posted
Molefi Kete Asante is the de facto founder of modern Afrocentrism. His groundbreaking work, Afrocentricity, and his position at Temple University's Department of African American studies catapulted him to top rank of Afrocentric cultural philosophy.
In his 2007 work, The History of Africa: the quest for eternal harmony, Asante addresses the issue of North Africa's people and their affinities which I present below witholding my criticism of Asante's methodology.
quote: ... popular historian J. D. Fage ... criticized the racist historian C. G. Seligman's Races of Africa, in which Seligman went so far as to speak of northern Africans as "Europeans," [although] his own work lacks sensitivity to the African reality as well. While Fage noted that Seligman used this description because he believed that "white" was superior to "black," his own discussion of race and Africa is not without difficulty. For him the question of the northern Africans is also problematic because "there is no satisfactory general name in modern use for the men of Caucasoid stock who do not live in Asia or Europe as most Caucasoids do, but who are native to Africa in that they have been resident there for many thousands of years" (Fage 1978, p. 6).
Prior to 2000 BCE all of the people of northern Africa were black in color. Furthermore, before the seventh century CE, North Africa was peopled mainly by black people and people who migrated from Europe in the ninth century BCE. There were no large populations of Arabs in North Africa before the rise of Islam and the religious movement that gave rise to the fervor for making converts of other people. Actually the Amazighs (so-called Berber people) have been in Africa much longer than the Arabs, but certainly not as long as the indigenous Africans. The Amazighs are culturally Africans and have not been interested in the racial politics of Europeans who claim that the Amazighs, because of skin color, are Europeans. The question of race in Africa is not the same question as in America or Europe. A person whose ancestors have been in Africa for several thousand years is clearly African in behavior, attitude, and responce to environment. Blackness is a color but it is also an experience, that is, a cultural and historical experience related to social practice, language, and cultural expressions.
In the early twenty-first century there are about 3 million Amazighs, which is not a large population out of approximately a billion people on the continent of Africa, yet a distinct enough population to view themselves as of different origin than Arabs, who came to Africa in large numbers in the seventh century CE. Amazighs claim to have been in the continent for at east 1500 years before the Arab invasions. Historians who have concentrated on this population which lives in Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Mauritania have often missed the point of this African group's African claim. They want to be identified as Africans. Their closest neighbors are the Hausa, Peul, Mossi, and Tamaschek ethnic groups. Intermarriage between these groups over the years has meant that many people called Amazigh are so culturally and geographically African, wearing amulets and believing in djinn (spirits), eating the same foods as their neighbors, and singing and dancing in the same way, that it is nonsense to speak of them in any other way. Like many indigenous Africans they are nominal believers in the Qur'an but maintain strong cultural cnnections to their ancestors. A proper reading of African history must always begin with Africa as the source and the inspiration for deeds done on the continent. One does not have to look outside Africa to explain African creations, phenomena, or activities. No aliens from Mars will be found responsble for building Great Zimbabwe or the Great Pyramids. Thus whatever cultural expressions one finds among the Amazighs must be seen as African expressions. Thay are neither Europeans, as we understand Europe, nor Asian, but African.
Though there is indeed much to critique in this short passage the view of the preeminent Afrocentric scholar is that Imazighen are an African people. Many will disagree with how he arrived at that conclusion but the preponderant weight of anthropologists and historians do nonetheless agree that Imazighen are Africans. Some Berbers on the otherhand still look to Levantine and/or Yemeni origin mythos for their roots. Such legendary roots appear in Graeco-Roman, Hebrew, and Arabic source material. Whila a people's self-determination must be respected the scientific value of their tradition is not above question.
Posts: 8014 | From: the Tekrur in the Western Sahel | Registered: Feb 2006
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^ I find the claims of Eurocentrics on the Amazighen as well as Egyptians to be strange as well as contradictory. How could these peoples not be African, when they are obviously native to the African continent? The very attempt to separate North Africa from the rest of Africa by and large is laughable at best, and pathetically absurd at worse.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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^ I find the claims of Eurocentrics on the Amazighen as well as Egyptians to be strange as well as contradictory. How could these peoples not be African, when they are obviously native to the African continent? The very attempt to separate North Africa from the rest of Africa by and large is laughable at best, and pathetically absurd at worse.
Posts: 26238 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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Well Al Takruri are u claiming that they are not AFrican.
I dont really find European ideology very strange at all it makes complete since it has nothing to do with academics at all.
Berbers in general dont even claim to be arabs so u can throw that out the door but really what are Berbers
Posts: 410 | From: Al-Ard | Registered: Jun 2009
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It doesn't agree with statistics I've seen. I do not know where Asante got his figures from but unless it is a typo (the book I used was a first publish first edition) then whoever complied it has conservative criterion as to who is Amazigh.
quote:Molefi Kete Asante is the de facto founder of modern Afrocentrism.
If you insist on proper names - e.g. Falasha versus Beta Israel - why don't you apply same to others? Did Asante ever claim to start "modern Afrocentrism"?
quote:Originally posted by astenb:
quote:Originally posted by AswaniAswad: but really what are Berbers
Mixed Africans
So "Berbers" only came into existence when foreigners invaded?
Posts: 4254 | From: dasein | Registered: Jun 2009
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And if you're all that, instead of taking running snipes at everybody elses posts why don't you try to compose an original contribution on anything?
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