What are the issues that are so hotly debated by Stephen Howe in his book Afrocentrism or by the French reactionaries Francois-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar, Jean-Pierre Chretien and Claude-Helene Perrot in their attacks in the recently published Afrocentrismes. Of course, already I have responded to quite a lot of critics in my book, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism. But what is it that scares so many white scholars and many black white scholars? As a cultural configuration the Afrocentric idea is distinguished by five characteristics:

(1) an intense interest in psychological location as determined by symbols, motifs, rituals, and signs.

A few weeks ago I was driving down a lone country road deep into the interior of Ghana and came across a small village of six or seven houses and a church. The church was the most beautifully cared for structure in the little settlement and right over the front door was a large picture of a white Jesus. Nothing illustrates for me more than this the intractable problem of misapplied agency, of deep dislocation. There is no referent for this situation except the domination of Europe in the mind of Africa. Nothing else can be said or ought to be said about it. It cannot and should not be gainsaid, argued, or debated, but it must be eradicated.

I believe that signs, symbols, rituals and ceremonies are useful for societies, and furthermore, I accept that societies are held together or disintegrated on the basis of symbols. We go to war over symbols, we fight over proper rituals of respect, and we find our lives enriched by the memories of those who have achieved heroic stature by standing for what we stand for. In the United States we have fought a battle with the State of South Carolina, the first state to declare itself independent of the United States during the Civil War during the last century, now it has become one of the last states to give up the Confederate Flag which stood for slavery, injustice, bigotry, and white racial domination of Africans. Many white South Carolinians have argued that the flag is a symbol of their ancestors’ fight against the government and they believe that it should stand on the grounds of the state capitol. Of course, we Africans, descendants of the enslaved, see it as a symbol of vicious racism. The debate is over the symbol as an engender of hatred and bigotry for a united society or as a particular instrument to encourage repression of a minority. We are clear that the aim of the symbol of the Confederate flag is not community unity, it is divisive, intentionally divisive. Here in the United Kingdom, you know too well the tyranny of racial and religious hegemony and the forcing of particular symbols and rituals of power down the throats of others.

But my aim, back to my point, is to show that the very intense concern the Afrocentrist has with psychological dislocation, that is, where a person’s psyche is out of sorts with his or her own historical reality, is a legitimate issue for any African corrective. You cannot have an African building a church in the heart of Ivory Coast that is larger than St. Peter’s in Rome without wondering what do we Africans think of our own ancestors? A one hundred or two hundred million dollar shrine to an African deity might have changed forever the religious respect for Africa. But a people who do not respect their own gods should not ever expect respect from anyone. I am saying this as one who is not religious. I am talking pure symbolism here, pure rationalism, not irrationality, but common sense. If you are not going to use the money as you should to improve the health conditions of African people, the educational standards, and the economic circumstances, then by God, use it to showcase your own ancestors, not to compete with Rome for who can build the largest European building in Africa.

Europe has had no problem asserting its hegemony over everything on earth. Huntington claimed (p. 81) that the West

- Owned the international banking system
- Controlled all hard currencies
- Provided the majority of the world’s finished products
- Exerted moral authority over other leaders
- Was capable of massive military intervention
- Controlled the sea lanes
- Conducted most advanced technical research
- Dominated access to space
- Dominated aerospace
- Dominated international communications
- Dominated high tech weapons production

We seek neither hegemony nor domination of others, we abhor the idea that one group should impose its will on others against their wills. Yet it is just this deliberate insistence on the part of whites to hold hegemony over Africans that has caused so much racial friction and unrest. Not only has the time run out on this type of domination, there is no longer a willing audience for it. But the lingering effects of more than three hundred years of psychological and cultural domination have left us off of economic and political terms.

(2) a commitment to finding the subject-place of Africans in any social, political, economic, or religious phenomenon with implications for questions of sex, gender, and class.

The Afrocentrist is committed to the idea that Africans are agents in the world and therefore should not be viewed as spectators. But even more, I recognize that people can be seen as agents, but can have misdirected agency, a problem of immense proportions. You do not have to be white to serve those interests in the United States, you can be black and serve hegemonic interests against blacks. Today, a black ultra conservative serves as vice presidential candidate on the Reform Party ticket with Pat Buchanan, one of the most threatening throwbacks to the Neanderthalian age in American politics. There are always a few wobbly ducks who cackle on command from those who seek hegemony.

So the problem of Africans being moved off of terms is a world wide issue. It is not simply an American or a British issue, it plagues Africans in Canada as well as those in Australia. It raises its head everyday in South Africa and Nigeria, in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. Everywhere we are confronted with the possibilities of being moved to the margins, yet the task of our generation is to resist hegemony from morning till night. We can only do it, however, by seeking the subject place in everything. We remain one of the few people who have allowed others to become experts on our history and our ancestors; this is the source of our confusion. The Ghanaian often refers you to Rattray for information on Asante customs and some Nigerians still believe that Lady Lugard’s A Tropical Dependency says everything about Nigeria.

Afrocentrists take a strong view that racial, sexual, gender, and class discrimination and exploitation must be condemned outright and forthrightly. All Afrocentric analysis is a critique on domination. Furthermore, all Afrocentric analysis is a critique on hierarchy and patriarchy because the analysis stems from all forms of oppression.

(3) a defense of African cultural elements as historically valid in the context of art, music, and literature.

Since Europe has asserted Greece as the standard by which it judges and evaluates all things cultural, Africa finds it difficult, within this context, to speak of its own classical art, music, and literature. To say beautiful and mean only a European conception is to distort reality. It is only one conception. Michelangelo’s David is one way to look at a man, it is not the only way. The ritual dances of hegemony are often dazzling in their portrayal of Europe as the standard by which all others should be judged. The rhythms, however, are jagged, and imprecise.

To say classical art, classical music, or classical dance, cannot mean only European art, music, and dance, and be meaningful in the world context. Any cultural form worthy of emulation is classical for a particular history. There is every reason to speak of classical Akan or classical Yoruba or classical African American forms of art, dance, or literature as there is to speak of any European form. The problem here with our understanding is the deafening tones of white insistence on its own values as universal when in fact they are regional, particular, though exported internationally. As King Lobenguela puzzled over the Scottish missionaries interest in bringing their god to the Ndebele, he said to Moffat, "we have our own god, Nkulunkulu, and you have yours. Why do you want us to have yours?" Of course, Samuel Huntington said that the European world was not smartest or brightest but the most "willing to use violence to bring about its political will." King Lobenguela’s time was short; soon he had a flood of whites in his kingdom teaching "servants to be obedient to your masters."