An Intellectual Biography of Africa: A Philosophical Anatomy of Advancing Africa the Diopian Way

By Francis Kwarteng

Africa is the birthplace of humanity and civilization. And yet people generally don’t want to accept the scientific impression of Africa as the birthplace of human civilization. The skeptics include Africans themselves, a direct result of the colonial educational systems still in place across Africa, and even those Africans who acquire Western education, particularly in the humanities, have been trapped in the symptomatology of epistemic peonage. These colonial educational systems have overstayed their welcome and should be dismantled. This is where African agency comes in. Agential autonomy deserves an authoritative voice in shaping the curricular direction of Africa. Agential autonomy implicitly sanctions an Afrocentric approach to curriculum development, pedagogy, historiography, literary theory, indigenous language development, and knowledge construction. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics?information and communications technology (STEM-ICT) and research and development (R&D) both exercise foundational leverage in the scientific and cultural discourse of the kind of African Renaissance Cheikh Anta Diop envisaged.

“Mr. Francis Kwarteng has written a book that looks at some of the major distortions of African history and Africa’s major contributions to human civilization. In this context, Mr. Kwarteng joins a long list of thinkers who roundly reject the foundational Eurocentric epistemology of Africa in favor of an Afrocentric paradigm of Africa’s material, spiritual, scientific, and epistemic assertion. Mr. Kwarteng places S.T.E.M. and a revision of the humanities at the center of the African Renaissance and critiques Eurocentric fantasies about Africa and its Diaspora following the critical examples of Cheikh Anta Diop, Ama Mazama, Molefi Kete Asante, Abdul Karim Bangura, Theophile Obenga, Maulana Karenga, Mubabingo Bilolo, Kwame Nkrumah, Ivan Van Sertima, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several others. Readers of this book will be challenged to look at Africa through a critical lens.”

Ama Mazama, editor/author of Africa in the 21st Century: Toward a New Future

“There are countless books about the evolution of European intellectual thought but scarcely any that captures the pioneering contributions of Africans since the beginning of recorded knowledge in Kmet, a.k.a. Ancient Egypt. Well, that long drought has ended with the publication of Kwarteng's An Intellectual Biography of Africa: A Philosophical Anatomy of Advancing Africa the Diopian Way. Prepare to be educated.”

Milton Allimadi, author of Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in the Media

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669836544

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Copyright © 2022 by Francis Kwarteng.

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Rev. date: 07/12/2022

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Dedicated to:

                    Emeka Nwadiora:

                                    A great inspiration, mentor, idol, teacher.

                    Richard Hammel:

                                    My brother, my friend, my mentor.

        Special dedication:

                    Ama Mazama

                    Toni Morrison

                    Harriet Tubman

                    Wangari Maathai

                    Ida B. Wells

                    Phyllis Wheatly

                    The Candaces of Ancient Nubia

                    Abdul Karim Bangura

                    Cheikh Anta Diop

                    Molefi Kete Asante

                    Chandra Kant Raju

                    Toyin Falola

                    Marcus Garvey

                    Bob Marley & Peter Tosh

                    Abdias do Nascimento & Machado de Assis

                    Kwame Nkrumah

                    W.E.B. Du Bois

                    Nelson Mandela

                    Victor Lawrence

                    Wole Soyinka

                    Maulana Karenga

                    Anténor Firmin

                    Patrice Lumumba

                    Ivan Van Sertima

                    Imhotep

                    Ngugi wa Thiong’o

                    Alexander Pushkin

                    Amilcar Cabral

                    Frantz Fanon

                    Chinua Achebe

                    Theophile Obenga

                    Haile Selassie

                    Joseph Boulogne &Alexandre Dumas

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 ‘Songs of Sorrow": A Tribute to Prof. Kofi Awoonor & the Religious Terrorism Question

• Prof. Awoonor, A Literary Giant

• On Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery

• Notes: Awoonor, An Unresolved Controversy

List of Books By Kofi Awoonor

Poetry

Translated Work/Ewe Poetry

Prison Memoir

Political Essay

Non-Fiction/Literary Criticism

Plays

• Books By or About Kwame Nkrumah (& His Ideas)

Chapter 2 The Power of Critical Thinking: Unclosing the African Mind

• Pan-Africanism and the Mindboggling Intolerance of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind

• The Economic, Cultural, and Political Hemorrhaging of Africa

• Cultural Relativism: The Quest for Cultural Independence & the Example of Female Circumcision

• The Unique Perspective of Afrocentric Theory: Organizational Theory and Social Work

• The George S. Dei Corpus

Chapter 3 The Complex Dynamics of Nelson Mandela’s Legacy

• Bill O’Reilly and the Legacy of Nelson Mandela

Chapter 4 Ama Mazama: An Intellectual Warrior for Africa

• The Intellectual Warrior in Mazama

• Notes: Written Out of History

• The Exceptional Gifts of the Black Woman

• Courses Taught (Temple University)

Undergraduate Courses

Graduate Courses

• Languages Studied and Understood

• Publications: Books

• Translated Works (English to French)

• Textbooks for Children

• Book Reviews

• Encyclopedia and Dictionary Entries

• Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

• Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters and Monographs

• Service to Editorial Boards

• Service to Temple University

• Reviewer for Refereed Journals and Presses

• Honors and Awards

• Community Awards

• Service to the Community

• Professional Membership

• Consultancies

Chapter 5 Ama Mazama: An Intellectual Warrior for Africa

• An Afrocentric Response to the White Savior Complex

• The Black Studies War: Gates and Appiah as Antitheses of Mazama

Chapter 6 The Implications of Mazama’s Ideas for the Moral Imperative of Africa’s Cultural Independence

• Mazama and the Influence of Marcus Garvey

• Pope John Paul ll and African Religion

• Notes: Framing Africa’s Artificial Crises

Chapter 7 A World-Class African Scientist: The Revolutionary Scientific Contributions of Victor Lawrence

• Books Co-authored By Victor Lawrence

• Peer-Reviewed Articles

Chapter 8 A World-Class African Scientist: The Legacy of Ancient Egypt & Victor Lawrence

• On S.T.E.M.: The Imperative of Afrocentric Historical Consciousness

• Afrocentric Pedagogy and the Politics of Language

• A Craze for Colonial Languages in Postcolonial Africa

Chapter 9 Abdul Karim Bangura: An Intellectual Giant with 5 PhDs

• Accidental Discovery of Abdul Karim Bangura

• The Making of an Intellectual Octopus With 5 Brains

• The Bangura Corpus

• The Intersection of Bangura, C.K. Raju Et Al

• Professional Careers and Affiliations

• Honors and Awards

• Professional Memberships

• Selected Books by Abdul Karim Bangura

• Special References on African Fractal Complexity

Chapter 10 On the Intellectual Map: Molefi Kete Asante Advances Africa

• Selected Books

• Courses Taught (Temple University)

• Special Awards for Teaching and Scholarship

• Research and Scholarly Articles

• Book Chapters

• Languages Read or Studied

Chapter 11 On the Intellectual Map: Molefi Kete Asante Advances Africa

Chapter 12 In Conclusion: Answering the Critics of Afrocentricity

• References (Chapter 11 & Chapter 12)

Further Reading

• General But Related Topics

• On Afrocentricity (Molefi Kete Asante)

• Cheikh Anta Diop & African Historiography

• Theophile Obenga on African Philosophy

• Toyin Falola & Africa

• On Women’s Rights, Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting, Ending Violence Against African Women and Girls

• On Asia’s African Diaspora

• On Negritude

• On Colorism

• On the African University

• On African Archeology

• On White Ignorance/Critical Race/Centering Black History (Mike Eric Dyson Uses Afrocentric Lexis/Language/Lingo)

• On Kwame Nkrumah and the Institute of African Studies (African Studies)

• On Passing for White (Black Mother’s White-Skinned Baby Replaced with a Black-Skinned One)

• On Black Psychology, Kwame Anthony Appiah (as Indian and Criticisms of In My Father’s House) & More

• On African Unification (Ideology/Afrocentricity)

• On English and the African Writer (Chinua Achebe)

• The African Union & the Moral Urgency of Afrocentric Knowledge Construction

• On the Importance of Context: The African-Centered or Afrocentric Methodology

• Untangling Blackness & Other Matters

• On Africa’s Intellectual, Theological, and Historical Contributions to Christianity & Founding of the Modern University

• Leila Tayeb: What is Whiteness in North Africa?

• The Scandalous Ignorance of Hegelian Racist Hugh Trevor-Roper and the Evolution of African History

• The Role of Enslaved Africans and Chattel Slavery in the Founding of Many America’s Elite Universities

• France, the United States, and the Underdevelopment of a Black Republic, Haiti

Preface

No observer of African intellectual history has been as astute and careful in analysis as Francis Kwarteng whose broad reading and deep understanding of the flow of African cultural history have captured the essential threads of contemporary African thinking. Kwarteng’s boldness in tackling the works of principal authors on intellectual issues is admirable because he has stepped into the stream of history to not just observe the currents but to impact the currents flowing in our history. I see Kwarteng’s remarkable manuscript in the context of J. E. Casely Hayford’s (Ekra-Agyeman) initiative in setting out a path for African scholarship, literary creativity, and philosophical survey of our best thinking.

When one reads Kwarteng one is reading a writer who has read; this is always the test of a real scholar. There has rarely been a contemporary writer who has delved so deeply into the thinking of those who have practiced political or philosophical action as intellectuals. He has drawn distinctions that were necessary, and he has written penetrating critiques of those who have paraded as African intellectuals but who have failed to anticipate close readings like the work of Kwarteng. For me, he has demonstrated his heroic nature by turning the current battle for the minds of Africans toward emphasis on Afrocentric thinking. While this has been a long time coming in the works of school intellectuals, Kwarteng has leaped immediately into the struggle to establish the intellectual tradition that is best suited to the interest of Africans. It is here that we see the dividends of assertive African agency on the part of a fearless intellectual.

Like all intellectual histories or biographies, one has to tell the basic story before one can set the terms of analysis. It is in this arena that Kwarteng’s work has its most powerful impact on our thinking. He has shown, in a way that is unlike that of school scholars, how to outline the work of intellectuals and then to demolish their thinking when it comes to the value that they have for African consciousness. It is this precision in all its density that elevates Kwarteng’s works, and especially this one, to the level of an essential work of scholarship. I am particularly impressed by his decisive judgment when it comes to articulating his ideas about those who have written from a Eurocentric perspective about African people. In effect, Kwarteng, as an organic African intellectual, with a clear mind and an eye toward raising the level of political and cultural consciousness of two billion Africans outlines an assertive position on culture.

If one starts the quest for knowledge at the beginning of Homo sapiens’ time on the earth, nearly 300,000 years ago, one finds that the center of that experience was Africa. All living humans have DNA that stems from the African origin. It is not a far jump to contemplate the fact that all human history, at whatever time we begin the calculation of history, begins with Africa. So philosophy, religion, literature, politics, law, astronomy, anatomy, chemistry—all began with African people. There is neither anatomy nor chemistry without mummification in the Nile Valley. There are no pyramids or temples without the rope-stretchers who gave the world measurement of the earth, geometry, after the Nile had overrun its banks year after year. Astronomy begins with the clear skies of Kemet and the planet and the star-gazing of the farmers who plowed the fertile soil of the river valleys. Kwarteng knows that those who do not start with Africa but are attuned only to European or Arabic thinking will never be able to raise the level of our consciousness and understanding of our own history.

Let it be clear that this book in all of its detail, breadth of writing, and reasoning will set the plinth for many scholars who will follow the route established in this volume by Francis Kwarteng. Let us read and learn from his broad knowledge. I salute him for opening with my friend Kofi Awoonor whose brilliance shines on us even till now. May the ancestors named and unnamed always eat with us as we learn from Brother Kwarteng!

Molefi Kete Asante, author of The History of Africa

April 8, 2022

Introduction

On Africanness, Africanity, and the Case

of Smokey Robinson and Lori L. Tharps

That Barack Obama would be placed alongside primates, i.e., monkeys, in an assignment that asked Michigan-based high-school students in a biology class to identify primates on a worksheet shows how racism is deeply entrenched in American society (TheGrio Staff, 2022). Obviously Obama’s African ancestry has everything to do with this painful controversy. What is it about the name Africa, a name with a rich, inspiring, interesting history (South African History Online, n.d.), that makes some people uncomfortable and causes them to lose their minds, to distance themselves from it, Africa, the world’s second-largest continent after Asia?

Binyavanga Wainaina’s insightful essay (2005) How to Write about Africa says it all.

How remarkable that non-Africans and others from within suspend their mental faculties once a discourse on Africa, Africans, and the African Diaspora arises! a friend once shared with me.

I could remember vividly the controversy Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) (and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family) generated about the African-descended family branch of Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States. Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence. Science has not rendered its verdict on another brewing controversy yet, a controversy about whether West Ford was an African-descended love child of America’s first president George Washington (Abramson, 2022), and the story is already being dismissed out of hand. (However, there exists an alternative fact that John Hanson, not Washington, was America’s first president depending on which historian or Hanson biographer you ask.) Like the white scholars and historians who rejected these groundbreaking stories and some of who still do even after science had rendered its affirmative verdict in the case of the Jefferson controversy, Smokey Robinson and Lori L. Tharps either rejected or were simply confused about the social and historical facts of their Africanness—their Africanity.

Smokey said on The View that he preferred Black American to African American. Or Tharps who stated in an article, I Refuse to Remain in the Lower Case, she was initiating a revolution that would see African-American changed to Black American. The contention was therefore about identity in the American body politic: Black as opposed to African. Bob Marley meant this when he said the right to decide one’s destiny is a matter of personal choice (Zimbabwe). Whatever their reasons for this choice, the trigger-happy white police officer in America does not see beyond the phenotypic equivalency between Black and African. Racial essentialism is therefore a fact of American life. The senseless massacres of Amadou Diallo and Ahmaud Arbery tell this story so eloquently, powerfully, and poignantly. Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise and Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb tell the other story of America. It is the same reason Stevie Wonder once contemplated relocating to Ghana (McCollum, 2021). And yet Still I Rise and The Hill We Climb are devoid of the characteristic feature of factual ambiguity that defines and threads through Smokey’s poem.

No mention of African survivals, retentions, or Africanisms (Dixon, 1990; Henriksen, 1975) by Smokey and Tharps either. Smokey did not bother to make room for Africa’s primordial cultural, linguistic, spiritual, culinary, musical, and intellectual contributions to the four hundred years of African American culture and psychological resilience (Chapter 2). Toni Morrison’s more refined arguments in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination represent serious positions of intellectually sophisticated articulations than the thematic naiveté of Smokey’s pop poem. In reviewing Playing in the Dark, Linda Krumholz (1996) exposited that White America used Blackness to construct the identity of America. The historical provenance of this American identity is African essentialism. Whether it is admitted or not, Africa courses through the arteries of Greco-Roman civilizations and Western civilization. Therefore, the rich history of African Americans does not begin with slavery as Smokey’s poem mischievously seems to suggest (Asres, 2017; Badawi, 2017). This Smokey problematic surmise is shared by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2008).

On the contrary, an American entertainer and businessman Steve Harvey, Robinson’s friend, called Africa his homeland and America his home (Ghanaweb, 2022). One could only conjecture Robinson’s position on American-based second-generation immigrants of continental African ancestry who mock Africa and have no respect for African history, values, and culture or a Harvard professor of Nigerian ancestry, Teju Cole (2014), who reinterprets James Baldwin in a manner that bespeaks a belittling of the historical context of Baldwin’s thinking about and philosophical exploration and analysis of complex issues of race relations, human behavior, racism, aesthetics, and art. Besides, the genetic connection between Africans and African Americans is not a question for debate (Tishkoff et al., 2009).

Who is an African? Is it the I am an African of Thabo Mbeki, Wayne Visser, or F.W. de Klerk? (Igboin, 2021; Sapa, 2013; Thabo Mbeki Foundation, 2016; Visser, 2005). Smokey also failed to mention that European enslavers who fathered children with African women in Africa and the Middle Passage during the European Slave Trade also fathered children with enslaved African women in the Americas in what sociologist Rachel A. Feinstein (2018) referred to as when rape was legal. Smokey’s cousins are scattered across Africa. Are they Black or African? In other words, Americans such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Molefi Kete Asante stood with Africa in a way many African intellectuals may not have done. What’s more, Smokey’s head is no match for Du Bois’s or Asante’s. A Black American is no match for Asante’s The History of Africa and The African American People or Du Bois’s The World and Africa and Africa: Its Place in Modern History and The Gift of Black Folks. Smokey completely ignored the intellectual and cultural intercourse between African Americans and Africans. While the influence of African Americans on Africans is a well-known fact, the reverse may not be widely known (Adi, 2018; Cole, 1985; Esedebe, 1994; Garrett, 1966; Geiss, 1974; Goode & Jordan, 1969; Henriksen, 1975; Quarles, 1996; Shepperson, 1960; Stuckey, 1969, 1972; Thorpe, 1961; Turner, 2002; Walters, 1997).

What the scholar John M. Spencer (1995) calls rhythmic confidence and the rhythms of Black folk are absent in Smokey’s poetic indifference. Connective contributions—of aesthetic, musical, and cultural nature—of traditional African musical forms to American blues and jazz have been established by music critics, sociolinguists, musicologists, and anthropologists (Denselow, 2006; Guralnic, Santelli, George-Warren, & Farley, 2003; Kubik, 1999, 2017a, 2017b). African American popular music shaped what Tsitsi E. Jaji (2014) calls transnational black solidarity, which encompassed an intellectual stretch of the political and cultural aspirations of Africa and African America. The nexus between the kora of Ancient Mali and the guitar of American blues is clear. Even rap owes as much to Africa’s oral traditions and griot rhetorical aesthetics (Welbeck, 2017). Call-and-response forms that predominate in African music figure as well in the work song, the blues, jazz, and other Americanized strains of African music, Ted Gioia (2008) notes, writing further that African performance arts also influenced soul, salsa, blues, jazz, ragtime, samba, Broadway musicals, rock, calypso, R&B, cumbia, and even some contemporary operatic and symphonic music.

American folk singer Paul Simon’s Graceland, to which Ladysmith Black Mambazo contributed backing polyphony, an album influenced by traditional African musical instruments (Kwarteng, 2016), and Spirit Voices, a song from his other album Rhythm of the Saints, incorporated a Ghanaian folk tune Yaa Amponsah, originally recorded in the late 1920s (Ashton, 2018). For instance, Simon acknowledged some striking similarities between South Africa’s mbaqanga and the R&B of the 1950s (Fricke, 1986; Runtagh, 2016). R&B is usually associated with African Americans. Mbaqanga would exert an influence on Simon and his folksy musical signature. Smokey may have forgotten that Africa’s wealth built the West and that the foundation of the West’s wealth is Africa itself (Drayton, 2005; Wambu, 2022). Likewise, Ngugi wa Thiong’o once wrote that Africa has been the eternal donor to the west (Khelef, (2018). Despite the hypocritical denials, Africa is at the center of the political, historical, artistic, and aesthetic experience of the American experiment.

The 1619 Project captures the essential thread of this epistemic reality—just as Diopian scholarship stands at the center of classical civilizations, Ancient Egypt primarily, and Ancient Egypt stands at the center of human civilizations. It turns out that, contrary to prevailing Eurocentric conventions which normatively situate Europe in the origins of the modernity narrative, the locational primacy of Africa and Africans birthed the provenance of modernity itself (French, 2021). Asante concurs by correctly and eloquently pointing out that There wouldn’t be modernity without Africans (Molefi Kete Asante Institute, 2021). Africans and the vast natural wealth of Africa helped Europe build modern cities and furnish academic institutions (Asante & Dove, 2022; Dove, 1995). When he wanted to develop a proof for gravitational theory and measure the earth’s circumference, Isaac Newton looked up to the Africans of Ancient Egypt (Sherwood, 2020). Ancient Egypt was, therefore, an important influence on Newton and his thinking. And yet Africa is always relegated to the backdoor of human history. The UNESCO-sponsored two-phase General History of Africa represents a corrective response to the historiographic peripheralization of Africa.

If Smokey was a victim of Du Bois’ double consciousness, an important theme in The Souls of Black Folk and an influence on the literary landscape of Vietnamese-American Viet Thanh Nguyen, in particular on his Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed (Washington Post Live, 2021), then Smokey would be surprised at J.E. Casely Hayford (1969) calling double consciousness a pathetic one. Hayford seemed to suggest that double consciousness is a choice, a self-directed or self-driven choice one makes of one’s volition, rather than an imposition from without. In his mind, freedom from this artificial external imposition is also a matter of conscious volition.

Perhaps unbeknownst to Smokey and like-minded characters, Africa and Africans are at the heart of the institutionalization of American higher education: The beginning of science at the American college and the American university is, in fact, a story of the violent consumption of living and deceased enslaved people…The professionalization of business and the arrival of business on campus as an academic pursuit is very much tied to the evolution of the slave economy in the 19th century…And so, professionalization in higher education, the arrival of the professional schools, is very much the story of the power and the influence of the 18th and 19th century slave economies (Brown University, 2003; Democracy Now, 2022; Harvard Radcliffe Institute, 2022; Harvard University, 2022; Wilder, 2013).

The preceding claims notwithstanding, do Asian Americans and European Americans who have been in America for generations potentially suffer from the same degree of identity crisis as Smokey and Tharps? The word Black itself is suffused with so many negative and poisonous connotations and representations in the Eurocentric canon of Western imageries. We believe it was just right for Ramona Edelin and Jesse Jackson to propose African American rather than Black American (Goffe, 2012). Lance Marrow (2001) was correct in his estimation that the texture of the U.S. is infinitely more black African than it is French or German or Scottish. Black here means African. Africa deserves a fair share of the credit. Now, if Smokey is Black, then what is Thomas Clarence?

How should members of the African Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere (outside the United States) be called since they are also part of the Americas and, therefore, technically Americans? Are the descendants of African Americans (and their descendants) who settled in Liberia and Sierra Leone (after the American Revolutionary War) Black or African? We could not ignore the political and intellectual nexuses and collaborations between Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah, between Ida B. Wells and Oguntola Sapara vis-a-vis the campaign against lynching (Wells, 2020), between J.E. Casely Hayford and Booker T. Washington, and between Hayford and Du Bois (Eluwa, 1971). Are Afro-Caribbeans like Marcus Garvey or their descendants like Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), and Harry Belafonte who influenced American politics and culture Black or African? Does the fact that so many African Americans trace their ancestry to Nigeria turn African American into Black (Edward-Ekpu, 2020)?

Peter Tosh’s African (1977) resolves this needless ideological conundrum, calling attention to the fact that the African Diaspora is African. On Greetings, Burning Spear wondered why so many African Americans have turned their backs on their African roots and culture. Greetings questions those African Americans who have disowned their African brothers and sisters and calls for a Pan-African union between continental Africans and the African Diaspora. Yet Smokey’s position on The View was informed by his bad taste in history. African Americans like Randall Robinson fought to dismantle Apartheid. Kevin K. Gaines’s American Africans in Ghana (2008) and James H. Meriwether’s Proudly We Can Be Africans (2002) expand upon the political nexus of Africans and African Americans (Jacobs, 2014), of the decolonization of Africa and the U.S. civil rights movement (Afro-Caribbeans contributed to the decolonization efforts of African nationalists as well). Enslaved Africans built America and fought in the Civil War to end the criminal slavocracy of America. Smokey may learn a thing or two from a close reading of Asante’s 400 Years of Witnessing: A Memoir of a People 1619-2019, a book of poems.

And since Barack Obama’s white mother, Ann Dunham, is believed to have likely descended from an enslaved African called John Punch who lived in the 17th century (Stolberg, 2012), and his father Barack Obama, Sr., an African from Kenya, will Smokey and Tharps categorize Obama as Black or African? Did Obama’s father fight or lay down his life for America, the basis of Smokey’s crude definition for what constitutes a Back American? Was Obama’s white mother Black American or African American? The Smokey poem makes it seem Black American is a new human species. And yet African Americans also fought for Europe during World War ll, so-called. African Americans helped rescue Jews, the Roma, and others, and Europe itself from the bloodsucking tyranny and military onslaught of Adolf Hitler, a son of Europe.

Smokey in his poem A Black American made it clear that the European is African European, the American whether Black or white is African, the Asian African Asian, that everybody on the planet is African because humans originated in Africa. It must be emphasized that Africa is not only the genesis of human evolution but of human civilization as well. But he also indicated in the poem that Black is not our color and reserved African American for African immigrants in the U.S. (Genius, n.d.). His ignorance is evident, which is that he understood African to be a race not knowing that race does not exist. The poem itself may have implied that Black American is a different race. Also, contrary to Tharps’s microcosmic melting pot, Africa remains the undisputed and truest melting pot on the planet.

Smokey’s poetic conservatism enjoys imprimatur in Bill Cosby, who emphatically stated in his infamous Pound Cake Speech that we, that is, African Americans, are not Africans. Cosby also reproached African Americans for adopting Africans as he associated these names with criminality and social deviance (Sewer, 2015). What Obama’s name meant to Cosby is only a matter of pure conjecture. Asante’s The Book of African Names poses an apposite riposte to Cosby, even as sociologist Michael Eric Dyson (2015) tore into Cosby for his insensitive rhetorical discretions against poor Black people. The self-appointed public moralist Cosby earned a privileged mention in Asante’s 100 Greatest African Americans, two years before his Pound Cake Speech.

But then Africans and African Americans must learn to respect each other. Africans must desist from calling their African American brothers and sisters Akata, a racial slur, an epithet, a word Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian American science fiction and fantasy writer insists it’s not a nice word, and African Americans must desist from calling their African brothers and sisters African booty scratcher (Ibeh, 2022; Robinson, 2022). While Okorafor was called Akata by a Nigerian, which she said angered her, she nonetheless adopted the word for her Nsibidi fantasy series Akata Warrior, Akata Witch, and Akata Woman. During Trevor Noah’s public exchanges with Kanye West, Trevor voiced out how racists succeeded in teaching Black people to tear their blackness apart whenever they find themselves in disagreement (Krishnamurthy, 2022).

But then, what should we call Black African immigrants who have lived in the US for generations or who are first-generation immigrants? Black Americans or African Americans? The late American-based Nigerian editor Chika Onyeani opposed Smokey’s argument that US-based African immigrants be called African-American (Goffe, 2012). We are thus drawn into the familiar territory of the controversy that arose in response to the titular translation of Camara Laye’s L’Enfant Noir to The African Child or The Dark Child. But French for black is noir (masculine) or noire (feminine) and The African Child is L’Enfant Africain. Europeans make this awkward argument against art restitution where they conveniently allude to stolen African art (just like the British stole India’s Koh-l-Noor (Boissoneault, 2017). in their museums, private homes, and galleries as belonging to the universal culture of humanity but resort to sub-Saharan, North Africa, black, people of color, and Negro when it suits them. If African art truly belongs in the aesthetic pantheon of humanity, why does the European imagination reduce Africa and its association with black and their derivatives to negative connotations?

And then the binary opposition between the Afrofuturism (Dery, 1993) of Octavia Butler and the Africanfuturism of Nnedi Okorafor rears its head. The argument is that African American writers and scholars hardly trace the provenance or genesis of Afrofuturism to the continent of Africa (Hanchey, 2020; see Omenana Magazine). Therefore, Nigerian-American science fiction and fantasy novelist Okorafor coined Africanfuturism, which pays homage to the centrality of Africa, to distinguish it from Afrofuturism (Okorafor, 2019; TED, 2017; Wabuke, 2020). Okorafor has argued that Afrofuturism privileges or prioritizes the concerns and interests of African Americans, whereas those of Africa are marginalized (Hodapp, 2021). The result of being held hostage culturally, institutionally, psychologically, and epistemologically by the hegemony of European languages partly explains this confusing state of terminologic and nomenclatural crisis—such as we see between Smokey and Chika. This equally speaks to how Asante (n.d.) wrestled with Afrology, Black Studies, Africana Studies, etc., before finally settling on Africology.

Even Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has entered the science fiction space with her debut short story The Visit (Ibeh, 2021). Contrary to the intellectual, aesthetic, and definitional tensions between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, two Africans (Yvette Lisa Ndlovu & Shingai Njeri Kagunda) and two African Americans (Hugh H.D. Hunter & LP Kindred) have teamed up and created an online platform The Voodoonauts to advance the Afrofuturism and fantasy genres. All four will also be editing an anthology called Voodoonauts Present: (Re)Living Mythology (Alexander, 2022; Voodonauts, 2020). Smokey certainly overlooked the imperative of Pan-African solidarity in advancing the two communities.

Tina Lasisi, a biological anthropologist, correctly points out, a fact lost on Smokey and Tharps, that What people mean when they say ‘Black’ or ‘white’ can encompass a huge spectrum of skin tones. But those definitions have been carved out by predominantly white scholars who presented their own race with a wealth of nuance that they did not necessarily give to others (Seo, 2022). From a purely scientific standpoint, the spectrum of melanated hair or otherwise, kinky, curly, wavy, or straight, and skin-tone variations also add to the evolutionary richness of human differentiation (Jablonski, 2006, 2014; Lasisi, Ito, Wakamatsu, & Shaw, 2016; Lasisi et al., 2021; Magona, Jablonski, & Fellman, 2018).

Smokey, who had never been to Africa (Germain, 2022), and Tharps may not have understood that contemporary Africa is largely an invention, someone else’s convenient fabrication, Europe’s imagined Dark Continent, of which Europe became the land of civilization, science, mathematics, philosophy, and Greece—another invention presented as an originary and authoritative fact of creative imagination, of the powers of the mind. Nonetheless, unlike the brutal honesty of Frederick Douglass’s What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July, Smokey’s potboiler poem and Count Cullen’s Heritage and Langston Hughes’s Afro-American Fragment treat Africa with psychological, emotional, and nostalgic distance. Africa, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ultimately became the antithesis of Europe. This invented Africa became the nightmare of the dream of the civilizing mission of Europe, of the American Dream.

It is these historiographic, historical, and epistemological fabrications that Ama Mazama, Cheikh Anta Diop, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Djibril T. Niane, Abdul Karim Bangura, Boniface I. Ohichere, Toyin Falola, Molefi Kete Asante, Kenneth O. Dike, Tsehloane Keto, Marcus Garvey, Theophile Obenga, W.E.B. Du Bois, J.F. Ade-Ajayi, Maulana Karenga, Wole Soyinka, Mazisi Kunene, Chinua Achebe, Bethwell A. Ogot, and scores of others are challenging. These scholars ushered in a true intellectual revolution worthy of celebration and institutionalization in the African Academy.

Therefore, for Americans to defer to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for their scholarly insights about Africa and its culture, people, and history is for these Americans to commit epistemic suicide. The two are not reliable sources on Africa. Appiah’s In My Father’s House is a product of Hegelian heresy. Gates’ Wonders of the African World restates Hegelian traditions. Asante’s Afrocentric theory, the copious writings of Mazama, Falola, Bangura, Obenga, Karenga, etc. put these Hegelian and Eurocentric heresies about the African world to rest. Under the heretical aegis of Eurocentrism and Hegelian hegemony, Europe’s Dark Continent resolves into a symptomatic derivative of an epistemological psychosis emblematic of the larger geopolitical headship of the West. It is this epistemological psychosis that haunts Smokey and Tharps.

Epistemological psychosis creates the kind of symptomatic condition Bob Marley referred to as No chains around my feet, but I’m not free (Concrete Jungle). It is the same condition that causes Black South Africans to attack and kill other Africans while leaving intact what Achille Mbembe (2015) calls the structure of whiteness and Damon Young (2021) referred to as whiteness is pandemic. Whiteness is an issue but we do have our own problems which we must tackle head-on: Ethnic chauvinism and what I call the crisis of comparative religion where African Religion is misinterpreted, abused, and misused for financial gain, self-aggrandizement, and criminal pursuit of power—and where foreign religions such as Islam and Christianity are used to terrorize the physical bodies and minds of Africans, to undermine the growth and development and political stability in Africa, and to impoverish African practitioners of these religions.

The other issue of Black South Africans killing other Africans on the basis of their alleged foreignness is of grave concern. Foreignness is an alien culture and it defeats the purpose of ubuntu and the fact that no African is a stranger or foreigner in Africa. This is vintage Diopion cosmopolitanism, one of the characteristic pillars of the Southern Cradle Theory. In other words, Africa is not unique in terms of the artificial or man-made problems confronting it. There is an ongoing debate among some Africans that Africa should be rechristened because the word Africa is symptomatic of myriad negative connotations and associations. If so, then Europe and the U.S. must be renamed. In fact, each habitable continent should be renamed. On a New York train I overhead a White American telling his colleague, another White American, that America should be named after Coolio’s Gangsta’s Paradise and Europe after Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal." Other passengers heard this and started chuckling. I did not laugh or chuckle because I realized the seriousness of the titular implications.

Moreover, while Americans know very little about Africa and Africans, many Africans may not know much about Africa. And so, as should be expected, white ignorance becomes synonymous with the ignorance of these Africans. Most Africans I have come across have not heard about or read Diop, Fanon, or Obenga. I do not yet know if Smokey and Tharps read Diop, Fanon, and Obenga. What I do know is that neither was born in the White House nor will they be interred there when they pass on as we all will do someday. In America, they will always live and be interred in their social clothes of Africanness or Africanity even as Africans celebrate their whiteness in Africa, this whiteness they Smokey and Tharps called Black. They may have forgotten that the concept of Africa is more genetically and phenotypically inclusive than Black.

It is clear why Smokey is an entertainer and not an intellectual—much like Kanye West or Lil Wayne endorsing Donald Trump. Epistemological psychosis blights the mind of Africa and the independence, development, and growth of Africa. The structure of whiteness is an entrenched pandemic which means whiteness does not require a physical presence in the African world to inspire and institutionalize systems of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and racism. Carter G. Woodson’s The Miseducation of the Negro and what Chinweizu and Asante call the Pan-European Academy are the means via which the criminal invasion and colonization of the mind of Africa is actualized.

Afrocentric theory is the most important epistemological, philosophical, and methodological revolution to take place in African Studies and African American Studies since the 1960s. The presence of Afrocentric theory in the academy means Eurocentrism belongs in the extinction age of the dinosaurs. The fact that Afrocentric theory is not color-conscious, a view cemented by Being Human Being: Transforming the Race Discourse, authored by Asante and Naa Dove, is apt. Asante (2009) insists elsewhere that Of course, non-Africans can adopt an Afrocentric orientation to data about Africa. Therefore, we should dismiss Mbembe’s jaundiced description of Afrocentricity as epistemic counter-racism (Balakrishnan, 2016). This text is an important addition to the intersectional discourse of Afrocentricity, agency, and methodology. This further reinforces the distinction between Afrocentricity and Negritude. The intellectual and methodological rigor of Afrocentricity sets it apart from Negritude. Neither is Afrocentricity Afropolitanism, a term coined by the writer Taiye Selasi (2005) and academized and popularized by philosopher Mbembe (2007) among others (Pucherova, 2018), but rejected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who, in an interview, said, I reject it because it’s something applied to Africans in a way that doesn’t apply to other people (Juompan-Yakam, 2020), and others (Dabiri, 2016; Santana, 2013).

An Intellectual Biography of Africa appends an additional voice to the epistemological putsch against the edifice of the criminal Hegelian heresy. In this work, I use African world in a sense that is representative of continental Africa and the African Diaspora.

Mazama, Bangura, Asante, and intellectual inspiration from Falola and Emeka Nwadiora made this project possible. The intellectual biographies of the individuals covered in this book are meant to inspire others about what they can achieve should they put their minds to their aspirations. Diop’s The African Origin of Civilization, Mazama’s The Afrocentric Paradigm, Bangura’s African Mathematics: From Bones to Computers, Falola’s Decolonizing African Studies, and Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea and The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism inspired this book. The prehensile and prodigious minds of Diop, Bangura, Asante, Falola, and Mazama are beyond description.

I thank them all.

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Chapter 1

‘Songs of Sorrow": A Tribute

to Prof. Kofi Awoonor & the

Religious Terrorism Question

Yes, we all know of material corruption, we confront it all the time. Tragically neglected however is what we should learn to designate as spiritual corruption. Those who organized and carried out the outrage on innocent lives in Nairobi are carriers of the most lethal virus of corruption imaginable—corruption of the soul, corruption of the spirit, corruption of that animating humanistic essence that separates us from predatory beasts. I am no theologian of any religion, but I aver that these assailants delude themselves with vistas of paradise afterlife, that their delusion is born of the perverted reading of salvation and redemption. Those who attempt to divide the world into two irreconcilable parts—believers against the rest—are human aberrations. As for their claims to faith, they invoke divine authority solely as a hypocritical cover for innate psychopathic tendencies. Their deeds and utterances profane the very name of God or Allah…

Let us determine that, on this continent, we shall not accept that, after victory over race as card of citizen validation, Religion is entered and established as substitute on the passport, not only for citizen recognition, but even to entitlement to residence on earth…

Suffice it to stress for now that Kofi Awoonor was a passionate African, that is, he gave primacy of place to values derived from his Ewe heritage. That, in turn, means that he was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of ecumenism towards other systems of belief and cultural usages—this being the scriptural ethos that permeates belief practices of most of this continent. We mourn our colleague and brother, but first we denounce his killers, the virulent sub-species of humanity who bathe their hands in innocent blood.

—Wole Soyinka, Sahara Reporters (2013)

Prof. Awoonor, A Literary Giant

We could remember rummaging through a collection of secondhand books one Saturday afternoon in New York, Manhattan, when we came across a book, a strange book, almost threadbare. And the book in question was This Earth, My Brother—which Ato Quayson (2013) called one of the best examples of modernist alienation in African literature. That was in 2007, we think, more than a decade ago. And it was authored by none other than our own great rhapsodist and wordsmith Prof. Kofi Awoonor. Prof. Awoonor constructed complex plot structure and novelistic prose, as Quayson (2013) points out in the special case of This Earth, My Brother.

Before our chance encounter with This Earth, My Brother, we had read his beautiful Rediscovery and Other Poems, a task which, we believe, we also accomplished in 1997 or thereabouts, in the same New York. Our maternal uncle’s African American wife, a teacher in New York, loved the fierceness and emotional fire of Prof. Awoonor’s lyrical tongue, literary assertiveness, and poetic psychology.

However, Prof. Awoonor, like Mariama Bâ, Wole Soyinka, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, Nuruddin Farah, Ama Aidoo, Chinua Achebe, just to name a few, was not the kind of writer one read with intentional celerity and youthful casualness. Going straight to the point, Prof. Awoonor had an uncanny gift to officiate the complex marriage of words in a terpsichorean manner of his colorful and agile pen, typified by his audacious auctorial individuation, which, after all, neutralizes or disarms one’s hardened moments of psychological and emotional inertia—and converts this starchy inertia to a surfeit of enlightenment.

Moreover, his long stream of antagonistic and agreeable words managed to find a user-friendly community in the healthy body habitus of his arsenal of creative poetry—marinated in a rich vernacular of poetic chemistry.

The invigorating Blackness of his poetic orthography glanced off white pages as the wiggling feet of our greatest traditional dancers—of Adowa, Bobobor, and Kpanlogo—glance off dancing floors. In fact, his signature facility for poetic and literary articulation was one of a kind. And he was sometimes very difficult to read, too, at least in the case of those of us who came from the natural sciences, engineering, and pure mathematics backgrounds. Then again This Earth, My Brother, like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, richly adds to the fictionalized milieu of post-Nkrumah Ghana. We may even extend the evaluative compass of our rubric to include this work, primarily This Earth, My Brother, in the repertoire of postcolonial scholarship.

Or in the domain of critical theory.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood, Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, and Wole Soyinka’s The Open Sore of a Continent, again, to name but three, critically address some aspects of the checkered postcolonial and neocolonial experiences of the political life of Africa. Prof. Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother belonged in the same class as the corpora of these literary giants.

In poetry, he joined the enviable pantheon of giants such as Soyinka, Maya Angelou, Derek Walcott, Ama Ata Aidoo, Kofi Anyidoho, Efua Sutherland, Mazisi Kunene, Gwendolyn Brooks, J.P. Clark, and Atukwei Okai. And what of The House By the Sea? Doesn’t it belong in the classics of our great prison memoirs encompassing Thiong’o’s Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary and Wrestling with the Devil, Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Ruth First’s 117 Days, and Jack Mapanje’s The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, and Soyinka’s The Man Died? (Some scholars suspect that Ali Mazrui’s caustic critique of The Man Died engendered the foundational context for the acrimony that would occasionally impair the relationship between the two, Soyinka and Mazrui. See: Agyeman-Duah & Promise, 2014; Assensoh & Alex-Assensoh, 2014.).

Prof. Awoonor’s strong sense of political consciousness and social justice would land him in prison for reportedly extending assistance to a soldier who had attempted to topple the military regime at the time. His imprisonment gave him a sour taste of the turbulence, subversiveness, and instability of Ghanaian politics. The imprisonment was also an opportunity for deep reflection on which career trajectories he was to pursue—whether as an academic, literary scholar, poet, or career politician—or a combination of these options. The bitter experience of imprisonment was to prepare him for his career as a diplomat and politician, later a key player on the international and domestic political scenes.

Prof. Awoonor was cut out for politics contrary to a view held by an American colleague of his that he was not a political man (Schwartzman, 1976). In his rich literary repertoire, for instance, he demonstrated a remarkable grasp of political economy, social justice, and the challenges of nation-building—knowing full well that nation-building was not merely an act of frivolous intellectualism but an implied praxis of rigorous intellectualism and uncompromised patriotism.

His ideological alignment with Jerry John Rawlings and the putschists of 1981, represented by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), affirmed his long-standing left-leaning political beliefs and made him an easy target of the reactionary critics on the other side of the political aisle. As Ghanaweb (2013) put it directly quoting and paraphrasing Rawlings, Prof. Awoonor:

Spoke against socio-economic injustice and had a good understanding of human frailties and inequalities.

…helped lay the foundation of the revolution which saw a period with a sense of purpose and integrity—a period when democracy was at its best…

On the onset of the 31st December 1981 revolution when integrity was very high you were one of the bold and leading advocates of the PNDC principles and we thank you for it.

We once visited our friend, Dr. Molefi Kete Asante of Temple University, the father of Afrocentric theory, in his office in 2009. Asante shared his fond reminiscences of the great Prof. Awoonor with us. Among other narrative accolades, he told us how they had met in Brazil when the Professor served as Ghana’s ambassador there. Asante spoke greatly and respectfully of him as well as of his large body of work.

Indeed, the auctorial, literary, and poetic arms of the intellectual octopus of Prof. Awoonor ran all over the place like a hyperactive child in a candy store! Overall, although he sporadically adopted the experimental approach in pursuit of a unique literary and auctorial identity, the smorgasbord of his literary interests and explorations would enrich the epistemological, aesthetic, and intellectual topology of Ewe, Ghanaian, and African culture and languages. His contributions to the growth, indigenization, and refinement of English are not in doubt (Anyidoho, 2009). He also made the academic intercourse between Ewe and English the romantic envy of what others considered to be nativist and essentialist theories about other Ghanaian languages, thereby internationalizing Ewe through this critical formulation of literary intercourse and translation criticism.

Prof. Awoonor made significant contributions to Africa’s