African Pyramids of Knowledge

PREFACE

The Afrocentric method seeks to transform human reality by ushering in a human openness to cultural pluralism that cannot exist without the unlocking of our minds for acceptance of an expansion of consciousness. I seek to overthrow parochialism, provincialism, and narrow Wotanic visions of the world by demonstrating the usefulness of an Afrocentric approach, based on beginning with ancient Kemet, to questions of knowledge. Without a plausible ideology we can never march in the same direction; Afrocentricity is essential for the collective vision. I must alert you to the overpowering value of realizing an Africa truth that has been staring us in the face for thousands of years: the permanence of the pyramids.

There is nothing profound in such a pronouncement, there have been similar pronouncements by various other writers, but what is different, I hope, is the identification of the principal cause of the failure in those other formulations. In the West there have been theories and critiques that are fraught with problems whether you call them by the names of existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, post-colonialism, or deconstruction. What we have come to know is that the proponents of these views have hedged their bets in a European worldview that is moribund when it comes to looking at the outside world. They cannot truly grasp the significance of a revolutionary idea that would challenge the Eurocentric projection of its method as universal. However, the time has come for a total re-evaluation of both intellectual privilege and the assertion of European dominance in knowledge.

There are several reasons for this state of affairs. The first is that the enthusiasts would be overturning themselves, a most difficult task, particularly if they believe that there is at least a little bit of good in their formulation. Secondly we are talking to and about a society or worldview that has dominated for 500 years. What would the philosophers of Europe mean by humanism except perhaps expanding to other Europeans, except perhaps to admit other peoples into the historical consciousness of Europe? But for Europeans to enter into a view, a perspective where they will be able to share with others in a world of plural perspectives is to ask them to submit to revolution. This is precisely why the French insist on everyone in the society adopting French habits and customs; they cannot bear to see difference because difference, for them, poses a threat to their place. But it is not so bad to have a plural vision in a nation. After all, the nation is not an ethnic affair; it is profoundly about acceptance of other people in a pact that however imperfect tends toward common civic objectives. In fact, it is a realism that must come in order to protect the Eurocentric view as one part of the human view. Anyone advancing an exclusively Eurocentric view as universal is apt to be disappointed because such a view is dead. There is a growing critique of hegemony and domination. No one will be a slave anymore. Nations have risen up against political hegemony in a challenge to the authority of the West. Oppressed people have turned the tables on their oppressors. The primitive hold that Europe once held over the world has crashed into the barricades of history and we are at a new turn in the world of ideas and knowledge.

The former enslaved are using every means possible to maintain their revolt against oppression; and in revolt, they overturn both their own victimization and oppression and the idea that Europe is supreme. But the project of human knowledge is even more; it is a search for method that will establish a base for further inquiry into the processes and the practices of human culture.

Afrocentricity, as an aspect of centrism, is groundedness that allows the student of human culture investigating African phenomena to view the world from the standpoint of the African. In addition, Afrocentricity, as Ama Mazama argues, is a paradigm and its implications are multifarious and constant.¹ Since the publication of Mazama’s book, The Afrocentric Paradigm, the theoretical and critical works on Afrocentricity have exploded. The current book is in some ways bringing us into the 21st century with new avenues for research and critique.

I have divided the book into four sections: (1) The Intellectual Landscape, (2) A Mobilization of Ideas, (3) Confronting the Historical Situation, and (4) Asserting The New Cultural Reality. The idea is to examine what constitutes the discipline of Africology; secondly, to discuss the hallmarks of creative and philosophical origin as part of the critical process of African recovery; thirdly, to propose new ways to deal with the historical situation, and fourthly, to envision what innovative examination of agency can do for the interpretation of human phenomena.

CHAPTER ONE

The Intellectual Landscape

African resurgence will never take place until Africans champion a renaissance grounded in a new paradigm of dramatic narratives of victory. ¹ I do not bemoan the contemporary intellectual landscape because there is no escaping the fact that few offers of illuminating dramas exist outside of the Afrocentric school of thought. But circumstances of nihilism, decadence, and fear are rooted in the inability of our intellectuals to tag our success to new methods of analysis.

The ancient people of Kemet (ancient Egypt) who lived along the banks of the Nile took advantage of whatever situation was presented to them by the river’s flow. In our own time we must take full advantage of the definitional, critical, historical, and cultural conditions found in our societies. The African scholar must dip the gourd into the eternal stream of African history and analyze every conceivable activity for its utility and application for present and future generations. You must detach from Europe in order to see what your ancestors have done, as Kofi Asare Opoku, said. If the river was full of–water, the Kemites used large barges to float stones to various sites. If the river had little water, they used heavy sledges pulled by hundreds of people over constantly replaced wooden rollers. Every day was one of decision-making in the best interest of society. We can do nothing less in recovering our historical stance toward the future.

I have maintained that the Eurocentric West is trapped, even in its best intentions, by its concentration on itself, its selfishness, its inability to draw a wider picture, and it unabashed drive for greed and materialism. Thus it becomes possible for Trent Schroyer writing in The Critique of Domination to begin his attack on a scientized Western civilization with a passage such as the following:

"The critique of domination, or the reflective critique of socially unnecessary constraints of human freedom, is as old as the Western concept of reason. In classical Greek philosophy the notion of reason (nous) was developed in relation to the seeing of the invisible in the visible, or of the essential in the appearing."²

Schroyer’s emphasis on the Greeks, who were intellectual children of the Africans, suggests why the Afrocentric method has another advantage over the critical theorists. Wilden, Habermas, Sartre, Marcuse and other important minds of the West, some not even Europeans, have tried to set out a critical theory with its ties to the Greeks, but alas, we have broken from that tradition. I have read the Eurocentric writers as a part of my intellectual history but since I share other classical traditions as well I have no reason to be trapped in the European past. Essentially Sartre and Marcuse found that the foundations of a critical theory associated with the concept of negative reason, that is, the knowledge of something because you know what is not, were elusive. Boaventura de Sousa Santos wants to point Europe toward an appreciation of what he calls the epistemologies of the South but as a way to re-assert Europe. My claim is one of freedom from the constraints of Eurocentrists in connection with critical theory; yet I do not claim that the final emancipatory moment will have come when Africans write an entirely new discourse. Stepping outside of the historical moment might permit new interpretations, new criticisms, ultimately the acquisition of new knowledge. This is why the recent works of Kimani Nehusi, Ana Monteiro Ferreira, Reiland Rabaka, Christel Temple, Michael Tillotson, Nilgun Anadolu-Okur, and Lusaka Nkala must be examined for their theoretical implications for those who would seek another path.³ I have also been impressed, though with some critique, with the growing corpus of Lewis Gordon around Existentialism in which he argues that existence and meaning are important in the context of black liberation. There is nothing wrong with this formulation because Afrocentrists argue that black liberation must come from black agency; this is the Afrocentric intervention into the question of existence and liberation.

Nehusi is exploring the origins and connections of language and culture in the African world as a new way to assert our relationship with each other. This is valuable and useful documentation of the value of the ancient classical languages of Africa. In this work, he is joined by the Congolese writer, Lusaka Nkala. Ferreira, on the other hand, has contributed an outstanding work on theoretical approaches to the question of world knowledge and has advanced the idea that seeking the Afrocentric ethic might be the most appropriate avenue of transformation. Christel Temple and Anadolu-Okur explore the dimensions of literature and theater in regard to the development of a practical response to culture.

Taking the position that the reduction of agency is the practical result of those who seek to prevent Africans from exercising their legitimate goals, Tillotson has written a provocative treatise on the essential nature of the process. Perhaps no other writer has done as much as he has done to establish the mechanism for the prevention of black success. As we speak of white privilege in terms of white Americans; we can now speak of the impact of white privilege on Agency Reduction Formation as it applies to Africans. In almost all historical, social, or economic dimensions, one sees this situation at work.

INSIDE HISTORY

However, a person steps outside one’s history with great difficulty. In fact, the act itself is highly improbable from the standpoint of true historical consciousness. There is no anti-place, since we are all consumers of space and time. There is, of course, the unknown that we presume. is out there until we know it by being there. Our place is the constantly presenting and re-presenting context, the evolving presentation context, the perspective—that is, history to us.

Afrocentricity is a self-conscious obliteration of the subject/object dichotomy and the enthronement of an African vision. It is necessary to advance the intellectual movement toward a meaningful concept of place. In saying this I am challenging the Afrocentrist to maintain inquiry rooted in a strict interpretation of place in order to betray all naive racial theories and establish Afrocentricity as a legitimate response to the human conditions. All knowledge results from an occasion of encounter in place. But the place remains a rightly shaped perspective that allows the Afrocentrist to put African ideals and values at the center of inquiry. If this does not happen then Afrocentricity does not exist. What are African ideals and values? The answers to this question provide the arena for Afrocentric debate, discussion, and endarkening. The Afrocentrist will not question the idea of the centrality of African ideals and values but will argue over what comprises those ideals and values. The Afrocentrist seeks to uncover and use codes, symbols, motifs, myths, and circles of discussion that reinforce the centrality of the paradigm as a valid frame of reference for acquiring and examining data. Such a method appears to go beyond Western history in order to re-valorize the African place in the interpretation of Africans, continental and Diasporan. It is no secret that much of what parades as African have been interpreted only in the light of Europe, thus warping our understanding of theory and method.

A collection of data, for example, for an Afrocentric project will consider cognitive and material systems, direct and indirect, data-gathering measures, myths, video-recorded conversations, and unobtrusive acquisition processes based on the African culture, e.g., the style of male address used in fervent greetings, unspoken cultural understandings about relationship to elders, and so forth. Knowledge relates ultimately to some human interest even if it is only to see the person who conceives a problem.

SETTING THE FUNDAMENTAL AFRICANIST QUESTION

The pyramids of Africa, not the Odyssey or Iliad of Homer, are the initializing tokens of human intellectual inquiry into the nature of being. Nothing captures the moment of human creative energy with as much comprehensive intelligence as the building of the pyramids. Consequently no human figure in the ancient world looms as large or as important in the beginning of our knowledge as Imhotep, the architect and philosopher of the Sakkara Pyramid. Each pyramid was a massive text and a testimony of the brilliance of the Africans who build them along the Nile River. Marcus Garvey once said, We must never stop learning.⁴

Consequently, the pyramids, in all of their complexions and adumbrations, must become the central fountain for the sciences and social activities of the ancient African world. Whether geometry or medicine, organization or construction techniques, architecture or astronomy, one sees in the building of the pyramids the master narratives of African civilization, and hence, the beginning of the built-societies of the world. Herein are the essential characteristics of the building blocks of modern knowledge.

Unfortunately the Africanists, much like Egyptologists, their counterparts who deal with ancient Egypt, tend to be Europeans whose interest in Africa serves European studies more than African studies. They were unable to see beyond Greece and their studies of Africa therefore are woefully inadequate and often uninteresting. Where Africans participate in such enterprises, for example, under the aegis of the African Studies Association, they are bound by the same protocols as the European scholars. Since 1990 the African Studies Association annual conferences have had fewer than ten panels dealing with (Egyptian) Kemetic traditions or the relationship of the Kemetic culture to the rest of Africa. One asks, How can hundreds of scholars participating in intellectual conferences on Africa not discuss ancient Egypt, Classical Nubia, Beja, Meroe, or the impact of Nile Valley Studies on our contemporary understandings? In fact, the African Studies Association’s reaction to ancient Africa is in line with the emphasis that such scholarly conferences, such as the American Studies Association, place on examining the Greeks and Romans. One is inclined, however, to suggest that Americanists probably place more emphasis on those classical cultures than Africanists place on Kemet and Nubia. What many scholars who participate in African Studies do is not properly African Studies but European studies of Africa. This has little to do with the racial background of the scholar but rather with the perspective from which the person examines data.

SEEING REALITY FROM A DIFFERENT PLACE

On some commuter trains half of the seats face forward and half face in the opposite direction. Although you are moving in one direction, depending upon which way you are faced you get a different view of reality. In the face forward position you see things going. On some trains they have seats against the sides of the wall—in those cases you see things coming and going. Well, we are like that at this moment in history we see things from both vantage points—coming and going—and what we see going are the vestiges of a system of racial domination—it was a wrong headed system in the first place—what we see coming is a postmodern society that is sympathetic to diversity and committed to plural views. Thus, no longer can European studies of Africa parade as African studies; the overthrow of the dominating canon has already begun.

A person who studies the economics of Tanzania in an economic department and then completes a dissertation on some aspect of the Tanzanian economy cannot automatically be considered an Africanist. In fact, such a person is essentially an economist albeit an economist who employs the assumptions, predispositions and methods of economics to the Tanzanian economic sector. Application of the protocols of the economic discipline to an African nation is a matter of selection not of philosophical outlook, it is a matter of temperament not of methodological discipline, a matter of fancy not of perspective.

What is difficult for some people in the field to understand is that African American Studies is not merely a collection of courses on a particular subject matter different from other courses by concentration on African phenomena. However, by virtue of the work in the field it has become a variety of human studies in the prosecution of its work. Africology is a human science; it is committed to discovering all the ways Africans search for harmony in society. Unlike most Western social sciences it does not examine data from a distance in order to predict behavior. Unlike some other disciplines it is neither purely social science nor humanities but a merging of the two fields as well as the use of several approaches to phenomena stemming from the Afrocentric paradigm. While it is possible for the sociologist and the anthropologist to say that their fields contain nothing new, that is, nothing that is not treated in other extant sciences; the Africologist knows that the results of the Afrocentric perspective is so profoundly revolutionary in the field of knowledge that it virtually constitutes novelty.

LINES OF AFROCENTRIC INQUIRY

In the book Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge, I had argued that cosmological, epistemological, axiological, and aesthetic issues frame the Afrocentric enterprise. I still accept this thesis and believe that it is valid. In this regard the Afrocentric method pursues a world voice distinctly African-centered in relationship to external phenomena. We are unable to gather meaning from our own cultural and historical background if we do not explore all the dimensions necessary for knowledge.

Although I recognize the transitional nature of all cultural manifestations of a social, economic or political dimension, I also know that in the United States and other parts of the African world, culturally speaking, there is movement toward new, more cosmo-cultural forms of understanding. The legendary educator Susan Goodwin has insisted that we need to explore dimensions of knowledge not necessarily discussed in the one or two levels of thinking found in the Western world. In fact, Northern Europeans may have abandoned the lessons of Kvasir much to their detriment. Actually the Norse god of knowledge was also associated with wisdom. This, of course, was long after the appearance of Djehuty also called Thoth. Nevertheless, meaning for the Afrocentrist in the contemporary context must be derived from the most centered aspects of the African’s being. When this is not the case, psychological dislocation creates automatons, that is, robots; that are unable to fully capture the historical moment because they are living on someone else’s terms. We are either existing on our own terms or the terms of others. Where will the African person find emotional and cultural satisfaction, if not in her own terms? By term I mean position, place or space. In the Kemetic sense or ciKam or mdwKam sense I mean djed.

COSMOLOGICAL ISSUE

The place of African culture in the myths, legends, literatures and oratures of African people constitutes, at the mythological level, the cosmological issue within the Afrocentric enterprise. What role does the African culture play in the African’s interface with the cosmos? Are dramas of life and death in this tradition reflected in analysis? In the Diaspora the ubiquity of the dance finds its expression in life itself as a reflection on the periods of human history that have given a people its myths and ancestral narratives. Thus, an exploration of civilization, for example is central to any Afrocentric interpretation of cultural or social reality. Indeed the fact that the dance is a way of life in traditional society is pervasive because everything is a part of everything else. Agriculture is not separated from medicine and medicine is integral to every other sector of society. One cannot divorce agriculture from metallurgy or from ritual; everything is integrated and connected like the interrelationship of every aspect of the construction of the pyramids.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL ISSUE

The key to the epistemological issue is how do we ascertain what is important in our quest for truth and a workable version of human reality and how do we assess such knowledge from the standpoint of acquisition of intellectual value and virtue. We are aware that African people have dealt with every fundamental issue that we face in contemporary time in Africa’s history. Political authority and moral respect are based on aspects of human relations: (1) those that demonstrate in their lives a commitment to African values, and (2) those that possess some personality exchange value, such as good character, decency, and resistance. These are some of the epistemological lines that lead to discovery. In addition, we seek to resist oppression, sexist repression, and economic subjugation, while at the same time promoting the exercising of economic activity by Africans and women. Liberation is never