problems from
the cloth of African culture.51
Above all, building the “Afro-center” required a concerted program for mental
decolonization, which African leaders embarked upon in diverse manners. From
 Inheriting Black Studies 81
revised school curricula to philosophy clubs to daily radio and news propaganda,
the fact that an African civilization really existed—that it was coming into coher-
ence, finally rising again—pervaded the expectations of the youth raised in this
generation. “During my childhood in Guinea, S
ekou Tour
e had often said that
Guinea’s independence was but the beginning of the United States of Africa,”
recounts Manthia Diawara. “The Pan-Africanists had been looking for an Africa
without frontiers, one that would be competitive with the rest of the world.”52
The concept of “Africa” which cohered in this pan-African civilization com-
bined two elements: Africa’s persistence as a material culture independent of
imperialism, at least in the colorful character by which its rituals and languages
revealed themselves to the world; and the undeniable existence of Africa as an
identity born in resistance to the oppressions that its people faced, both on the
continent and abroad. For Aim
e C
esaire, whose concept of N
egritude became cru-
cial to this generation, “Africa” had implicitly existed through the frictions of
encounter which likewise consolidated “Europe” as a discrete material entity.53
Certain worldwide events were responsible for placing Blacks into common status:
slavery, colonialism, imperialism, apartheid. Africanity coincided with C
esaire’s
explanation of N
egritude, in that:
[N
egritude] is a way of living history within history; the history of a
community whose experience appears to be … unique, with its transfer of
people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its
fragments of murdered culture. How can we not believe all this which has its
own coherence, constitutes a heritage?54
From Frantz Fanon to Amilcar Cabral, Afro-revolutionaries of the decolonizing
years asserted that Africa existed as a heritage of resistance that evolved with its
people through their worldly relations, inhering especially in grassroots politics,
historiography and legend. 55
The project of building an “Afro-center” therefore required not only asserting
Africa as a living entity, but placing it at the center of a new epistemological plain.
For Kwame Nkrumah, African consciencism—what he described as “a philosophy
and ideology for decolonization”—required triggering a paradigm shift in broader
world thinking.56 For Nkrumah, all revolutions, from 18th century France to
Grecian antiquity, had been indissociably tied to a rupture in how people under-
stood the basic elements of time, space, and materiality. Beginning with Thales in
the 7th century BC, Nkrumah painstakingly demonstrated how ancient under-
standings of the world—for example, that all people and plants consisted only of
water—justified uneven distributions of power, including the entrenchment of an
enslaving society. Similarly, during the Enlightenment, Descartes’ principle that
the Earth could be mastered by anyone because it existed under an observable set
of rules, affirmed the capacity of the individual as sovereign, the fraud of the King
as sacred, and a world that should be governed by right reason, hypostatized in
the free movement of markets. Such beliefs, as Nkrumah demonstrates, precipi-
tated in the avid republicanism of the French Revolution. The achievement of an
82 Souls January–March 2020
African Revolution, then, could not just mean independence for Black nations; it
would have to emerge from a rupture in world thinking.
Africa provided this possibility so long as the vital elements of an African con-
sciousness were fully tethered to a historical interrogation of the world. “It was
said that whereas other continents had shaped history, and determined its course,
Africa had stood still, held down by inertia,” wrote Nkrumah, explaining: “Such
disparaging accounts had been given of African society and culture as to appear to
justify slavery, and slavery, posed against these accounts, seemed a positive deliver-
ance of our ancestors.”57 The confabulation of Africa as a historical dead zone had
given Europe its confidence as conqueror. That the majority of territories should
still lay under this ideological shadow persuaded Nkrumah of the need to begin
knowledge again, to develop an epistemology from what tenets of African learning
still remained untrammeled by colonists. “In the new African renaissance, we place
great emphasis on the presentation of history,” wrote Nkrumah. What he called
the “African personality”— defined as “the cluster of humanist principles which
underlie the traditional African society”—provided a basis for reconstructing a glo-
bal epistemology, beginning with principles like Africans’ belief in the visible ver-
sus invisible world.58
Thus, the resurrection of Africa, defined on its own terms and with claims to
an unbroken history of global interconnection, might provide the deliverance
needed to shake faith in Europe’s claim to hegemony. The revelation that the King
was mortal, which felled the monarchy, or that God was dead, thereby surrender-
ing the propulsion of history to the machinations of man, met its equal in the
implosive power of Africa’s restoration to History. “For an African to assert the
African fact that ancient Egypt was a black civilization shakes the very foundation
of the doctrine of white supremacy,” writes Molefi Kete Asante.59 As Manthia
Diawara recounts:
The idea that Negritude was bigger even than Africa, that we were part of an
international moment which held the promise of universal emancipation, that
our destiny coincided with the universal freedom of workers and colonized
people worldwide—all this gave us a bigger and more important identity than
the ones previously available to us through kinship, ethnicity and race.60
Afrocentrism in the ideology of postcolonial Africa marked an attempt at total
global revolution through a direct and originary assault on the principles of
Eurocentrism.
Across the African world, this assault came in varying forms. In the United
States, by reshaping Black culture along African lines, Afrocentrists in the 1960s
underscored that America was a country full of Africans. The history of the US
was inseparable from the history of Africa as well. But only by confronting that
fact, as an everyday revelation, could either the country or the world have a hope
of reconciling to its violent history. Revolution had to be conceived of as a histor-
ical problem in order for justice to mean a transformation of the kind that would
change the meaning of “Blackness” forever.
 Inheriting Black Studies 83
Afrocentrism was a narrative tradition that took the separation of “Blackness”
from “Africa” as the problem for thought. Its saw slavery and colonialism as the
progenitors of a great crisis in language—a holocaust in all thought but that of the
European. Yet the crisis was not hopeless. The fact that Africa’s people possessed
real cultures, traditions, and practices meant that neither “Africa” nor “Black”
could be either empty signs or false starting points. Rather, they had to be recog-
nized as part of a historical process that nonetheless had configured Africans into
a world of racial domination. The power of Afrocentrism was its capacity to pre-
sent this unethical relationship to the past as a matter of unacceptable truth.
As Nahum Chandler has suggested, the concept of “the Negro” as a figure of
unacceptable truth was pivotal to Du Bois, both in his conception of African his-
tory and in his emancipatory thought. Nowhere was this clearer than in Du Bois’s
biography of John Brown, the militant white abolitionist, with whom Du Bois
grappled with the extraordinary puzzle of a “social being … belonging simply and
purely to a ‘White’ race who yet came to recognize himself as configured within
the movement of an unsettled question … the ‘Negro question.’” 61 To Du Bois,
Brown represented the best of what America had to offer: its future. But he owed
that to the Negro. The best of America owed itself to the Negro. This incredible
fact defined, for Du Bois, not only the promise of the color line as the problem of
the 20th century, but the role that African history would play in world
transformation.62
Afrocentrism viewed history as a weapon whose resurrection meant an always-
explosive threat of encounter. The slave’s genesis within Blackness presupposed
the capacity of abstracting an Africa without a past—something that the tradition
of Afrocentrism rejected. But to locate the birth of modernity within Africa meant
an implosion of the originary thread of history itself. The restitution of the Black
as the African, in other words, could not help but indict the world at large. This
political practice became exceedingly important in the 20th century when prospects
of integrating into White society—whether the Black diaspora in the US or
African states into the international community—appeared chimerical and separat-
ism became the provocative alternative for political life. Afrocentrism represented
the largest-scale attempt to formulate a dissident Afro-center in response. As
opposed to earlier generations of pan-African activists, the new generation of
Afrocentrists underscored “return” to Africa as a frame of mind. It shifted the
frontier of Black nationalism to a question of epistemology. Historical reckoning
became a program of everyday revolution.

Conclusion: Unsettling “the other”

Sixty years since Afrocentrism fell like lightning on the doors of the academy, let
us reflect on the reception of this tradition vis-a-vis what is called the Black polit-
ical genealogy. Without a doubt, Afrocentrism remains in many chambers of the
Western scholarly imaginaire a type of “farce.” Branded a sinister doppelganger, a
84 Souls January–March 2020
perjurer, a specter who must be ousted at the faintest glimmer of proto-national-
ism, Afrocentrism has been quarantined from orthodox Black thought as “anti-
intellectual.” Made up instead of raw emotional decrees, its intrusion on any aspect
of soulful scholarly pursuit is considered, de facto, “abrasive.”
What elicits this sensitivity on the part of the Western scholar, so closely resem-
bling fear? How can one explain this collective reaction of enormous proportions?
Is it possible that Afrocentrism’s methodological questioning touches not on lies
and fabulations, but on something perturbingly real? Put another way, does the
potency of Afrocentrism reside in the very reason that it still provokes silence
and censure?
These questions must form the crux of any methodology to write Afrocentrism
into the Black Radical Tradition, examining it in its rightfully central role. At the
commencement of the slave trade, the African’s debasement occurred by way of
Blackness; the Black was the invention of a Master who desired a slave with no
history, no familial context, no culture which could provoke confusion or fear.
What set the slave apart from the African on the homeland was the asymmetry of
the White man’s power in that foreign land. In the forests ruled by Black “magics,”
the White man was always at a loss. Blackness was the innovation which compen-
sated for what the White did not understand. “When nations meet on terms of
independence and equality, they tend to stress the need for communication in the
language of the other,” writes Ng ugī wa Thiong’o. “But when they meet as
oppressor and oppressed, as for instance under imperialism, then their languages
cannot experience a genuinely democratic encounter.”63
Afrocentrism returned the baggage of culture and the significance of history to
the Black, for whom this ethnographic texture formed a kind of protection. The
presumption of Eurocentrism was its universalism: not only that its sciences were
correct in every way, but that they already included everything that could be
known. The invention of the Black was Eurocentrism’s attempt to make the
African knowable by stripping away the past. Afrocentrism restored what was not
understood, and which therefore appeared unnatural and perturbing.
But what would it mean to confront Afrocentrism at its word? What would it
require to face the fearful possibility that not everything is already known, that the
place from whence the wealth of the world has sprung has never, not once, been
understood? What would it take to demand that the West confront the Black with-
out the presumption of knowledge that has already consigned them to an obliter-
ated past, to a being of nothingness? Would this unsettling moment provide the
possible beginning to what Ng ugī called a “genuinely democratic encounter?”

Notes
1. My definition of ‘tradition’ follows Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition (Raleigh: UNC Press, 1983).
2. On the imperial invention of Africa, see Phillip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British
Ideas and Action, 1780-1850 (London: Springer, 1965); On the double invention, see V.Y.
 Inheriting Black Studies 85
Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996); D.A. Masolo, African
Philosophy in Search of Identity (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994).
3. On genealogies of the European nation-state, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York and London:
Verso, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
1983); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). Regarding Black nationalism, Wilson J. Moses argues
that the nationalist spirit is defined by its search for a state. See W.J. Moses (ed.), Classical
Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York and
London: NYU, 1996). However, a substantial historiography has questioned this
presumption, suggesting that Black nationalism’s aims have been more ontological and
epistemological in nature. See Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public
Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 239–273; RMichael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of
Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001);
Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle
for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2018), 5–6.
4. Archie Mafeje, “Africanity: A Combative Ontology,” pp. 31–41 in The Postcolonial Turn,
ed. Ren
e Devisch and Francis Nyamnjoh (Bamenda: Langaa, 2011).
5. Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2012).
6. Vincent Harding, “Beyond Chaos: Black History and the Search for the New Land,” in
Amistad I, eds. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Institute of the Black
World, 1970), 267–292.
7. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 120.
8. Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity (Buffalo: Amulefi Publishing Company, 1980).
9. Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became an Excuse to Teach Myth
as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
10. As described in Molefi Kete Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” Journal of Negro
Education 60, no. 2 (1992), 173.
11. See Adam Ewing, “The Challenge of Garveyism Studies,” Modern American History (2018),
399-418.
12. John Blassingame, “Black Studies and the Role of the Historian,” in New Perspectives on
Black Studies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Urbana, IL: ERIC, 1971), 222.
13. Martin Kilson, “Whither Black Education?” School Review 81.3 (1978), 432.
14. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African-American Popular History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical
Pasts and Imagined Homes (New York: Verso, 1998), 1.
15. Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 11.
16. K.A. Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press); K.A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New
York: Penguin, 2007); Achille Mbembe and Sarah Balakrishnan, “Pan-African Legacies,
Afropolitan Futures,” Transition: An International Review 120, no. 1 (2016): 28–37; Sarah
Balakrishnan, “The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African
Studies,” History Compass 15.2 (2017); Paul Gilroy and Tommie Shelby,
“Cosmopolitanism, Blackness, and Utopia,” Transition 98 (2008), 116–135; Sarah
Balakrishnan, “Afropolitanism and the End of Black Nationalism,” pp. 585–595 in
Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 2nd edition, ed. Gerard
Delanty (New York: Routledge, 2018).
17. Ewing, “The Challenge of Garveyism Studies,” 408-9.
18. Robinson, “The Invention of the Negro,” Black Marxism, 119–154.
86 Souls January–March 2020
19. Melville Herskovits, Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941); Sidney
Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological
Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New
World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
20. Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1993); Brent Hayes Edwards, Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009).
21. Moses, Afrotopia.
22. Allen Callahan, The Talking Book: African-Americans and the Bible (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the
Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Gosnell Yorke, “Translating the Bible
in Africa: A Postcolonial and an Afrocentric Interrogation of a Long-Standing Tradition,”
pp. 232–250 in Translation Revisited: Contesting the Sense of African Social Realities, ed.
Jean-Bernard Ou
edraogo et al. (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018).
23. James Sidbury, “Reading, Revelation, and Rebellion: the Textual Communities of Gabriel,
Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner,” pp. 119–133 in Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History
and Memory, ed. Kenneth Greenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
24. Charles Long, “Perspectives for a Study of African-American Religion,” in African-
American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture, eds. Timothy Fulop and
Albert Raboteau (New York and London: Routledge): 37-56.
25. John Parker, Making of the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra
(Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000), 8; Philip S. Zachernuk, “Of Origins and Colonial Order:
Southern Nigerian Historians and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ c. 1870–1970,” Journal of
African History 35.3 (1994), 427-455; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Of Revelation and
Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991); Adam Ewing, “Kimbanguism, Garveyism, and
Rebellious Rumor Making in Post-World War I Africa,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black
Politics, Culture, and Society 20.2 (2018), 149–177.
26. Robinson, Black Marxism, 169.
27. Adam Ewing, The Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and
Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014); Wilson Jeremiah Moses,
The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978).
28. Maria Stewart, “Address at the African Masonic Hall,” in WJ Moses, Classical Black
Nationalism, 95, 92.
29. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1903), 8.
30. Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Baltimore: Black Classic
Press, 1994), 131–132.
31. Moses, Afrotopia, 1-2.
32. W.E.B. Du Bois, “On the Beginnings of the [Encyclopedia Africana] Project,” reprinted
from the front page of the magazine section, Afro-American (Baltimore: October 21, 1961),
in Moses, Afrotopia, 161.
33. Nahum Chandler, Toward an African Future of the Limit of the World (London: Living
Commons Collective, 2013).
34. Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from
4500 BC to 2000 AD (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987 [1974]), 20.
35. Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity (Buffalo: Amulefi Publishing Company, 1980).
36. Kelefa Sanneh, “After the Beginning Again,” Transition 87 (2001), 66-89.
37. Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African
American Images 2003 [1980]), 40.
38. Asante, Afrocentricity, 3.
 Inheriting Black Studies 87
39. Maulana Karenga, “The Nguzo Saba (The Seven Principles): Their Meaning and Message,”
pp. 276–287 in Modern Black Nationalism ed. William Van De Burg (New York: New
York UP).
40. Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion (London: MacMillan Press, 1984).
41. William Martin and Michael West, “Introduction: The Rival Africas and Paradigms of
Africanists and Africans at Home and Abroad,” pp. 1-38 in Out of One, Many Africas:
Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa, ed. William Martin and Michael West
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press).
42. J.A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color (New York: Touchstone, 1946); George G.M.
James, Stolen Legacy: The Greeks were not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, but the People
of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians, were (Newport: African Publication
Society, 1954); Chancellor Williams, Destruction of Black Civilization (Chicago: Third
World Press, 1976); Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (New York: Random
House, 1976); Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Africa: Mother of Western Civilization (Baltimore:
Black Classic Press, 1988); Martin Bernal, Black Athena Volume I (Rutgers: Rutgers
University Press, 1987), Black Athena Volume II (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1991)
and Black Athena Volume III (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Runoko Rashidi
and Ivan Van Sertime, African Presence in Early Asia (Picataway: Transaction, 1988);
Runoko Rashidi, Black Star: African Presence in Early Europe (London: Books of Africa,
1985); John Henrik Clarke, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and
The Rise of European Capitalism (New York: A&B, 1992); Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt:
The Light of the World (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1992 [1907]); Marimba Ani,
Yurugu: An African-Centred Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour
(Trenton: Africa World Press, 1994); Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile and His
Family (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1996); Wayne Chandler, Ancient Future: The
Teachings and Prophetic Wisdom of the Seven Hermetic Laws of Ancient Egypt (Atlanta:
Black Classic Press, 1999); Innocent Chilaka Onyewuenyi, The African Origin of Greek
Philosophy: An Exercise in Afrocentrism (Nsukka: University of Nigeria Press, 2005);
Runoko Rashidi, African Star Over Asia: The Black Presence in the East (London: Books of
Africa, 2012); Thomas Slater (ed.), Afrocentric Interpretations of Jesus and the Gospel
Tradition (Leiden, 2015); Rover Bauval and Thomas Brophy, Black Genesis: The Prehistoric
Origins of Ancient Egypt (Rochester: Bear and Company, 2015).
43. A.J. Binder, Contentious Curricula: Afrocentrism and Creationism in American Public
Schools (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009); Terry Kershaw, “Afrocentrism and the
Afrocentric Method,” Journal of Black Studies 16, no. 3 (1992): 160–186.
44. Keith Mayes, Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday
Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2009).
45. Algernon Austin, Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the
Twentieth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
46. Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop, 11.
47. For recent work centering women in the Black nationalist tradition, see Blain, Set the
World on Fire; Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed
an Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
48. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” Massachusetts Review 6.1 (1964): 13–52.
49. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of
Black Leadership (New York: William Marrow & Company 1967).
50. Vincent Bakpetu Thompson and Basil Davidons, Africa and Unity: The Evolution of Pan-
Africanism (London: Longman, 1969); Errol Anthony Henderson, Afrocentrism and World
Politics: Towards a New Paradigm (Westport: Praeger, 1995).
51. L
eopold Senghor, On African Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1964); Julius Nyerere,
Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Kwame Nkrumah,
88 Souls January–March 2020
Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1964); Emmanuel Akyeampong, “African Socialism; or, the Search for an Indigenous
Model of Economic Development?” Economic History of Developing Regions 33.1 (2018),
69–87; Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkruahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in
Ghana (Ohio: Ohio UP, 2017); Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015).
52. Manthia Diawara, In Search of Africa (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), 163.
53. Aim
e C
esaire, “Culture and Colonization,” trans. Brent Hayes Edwards, Social Text 28, no.
2 (2010): 127-144.
54. C
esaire, Discours sur le colonialism, 82.
55. Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” Transition no. 45 (1974): 15; Frantz
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1964).
56. Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-Colonization (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1964).
57. Nkrumah, Consciencism, 62.
58. Nkrumah, Consciencism, 75.
59. Molefi Kete Asante, “Decolonizing the Universities in Africa,” in Contemporary Critical
Thought in Africology and Africana Studies, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Clyde E. Ledbetter
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 8.
60. Diawara, In Search of Africa, 6.
61. Nahum Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2014), 113.
62. Nahum Chandler, “The African Diaspora,” Palimpsest: A journal on Women, Gender, and
the Black International 3, no. 1 (2014): 1–7.
63. Ng~ugĩ wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre (Portsmouth: Heinemann Publishers, 1998), 31.

About the Author

Sarah Balakrishnan is a doctoral candidate in History at Harvard University. In
writing this article, she would like to thank Adam Ewing, John & Jean Comaroff,
Anthony Farley, Efe Igor, Kirk McLeod and Iman Mohamed.