Lansana Keita was a well regarded Sierra Leonean philosopher who passed on recently. Professor Keita spent most of his career teaching and researching philosophy and economics in Sierra Leone, the United States where he spent over a dozen years working, the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), the University of the Gambia and most recently at Kwara State University in Nigeria. His contemporaries include Kwasi Wiredu from Ghana, Paulin J. Hountondj, from Benin and his good friend and colleague, Abiola Irele from Nigeria. All these illustrious African philosophical figures and scholars have since passed on and Keita joins their ranks as an ancestor. Arguably, although he is probably the least well known of them outside African philosophical circles, he pursued and probably committed to paper, the most radical ideas of the lot. In terms of vision, consistency and boldness, his thought emphasised the primacy of Kemetian philosophical traditions and civilisation to human culture. He was Afrocentric without unnecessary grand-standing and he refrained from making his scholarship and contributions solely about himself as some of his contemporaries did. His reflections and writings are calm, well considered, convincing and demonstrated him to be a scholar devoted to African intellectual agency from a broad historical perspective. Keita went went on to edit one of the most significant volumes on philosophical theory and practice in contemporary Africa titled, Philosophy and African Development: Theory and Practice (2011).
Sanya Osha’s text Dani Nabudere’s Afrikology—A Quest for African Holism is one of those rare texts in contemporary times that treats of Africa in strictly holistic terms both in archaeological and historical time depth, and territorial width. Most texts on Africa by African scholars tend to be particularistic in terms of the scope of their research. Osha’s text necessarily takes an holistic approach to Africa because the subject of his text, Dani Nabudere’s works, sought to analyse Africa holistically from its distant past to contemporary times. But Osha’s text is not just about Nabudere’s approach to Africa in world archaeology and history; it is also about comparative analysis of the Afrocentric approaches to the African condition and its past anthropology and history by C.A. Diop, Molefi Asante and Wim Van Binsbergen.
Though Nabudere had written variously on aspects of African politics, culture and philosophy, as Osha informs the reader, his importance derives from the fact that later in his career he developed the idea of an Afrikology that sought to link the civilisational primacy of Ancient Egypt with the general African past and present. Osha claims that this linkage of the very noteworthy achievements of Ancient Egypt with the traditional cultures of Africa is what sets Nabudere’s Afrikology apart from other Afrocentrists. In this regard, Osha’s study of Afrikology represents a critical ‘study of the concept of Afrikology with a view of understanding its full epistemological value’.
Although Nabudere invented the term Afrikology to encompass his holistic approach to the meaning of Africa, the term should be properly understood to fall under the theoretical umbrella of a generic Afrocentricity. According to Osha, Afrocentricity, in general, is an ideology of optimism and joy even when conditions of death threaten. In this regard, conventional philosophy which, according to Osha, relies on a dialectic that would have doomed Afrocentrism to its death, is much at loggerheads with the idea of philosophy as expressed in Afrikology. As Osha puts it: ‘If the dialectic had become the sole momentum of philosophy, death had threatened to be Afrocentricity’s permanent condition and feature. However, Afrocentricity has been able to effect a complete refusal of this proposition and hence philosophy’s unyielding hostility toward it’(xii).
Given that the term ‘Afrocentricity’ and its meaning were founded on the response to a dominant global Eurocentrism that contemplated and defined most matters African from the subjective standpoint of Europe, the Eurocentric influence has been so great globally that matters and concepts now taken for granted are, on further analysis, of Eurocentric provenance.
If Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism are conjoined conceptually, both paradigms would seem to be founded on incompatible optics. Osha argues that his analysis ‘prepares the stage for a much needed conversation across the meaningless conflicts that refuse to generate mutual understanding. The refusal or inability of Afrocentricity and Eurocentrism to understand each other is quite striking’(xii). There is a problematic here because the perceived opposition between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism is basically ideological. On this basis, Osha argues that both schools of thought ‘pursue different aims and interests that are often unrelated even when they address similar concerns. Such aims and interests are never aligned to engender mutual understanding’(xii).
Some clarification may be needed here. The whole ideological struggle begins with emergence of what came to be known as Western/European civilisation, a civilisation which derives from an alloy of Christianity and Greco-Roman civilisation. Christianity provided the spiritual template while Greco-Roman civilisation provided the intellectual inputs. As British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead once put it: Western philosophy is not much more than footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. But this sturdy civilisational alloy, beginning with the Greeks, was not sui generis. There were important inputs from Ancient Egypt and Ancient Sumer. But it was Ancient Egypt that provided the most important inputs—mathematics, engineering, proto-surgery, sculpture, and architecture. Greece and its stock of philosophers eventually greatly impressed the rest of Europe by way of Rome. Rome conquered most of Europe and transmitted not only Christianity but its language, engineering, and its legal system. But the influence of Ancient Egypt was evident in the European Renaissance. Frances Yeates’ (1964)Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition makes a strong case for that.
Yeates discussed the role of the neo-Egyptian God of knowledge—adopted by the Greeks then the Romans– Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus– in the development of science during the European Renaissance. Isaac Newton, the master scientist of the European Reniassance, testified to this. The intellectual basis for this continuing Ancient Egyptian intellectual patrimony in Europe’s intellectual development is to be found in the works of Ammonius Saccas and his pupil, Plotinus, who hailed from Lycopolis in Upper(Southern) Egypt. The writings of Plotinus found in the Ennieds are generally referred to as neoPlatonism, but in actuality, could be construed as a reformulation of Ancient Egyptian cosmological thought founded on principles of a holistic monism. It was this tenor of thought that fueled early Christianity as expressed by the early Christian theologian, Augustine , who hailed from the Roman province of North Africa now known as Algeria.
This European alloy of Greco-Egyptian thought linked with Roman technology and Christianity provided the template for the European Enlightenment that followed from the European Renaissance. This intellectual Zeitgeist also produced the foundational intellectuals for modern-day Europe, as in the case of Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, et al. And before the Enlightenment, there was the work of Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, etc.
This period also witnessed the rise of modern science. It was at this point that Eurocentrism assumed its impressive power in Western Europe. The West European(Spain, Portugal, Britain, France and Holland) conquest of the Americas, followed up by the Atlantic slave trade which provided cheap labour power for the economic growth and development of those vast areas. Such were the profits from the Triangular Trade enterprise involving Africa, Western Europe, and the Americas, that commercial capitalism morphed into industrial capitalism with its novel technologies generated by novel scientific findings.
But the important thing to note is that during this period from the 16th century onward, the African persona became objectified in the biological sense of belonging to a less evolved branch of homo sapiens Stephen Jay Gould’s(1981) text text The Mismeasure of Man effectively makes that point. Yet in pre-modern times, the African persona did face cultural and some suffused biological bias. The Jewish Talmud and the Biblical meme of the Curse of Ham expressed negative ideas about the African. The Greek philosopher Aristotle also wrote disparagingly about the African in his Physiognomica with the following. ‘Too black a hue as is the case with Egyptians and Nubians marks a coward. Too white a hue as in the case of women also marks a coward. The best colour is the tawny colour of the lion. Such a colour makes for courage’. In other words, according to Aristotle, cowardice was a genetic trait of Africans.
Such was the attitude toward the generic physiognomy of Africa, that 8th century Iraqi African writer, Al Jahiz(1981), had to intervene in the defence of Homo Afer with his On the Superiority of the Black Race over the White. These non-scientific attitudes were just a prelude to the pseudoscientific study of the African body by Eurocentric applied science during the era of Darwin’s(1859) Origin of Species. Consider in this context Compte de Gobineau’s On the Inequality of the Races and Hegel’s Philosophy of History. For Hegel, Africa was untouched by the march of world history—totally ignored by Geist except for Ancient Egypt whose presence in Africa puzzled him—as human rationality in action. In other words, the pseudo-science of the Zeitgeist argued that the African was less evolved biologically especially in terms of human intellect, and, as result, Homo Afer belonged to Aristotle’s category of ‘natural slaves’. It was on this genetic basis that Homo Afer became a labour slave in the European settlements in the conquered Americas, purely for the enrichment of England, Spain, Portugal, and France. The wealth of the slave employment nations led in turn to the Eurocentric colonisation of Africa and much of Asia. The 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were the unquestioned centuries of Eurocentric dominance.
The received doctrine for the post-Columbian era was that the African was a biological inferior incapable of producing any semblance of what the anthropologists called ‘civilisation’. This ideology formed the basis for the concocted puzzle about the ‘race’ of the Ancient Egyptians. Given the a priori assumption that Africans were incapable of civilisation, that of Ancient Egypt was explained by prominent Egyptologists such as Henry Breasted as the work of an ‘Asian dynastic race’ that entered Egypt to create the Egyptian civilisation. A similar idea was promoted by Charles Seligman expounded as the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ in his text(1930), The Races of Africa. Seligman’s claim was that any semblance of civilisation in Africa was due to dark caucasoids who entered Africa to spread civilisation along with their genes. This was the pseudoscientific ideology that served as the template that promoted a dominant Eurocentrism founded on an assumed intellectual inferiority of Homo Afer. There were, of course, some opposition to this theory of civilisation by J.S. Mill(1850, Fraser’s Magazine) who argued that the Ancient Egyptians were, as he put it, ‘negroes’, and Constantin de Volney who also claimed African ancestry for the Ancient Egyptians. The task of responding to this Eurocentric ideological panoply of anti-African ideas was indeed daunting.
It was this complex set of ideas that Nabudere set out to confront. Osha writes that Nabudere was first grossly affected by what he called ‘Africa’s First World War’ which he examined in Africa’s First World War: Mineral Wealth, Conflicts and War in the Great Lakes Region(2004). Nabudere explains the 1885 Berlin Conference as the partitioning Africa only to satisfy the economic wants of the colonial powers. The vast areas of Central Africa with its enormous reserves of strategic minerals were much coveted by the West’s colonial powers. These areas included the Congo and its peripheral countries such as those of the Great Lakes—Rwanda and Burundi. Nabudere focused on the violent intrigues of the Congo and its surrounding nation states such as Uganda and Zimbabwe in his analyses of the post-colonial turmoil of that vast area.
It was this situation that prompted Nabudere to seek to understand the African condition by evaluating matters holistically and phenomenologically. According to Osha, he was compelled to drop his research anchor first in ancient Ethiopia[in reality Nubia] as the progenitor of Ancient Egypt, Africa’s acme of world civilization to date. It was Ancient Egypt as KMT that served as the foundational template for Ancient Greece, the intellectual progenitor of Europe’s intellectual profile. Nabudere’s ideas in this instance are expressed in Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness: an Epistemology. Nabudere defines Afrikology thusly[cited by Osha]: ‘Afrikology seeks to retrace the evolution of knowledge and wisdom from its source to the current epistemologies, and to try to situate them in their historical and cultural contexts, especially with a view to establishing a new science for generating and accessing knowledge for sustainable use’(26).
It is this intellectual vantage point that leads Nabudere to locate the foundations of Africa’s primordial cultures in a basic substratum of ideas and practices. In this regard, Nabudere cites Gerald Massey and Carl Jung as support in this instance. The key point that Nabudere makes is that although Greek thought derived from Ancient Egypt, it’s dualistic form and content approach to knowledge was a radical departure from the holistic approach as presented by foundational African thought. It is this holistic model that Nabudere seeks to implement to heal the malaise that plagued postcolonial Africa, especially in the Great Lakes area. He expounds on this theme in this subsequent text, Afrikology and Transdisciplinarity : A Restorative Epistemology(2012). According to Osha, in this text Nabudere seeks to ‘establish a connection between restorative justice and Afrikology. His methodological approach is essentially transdisciplinary; it rejects the traditional divisions between academic disciplines while advocating a more holistic strategy toward knowledge production’. On this basis, Nabudere then posits that ‘ knowledge emanates from the heart which processes the sensations and experiences derived from the five senses’(23). This could possibly mean that for Nabudere, the foundational basis for knowledge is an emotive one. He then makes the surprising claim that ‘humankind is inextricably connected to the cosmos, which not only provided the rationale for knowledge generation , but goes on to structure knowledge in a holistic manner’(23). This strong holism claim would seem surprising at first, but modern physics operates on just this basis as it demonstrates that all events in space and time are linked. This is the cosmological holism from which Nabudere grounds his Afrikology. It is diametrically opposed to Cartesian dualism and the compartmentalisation of modern Western thought and research. In this regard, he established support for his position with the observation that C.A. Diop argued also for a more comprehensive and integrated approach to knowledge. Yet given the impact of ancient Egyptian knowledge in the generation of early Greek thought, and later by way of Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus , traces of that comprehensive approach to knowledge are to be found in the works of modern Western-continental philosophers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, et al. in their phenomenological /hermeneutical approach to knowledge.
Nabudere’s holistic approach to African knowledge is such that he sees links among all of Africa’s traditional knowledge paradigms—all founded on a basic foundational palimpsest. In this regard, he engages in critiques of the works of scholars such as V.Y. Mudimbe , K.A. Appiah, Paulin Hountondji, and others. In sum, the central thesis of Afrikology for Nabudere is that all of Africa’s thought systems should be recuperated in holistic fashion which would ‘redress the incompleteness, contradictions, and disconnects caused by Cartesian rationality’(49).
In juxtaposition to Nabudere’s Afrikology, Osha examines the works of Wim van Binsbergen, C.A. Diop, and Molefi Asante. Van Binsbergen(2012) in his text Before the Presocratics argues for the protohistorical centrality of Africa in world culture, but he dilutes this centrality with the thesis that epistemic formations in protohistory are not singular, rather they should be viewed as ‘being part of a global and historical continuum of knowledge traditions that is perpetually subject to migration and transformation—in short all the elements of transplantation and dispersal. In this light, the strict separation between regional and ethnic knowledge becomes misguided and often preposterous’(59).
On the basis of this assumption, van Binsbergen, appealing to comparative mythology, comparative linguistics, comparative ethnography, and genetics, argues that although homo sapiens originated in Africa and migrated to areas outside of Africa, there was also a ‘Back to Africa’ return migration which introduced to that continent much of the cultural traits that are viewed as traditional and indigenous. Van Binsbergen labeled his thesis the ‘Pelasgian hypothesis’ according to which early Africans migrated to all parts of the world in centrifugal fashion then migrated back into Africa, a process he called ‘Pandora’s Box’. It is here that van Binsbergen’s thesis becomes controversial. For him, the cultural forms and practices that are normally taken to be indigenous to Africa are in reality transplants from external sources. In this regard, the cultural forms of the Nkoya people of Zambia, for example, are shared by other peoples outside of Africa. Thus, according to van Binsbergen, as summarised by Osha, ‘The Nkoya system is not unique. Instances of element cosmology can be found in Chinese Taoism, Egyptian cosmology, and in other systems found in Africa, North America, India, Japan, and Ancient Greece’(64).
In general, van Binsbergen’s research alogorithm is what one might call a ‘ cultural transcontinentality’ which he labels as Pelasgian. It is this approach that would lead him to argue that the cosmological four and five element system normally attributed to its presumed Greek originator, Empedocles, had its origins in Asia millennia before the Presocratics. This approach also explains van Binsbergen’s claim that supposedly indigenous cultural forms such ‘geomantic divination’ and the ‘Sunda hypothesis’ derive from sources in Asia. Osha’s citation(77) of van Binsbergen is clear on this point. Van Binsbergen writes that ‘Africa has always been an integral part of global cultural history at large, but hardly, since the Upper Paleolithic(30-12kaBP), with decisive, pan-continental impact Afrocentrists have claimed for the African continent’. According to van Binsbergen, the empirical data doesn’t support the fundamental Afrocentric idea that Africa has made ‘inalienable contributions to global cultural history, e.g. geomancy’(77).
But how valid is van Binsbergen’s theory? The OOA hypothesis (Stringer 1994) has been the most robust theory on human origins to date despite challenges from the multiregional hypothesis(Wolpoff 1984). This would mean that humans originated in Africa and remained there more than 120k years before migrating out of that landmass some 60kya. This hypothesis is buttressed by the fact that the genetic diversity of Africa’s populations is the most in the world. Again, van Binsbergen’s hypothesis is founded on migrants returning to Africa from Asia since the Upper Paleolithic.
Van Binsbergen’s hypothesis is easily rendered problematic by appeal to genetics. The major Y haplogroup in Africa is E which split into two(2) sub-clades in Africa, E1b1a and E1b1b. Africa is the only continent where haplogroup E(E-M96) predominates. On the female mtDNA side, L1 , L2, and L3 are dominant but only with L3 found outside of Africa . The issue now is from which haplogroup did E descend. The answer is DE—with D found in Asia and E found in Africa predominantly. Van Binsbergen’s thesis becomes problematic for the reason that haplogroup D predominates among the Africanoid Andamese islanders who live East of India. D has also been found in Nigeria, i.e., extreme West Africa. Of importance too is that the YAP insertion is > 80% in Africa’s populations, but much less in Asia. This would mean that haplogroup D(M-174) could not be the source of E. The conclusion reached by Underhill(2001) was that Africa—not Asia—was the point of origin of haplogroup D. Similar considerations apply for the case of Y-haplogroup R. R predominates in the Cameroon and is also found in Guinea Bissau, but it is one of the major European Y-haplogroups. The Eurocentric explanation here is that there was some back migration of R into Africa. Yet the most parsimonious explanation would be that given the primacy of humankind originating in Africa, all Y and mtDNA haplogroups would be derivative from original African haplogroups. There may have been some back migration in the case of North Africa given the existence of the West Asian J haplogroup there. This would derive from the post-8th century Islamic invasions into North Africa. Yet, the predominant male Y haplogroup in North Africa is the African E1b1b. And again, it should be noted that the predominant Y haplogroup in the Sudan is haplogroup J, more so than in the Arabian peninsula. This points to a highly possible African source of J. The problem with the van Binsberegn hypothesis is that he assumed that if a set of similar cultural traits are found external to Africa and are also found in Africa, that would signify back migrations into Africa by groups bearing those traits. The ultimate test of this hypothesis would be genetic analysis, which in the instances he cites do not offer support.
In his analysis of Nabudere’s holistic approach to Africa’s cultural forms, Osha discusses C.A. Diop as an example of classic Afrocentrism. The Ancient Egyptians and their culture were always seen by the ancient authors as indigenous Africans as witnessed by Herodotus, Aristotle, Ammianus Marcellinus(Aegypti plerique subfusculi sunt et atrati) and others. During the colonial era, researchers such as Champollion(1867), who studied the culture of the Ancient Egyptians extensively and is the noted creator of the Rosetta Stone, conclude that the Ancient Egyptians and the Nubians were of similar ethnicity. The observations of Volney, J.S. Mill, and J.C. Prichard also supported the African origins of the Ancient Egyptians. Naysayers such as British historians, Arnold Toynbee and Hugh Trevor Roper should however be mentioned. Both denied that there was ever an indigenous African civilization of note. However, what sets Diop apart from those mentioned authors is that he argued that Ancient Egypt was the world’s first established civilization and, more importantly, had strong cultural links with the rest of Africa in terms of language and general culture, all deriving from an indigenous African cultural substratum. It is on this Diopian premise that Nabudere anchored his Afrikology.
Osha engages in a discussion of Diop as representing classic Afrocentrism with his spirited illustrations of organized African societies of the Middle Ages. This is presented in his work titled Precolonial Black Africa[ these days, of course, the terms ‘Black Africa’ or ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ must be discarded as patently Eurocentric constructs] with Ghana, Mali, and Songhay as his points of Afrocentric reference. Osha would point out that Diop was psychologically at ease with the culturally superimposing role over traditional African vitalism found both in Ancient Egypt and other African cultures, that Islam played in Africa from the 8th century onwards. In this regard, Osha points out that Diop’s acceptance of the Islamic template in Africa would seem to be ‘imbuing Afrocentric discourse with undeniable transcontinental attributes’(93). Yet there is a problematic here concerning the status of Islam vis a vis medieval Africa. Its academic scholarship derives mainly from Nestorian Christian Syrians who translated the secular Greek knowledge into Arabic, which in turn was transmitted to North Africa and academic centers such as the University of Timbuktu in Ancient Mali. The point being made here is that what gave Timbuktu its ancient fame was its academic dissemination of ancient Greek knowledge and modes of inquiry transmitted by Nestorian Christians of Syria. And, of course, as has been pointed out by the Greek scholars themselves, it was the Ancient Egyptians who held the original copyright to Greek knowledge. The role of the Greek colonial town, Alexandria, in Egypt is evident in this regard. The important technological advances made within the context of Greek civilisation were mostly made in Alexandria, Egypt; Heron was a native Alexandrian and Archimedes studied there.
Osha’s panoramic text next includes in his matrix of Afrocentric theories the foundational works of Molefi Asante(1987) whose The Afrocentric Idea established the theoretical basis for viewing the world through subjective African lenses as an antidote to a psychologically corrosive Eurocentrism. It is Asante’s theoretical approach that explains the intellectual approach of Diop , Nabudere, and others of Afrocentric bent in the sense that it justifies African agency in observing and evaluating phenomena from the vantage point of the African self. It is in this regard that Eurocentrism is confronted. Osha labels Asante’s orientation and works as ‘Deep Afrocentricity’ as the natural phenomenology of the African mind. Osha cites Asante as follows: ‘the christallization of this perspective I have named Afrocentricity, which means literally, placing African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior’(100). From this phenomenological template, the Asante model could then take any item pertaining to the African world and offer new labels and definitions even within the languages of Europe. In this regard the name ‘Ancient Egypt’ becomes ‘Kemet’ as in his text Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowedge(1990). Similarly, the Eurocentric term ‘Negro’ becomes ‘African’ , ‘tribe’ becomes ‘people’ , and the European names, religion, and languages imposed on Africans over the centuries become problematic as signs of thwarted and silenced subjective agencies.
Asante acknowledges the impact of a reactivated Afrocentrism when he writes that Western social scientists ‘do not use the terms Bushman, Hottentots, pygmies, tribes, and primitives, as much as they used to before 1980’(123). It is this capsizing of the Eurocentric narrative that serves as the foundations for the Afrocentric paradigm. In Asante’s African world, the Eurocentric ‘you’ becomes the African ‘I’. Thus within this lexical matrix patently Eurocentric terms such as ‘New World’, ‘black Africa’, ‘MENA’ ‘negroid but not negro’, ‘Afro-Asiatic languages’, ‘caucasoid’, ‘tribal dancing’, ‘tribal art’, etc. are erased from the Afrocentric linguistic tapestry. In Asante’s Afrocentric world, the goal is to unmask ‘Western universalism’ as no more than ‘Eurocentric particularism’ and to affirm that ‘Africa is at the heart of all African American behavior’ as reflecting the ‘internal mythic clock, the epic memory, the psychic strain of Africa in our spirits’(106). It is this Afrocentric template that informs Nabudere and explains C.A. Diop and his precursors. What needs to be done has already written, but there is an ongoing struggle for the African mind. The fact is that colonial structures are still much in place in Africa as witnessed by the false consciousnesses of Francophone, Anglophone, and Lusitaphone Africa. Legal and educational structures have not been normalised for Francophone and Anglophone Africa. Educational structures and styles imposed during the colonial era are still in place. As a result, little educational and academic exchange takes place between neocolonial national structures. One of the reasons for this situation was long ago offered by Frantz Fanon in the prescient chapter four(4) of his The Wretched of the Earth, titled ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’. In paraphrase: a very materialist and rent-gaining caste are in control of the post-colonial nation states of Africa whose subordinate fealty is to Euro-America and the oligarchic states of the Middle East.
Apart from the naturalised ethnic divides, the curse of religious divides spawned by the imposed religions of Islam and Christianity add to the levels of a severely false African consciousnesses. Coptic Christianity, which is the natural form of African Christianity is hardly seen as such, and an alienating and unconscious fealty to Mecca constitute some of the psychic obstacles that Afrocentricity has to contend with. The same alienating issues face Asante’s ‘Africans of the Disapora’. Africa is interred within their bones, as Asante argues, but they fail to acknowledge such. The implicit goal of their leaders is to meld with the dominant cultures of their host nations. It is in this regard that Osha’s text is important because it exposes the sub rosa issues afflicting the African subconscious and psyche.
To explain African survivability during the era of European expansion into Africa, Asante appeals to the idea of nommo or ‘word force’ as ‘vital to the Afrocentric project’. According to Osha, ‘nommo’ is about ‘the power and magic of the word to invoke, as well as transfigure, that which falls under its spell’(106). It is nommo in the form of orature, pathos, and spirituality that are at the base of African survivability under the ineffable tragedies of the Atlantic crossings and subsequent enslavement, the Congo genocide during Belgian colonialism, the German colonial genocide of the Herero people of Namibia , and South African Apartheid. It is this survivability under the aeges of Asante’s nommo that prompted Janheinz Jahn to write Muntu(1961). On account of the huge exploitative pressures put on the African people from the Atlantic slave trade onward, it was assumed that the African race would eventually become extinct.
How different would things be were the Afrocentric enterprise to succeed? Africa’s peoples would assume full subjective agency derived from the foundations established in Ancient Egypt. The concepts of Maat and Atenism would be revived to replace those alienating religions that control the spiritual lives of Africa’s peoples. In this regard, the alienating conflicts between Islam and Christianity would be negated. The African continent, now truncated into fifty four states, would see that number much reduced with a very manageable number of Pan-African languages all joined together by a few or single internationally exchangeable currencies. Africa’s technological prowess would grant it first world status and Africa’s diasporic populations would be fully integrated into the mainland in terms of citizenship statuses of their choosing. This is what Africology or Afrikology would be aiming at. It is Asante’s theoretical substratum that engenders this kind of thinking.
Osha’s analysis of Nabudere’s Afrikology brings into perspective the serious issues that confront Africa’s peoples as they continue to live in an Eurocentric world—which most take for granted. But the Afrocentric approach will quickly point out that global institutions such as the U.N., the IMF, the World Bank, WHO, WTO, etc, are all Eurocentric institutions that maintain an Eurocentric dominance. in this context, the peoples of Africa continue to be economically exploited, saddled as they are with the intolerable exchange rates of their weak paper currencies in their weak, artificially created nation states of Eurocentric design. Similarly, the displaced people of Africa whether in the Americas or Europe live out their quarantined lives mainly as pitied subalterns. Given Afrikology’s holistic claim that the human spirit and body are one, Africa’s spirituality and physically and persona are entrapped under the alienating impress of the two totemic idols of Eurocentric Christianity and Arab-founded Islam. This is what the African world looks like when viewed through the lenses of Afrocentrism.
Nabudere’s holistic and transdisciplinarian approach to knowledge influenced by the previous works of Diop, Asante, and others is an analytical guide for the future. In this regard, Osha’s text on Nabudere’s works is timely. Yet, it makes its points of criticism. Despite his affinity for the works of his predecessors, Osha argues that Nabudere’s transdiciplinarity, founded on Cartesian principles, is at odds with his holistic approach to knowledge according to which ‘the heart is the foundation of knowledge’ (125). All in all, Osha’s work on Nabudere’s Afrikology is a noteworthy effort bringing to the fore the key issues that confront Africa’s people in these times of conflict and developmental stasis.
Lansana Keita was a professor of philosophy and economics who passed recently. He spent several years working in the United States, Nigeria and the Gambia. He also made significant contributions to African scholarship through his numerous contributions to the Dakar, Senegal based CODESRIA, a continental African organisation devoted to the development of the social sciences and humanities.
