Afrocentricity, Ecocentrism, and Ecofeminism:
New Alliances for Socialism

By Charles Verharen

This essay calls for a coalition of reform-minded groups that are developing new and remarkably congruent philosophies. What the groups have in common is resistance to being defined by the "other." The essay starts with Afrocentricity because of claims by Du Bois (1995, 26) and Asante (1993, 169) that African Americans should be in a unique position to create new solutions to problems of cultural oppression. The Africana thinkers who have been the intellectual pre- cursors of Afrocentricity (like Diop, Fanon, Du Bois, Locke) have laid the foundation for a new philosophy that has striking ontological parallels with the work of deep ecologists and biocentric philosophers. This new philosophy also exhibits epistemological links to eco- feminist philosophers.

The resemblances among these new philosophies are not adventitious, but rather the effect of common responses to oppression. The new philosophies are non-hierarchical, inclusive, holistic in their ontologies or epistemologies, and supportive of cultural difference.

The conclusion will consider whether these new philosophies have natural affiliations with well-established socialist philosophies that have emerged from other cultural contexts resisting oppression. What I'm looking for is a consensual philosophical foundation for a real democracy. In the world's present circumstances, socialism requires the broadest possible coalition of forces to hope to achieve democracy (Verharen, 2001).

Afrocentricity is a late 20th-century movement based on two principles: true self-knowledge must be grounded in one's own historical context; and self-knowledge properly pursued yields personal agency moving toward a global community that preserves cultural difference. While the United States African American scholar, Molefi K. Asante, has given Afrocentricity its name and most recent impetus, its roots may be traced through a series of classical 20th-Century Africana thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois all the way back to Frederick Douglass and David Walker in the 19th century.

Critics of Afrocentricity often confuse the movement with Afrocentrism. The two movements have common origins in the African diaspora, but they are quite distinct philosophies. Both have also received a good deal of critical attention because of their consequences for public education. Critics like Mary Lefkowitz (1996) and Stephen Howe (1998) have charged Afrocentric educators with teaching myth as fact to bolster African American students' self-esteem: Ancient Egyptians were black. They had batteries. They flew gliders. They practiced brain surgery. Egyptian civilization began in sub-Saharan Africa. The Greeks stole Egypt's cultural legacy. Africa was a utopia destroyed by European enslavement and colonization. What is good in the European cultural legacy is African; what is bad is distinctively European. Africans are civilized and Europeans are barbarians (Verharen, 1997).

Some proponents of Afrocentrism deserve criticism for their undocumented and contentious claims. However, Afrocentricity must be singled out as a unique version of Afrocentrism with a distinctive methodology. W.E.B. Du Bois used the term Afrocentrism in the early 1960s in conjunction with his plans for an Encyclopedia Africana  to be produced in Ghana (Moses, 1998, 243). Afrocentrism as a movement exhibits several variations. In its most neutral guise, it is simply a research methodology. Choosing to sympathize with Africans on the African continent or in the diaspora, proponents of this form of Afrocentrism see the world through Africana eyes and reinterpret world history by filtering it through the viewpoint of Africana experience. Wilson Moses's Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History is perhaps the best example of this form of Afrocentrism in action.

A second kind of Afrocentrism expresses a philosophy of vindicationism that challenges the European tradition of denying the humanity of Africans. A popular variant of vindicationism called "Nile Valley Afrocentrism" claims that the ancient Egyptians were black and that their traditions formed the basis of European civilization. St. Clair Drake's Black Folk Here and There furnishes an exhaustive history of Afrocentric vindicationism.

A third kind of Afrocentrism goes way beyond vindicationism to a philosophy (or perhaps an ideology) of black supremacy. Citing environmental, cultural, or genetic reasons for Africana superiority, proponents of this form of Afrocentrism argue that not only were Africans the first civilized peoples but they have also proven themselves to be far more civilized than barbaric Europeans could ever hope to be. Because it paints Europeans and their American counterparts as incapable of civilized life, this version of Afro- centrism, vividly depicted by Marimba Ani's Yurugu, threatens the very existence of integrated public education.

Mindful of Afrocentrism's potential to drive blacks and whites even further apart, Asante distinguishes his version of Afrocentrism from the other three varieties by calling it "Afrocentricity." Asante first publicizes this term in his Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change in 1980. The "Afro" in "Afrocentricity" reflects a commitment to the idea that all humans are African in origin, the "centricity" a commitment to the idea that people must center themselves in their own cultural experiences (Verharen, 1995a). African American students who claim an Africana heritage, for example, must have access to Africana history from the very beginning of their formal education.

Afrocentricity's centering process leads to a restoration of Africana peoples' agency. However, the same process will work for any group that has lost its natural human agency through enslavement, colonialism, or other less obvious decentering forces. Afro-centricity escapes being the inversion of Eurocentrism because it does not give Africa pride of place. Paradoxically, anyone can be an adherent of Afrocentricity if he or she seeks solidarity with everyone else on the globe by way of cultural self-knowledge.

Afrocentric movements constitute a critique of European and American challenges to African humanity. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously claimed that all men were created equal. What he really meant was that all white men were created equal. While recognizing slavery's incompatibility with the nation's founding principles, Jefferson also maintained that Africans' obvious inferiority prevented any possibility of their integration into American society as equals (1995). Slavery's abolition, he argued, should be immediately followed by the Africans' return to Africa.

In making such claims, Jefferson anticipated the anti-African sentiments of European philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. These philosophers-and European society as a whole-could only justify the extremely profitable practice of slavery by dehumanizing Africans. Hegel even went so far as to insist that slavery would bring Africans to full consciousness by increasing their "human" feeling: "Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is Freedom; but for this man must be matured" (1956, 99). Even some African American thinkers, such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, believed that slavery was part of a divine plan to Christianize Africa.

Such brutal assaults on Africans' very humanity gave rise to two distinct responses, prefiguring the vindicationist and black suprem- acist forms of 20th-century Afrocentrism. One of the earlier thinkers to discuss these issues was the vindicationist David Walker, an African American who claimed not only that the Egyptians were the founders of the world's first great civilization but also that they were black. In his "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World," he described the ancient Egyptians as "Africans or coloured people, such as we are-some of them yellow and others dark-a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt-about the same as you see the coloured people of the United States at the present day..." (Walker 1996 [1829]). Frederick Douglass also believed that the Egyptians were black. With the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone throwing Europe and America into Egyptomania, it seemed obvious to Douglass that blacks could not have been the subhumans Hegel and other philoso- phers claimed Africans to be. Ironically addressing those who still maintained that nothing glorious could come out of Africa, he said, "Egypt is in Africa. Pity that it had not been in Europe, or in Asia, or better still in America! Another unhappy circumstance is, that the ancient Egyptians were not white people; but were, undoubtedly, just about as dark in complexion as many in this country who are considered genuine Negroes..." (Douglass 1953 [1854]). Inspired by his vision of a direct connection between ancient Africa and modern America, Douglass advocated integration into American society.

Alexander Crummell and Marcus Garvey took the opposite tack, rejecting assimilation in favor of a return to Africa. Inverting Jefferson's argument about Africans' inferiority, these black supremacists believed in Africans' biological and cultural superiority. In the early 20th century, Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association laid the groundwork for black supremacist movements that continue to this day. George James's Stolen Legacy, for instance, takes its inspiration from Garvey's belief in the African origins of Greek culture. And separatist movements like the Nation of Islam are sympathetic to Garvey's theories about black superiority. The dialectic between assimilation and separatism continues to the present moment.

Afrocentricity's founding thinkers are bound together by their remarkable ability to navigate successfully between the extremes of assimilation and separatism that divided their historical predecessors (Verharen, 2002). Unlike many earlier philosophers on race, these thinkers reject all claims to genetic or cultural superiority and advocate instead a philosophy of universal inclusion. Self-knowledge grounded in each person's individual cultural context is the only route to this universalist philosophy. In Fanon's striking example, Africana students in former French colonies were once forced to learn about "our ancestors, the Gauls" (1967, 147). Under Afrocentricity, Africana students would first learn about their real ancestors and only then learn about the ancestors of others-including those of their former colonizers.

Critics like Lefkowitz and Howe have a field day with this insistence on self-knowledge. Doesn't this prove, they ask, that Afrocentrists really are separatists? And if Afrocentricity is a philosophy of universal inclusion, they demand, why does it particularize itself by invoking the name of Africa?

It is true that Afrocentrists are concerned about the survival and flourishing of their own peoples. Diop and Fanon, for instance, hoped to create a continental African unity out of the ashes of colonialism (Verharen, 1995b; 1997). In addition to their interest in Pan-Africanism, Du Bois (1973) and Locke (1989) sought an end to segregation in the United States. Asante, the only founder of Afrocentricity still alive, concentrates on post-segregation crises that recall the bleakest hours of Reconstruction.

But Afrocentricity goes far beyond these local concerns to an emphasis on humanity as a whole. In response to critics, most Afrocentrists turn to what has become known as the "Out of Africa" hypothesis-the idea that all humans can trace their cultural and genetic heritage back to Africa. As a trope signifying the whole of humanity by one of its parts, the name "Afrocentricity" urges us to atone for past injustices like slavery and to avoid future sins against human unity. Diop, for example, in his Civilization or Barbarism, notes that modern technology gave Europe the power to enslave or colonize most of the world, while modern philosophers like Hegel provided philosophical justifications for barbaric treatment of non-Europeans. As an alternative to such barbarism, Diop offers a philosophy that brings all people together. Describing humanity's African origins as an accident of geography, Diop does not privilege Africans over any other group of people. Rather, he suggests that we maintain our individual cultural differences yet use our common origins as a foundation for a new global civilization that can stand against barbarism. In this new world community, modern technology can enhance cross-cultural intimacy to unite the world.

And while all of Afrocentricity's founders support close study of Africa's traditions, none of them deny the importance of European cultures-for whites and blacks and all other humans. In fact, most of them were strongly influenced by their exposure to European traditions in Europe itself. Du Bois's ideas about global unity through cultural complementarity were current at the University of Berlin, where he was a student during the 1890s. Locke's cosmopolitanism was nourished in the company of fellow Rhodes scholars from around the world at Oxford in the early 1900s. Though he was born and raised in the Caribbean, Fanon's French education familiarized him with philosophers from Hegel to Sartre. While Diop was born and raised in West Africa, his explicit references to European classicists and Egyptologists who believed in the African origins of European civilization reflect his many years at the Sorbonne.

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