Africana Intellectual/Pedagogical Work: Teaching to Answer the Call to the African Renaissance in the African Diaspora Context

Introduction

In this article, using duo auto-Afronography, a research method grounded in Afrocentric normative theory and scholarship within the academic discipline of Africana/Black Studies or Africology, we investigate possibilities for teaching that answers the African Renaissance call. Disciplinary Afrocentric normative theory requires placing Africans at the center of our pedagogical practice and research (Asante, 2017). A burgeoning array of multimedia resources about Africa online (animations, videos, etc.), as well as school texts and books written for young readers merit critical assessment. While there have been critiques of bias in online content like the “Slave Tetris” video game (Thomas, 2015) and depictions of proverbially “happy slaves” in children’s books (King, 2017), assessment criteria and standards informed by Africana/Black Studies theory and scholarship are needed. Thus, we co-narrate our experience interrogating our own intellectual and pedagogical work and assessing what selected African history teaching resources and relevant historical scholarship about ancient Mali’s legendary emperor, Mansa Musa, as one example, can provide to connect African American students to their Africana heritage and the African Renaissance vision. In other words, we ask: Can these materials aid teachers educate students for African diaspora literacy consciousness (Boutte et al., 2021; King, 2021b), that is, for a “global African identity” (Temple, 2005)?

Popularized by Cheikh Anta Diop (1990/2000), whose scholarship advanced our understanding of the cultural unity of Africa, and further promoted by South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki (1998), the African Renaissance concept envisions the transformation of Africa’s future and how Africa’s histories, peoples, and contributions to the world are understood. According to Mbeki, African underdevelopment should be a matter of concern to everyone in the world and the African Renaissance victory addresses not only the improvement of the conditions of life of the peoples of Africa but also humanity’s victory. What does this call to the African Renaissance on the continent mean for African ancestry students and their teachers in the Diaspora? Carr (2017) observes:

“On the African continent, the study of indigenous African traditions and epistemologies has led to the proposal of an African Renaissance, linked longitudinally to the African past. In the Diaspora, particularly in the United States, a similar impulse has led to the birth of Disciplinary Africana Studies, defined as the study of Africa when and wherever it is found.” (p. 12)

This Disciplinary Africana Studies approach can also be understood as putting the African Renaissance into practice, making it possible for African ancestry students to embrace a trans-state Pan-African identity. However, in the “Apartheid U.S. public school system” this intellectual and pedagogical work remains fraught with political contention (Carr, 2017, p. 16). In the next section we co-narrate our personal reflections on teaching about and curriculum materials related to Africa.

The History Teacher’s Story: My Students and My Pedagogy

Teaching seniors in an honors level high school history course in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia (USA) has been an enriching experience. The district serves students of diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds and my students bring a great deal of knowledge into the classroom from their school and lived experiences as some of their families come from other states, the Caribbean and West Africa. This mix of social and cultural backgrounds allows for engaging conversation about various topics and I have noticed my students’ genuine interest in wanting to connect to their Africana heritage. However, there are some challenges. My Honors History course introduces students to an Africana educational experience by delving into conversations about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa. This unique comparative approach to exploring 20th century social justice movements engages students with their Africana heritage while still meeting the requirements of the honors level curriculum. My seniors are mature enough to handle discussions about complex, sensitive topics such as racism, discrimination, and systemic oppression. They willingly engage analytically with these topics and are open to interrogating issues from multiple perspectives but they have had little exposure to information about Africa before they take my class.

Compared to my United States History and United States Government classes, Honors History is part of an international program and I am not restricted by state teaching standards, so I can introduce my students to various topics related to Africa and the Diaspora. I bring my knowledge as an African American Studies major at Howard University, what my grandfather taught me about my blackness and my heritage and my own genuine interest in our Africana heritage into my classroom space, all of which I use to help students navigate their learning about Africa. Nevertheless, standards and curricula are often limiting. For example, students learn about Nat Turner, but from a one-sided perspective that highlights Turner’s slave rebellion as a spark to sectionalism and tension within the country leading to the Civil War. This perspective fails to highlight this rebellion as a site of resistance among the enslaved that was an impetus to the abolition of slavery in this country. Likewise, presenting the forced removal of Native Americans, called the “Trail of Tears,” only as a necessary evil resulting from Western expansion misses an opportunity to discuss the lasting consequences of this horrific event on indigenous populations. Curriculum and textbook control of students’ thinking in such ways may also contribute to African Americans feeling disconnected when learning about Africa.

To assess students’ prior knowledge when I introduce a new topic, I always put a list of words, phrases, key figures, etc., on the board and ask what they know or think a given item means. Words and phrases for the American Civil Rights Movement include: rights, conflict, racism, slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, constitution, amendments, for example. Topics and phrases that introduce South African Apartheid include: oppression, humanity, diaspora, trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonization, kingdom, government, Dutch, Africa, among other ideas. My students exhibit a tremendous amount of prior knowledge and understanding of the words and phrases I use to introduce the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. They recall specific instances of learning about this topic, seeing information on social media and even hearing stories from family members. However, when I introduce South African Apartheid, they neither have any prior knowledge nor feel connected to the topic. I have often wondered why?

I find it even more troubling that my African American students’ only meaningful connection to Africa seems to be slavery. I purposefully include the word “slavery” among various introductory terms and phrases, but one way or another, our conversations always seem to focus mostly on slavery. One student typically brings up how Africans sold each other into slavery. Another gives a detailed depiction of the triangular slave trade, while yet another speaks of the horrors of the middle passage. While my students can express a great deal of knowledge in relation to the important topic of slavery, they fall short in commenting on and seem to be disconnected from any other topics related to the continent that I present in my introductions. I believe my students’ higher level of engagement with and interrogation of issues when I am teaching the Civil Rights Movement is because they feel more knowledgeable about and connected to their African American experience and they hold onto the idea that the consequences of this struggle directly impact their lives. They feel a need to consider how some aspects of our circumstances in the United States have not changed and to think of ways to combat these issues in our contemporary context. On the other hand, students see the experiences of those in Africa as disconnected from their own lived experience. When discussing South African Apartheid, students seem more willing to absorb information rather than to critically interrogate it and apply their analysis to their own lives. However, I think their less than critical engagement has more to do with a lack of connection not a lack of interest. How can teachers deepen African American students’ connection to African history and contemporary realities?

In this age of technology students can receive all kinds of information about Africa from various online multimedia sources but with no standards or criteria and most students lack the skills to properly evaluate such information. Educators need to know how to interrogate the validity of multimedia and print sources (including school texts as well as historical scholarship) used in the classroom and how to provide students with a lens to view both Africa’s unique contributions to the world and African American students’ connections to Africa as people of African ancestry. Further, we need more accurate and comprehensive instructional materials, not to control students’ thinking, but for a pedagogy that allows students to develop their own culturally-informed lens to understand connections between Africa and the African Diaspora.

The Professor’s Story: My Intellectual/Pedagogical Journey

As a teacher educator and researcher seeking to develop liberating education experiences and research methods, I often wonder what knowledge or experiences make consciousness possible. My lived experiences counter the propaganda about our African heritage in biased teaching resources that pass for education. These experiences influence my research and teaching. For example, when I attended the U.N. International Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985, a student I met at the University of Nairobi invited me to join his family on a visit to see their grandfather. When we entered this elder gentleman’s home in an impoverished area of the city, he thought I was from Kenya. When the family told him that I was from the United States, the old man started to weep and said: “Thank God one of our daughters has come home. Don’t ever feel ashamed about what has happened because you have a home here.” This is part of the crime. How ironic. We have been made to feel ashamed. This is the crux of the Pan-African challenge we are facing in education on the continent and in Diaspora contexts. Will slavery and African participation in this crime against humanity continue to separate us and obstruct our identification with our shared Africana heritage? Can existing educational resources facilitate young people’s (re)connection or reconciliation with Africa? Rather, is education in Diaspora contexts a hopeless hindrance to “diasporic subjectivity,” and as such, an obstacle to the African Renaissance vision (King, 2021a, p. 146)?

These questions influence my intellectual and pedagogical work and my scholarship focused on deciphering ideologically flawed school textbooks and the harmful effects of the “amputation of memory” (Carr, 2011) in curricula. These concerns also stem from my experiences coming of age intellectually and politically as an activist student resisting eurocratic school knowledge and participating in the struggle to establish the discipline of Africana/Black Studies in the 1960s (King, 2020). My intellectual and pedagogical journey has also involved combatting ideological distortions in supposedly “multicultural” textbooks and curricula, including ideas such as: “The United States is a nation of immigrants” (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2021). During a controversial History/Social Studies curriculum framework and textbook adoption in California in 1991, when the idea that “Africans sold their own brothers and sisters into slavery” pervaded the discussion, Wynter’s (1992) Black Studies analysis of the textbook debate offered a clarifying counter argument: “There were no Africans then.” That is, “there was no concept of ‘Africans’ among these diverse peoples at that time; rather the peoples of Africa identified with their lineage (family or kinship), clan or dissent group and not with the continent” (King, 1992, p. 329).

Using Wynter’s (1992) theorizing of such textbook (mis)representations of African participation in the slave trading busines (e.g., “Africans selling Africans”), my investigation of the clash around this textbook adoption involved teachers and parents in a research workshop, noting that slavery as it had existed in West Africa “did not begin with (African) chiefs selling their own people to Europeans; and before it ended, Europeans engaged in outright wars and made military alliances to capture their own prisoners of war for sale” (King, 1992, p. 329). Thus, also missing in these textbooks’ narratives were more complete and accurate accounts of the various historical forms of captivity, subjugation, tribute, and unfree labor in Africa and Europe that should have been compared, not with chattel slavery in the Americas, but with European slavery, serfdom, or vassalship. Nor was there any discussion in these textbooks of different conceptions of slavery in the minds of those who eventually came to be defined as white in Pan-European terms by the social construction of race versus their identities as British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. (Horne, 2020). Likewise, because no Pan-African conception of African identity existed in Africa at that time, “villagers who raided other villages in the same region did not perceive themselves, necessarily as one people (but then neither did the Vandals, Gauls, or Visigoths of Europe)” (King, 1992, p. 331, emphasis in the original). Also, it is worth remembering that these “slave trading” nations of Europe were in competition with each other: the canons they installed to defend their forts built along the West African coast were pointed outward—facing the ocean—not inward facing toward the continent, from whence the captives they imprisoned in these dungeons awaiting deportation had been taken.

An exchange with a white teacher during a particularly contentious California Curriculum Commission textbook evaluation meeting illustrates another problematic idea in the white mind. She thanked me for the professional development presentation I made to prepare the teachers for their deliberations. Quite unselfconsciously she said, “You really educated me today, Dr. King. I never knew anyone else had been slaves except Africans.” She didn’t think about or recall slavery in ancient Greece and Rome. The implications of such racist, socially produced ignorance pale compared to the curriculum violence inflicted on Black students, particularly when the subject is slavery and Africa (Watson-Vandiver & Wiggan, 2021). Others are also traumatized. A Latina teacher tearfully wondered aloud what to tell her Mexican American students about textbook depictions of their Aztec ancestors engaged in “human sacrifice.”

Textbook bias issues that I investigate and challenge in my research and teaching, “not as a historian or learning or reading specialist but as a sociologist interested in the sociology of knowledge that functions as ideology,” continue to roil schools and educators in the U.S. and other African Diaspora contexts (King, 1992, 2021a, p. 319). From within the worldview perspective of the academic discipline of Africology, however, there is no ambiguity about what counts as a valid claim to knowledge; what knowledge and consciousness permit a critique of the “social domination of ideas” (Giddens, 1979) and the “role of the intellectual in the partisan struggles of political life” (King et al., 2019). The radical Black Intellectual Tradition (Kelley, 2020) informs the epistemological approach to knowledge for African diaspora literacy consciousness and my vocation as a Black scholar (Harding, 1974). This approach includes challenging the way African enslavement is taught, which ideologically alienates us from our right to culturally grounded trans-state Pan-African identification with our Africana heritage (Carr, 2011), feelings of belonging and “trans-Atlantic kinship” (Temple, 2005, p. 166). The normative goal of the discipline of Africology that shapes my research and teaching is: using knowledge “to transform the lives of Black people. . .and humanity” (Carroll, 2007, p. 25).

Using Duo Auto-Afronography to Critically Assess African History Teaching Resources

In 2018 to 2019 the United Nations dispatched expert Working Groups to examine and to report back to the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights regarding African peoples’ well-being in the Diaspora. They reported grave concerns about the education of African descent people in the U.S. and Canada. ¹ For Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora, education, including the intellectual and pedagogical work of scholars, is critical to answering the call to the African Renaissance, the Pan-African challenge in the Diaspora context (Asante & Dove, 2021). In response to this challenge, as African-centered scholars, we used duo auto-Afronography, a research method grounded in normative Afrocentric theory, to reflexively examine our thinking, pedagogical practice, and selected African history teaching resources. Akin to what in sociology is called ethnography or case studies, Asante and Mazama (2005) state that Afronography:

. . .begins from a different place and has objectives that are often at variance with those of ethnography. While ethnography was developed as a Eurocentric way of acquiring information about people other than Europeans, Afronography is a method of gaining access to information about Africans from the standpoint of African culture itself. (p. 76)

Auto-Afronography seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience to understand cultural experience (Ellis, 2004; Holman Jones, 2005). Duo auto-Afronography involves two researchers who collaborate and use themselves, that is, their own biographies, as sites of research “from the standpoint of the culture” (Norris et al., 2012).

A Critical Assessment Informed by the Africana Studies Framework

This section introduces the way the Africana Studies Framework, which consists of seven conceptual categories (e.g., the “Social Structure” and the “Governance Structure”) and framing questions informed our critical analytic assessment of the teaching resources we considered. Carr (2011) presents this Framework as a methodology to teach African American Studies/Black Studies/Africology courses (Norment, 2007) to broaden the questions that can and should be posed about African people’s experiences. A “Social Structure” conceptual category framing question focuses on “the systems Africans opposed” and permits students to ask: “Who are we (Africans) to others?” Framing questions within the “Governance Structure” conceptual category focus on “the internally-organized systems Africans used to survive and ultimately oppose those systems.” These framing questions ask: “Who are we (Africans) to each other?” And “What social structures did Africans find themselves in that required them to think of themselves as being connected?” Or “How did Africans seek unity in thought and action?” ⁴

The audiovisual media we reviewed typically present Mansa Musa not in relation to other African people but only compare him to others (non-Africans), wealthy white men, for example, Cairo merchants or other Arabs. Thus, we only “see” Mansa Musa through a eurocratic or Arab social structure lens, using the “social, economic, political, and cultural environment” of others as criteria by which to interpret Mansa Musa’s actions and to judge his historical significance. Emphasizing that he was a “legend in medieval Europe,” for instance, a focus within the “Social Structure” conceptual category, places the emperor, and the Mali Empire within the context of how other imperial nations functioned during this historical period. However, this focus offers no opportunity for students to consider framing questions within “Governance Structure” conceptual categories that ask what Mansa Musa meant to other people in Africa then, or what he means to us in the Diaspora, on our own terms as people of ancestry today.

We found that the narratives presented in these audiovisual resources do not incorporate the historical information included in the history books for students and young readers as far back as the 1960s. Such earlier scholarship (historiography) contextualized Kankan Mansa Musa as an exceptionally effective and devout African leader who valued education and scholarship, who built institutions of learning for his people, and who, in doing so, dramatically transformed not only West Africa’s architectural heritage but also African people’s standing in the world. Through such scholarly interpretation that aligns with the Africana Studies Framework’s “Governance Structure” conceptual category, students can learn about what it was like to live in this prosperous empire among the diverse peoples Mansa Musa governed and, by appreciating their humanity, students even have the opportunity to identify with a shared Africana heritage of the people of the Mali Empire.

Narratives that represent Mansa Musa primarily as the “richest man who ever lived” in comparison to wealthy Arabs then or contemporary white men are not informed by Afrocentric normative theory, which requires centering African people’s experience and viewpoints. For instance, we can consider Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage in light of African traditions of gold-laden spiritual pilgrimages that extend as far back as pious Nubian priests bringing generous offerings of gold to the Temple of Isis in ancient Egypt (Ashby, 2020). Teachers need professional development opportunities to learn about and critically interrogate the complex and evolving historiography of Africa using broader framing questions suggested by the Africana Studies Framework conceptual categories. Oliver’s (2013) book for young readers is the only one we found that intentionally takes up the question of slavery by including a comprehensive definition that contextualizes the meanings of the words “slave/serf.” While the participation (and betrayal) of some “African” rulers and traders in the slavery enterprise that evolved over time on the continent is well-documented, the historical record includes African resistance as well. Teaching such materials that include African resistance would allow students to see themselves within their Africana heritage not only as victims (e.g., slaves or “Africans who sold other Africans”) but also as subjects with humanity and agency.

It is also important to acknowledge that the accounts of Arab chroniclers that scholars rely on to reconstruct narratives of medieval Africa’s history in this period are not neutral or unbiased sources. Significantly, however, African/African American perspectives and moral condemnations of the trickery, deceit, and betrayal the enslavement enterprise entailed are preserved in African people’s expressive cultural forms (e.g., folklore, the oral tradition, African/African American literature, and African languages), identified in the Africana Studies Framework’s “Movement and Memory” conceptual category (Stuckey,1968). Yet, orthodox historical scholarship has typically not valued these “Ways of Knowing” (another Africana Studies Framework conceptual category) as valid sources of knowledge for research and teaching. Thus, the “mind” or point of view of Africa’s peoples regarding these matters, including evidence in local African languages of African people’s thought, values, and critical understandings of what enslavement meant, is also not present in the audiovisual media or print resources we reviewed and is unavailable to teachers struggling with the intellectual and pedagogical task of helping African American students to identify emotionally with and thus to connect to their Africana heritage. The following excerpts from our dialogue about this challenge illustrate intellectual and pedagogical aspects of this duo auto-Afronography inquiry.

Toward Solution-Oriented Conclusions

This study asked: Do online audiovisual resources and other history teaching resources convey intellectual/historical information informed by Africana/Black Studies scholarship and support African American/Diaspora students’ identification with Africa and the call to the African Renaissance? Not exactly. Yet, our interrogation of these matters and reflexive dialogue pointed us toward solution-oriented conclusions: Both novice and experienced teachers need historically accurate, comprehensive teaching resources informed by this scholarly perspective to facilitate students’ intellectual and emotional identification with their Africana heritage and to recover and pass on our memories as African people to future generations. Before engaging in the research and writing this article, the Teacher would not have taught the African Renaissance as a topic in his Honors History course. However, our research enabled him to further understand the African Renaissance as a call to connect African people in the Diaspora. He began to look inward at ways to improve his pedagogy to aid in answering the call. Participating in the duo auto-Afronography inquiry was fulfilling; the process affirmed his ability to tell his story from an Africana perspective and to better understand his students’ educational experiences, as well. This inquiry method offers a space for Black voices to articulate Black stories.

Given that so much (mis)information is available about the continent, it is imperative for educators to know the many ways that history teaching fails to provide students with adequate information and skills to interrogate this information for its validity and accurate representation of African people’s histories. With the Africana Studies Framework conceptual categories in mind, we also believe that as educators we should work to become students ourselves. We should be able to relate to our students intellectually and emotionally. Even if the teacher is not a person of African ancestry, it is still possible to create this connection. Lastly, teachers are not a bank of knowledge to simply deposit information into the minds of students. Rather, we should be a guide for our students, willing to assist them along their journey, not control it.