MY VISION OF AFROCENTRICITYOriginaly published in
http://animic.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/vol-1-nc2b01-english.pdf Afrocentricity can be defined in several ways, in general, it aims at enabling the black man to raise his head high and to attract the respect of the other races. Its appearance can be traced back to the efforts of the African-Americans such as W.E du Bois or even Martin Robinson Delany who in the 19th century inaugurated a vision of the past which integrated "a “negro-African” historiographic tradition integrating Egypt within its epistemological concerns." .
From its beginnings thus afrocentricity was essentially based on a re-examination of the past to put forward the great contributions of the black man to the progress of humanity, because until then the scientists tended to allot these contributions to other races. Mabika wrote in his book la Mystification fondamentale: “the mystifying ideology which has supported for two millennia the thesis of zero-contribution of the black man maintained a true ethnocide in the middle of all the black continent, Africa.”2 Afrocentricty aims at putting an end to this erroneous thesis of "zero-contribution ".
It appeared to me during my thesis researches that the original African thought is first of all a thought centered on the divine. John Mbiti is of the same opinion because he writes: “It is notorious that the Africans are religious beings; each people have his own system made up of a set of beliefs and practices. Religion so infinitely penetrates all the fields of life that it is not easy nor even sometimes possible to insulate it. This is why a study of these religious systems is finally a study of the men themselves in all the complexity of their existence, both traditional and modern .”3
Theology has thus a key role in the raising of the dignity of the African and in a greater participation and effectiveness of his contribution to the progress of humanity.
My afrocentricity is not radical, it does not reject the white race and his spiritual culture (Christianity), although it rejects scholastic Christianity and materialist rationalism. Because, on the basis of a second reading of the data of the kôngo religious culture, I show a convergence of the theological doctrines between the Bantu monotheism (which is of an Egyptian origin) and Christianity, thus proving an common origin of these two religions which can not be other than Egyptian.4 Cheik Anta Diop is of the same opinion when he writes: “Even today, of all the people of the earth, the Negro of Black Africa, only, can show in an exhaustive way, the essential identity of his culture with that of Pharaoh’s Egypt, in such a way that the two cultures can be used as reciprocal frames of reference.” 5
Two ways of thinking are used by humanity to arrive at the understanding and the control of nature:
• The lunar thinking: a thinking centered on the materialism and where supremacy is given to the reason over the intuition.
• The solar thinking: a thinking centered on the divine, a thinking where reality is perceived as being out of the physical field.
If the lunar thinking is the prerogative of the Western man, the black man always evolved within the framework of the solar thinking. But, since he lives under the spiritual and cultural domination of the West and the East, the black man lives apart from his natural epistemological and spiritual framework. All the western culture is based on a Hegelian vision of reason as being an internal contradiction within the cerebral cortex. Whereas the pre-colonial African defined reason as an external contradiction in which the revelations coming from God through the illuminated ancestors correct the mistakes inherent to the mortal mind. This vision of old African can be read in his answer to any difficult question: “Let us sleep and that the head may have a dream.”
My afrocentricity is first of all pragmatic, it seeks to solve, in the present, the essential spiritual and epistemological problems which undermine the dignity and the advance of the African and to prepare the African thought for the advent of the solar thinking. Thus the pragmatic afrocentricity seeks to:
• To equip the African to solve the issues of:
1. The fight against witchcraft. Speaking about what impedes the spiritual development of the black man, Oles a Mbâ affirms: “One of the impediments is precisely the belief in bewitching.”6
2. The re-establishment of the bond between the Africans and their ancestors, a bond essential to their epistemological approach.
3. The definition of an epistemology specific to the black man.
• To show the monotheistic nature of the religion of the Bantus by the establishment of a systematic kôngo theology, thus rejecting the assertion according to which the Bantu man, and thus the African, is primarily an animist.
• To show the limits of the lunar thinking and by an exploratory study to establish the imminence of the solar thinking (the original thinking of the black man).
My afrocentricity is thus an afrocentricity of the present which aims at equipping the black man to lead him to tackle the future in an approach which is appropriate to him. It is an afrocentricity which aims at helping the African to approach science, politics, religion, and philosophy in a solar approach; i.e., in an approach of external contradiction and not in an approach of internal contradiction as it is the case at present.
Among the tools that the pragmatic afrocentricity already proposes to the black man in his migration towards a future of solar approach we have:
• Animicism as an epistemological and a metaphysical approach which is conform to the negro-African vision of the world. Animicism, placing God above everything, affirms that reality is metaphysical and that reason is only a series of the direct and/or indirect revelations which enable man to arrive to the solution. Thus this philosophy establishes external contradiction as the starting point of purely African conceptions.
• The kemetic cosmological argument as a means of confirmation of the theology of hierarchical monotheism of the black man by the way of natural theology. The kemetic cosmological argument is thus not restricted only to establishing the existence of God, but it demonstrates the entire kongo theology by logic alone.
• The kemetic cosmology of the big-bang as a means of proving the convergence between science and religion, a convergence which is the very mark of the solar thinking.
¨Pragmatic afrocentricity has a long tradition in the kôngo nation. A tradition which starts with Kimpa Vita (Ndona Béatrice), passes through Paul Panda Farnana and finds a greater echo with the prophet Simon Kimbangu. All these famous figures of the kôngo nation worked to solve the problem of the black man in a pragmatic context.
Pragmatic afrocentricity does not turn the back on the efforts carried out by our predecessors: Sheik Anta Diop, Molefi K. Assante, Théophile Obenga… It confirms their theories on the basis of a second reading of the facts of the original spirituality of Bantus and their vision of the universe, because this second reading concludes to a convergence between Bantu theology and the Egyptian theology.
1.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrocentrisme 2. Mabika Nkata Joseph, la Mystification fondamentale, Lubumbashi : Presse Universitaire, 2002, p. 167.
3. Mbiti, J., Religion et philosophie africaines, Yaoundé : CLE, 1972, p. 9
4. Voir: Kiatezua L. Luyaluka, la Religion kôngo, Parsis, Harmattan, 2010.
5. Cheik Anta Diop, Antériorité des civilisations nègres, Présence Africaine, 1972.
6. Oles a Mbâ, Qui m’en veut ? Kinshasa, 2003, p.5
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