9 - Conclusion

Summary

The foregoing pages have offered a somewhat lengthy definition, although a much abbreviated history, of Afrocentrism, a term that became fashionable as a result of the efforts of its repackager, Professor Molefi Asante, during the 1980s. It is important to note that the term was used at least as early as 1962 in connection with the Encyclopedia Africana project under the sponsorship of Kwame Nkrumah and the editorship of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois. The context of its employment was a discussion of whether the encyclopedia would deal with the entire “African diaspora” or be limited to the continent itself. It was decided that the project would be centered on Africa as a geographical entity. It would be “unashamdely Afro-Centric, but not indifferent to the impact of the outside world up on Africa or to the impact of Africa upon the outside world.” Thus, within the historical context of 1962, the term “Afrocentric” was used to designate a geographical, rather than a purely racial, focus.

The Encyclopedia Africana was planned as a work “authentically African in its point of view and at the same time a product of scientific scholarship.” The planners were concerned with revising popular as well as scholarly images of sub-Saharan Africa, depicted as the “dark continent” by condescending missionaries and biased anthropologists. Sympathetic whites supported the revisionist goal in principle, and the proposed undertaking has been compared to such projects as the Encyclopedia Judaica or the Catholic Encyclopedia.