In his preface to the citation when I received the 2007 Cheikh Anta Diop Distinguished Award for Excellence in African Studies, Molefi Kete Asante, an articulate speaker, told the audience how his encounter with Cheikh Anta Diop changed his intellectual orientation and created an enduring foundation for his intellectual journey. Were Diop alive, he would in turn pay tribute to Asante for not merely serving as his successor, but moving his ideas forward to another century. This new book is what Diop, the intellectual Afrocentric par excellence, would have endorsed. We need a book with this kind of orientation, if only to compete with others that have been written with non-Africans in mind.
Molefi Asante's fame and reputation are now clearly well established, even if his views on Afrocentricity have led to serious academic disagreements. He founded a whole new school of thought based on Diop's conception of the centrality of Africa in world civilization. Like Diop, Asante has elevated the study of Egypt to a height no less impressive than its pyramids. The restoration of modern Africa, Asante has argued, times without number, lies in part in the borrowing of many of the older ideas and early beliefs of Egypt.
In a most predictable manner, The History of Africa starts with Egypt in Part Two, following a brief six-page discussion of the origins of humanity in Part One. Asante characterizes the history of Egypt as Africa's ‘age of literacy’. Asante credits Africa for initiating and creating many aspects of civilization (a list of key contributions is supplied in Chapter 2). ‘Africa has been denied its own agency for too long’, Asante confidently asserts, ‘because of racialized readings of the records’ (p. 21). Preferring the name ‘Kemet’ (‘the land of the blacks’) for what the Greeks later called ‘Egypt’, Asante presents a history to show that Egypt was the first civilization in the world (Chapter 3), and he analyses the elements of its civilization in Chapter 4, and of its government in Chapter 5.
In Part Three, which he calls ‘The Moment of Realization’, a chapter discusses the growth of kingdoms around Africa's five great rivers: Congo, Niger, Nile, Orange and Zambezi. In the lengthy Part Four, ‘The Age of Construction’, he provides information on Nubia, Axum, Carthage, Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Kanem-Borno, Hausa states, Zimbabwe, Yoruba, Benin, Dahomey, Swahili, Asante, Zulu, the Baganda and Congo.
The encounters of Africa with Arabs and Europeans, explored in Chapter 11, become what Asante calls ‘The Time of Chaos’ in Part Five. Chapter 12 shows how Africans resisted European and Arab slave dealers. In Part Six, ‘The Age of Reconstruction’, Asante sees the pan-African movement as the beginning of the restoration of Africa's pride. Chapter 13 ties the various nationalist movements of the twentieth century with the aspirations of pan-Africanism.
The last part, ‘The Time for Consolidation’, presents the picture of the path to Africa's independence and some of what the countries have achieved since the mid-1960s. The concluding chapter is on the creation of the African Union. Asante opens and closes the book with the views of Diop on Africa's renaissance: ‘For him [that is, Diop], it was possible to suggest a cultural unity of Africa that was manifest in everything Africans did … For Diop, as a pan-Africanist, it was necessary and useful for scholars to reevaluate the relationship of African societies to ancient Egypt’. The necessity of an African Union and the challenges facing Africa close the book.
Asante's narratives, the thematic organization and the titles given to each theme have to be read in the context of his mission to fight a racialized presentation of African history. His task is to make the African perspective the centre stage of African history. He believes that African historiography has been dominated by writing about Africans for and by the West ‘instead of writing Africa for itself, as itself, from its own perspectives’ (opening page and blurb). A formidable scholar with over sixty books to his credit, he writes with effortless ease and presents, with confidence, various African concepts, indigenous ideas and outlooks. While he presents the chronology of African history as an appendix to the book, his historical divisions are more reflective of thematic emphasis than of chronology.
Asante does not write because of fascination with African history, but because of a life-long commitment to Africa. An African American, his ancestry has been linked to Nubia and Yorubaland. For various reasons, he has been to Africa no less than 75 times. His travels in, and love for, the continent shape the orientation of the book, and there is a deliberate attempt to write from what may be considered an African perspective. It is not that Asante has ignored the writings of Europeans on Africa, but he has endeavoured ‘to place the works of African historians in the center of the narrative, thus rewriting and reorienting African history from the standpoint of Africans as subjects’.
The father of modern Afrocentricity in the United States has chosen to write about Africa in such a way as to complete a promise of a pan-Africanist discourse initiated by W. E. B. Du Bois. There is already an established constituency for Asante's ideas and philosophy of history to consume this new product. Those who are opposed to his established ideology have yet something new to talk about. Perhaps, as they talk about Asante and his new book, they will let us know their own politics and philosophical commitments.
