The Case against Afrocentrism

2. Conceptual and Paradigmatic Utilizations and Representations of Africa

2 Conceptual and Paradigmatic Utilizations and Representations of Africa Africa has been a crucial component of black Diaspora struggles from the very beginning. How blacks in Diaspora perceived, conceived, and utilized Africa is a reflection of both the prevailing and dominant images and constructions of Africa, and the dynamics of the ever-changing experiences of blacks over historical time and space. Five paradigms /perspectives defined and shaped black Diaspora perceptions of, reactions to, and utilization of Africa. These paradigms reflect the functions Africa served and continues to serve (negatively and positively ) in the black Diaspora struggle through historical times. They provide insights into how blacks conceptualized, utilized, and responded to Africa. They are civilization, cultural-nationalism, black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, instrumentalism, and Afrocentricity . These paradigms are not necessarily mutually exclusive, neither are they spatially and temporally confined. In fact, as this chapter will demonstrate, there is a very thin line between them, suggesting a mutually reinforcing relationship. Civilization The first encounter between Europe and Africa brought two fundamentally different civilizations together, neither of which really understood the other. This lack of mutual understanding and appreciation bore the seeds that would germinate in estrangement and eventual hegemony of one over the other. Europe eventually became the dominant and domineering power. In a bid to strengthen their hegemony, Europeans felt compelled to deny the historicity of civilization in Africa and to denigrate and demonize Africans. This was accomplished largely through the intellectually fraudulent practice of denying the reality of civilization in Africa and through deliberate misrepresentation of the historical realities of the continent and its peoples. Initially, this misrepresentation of African history and civilization grew out of a genuine sense of awe, mystification, and ignorance the Europeans 60 utilizations and representations of africa felt at encountering a civilization about which they knew absolutely nothing and one that was particularly striking for its exoticism. Encountering these strange, exotic, and enigmatic African civilizations and cultural realities undoubtedly mystified the Europeans. Later, such misrepresentation and denigration of Africa became deliberate and conscious. The strangeness and exoticism of Africa became, for the Europeans, a reflection of its essential inferiority and lack of substance . This set the stage for future flowering of racist and aristocratic ideological thoughts that legitimized exploitative and hegemonic institutions and experiences such as slavery and colonialism. The civilizational paradigm thus became the earliest structure within which the Europe-Africa encounter was defined and analyzed. For Europeans, the alleged absence of civilization in Africa justified the subordination of Africans and blacks in Diaspora. Over time, however, blacks used the civilizational paradigm as a medium of resistance and constructing identity. The supposed absence of civilization in pre-European Africa, and the alleged primitive, backward, and heathenish nature of its indigenous societies, coupled with the negative connotations of blackness in European thought, provided justifications for the enslavement of Africans . From the mid-eighteenth century on, pro-slavery advocates developed powerful ideological justifications of slavery based on alleged cultural and historical poverty of Africa. James Walvin contends: in the eighteenth century, it was important for slave owners to deny the claims of black humanity and to resist demands that they convert and Christianize their slaves. To admit slaves to the brotherhood of the church was to accord them an equality that might conflict with the claims that they were people destined by origins and race to a humbler, less-than-human role in life. Of course plantocratic ideology is best seen in its starkest form in the daily, brutal operation of their properties, and took its most clearly defined form in the legal system they erected around them. There was, however, a more public and metropolitan aspect of that ideology, in the form of pro-slavery tracts and pamphlets, growing in volume as the eighteenth century advanced . . . Time and time again, these plantocratic tracts turned to the issue of colour and race. The African connection, the reality of blackness (race) became the sustaining pillar of slavery. Several derogatory terms manifest the disdain with which Europeans regarded peoples of African ancestry. Terms such as “moors”, “blackamoors” and “Ethiopians” evolved and over time gave way to the generic “Negroes”, or “blacks.”1 utilizations and representations of africa 61 In Walvin’s view, “the transmutation of the African from a subject of cultural curiosity, viewed as inferior and beyond the pale, to being regarded as an object, a non-person, was the story of plantation slavery and...