During the past few months, a state of controversy arose over the ideas of the so-called “Afrocentric” through calls to cancel the visit of comedian Kevin Hart to Egypt or about the appearance of a “black” Cleopatra in a documentary film on the Netflix platform. History is a red line, and the question remained: What He is afrocentric, and why did his ideas spark so much anger? Afrocentrism is a political and cultural movement that considers all blacks to be of African descent, and that their vision should reflect positively traditional African values.
Believers in these ideas believe that Africans and other non-whites have been controlled through centuries of slavery and colonization by Europeans, and that European culture is inappropriate, and at worst diametrically opposed, to efforts by non-Europeans to achieve self-determination. This is why, according to Afrocentrism, people of African descent need to develop an appreciation for the achievements of traditional African civilization and to express their own history and value system. According to these ideas, African history and culture began in ancient Egypt, the cradle of civilization. Egypt led the unified Black Africa until the Europeans stole its ideas and technologies and obscured its record of achievements.
“Afrocentrists” believe that traditional African culture contradicts European culture in being more enlightened by its history, and the movement came as a response to “Eurocentric” trends about Africans and their historical contributions. The “Eurocentric” theory is based on the superiority of Western civilization and the superiority of Europeans over other races. “Afrocentrists” seek to confront what it considers to be errors and ideas perpetuated by the racist philosophical foundations of Western academic disciplines that developed during and after the early European Renaissance to justify the enslavement of other peoples.
The idea of Afrocentric developed through the work of African-American thinkers at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century due to changes in both the United States and Africa, whether the end of slavery and the decline of colonial power, but it flourished in its modern form due to the activity of African-American intellectuals in the civil rights movement and the development of American studies programs African universities. After the American Civil War, African Americans in the South gathered together in congregations to evade white control, established their own congregations, and worked hard to obtain an education. They increasingly took on more active public roles despite severe racial discrimination against them. African American and African intellectuals have looked to the African past to reassess what its civilizations achieved and what it means for modern people.
-Afrocentrism as a history reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s. And the pioneers of the movement sought to respond to European lies that claim that blacks did not make contributions to human civilization. Afrocentrism endorses the claim that the contributions of various black African peoples have been downplayed or denigrated as part of the legacy of colonialism and the pathologies of slavery by removing Africans from history. The term Afrocentrism appeared in 1962, and the adjective “Afrocentric” appeared in a printed proposal to enter the African Encyclopedia by the American historian William D. Bois.
-The number of supporters of Afrocentrism increased in the 1980s when many African Americans grew alarmed by the “conservative revolution” of President Ronald Reagan. In 1987, the British researcher Martin Bernal published the book “Black Athena”, in which he claimed that ancient Athens was occupied from the northern invaders and was annexed to a colony established by Phoenicia, an idea denied by Western researchers about the African influence on ancient Greek culture, as they accused the book of not Historical accuracy, scientific incompetence, and racism. Critics have argued that the quest for exclusive African values sometimes comes perilously close to reproducing racist stereotypes, and “Afrocentric” has even been accused of antisemitism.
In 2000, Professor of African American Studies Molefi Kate Asante gave a lecture entitled “Africanocentrism: Towards a New Understanding of African Thought in this Millennium,” in which he presented many of his ideas, including that “Africa has been betrayed by international trade, missionaries, and the structure of knowledge imposed by the Western world.” Its leaders and its people’s ignorance of its past.” Likewise, “philosophy originated in Africa, and the first philosophers in the world were Africans,” and that “Africanism is the only ideology capable of liberating the African people.”
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