By Tatenda Gapa

THERE was a gathering of African scholars at the Afrocentricity International Annual Convention in Harare last month. Many issues were discussed, but one of the major highlights was when the scholars noted that a disregard of Africa-centred and adoption of a Eurocentric approach to solving problems continues to slow progress and growth of the African continent. Afrocentricity has been described as the quality of viewing phenomena from the perspective of the African person, while a Eurocentric approach is the practice of viewing the world from a European perspective and with an implied belief, in the pre-eminence of European culture. Afrocentricity studies ideas, concepts, events, personalities, and political and economic processes from a standpoint of black people as subjects and not as objects. What would African people do if there were no whites? Afrocentricity answers the question by asserting the central role of the African subject within the context of African history, thereby removing Europe from the centre of the African reality. For more than 400 years of slavery and colonialism, Europe and America imposed their cultures on the continent while eradicating African systems that governed the continent’s societies. And a continued looking up to European systems and scholars while shunning Afrocentric solutions is what has retarded development on the continent. According to prominent African scholar, Professor Molefi Kete Asante from the Department of African-American Studies at the Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, education systems in Africa need to be challenged so that they become relevant in the African context. “There is a unique situation that now confronts Africa in the educational arena as well as the media,” he said. “Institutions that were based on white supremacy and the separation of races, need to be challenged to find relevance within a free, democratic Africa.” According to some of Africa’s finest minds that gathered for the annual convention, Africa already has a centre, a ground and sources of reference. For Africa to solve the problems it currently finds itself in that include poverty and hunger amid plenty, wars with fellow brothers and sisters, exploitation by and loss of precious resources to outsiders, it needs to look within. Prominent African scholar, Dr Augustine Tirivangana said Africa must revert to itself to get out of the myriad challenges it presently faces. “Within, in its cultures, systems, methods, lore and elders lies the answers that will catapult Africa to total unity and greatness,” he said. “The problem with Africa is that it is standing on many grounds and it is not on where it is supposed to be and as long as Africa does not set its own agenda, someone, an outsider, will set it for them. “Africa has been conditioned to think using Western frameworks which hardly solve the African problems.” According to Prof Asante, Afrocentricity is the quality of seeking in every situation the appropriate centrality of the African person. “Africa has all the answers to every single problem it currently faces, All Africa needs to do is look within and not without,” said Prof Asante. Eurocentricity, he said, had compromised Africa as the system was viewed and imposed as universal as well as the sum total of the human experience. He said Eurocentricity has nothing positive to offer the continent despite appearing ‘grand’. “Eurocentricity is based on white supremacist notions which endeavour to protect white advantage in education, economics and politics by teaching that what is white is universal, even human while what is black cannot be human,” said Pof Asante. “If our culture can only rely on concepts derived from European concepts and experiences then Africa is left with an imitated culture, the solution is the reclamation and restoration of Africa’s distorted historical and civilisation legacy”. Prof Asante described President Robert Mugabe as an iconic symbol of resistance who went against all odds and embarked on the Land Reform Programme as part of correcting historical injustices. The programme benefitted over 400 000 black households. Previously about 4 000 white farmers owned the country’s prime land. “Africans (in Zimbabwe) saw the European grabbing of African lands by force, trickery and fake deeds as a devious mechanism for dispossessing the ancestors’ descendants of the use of their own lands, if one used even the definition of land ownership then the 70 percent of Zimbabwean land that the 4 000 white farmers controlled was nothing more than common theft,” Prof Asante said. Africa, he said, has its own scholars and heroes which Africans should continuously refer to for solutions to Africa’s problems. It is time, said the scholars, Africans do away with the message that the West continues to put across, which is that Africa is a helpless and ‘dark continent’. If Africa is a dark continent, then how did the likes of an asthmatic Cecil John Rhodes, the chief coloniser and first man to sign a one million pound cheque find Zimbabwe as his safe haven?