Afrocentricity: Toward a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium by Dr. Molefi Assante

Africa has been betrayed by international commerce and trade. Africa has been often betrayed by the new science of the genetics of food, and the unequal distribution of resources. Africa has been betrayed by missionaries and imams who have called our own priests and priestesses false while holding up Africa’s enemies as our saviors. Africa has been betrayed by education, the Academy, and the structure of knowledge imposed by the Western world Africa has often been betrayed by its own leaders who have shown a talent for imitating the worst habits and behaviors of Europe.

Africa has often been betrayed by the ignorance of its own people of its past. Africans are, consequently, the most betrayed of contemporary humans. People so often betrayed must take a serious look at their own approach to phenomena, to life, to existence, to knowledge. The betrayals do not have to continue, nor must we resign Africa to the trash heaps of history as some contemporary Africanists and non Africanists have claimed. A continent and a people with such incredible potential can rise to meet any challenge, but our thoughts must become truly our own thoughts, separated from the enslaving thoughts of those who have sought racial domination. Of course, when I speak like this, I am speaking of Africa in the context and spirit of Marcus Garvey. I accept that the African world is not merely a geographical entity but a world entity whether by our own making or as is most probable by the making of the assaults and attacks and aggressions against African people. We are found in every continent and we occupy positions of influence in countries as widely separated as Brazil and the United Kingdom.

My aim is to help lay out a plan for the recovery of African place, respectability, accountability, and leadership.The theme of this conference takes us to the very core of the future of human interaction by seeking to examine Western knowledge, its structure, its relationship to conquest and domination, and its prosecution as an instrument to retain a white racial hierarchy in the world.We know that Africans have thought about the universe longer than any other people. The people of the world have been black longer than any other color.

In fact philosophy itself originated in Africa and the first philosophers in the world were Africans. The African tradition is intertwined with the earliest thought. Yet from the beginning of Europe’s interest in Africa the European writers referred to ancient African works as "Wisdom Literature," in an effort to negatively distinguish African thinking from European thinking. They could not conceive of Africans as having philosophy.Philosophy was meant, in their minds, to indicate a kind of reflection that was possible only with the Greeks. They constructed a Greece that was miraculous, built on the foundation of a racial imagination that established a white European superiority in everything.