Pre-Colonial African Paradigms and Applications to Black Nationalism

Abstract

From all cultures of people arises a worldview that is utilized in preserving societal order and cultural cohesiveness. When such worldview is distorted by a calamity such as enslavement, the victims of that calamity are left marginal within the worldview of the oppressive power. From the European Enslavement of Africans, or to use Marimba Ani’s term, the Maafa, arose the notion of European or White Supremacy. Such a notion, though emphatically false, has left many Africans in the Americas in a psychological state colloquially termed as “mental slavery”. The culprit that produced this oppressive condition is Eurocentricity and its utilization of the social theory white supremacy, which has maturated from theory into a paradigm for systemic racism. Often among African Americans there exists a profound sense of dislocation with fragmentary ideas of the correct path towards liberation and relocation. This has engendered the need for a paradigm to be utilized in relocating Africans back to their cultural center. To be sure, many Africans on the continent have not themselves sought value in returning to African ways of knowing. This is however also a product of white supremacy as European colonialism established such atmosphere on the African continent. Colonization and enslavement have impacted major aspects of African cultural and social relations. Much of the motif and ethos of Africa remained within the landscape and language. However, the fact that the challenge of decolonization even for the continental African is still quite daunting only further highlights the struggles of the descendants of the enslaved living in the Americas. The removal from geographic location and the near-destruction of indigenous language levied a heavy breach in defense against total acculturation. Despite this, among the African Americans, African culture exists though languishes under the pressures of white supremacy. A primary reason for such deterioration is the fact that, because of the effects of self-knowledge distortion brought on by the era of enslavement, many African Americans do not realize the African paradigms from which phenomena in African American cultures derive. Furthermore, the lack of a nationalistic culture impedes the collective ability to hold such phenomena sacred and preserve it for the sake of posterity. Today, despite the extant African culture, African Americans largely operate from European paradigms, as America itself is a European or “Western” project. The need for a paradigm shift in African-American cultural dynamics has been the call of many, however is perhaps best illuminated by Dr. Maulana Karenga when he states that we have a “popular culture” and not a nationalistic one. Black nationalism has been presented to Black People for over a century however it has varied greatly between different ideological camps. The variation and many conflictions of these different ideologies perhaps helped the stagnation of the Black Nationalist movement itself. An Afrocentric investigation into African paradigms and the Black Nationalist movements should yield results beneficial to African people living in the Americas.