The Demise of the Inhuman: Afrocentricity, Modernism, and Postmodernism

Chapter Two: Reason and Analysis: Africana and New Interpretations of Reality

13 2 REASON AND ANALYSIS Africana and New Interpretations of Reality Where Do We Stand? Much of what constitutes the matrix of Westernity has its roots in the conceptual framework of the philosophical thought of René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Max Weber exactly in the same sense that the roots of Afrocentric philosophical thought can be found in the historiographical research of Cheikh Anta Diop and its reclamation of the anteriority of classical African civilizations to universal knowledge; in the historical and sociological relocation of the African as a contributor to human civilization that we can find in the pioneering studies of W. E. B. Du Bois; in the works of cultural reconstruction of the displaced African peoples conducted by Maulana Karenga; in Molefi K. Asante’s Afrocentric philosophical and theoretical body of work.1 This is not to ignore other influences that are discussed as the importance of their work surfaces in the following chapters but rather due to the need to focus on a clear outline of the conceptual strengths of both paradigms for the sake of the dialogue between Westernity and Afrocentricity. Grounded in the philosophical and historical reclamations of ancient Nubian and Egyptian/Kemetic cultures as the foundational 14 THE DEMISE OF THE INHUMAN basis of African religious, aesthetic, ethical, and moral customs, Asante designed a conceptual apparatus to systematically analyze and confront the discourse and practice of white supremacy and its consequences, namely, a biased perspective of reality that oppressed and categorized as “subaltern” (Spivak, 1988) an entire continent and its people. In his works, he reaffirms the parameters of an African sense of the world and reclaims this culturally rooted African worldview to confront and resist white racism, to regain African cultural and historical centeredness, to critically build a metatheory based on the rhetoric of African discourse. The theory resorts to a critical thinking methodology for inquiring into the processes and practices of human culture while investigating African phenomena from an African standpoint. Confronting and discussing the Eurocentric hegemonic universalism prevalent in the academy, Asante identifies three fundamental themes in African cosmology that will have to be systematically addressed by Afrocentric scholarship: (1) human relations; (2) humans’ relations to the supernatural; and (3) humans’ relationship to their own being (1987: 168). The Kemetic spiritual and philosophical background of African ethics has been discussed in many authors’ works since Cheikh Anta Diop argued in The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality? that we can never understand the African people until we dare to link Africans to their classical past as emphasized and expanded by Molefi Asante (1998: xii). Authors like Maulana Karenga, Janheinz Jahn, Marimba Ani, Yoseph Ben-Jochannan, Molefi Kete Asante, and Willie CannonBrown , among others, have “well recognized that Kemet was a society that sought the sacred in life” (Cannon-Brown, 2006: 21) and that the standards for the African philosophical ideal are intimately connected to the search for excellence and goodness and a devotion for truth, harmony, and balance. These are the central values and ethical norms of a society inspired in the divine order following from the Kemetic notion of the world being organized in a godlike manner. In fact, the way people of Kemet perceived the divine world was intricately interwoven in personal lives, rituals, festivals, celebrations, and daily tasks “all done in accordance with the demands of ma’at and the rhythms of nature,” as Cannon-Brown explains (2006: 41). Reason and Analysis 15 The philosophical system of Ancient Egyptian Mysteries was based on three common functional principles that can be identified in all African ethical/religious expressions (Diop, 1974, 1991; Asante, 1998; Karenga, 1993, 2006): harmony, a concept that keeps a close spiritual relationship among humans and between humans and the environment; ethics or ma’at that in African societies is the generative principle of right and righteousness, balance, justice, respect, and dignity understood as the balanced and harmonious order of creation where spirit and matter are inseparable; and ancestors’ veneration that embodies the concept of memory and wisdom, and which is the source of ethical teachings and social harmony as ancestors watch over daily activities , promote social harmony, and create a sense of accountability among the members of the community. It is the relationship of humankind with nature and natural phenomena that are the central issues in the African cosmological understanding of life, death, and creation, cycles and rhythms of...