Sociology of Africa: A Non-Orientalist Approach to African,Africana,and Black Studies

Introduction

Uzodinma Iweala (2007), a Nigerian-born author and physician, wrote an astonishing article in the Washington Post, titled ‘Stop Trying To “Save” Africa’, in which he argues that the slogans of western humanitarianism, such as ‘save Darfur’, ‘stop genocide in Sudan’ or sloganeering to save ‘starving black children’ in Africa are a result of a region wracked by guilt at the humanitarian crises it has created in the Middle East, and so the West has turned to Africa for redemption. This fantasy of saving Africa materializes within liberal academic discourse, yet does not reflect a clear picture of the continent, and often ignores the creative mind of African-descended thinkers such as Du Bois, Fanon, Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nyerere, Nathan Hare, Maulana Karenga, and many others. I question how this image has been created and is sustained, and believe it is important to understand how the academic discourse compares in relation to the ideal of a fully rooted and contextual understanding of Black, African, and Africana studies. What would Black Studies scholars such as Du Bois or Fanon think of current scholarship in the field, and what their response would be? I would like to challenge scholars in the field to teach Black, African, and Africana Studies from an Afro-centric – and therefore non-Orientalist – perspective and furthermore to do so through the lens of an Africa-centered Sociology. The benefit of this approach is to provide a methodological and theoretical framework with which to understand the social, political, and economic conditions of Africa and the African diaspora from a contextual perspective. To do so, it is necessary to apply African and black scholarship and other sources of African intellectual capital.

As a brief overview and conceptual map of the structure of this article, there are several related concepts that I will discuss. The first is the concept of colonialism, which is a historical concept with vast implications for the post-colonial era. This is the starting point of analysis due to its relevance to the politics of the African continent, and also to the identity of the modern African diaspora. The second concept is that of Orientalism, first coined by Edward Said in his book, Orientalism (1994). Orientalism, and by extension neo-Orientalism, is an example of colonization in the modern context; colonization in terms of the predominance of a neo-Orientalist school of thought within western academia in relation to the African peoples and history. Colonization is the legacy structure and Orientalism is the present day reality of colonial thinking that is embedded in western education and intellectual structures. These concepts are used in conjunction with each other throughout this article, in order to provide context for the intellectual underpinnings of the field of Black Studies, and the driving force behind its inception and development to the present day.

Finally, the article describes and proposes an Africa-centered Sociology as remedy to some of the pitfalls in the largely neo-Orientalist educational structure of African and some forms of Africana studies today. As a relatively new field, Africana studies does provide a more Afro-centric definition than the older field of African regional studies, and it also improves on African studies in its consideration of the African Diaspora. Indeed, Africana studies is a direct challenge to the legacy structures of African studies and is more similar in approach and method to Black Studies. However, the afro-centric Black Studies approach would still be much stronger if rooted within a Sociology of Africa.

The Orientalist approach to regional area studies based most often in fields such as history, political science, and international studies extends from a history of colonialism and continues to the modern day by stealing the history of African natives and reconstructing it for the benefit of a Eurocentric educational system in the West. This history is written by the hegemonic powers of western colonialism, but there is evidence that it is being taken back by those to whom it truly belongs. Much work has been done in recent decades to review Africa through the paradigmatic lens of Africa-centered Black Studies. In this light, my analysis is used to provide the foundation for a new non-Orientalist ‘Africa-centered’ sociology, or what I refer to as the Sociology of Africa, that calls for the systemic study of the social, political, and economic conditions of Africa and the African diaspora by drawing from the perspectives of past and current African and black social theorists and political leadership, and critical sociologists. The Sociology of Africa will employ ideas formulated by sociologists and social theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Jomo Kenyatta, Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Nathan Hare, Ali Mazrui, Molefi Asante, and Maulana Karenga.

The strength of the sociological approach is its ability to take into account the legacy of colonialism and its political and social impacts, and the current socio-economic and political dynamics that arise from these early structures. I also propose to use a scholarly activism and post-colonial critical sociology theoretical and methodological approach. The approach is based on the work of a combination of prominent African-centered black social theorists, post-colonial scholars and some of the critical sociologists listed earlier. The field of Sociology contains a vast amount of scholarship on the critical theory and power relations perspective. The scholarly activist approach is a direct reflection of critical activism, which also takes into account power relations in a society. Black Studies emerged as a uniquely activist field of study, and has historically demanded a direct relationship and link between the community and academia. What I refer to as a scholarly activist approach is similar to what author Terry Kershaw describes as a Black Studies paradigm and critical method based on exposing and redressing the power relations in a society (Kershaw, 1992: 482). Together, the proposed scholarly activism and post-colonial critical sociological approach provide a solid analytical framework through which to develop a contextually based Afro-centric Sociology of Africa.

My objective in this endeavor is to propose the Sociology of Africa as a new course offering in the field; a course that can integrate and critique the African, Africana, and Black Studies historical experience in academia. While each of these terms is open to critique and specification, in isolation, the fact of the matter is that they are generally conflated with regard to course offerings and the bureaucratic delineations of departments. Therefore, beyond my brief overview of the differences that do exist in these approaches, and description of the history of Black Studies in America, and because it is a separate task to catalog the full histories of these terms, I use ‘African’, ‘Africana’, and ‘Black’ Studies interchangeably. However, when I intend to comment on one separately from the others, I make that distinction. I rely on the term ‘Africana’ most prominently, as it signals ‘Africa’ but includes a diasporic quality that most easily describes these studies. Further, I treat African-American Studies as only a particular subfield of these. I do not intend to say that the distinctive emergence, usage, and implication of each of these terms is not itself a political creation of its time, but that is not the purpose here.

Africa’s Colonial Legacy and Structures

Africa’s borders were drawn in the 20th century by the colonial powers whose economic interests were best served by sustaining and intensifying tribal and ethnic conflict. This chaos allowed colonial economies to exploit Africa’s social, political, and economic resources, facilitating and extending modern slavery into the 20th century. The rule of divide and conquer is demonstrated clearly in the history of this continent’s colonial geography, and African leaders have partly failed to resist the ongoing implications of this enslavement. In fact, the social, economic, and political conditions of Africa have not changed much over the second part of 20th century. I therefore explore the continuation of early power structures put in place by the dynamics between the colonizer and colonized and that continue in Africa today. I argue that these structures have become more powerful, not less, as a consequence of capitalist globalization and Africa’s ‘development’.

In his book Racism without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2006) provides an interesting perspective regarding the continuation of racism, long after the actual ideology of racism loses its hold on previous generations. This theoretical perspective explains an important component of the problem in the West: What happens when ideology is color blind, but the legacy structures of racism remain intact? According to Bonilla-Silva, inequality still exists because the structures of racism persist, along with the people who enacted and supported these structures. Additionally, it is extremely difficult to measure the amount of progress that is made to combat racism because white racism is malleable and takes different forms over time. Race, we can agree, impacts life chances and opportunities as a fixed and ascribed status that cannot be changed, whereas class and poverty are achieved and malleable statuses. In this way, racism is embedded and remains intact over time, even after racists themselves are removed. For example, the genocide in Rwanda took place in 1994 as a result of tribal ethnic conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. Just before and during the genocide, there was no colonial power in Rwanda, however the colonial structures and mentality left in place by the colonial powers from 1935 under Belgium colonialism indirectly resulted in these mass killings. We can find many examples like this one in African history, and of events that resulted in genocide and tribal war or apartheid regimes like that in South Africa.

In the 20th century, the actions of imperialist and colonialist powers intent on using the natural and labor resources of the global south also led to the cultural destruction of native populations. Exploitation of economic resources by the West created detrimental social and political impacts within the societies of colonized peoples, in addition to leaving profound psychological impacts. This takes place as an internalization of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. These dynamics have taken place through both forcible and peaceful political and social activities, and as a by-product of rules imposed by the colonial powers. We can see in Jean and John Comaroff’s (1997) work that socio-political events and ideologies, including various forms of ethnic conflict, ethnocentrism, reactionary nationalism, elitism (in the colonized regions), democracy versus authoritarianism, free press and free speech, and human rights cannot be properly understood and defined within colonized spaces because the mind or psyche of the colonized peoples is not subject to self-determination, but often becomes an extension of the social and political will of the colonizer.

Orientalism Defined

Without colonialism and colonialist legacy structures of education and governance, Orientalism would not exist. Orientalism is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, relevant not just to Middle East Studies, but to all regional, area, and ethnic studies, and particularly to African/Africana/Black Studies. In his 1994 book Orientalism, Edward W. Said illustrates and defines the concept of Orientalism and how it applies within western academia, with a particular focus on the colonial period. He is interested in questioning the Orientalist discourse, and claims that the fuel driving Orientalism is not academic, but is more likely to be policy-oriented. The assumption of value-free and objective knowledge in area, regional, and ethnic studies does not exist in the Orientalist approach; rather, these fields have flourished today as a result of subjectivity in the West in the fields of history and anthropology, for example. On the other hand, Sociology is uniquely positioned to offer an approach that is critical toward the socially constructed sciences and to construct theories and methodologies that are able to explicitly identify the lens that is used to look at an issue.

According to Said, Europeans used to refer to the Eastern world as ‘the Orient’, a term which holds a vague meaning. Said asserts that this term is a European invention used to describe lands and people that have historically been perceived rather simplistically as mystic and exotic, with little distinction made between and among the peoples and cultures that exist in the region. Moving one step further from this analysis, Said also states that, ‘the Orient is not adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, a source of its civilization, and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other’ (Said, 1994: 1). Also according to Said, the European identity has been formed based on its perceived contrast with the mysterious and exotic Oriental others. Iweala (2007) describes this as ‘the West’s new image of itself’.

Edward Said described Orientalism as a process of ongoing colonialism in the Middle East, enacted through Eurocentric and western academia and policy. In his book, Said argues that the idea of Orientalism creates a separation between East and West, and generates animosity between different religions, cultures, and lifestyles. He believes that Orientalists have been trying to control the knowledge of the Orient and reconstruct the truth according to their specific policy needs and objectives within a Eurocentric viewpoint embedded within a subjective reality.

In a philosophical sense, Said’s perception of the ‘truth’ is similar to Foucault’s perception of the relationship between truth, power, and knowledge. Said believed that there is no real truth, there is only subjective knowledge that is imposed by western academia, policy institutions, and think tanks. The traditional ‘knowledge’ available today in the social sciences is accepted as reality but has been filtered and manipulated to meet the narrow political interests of colonial or neocolonial powers before reaching those it intends to educate. In this way, Said asserts, Orientalists are able to control, shape, and reconstruct knowledge of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. In his work, Said describes real knowledge as non-political and Orientalism as the insidious approach that extends into culture, scholarship, and institutions. Said viewed this politicized knowledge as a dangerous force in the world, and one that leads to interference in the region by western policy makers and government. Thinkers such as Eqbal Ahmad and Samir Amin also focus on the relationship between the truth and power, and the difference between real knowledge that is not politicized and ideological knowledge that has little basis in the truth. Said asserts that the truth should be independent of authority, political interests or external influences.

The best illustration of Orientalism can be found in the work of Bernard Lewis, an Islamic and Middle East historian who has been working and writing on the field of Middle East Studies for more than 40 years. In his recent work, What Went Wrong, Lewis (2002) argues that after 11 September 2001, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies have been under increased scrutiny in academia. According to Lewis, liberal academic activism did not facilitate American national security interests in the fields of Middle East Studies. Similar to Lewis, Martin Kramer’s (2001) book, Ivory Towers on Sand, implies that Middle Eastern Studies should be controlled by government and policy- oriented circles for the American interests in the region.

On the other hand, Said argues that Orientalism – area studies – is a career in the Eurocentric academic circles. His approach in fact is no different from Lewis and Kramer’s criticism in terms of career options available for some academicians. Hence, Said’s contribution to social theory demonstrates that imperialism and colonialism are alive and well in the modern world. Said attempts to find an answer to ‘whether modern imperialism ever ended, or … has continued in the Orient since Napoleon’s entry into Egypt two centuries ago’ (Said, 1994: xxii). Understood in a slightly different but related light, Benjamin Disraeli said that, ‘The east is a career’, in the sense that scholars have benefited either financially or academically from their involvement in the field (Said, 1994: xiii). According to some, this is a form of pseudo-scholarship which tends to be policy-oriented and ideological. As a result, there emerged a cadre of ‘Africanists’, similar to the ‘Islamicists’ or ‘Asianists’, whose specialization in these subjects came to demonstrate their own self-interest and opportunism.

African Studies and Orientalism

The African continent is most accurately characterized by its history of colonization and hegemony by western nations, including slavery, genocide, and widespread poverty. Each of these is eloquently and hauntingly described in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, The White Man’s Burden (1899). Kipling alludes to the belief in the right and obligation of the white man to ‘civilize’ or ‘improve’ the natives by helping them to become more like Europeans. This prominent view served to justify the goals and objectives of the imperialist powers and worked in the guise of a perceived moral benefit to conquered peoples. Colonized peoples, the popular sentiment went, should be educated and their history should be written according to a Eurocentric educational system.

In order to better understand Africana Studies, it is important to examine and apply postcolonial theories and to integrate the contributions of postcolonial scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Albert Memmi, and Aime Cesaire. This body of work can then be compared with the work of African Studies scholars such as Kwame Appiah, Ali Mazrui, Jean and John Comaroff, Molefi Asante, Mervat Hatem, Maulana Karenga, and James L. Conyers. To begin with, Edward Said, as mentioned, described the western view of the ‘Orient’ as a European construction of an imagined mystic and exotic place, abstracted from its geography. This imagined place is a by-product of European capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997: 689) and is real in that it exists as an expression of the European colonial mind. It has also provided a platform on which Europe has been able to build its own identity. Based upon a counter-definition to the ‘Orient’, Said asserts that Europe’s identity rests in its ability to define itself in relation to places like the ‘Orient’. Also in relation to nomenclature, Africana Studies scholar Ali Mazrui (2005) argues that European conceptualizations and cartography produced the modern term ‘Africa’. Mazrui (2005) examines the interaction between Africans and other cultures in the creation of the concept of Africa, arguing that the continent itself is a by-product of the interactions between a core ‘African-ness’, and Islam, combined with the impact of the West.

Kwame Appiah’s (1992) and Jean and John Comaroff’s (1997) arguments regarding the invention of Africa and of ‘Africa observed’ are very similar to Said’s concept of Orientalism. Appiah, however, argues that colonial languages, such as English and French, facilitate the continuation of colonial identities on the continent, thus propelling neo-colonialization through externally imposed cultural channels. In this way, the colonized peoples scarcely recognize their own oppression. In Appiah (1992), neo-colonialization shows us that Orientalism manifests itself within educational institutions, especially in the postcolonial era. For example, how many people would like to learn Swahili or their mother tongue in the continent? But most of the people want to learn English, French or Portuguese in order to find job or study opportunities. This reality is more destructive for the native culture of Africa than slavery.

Appiah perceives Orientalism as the process of neo-colonization of the African continent. Related to this, Said argues that the idea of Orientalism creates a separation between local cultures, and also eliminates the role of religion, culture, and lifestyle of the native or indigenous peoples. Said and Appiah similarly argue that the new so-called modern educational system will (and is) subversively destroy(ing) local cultures and languages without conscious detection by the native. The native is viewed as a savage, and the native language and culture are perceived as backward or traditional. According to Said, Orientalists have been trying to change local educational and public policy in an attempt to control the knowledge of the Orient and thereby reconstruct the truth. The truth now under discussion, however, is a fabricated truth that resonates with the modern image of Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997:121). The dichotomy between traditionalism and modernity will always tend to favor the modern, and over time, colonized peoples become increasingly detached from their own culture, and their language and traditions gradually become alien to them. In this context, Comaroff and Comaroff argue that the concept of Africa represents the antithesis of modernity – a geography marked by backwardness and a savage lifestyle. This image is an abstraction of the mind of the colonizer, implemented in concrete terms through the imposition of a foreign language and culture on the continental native (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997: 87).

Aime Cesaire (1972) describes Europe as a perceived center of civilization. Europe has long been perceived as the center of human rights, democracy, freedom of speech, and most importantly, the center of modernity. This perspective of a centralized civilization originated from an ethnocentric and wholly internal view of Europe. Despite this internal self-perception, two world wars started in Europe and were responsible for the deaths of more than 70 million people. Each of the transcontinental and globalized military occupations of the 19th and 20th centuries started at the hands of European and western colonialist powers. The argument regarding the ‘center of civilization’, then, has been rooted in both the perpetual idea and the historical reality of colonization and the hegemony and domination of Europe.

Cesaire’s description of Europe’s view of itself as the center of civilization reminds one of George W. Bush’s argument that the United States needed to promote democracy and our way of life abroad; a view also rooted in a fictional perception of self-importance. This type of democracy is an imagined democracy that does not have any intrinsic or applicable meaning in Africa or other parts of the world. Additionally, Cesaire’s analysis might be used in the recent discussion of torture cases in the United States. The US Congress has been discussing whether or not waterboarding constitutes torture. Each year, however, the US Department of State releases human rights reports pertaining to countries that use waterboarding as a means of political coercion. This is a signal that there is some clear bias regarding what is really meant by ‘democracy’, and the way that it is tied to the interests of those who are making the assertion. It should be clear however that the main stated goal of the empire is to impose civilization and to bring democracy and human rights, to liberate, just as it was applied to Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The idea underpinning the Christian missionaries that were sent to Africa and Latin America was also based on the civilization project, hidden within the values of imperialism. The imposed civilization project of the West dehumanizes the societies that it touches, and this was certainly Appiah’s experience growing up in British Africa in the postcolonial era. The colonizer communicates with colonized peoples through colonial culture and activities that it has created. These activities may include forced labor, intimidation, pressure, taxation, theft, and rape, and behaviors may include contempt, mistrust, and arrogance on the part of the colonizer. These are understood as aspects which are inseparable from the system of colonialism, regardless of how ‘humane’ the colonialist power believes itself to be. This is because Africa and Africanness cannot be understood using a western Orientalist approach. Therefore, Africana Studies must develop its own perspective and theory based on what it means to be ‘of Africa’ in the context of native culture, native experiences, and native epistemologies.

Frantz Fanon’s (1965) understanding of colonialism and its psychological affects on Africans is tied directly to his discussion of the fundamental issue of the legitimate claim to a nation. The concept of the nation refers to the territorialization of a group of people that takes place at the same time as the creation of domestic markets within the capitalist mode of production, whereas nationalism is a slightly different phenomenon, which sometimes opposes the colonialization process, but not the capitalist mode of production. We must distinguish between the type of nationalism found in the Third World and the colonizer’s form of nationalism because the nationalism of the oppressed and the nationalism of the colonizer is a power struggle tied to economic distribution. There are other forms of nationalism, however, including the examples of the Algerian nationalist independence movement under the French occupation, Kurdish nationalism under the Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi occupations, Uyghur nationalism under the Chinese occupation, or ‘American’ Indian nationalism under American colonial occupation. Nationalism under colonialization cannot be effective because it emerges within a colonized structure of relations in which social, political economic institutions represent specific interests, each of which are designed to be exploitative of the native.

Colonialism creates discontents from the viewpoint of the native; therefore, the post-native identity under occupation is different from the original identity. A post-native identity has little relationship with the past, because the reality of occupation generates different social, political, and economic structures, which in turn shape the new identity.

History of Black Studies in America

In their book, Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies (2003), Delores P. Aldridge, Carlene Young, and other contributing authors cover the developmental history of Africana Studies programs within American academia over the past century. The first part of the book covers the basics of Black Studies programs, how they came to be, and the divisions that exist within the black community concerning these programs. They further address how Black Studies should be taught and offer a glimpse into where Black Studies programs are headed. The authors draw attention to an early consideration, by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, of the purpose of Black Studies programs within the university. In Du Bois’s view, students in the US need to study the social development of African-Americans beginning with their cultural heritage of the tribes in Africa.

African regional studies began in the early part of the 20th century, at a time when there were no textbooks on ‘Black Studies’, nor were there Black Studies majors in any university. The birth of the Black Studies movement can be traced to the 1920s, when a cultural and intellectual renaissance was taking place within the African-American community. This renaissance helped scholars introduce new ideas to the Black public. The second phase of the movement came during the Great Depression, when the concerns of Black people were becoming more widespread. The movement came to a halt, however, at the start of the Second World War, and didn’t regain any momentum until the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. By the 1970s, real progress was taking place and curricula were formed, textbooks were written, and the foundation for African Studies as we know it today was established.

All it took was a reputable institution backing the need for Black Studies as a discipline for the movement to become truly legitimate. This is what happened in 1969 when the Institute of the Black World began a two-month project to create a curriculum that would include a very basic structure for a Black Studies program. They wanted the program to study what they called the ‘Black Experience’. However, like any other area of study, the curriculum needed to be narrowed to a few central goals in order to be effective. The four basic tasks the Institute outlined were: to promote and defend the necessity of the program amidst racism toward Black people, to teach and publish black theory and analysis, to generate new knowledge, and to preserve classic texts and traditions (Aldridge and Young, 2003: 7).

By 1972, the impact of Black Studies on campuses across the country was so visible that sociologist Wilson Record said that the development of these programs meant that ‘colleges and universities would never quite be the same again’ (Aldridge and Young, 2003: 8). Out of the Revolution provides an in-depth look at the trajectory through which Black Studies programs have permeated American campuses and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) (Aldridge and Young, 2003). These colleges and universities were born as a direct response and challenge to the Eurocentric and, at the time, segregated educational systems.

The boom in Black Studies programs met the demand provided by the increasing number of Black students attending college. Federal policies were making it easier for low-income minority students to pursue higher education. By 1975, the percentage of Black high school graduates enrolled in college was nearly the same as the percentage of white high school graduates, and this upsurge greatly helped with the development of Black Studies programs in the 1970s (Aldridge and Young, 2003). However, the growth of these programs did not remain a trend for long. Black student college enrollment leveled off in the 1980s and eventually started to decline. In the mid-1980s, Black Studies programs were being downgraded and merged within other departments. New administrators did not support the programs as they had before.

We have all seen old videos of African-Americans protesting in the streets at the time of the civil rights movement. What we are less likely to have noticed from this form of publicity is the increasing population of Black college students during this time period. It became more common for Black students to enter universities in the late 1960s and 1970s, and this student body brought with them diverse backgrounds and political convictions. Black student unions were being created all over the country, though often they were met with hostility. White students were used to universities being a ‘sacred white preserve’, and the influx of black students threatened this concept (Harris, 2004).

By the late1960s, there was an increased demand by students, even on progressive white campuses, and Black Studies programs were formed in universities such as Cornell and San Francisco State (Aldridge and Young, 2003). Within a decade Black Studies courses started to be offered, to some degree, in almost every major American university. But the trend was not universal, even among the cadre of HBCU’s established beginning in the early 20th century (Tennessee State University (TSU) was established as early as 1912). TSU is one of the 117 HBCUs in the country and has a rich tradition of educating African-American students. However, it surprisingly did not offer Black Studies courses or establish its Department of Africana Studies until 1994 (Aldridge and Young, 2003). As if making up for lost time, it now has one of the leading Black Studies programs in the country, and black history and literature courses are required for every student attending TSU, regardless of their major.

American Blacks have continually been described as being as in a state of ‘underdevelopment’. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, there was civil rights activism, blacks being elected to ever more important positions, and the expansion of the black middle class (Aldridge and Young, 2003). Aldridge and Young also examine how the progress of Black Studies programs at HBCUs has paled in comparison to the progress of Black rights as a whole over the past 20 years. Their book makes a few key points in support of this theory. It is asserted that African-Americans need an education system that is enlightening and inspires them to achieve, while also providing them with knowledge and understanding of African heritage. It is not the job of the educational system to force or instruct African-Americans to assimilate into the larger society because knowledge is not ever objective or culture free.

Obtaining upward mobility and material benefits through education has been the goal of African-Americans throughout our country’s history. However, the impact of traditional de-segregation of schools was like fitting a square peg into a round hole. Instead of fitting within their own culture, they were being forced to assimilate into the White-European culture. As a result, a strong interest in pursuing an independent black education developed to prevent the dominant American cultural education from taking over their studies, and highlights the self-determination, pride, and identity of African culture. This approach has led to the formation of alternate schools for black youth, and higher education institutions separate from the white/European colleges. These schools are controlled by blacks, and are therefore able to teach Africana Studies without the intrusion of biased opinions, racism, and oppression. Of the separate approach to education of Black peoples, Du Bois has said that:

I believed in the higher education of a Talented Tenth who through their knowledge of modern culture could guide the American Negro to a higher civilization. I knew that without this the Negro would have to accept white leadership, and that such leadership could not always be trusted to guide this group into self-realization and to its highest cultural possibilities. (Du Bois, 1968: 236)

African Studies in the United States has been impacted by a few key events, such as the 1950s independence movements in Africa, the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s, and the rise of the black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s. These movements challenged traditional conservative white-European values, and established the need for Africana Studies to reach classrooms across the country. This began with San Francisco State in 1968, and now nearly every university in the country either offers an assortment of Black Studies classes, or a full Africana Studies program. These programs used curricula that were meant to educate students about African-American culture, history, and beliefs. These programs have continued to struggle over time and faced budget cuts, mergers, and staff firings in the 1970s and 1980s, but have always surged back, with 25 new institutions that provided Black Studies programs created between 1986 and 1991 alone. Black Studies programs are here to stay and will continue to be a vital part of the American education system. They exemplify how a culture can withstand persecution and with determination, conviction, bravery, and support from the Black community, can overcome enormous obstacles. African-Americans have carved out and cemented a place within our culture while contributing to it in ways that are still emerging. From a purely scholarly perspective, regardless of what programs such as this are called – Black Studies, Africana Studies or African-American studies – the field has an important contribution to make to both academic knowledge and theory and is based on real-life experience and activism.

The Colonialist Legacy in US Academia

In order to understand the latent and manifest consequences of colonialism, it is important to comprehend the historical conditions that were in place before and after the occupation of Africa. Arising in the context of slavery and the colonial period, the arbitrary creation of African nation-states and the construction of national identities during and after the independence movements took place through reactive politics that led to entrenched ethnic conflicts. This was the creation of a false consciousness and the rise of imagined realities in Africa, comprising national or ethnic identities formed during the colonial period. Examples include Rwanda, Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somali, and Mali. This was not based on an organic process but rather on the reactionary forces within a colonized environment that subconsciously shaped and influenced the formation of something called an African identity. According to Appiah (1992), Africa is an invented project, with colonial languages used as a tool used to ‘civilize’ the ‘savage’ African into a conforming and compliant modern black man. At the same, using and speaking French or English creates divisions and effectively institutes an internal caste system among Africans, while even learning the language of the oppressor may be psychologically devastating for the native culture and languages. Concepts such as race and ethnicity are themselves a product of the neocolonialist and Orientalist approach, and the conception of race in Africa is a foreign concept for African natives, imposed on them through colonial and postcolonial education and language (Appiah, 1992).

In her article, ‘Africa on my mind’, Mervat Hatem (2009) shares her reflections on the important connections that exist between Africana Studies and Middle East Studies. She talks about the bifurcation of Africa and the historical implications of colonialism. In the 1950s, the African National liberation struggle occurred across the entire continent, led by Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Keita of Mali. The African Unity leaders all supported each other in their struggle against the colonialist forces. According to Hatem, North Africa is not considered a part of Africa and is instead treated as part of the Middle East. The fuel behind this bifurcated view of Africa was the economic interest of colonial western powers. However, Hatem argues that in Egypt’s Nasser era, Egyptian national identity was built on Islam, Arabism, and Africanism. Indeed, from my perspective, Arabism or Arab nationalism has been injected into Africa and the Middle East through divide and conquer policies, in large part because ethnic nationalism in Africa and the Middle East failed to help the cause of the national liberation struggles. Propelled as a part of democratic demand in the global south, today ethnic nationalism and tribalism is a destructive force for African unity. Two different fields of study emerged in the 1960s in relation to this one continent. According to Hatem (2009), the US geographical and political standpoint separated North Africa from the rest of the continent. Today, North Africa is perceived as a part of the Middle East and the region is now called the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In this context, scholars who focus on North Africa are part of Middle East Studies academic circles rather than the Africana Studies milieu of their recent past. This Eurocentric categorization separates the North from the rest of Africa in academia and in politics. As a result of these newly created arbitrary boundaries, African Studies scholars also focus on West, Central, and South Africa. With the creation of the African Studies Association in 1957 and the Middle East Studies Association in 1967, this bifurcation led to academic divisions between the north and the rest (Hatem, 2009). This demonstrates one obvious way in which categorization by western academia facilitates artificial divisions between African scholars, African communities, and African geographies.

In her article, ‘The “African” in Africana/Black/African and African American Studies’, Carolyn Somerville (2009) also examines the emergence of African and Africana Studies in 1960s academia in the US, following the civil rights struggle. It was at this time that Cornell University created the African Studies and Research Center. Somerville (2009) questions why African Studies and African-American Studies were not housed in the same department instead of being established as separate programs. Her article asks us to question the objectives of separating two fields that are so closely related. Indeed, many prominent Black Studies scholars recognize African-American Studies as a subfield of Black Studies (Karenga, 1993). Artificial boundaries based on a subjective reality generate physical separation in the field, which has been fueled by the Eurocentric educational system. As a result of this process, today, most of the African Studies scholars are based either in the political sciences or history. On the other hand, African American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, which is perceived as fulfilling the requirements of diversity promotion within American academia, whereas some African Studies departments, programs, and centers are funded by Title VI, a grant from the Department of Education, and categorized as National Resource Centers, such as in Boston, Harvard, Indiana, Michigan State, Ohio, Yale, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, Kansas, UNC Chapel Hill, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore.

I see two diverging sets of interests playing out in the field. African Studies is more closely tied to US national security interests in Africa, similar to the interests of the US in Middle East Studies. American academic institutions receive large numbers of government grants to promote the national security polices of the US in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Black Studies, however, follows the activism model, using an Afro-centric lens. The two approaches are now diverging in some important ways and are now at a crossroads. Black Studies became more connected to the interests of African-American studies in general. The scholarly activism approach of Black Studies does not receive as much support, for instance through government grants, because it is perceived as a part of the university diversity curriculum. The separation between African and Black Studies will consequently produce a figurative divorce between the Black community and African Studies in general.

In my view, Africana Studies should belong to all people with African origin, whether they live in Africa or the diaspora, and I do not believe that we can see this type of bifurcation within European or American studies programs. Similarly, John O. Voll (2009) conceptualizes and reviews regional studies within western academia in his article, ‘Reconceptualizing of the “Regions” in “Area Studies”’. According to Voll, the creation of non-western regions within western academia began with funding received from the National Defense Education Act of 1958. He claims that Africa scholars tended to separate North Africa from the rest of the continent because of these fundings, and he also discusses how US and British military planners changed the regional classification of the Middle East in the 1890s to the Middle East and North Africa. This demonstrates imperialist interests injected into western academia, a process that I believe demonstrates a neo-Orientalist approach. Today, due to western political and strategic interests, we are witnessing a similar transformation within Central Asian Studies.

Methodology and Perspective of a Sociology of Africa

The articles within the edited anthology Black Studies: Theory, Method, and Cultural Perspectives (Anderson, 1990) also provide useful insight into the historical, theoretical and paradigmatic approaches to Black Studies taken within academia, in addition to how these perspectives and an Afro-centric paradigm (Kershaw, 1990) have emerged. Attention is also paid to some of the core challenges and areas of dissonance that exist in approaches both within and toward this paradigm.

The factors that contribute to the approach taken to Black Studies within academia involve a complex interplay of considerations. First, to take just the example of Blacks in America, are the historical considerations that require us to look at the experience of slavery of Blacks in America, through the civil rights movements to the present day, and to examine the implications of these events and how they have shaped the socio-economic and psychological experience of Black Americans. Next, there is the sociological question of which lens or methodologies we use to approach Black Studies. In short, what do we study and how do we do it, given a diverse range of opinions as to what constitutes ‘Black Studies’? A common usage and the subject of this critique is the term ‘Black Studies’, referring to the multidisciplinary experience of African peoples throughout the world. In his article, ‘Black Studies: overview and theoretical perspectives’, Talmadge Anderson (1990) defines Black Studies in the context of its historical evolution.

Another area of inquiry is that of the political experience of Blacks in America, how they obtain political power and what their role is within the mainstream political environment. Of course economics is a crucial arena and the subject of many studies, in addition to the psychological experience of Black Americans and how they understand and process their history and subjective experience. There is no clear and unified answer on how to approach Black Studies within each of these fields of inquiry. One definition of a requirement of Black Studies, offered by Gordon (referenced by Anderson, 1990), is that the field should include the examination of the legal and moral status of Africans in America and in the African Diaspora, and also of the policies that impact the lives of Black people.

Anderson summarizes the history of the Black Studies field and describes its early days in the civil rights movement which involved a call for cultural representation of the Black experience within traditional academic curricula. The article describes the inception of Black Studies programs in university curricula at the time. This was understood by some to be a response to the failure of the US educational system to protect the traditions and heritage of all peoples universally. Education only served to preserve the traditions and heritage of the white European and Eurocentric cultures (Anderson, 1990). Black Studies began in the US as an interdisciplinary field in response to this failure. However, interdisciplinary Black Studies has not been able to achieve the objective of a field that is effectively theoretically and methodologically grounded in the Black point of view.

The field of contemporary sociology offers two approaches to Black Studies that are better able to handle the nuances and challenges inherent in the field. The major differences of opinion of scholars in the field is between those that take the positivist, value-free, or ‘objective’ approach (Kershaw, 1990) to the study of peoples of African descent, and those that use the critical approach (Horkheimer, cited in Kershaw, 1990) which does not attempt to be ‘value-free’ and looks directly at for the role of power-relations within a society. Terry Kershaw (1990) describes the underpinnings of the critical and positivist approaches in his article, ‘The Emerging Paradigm in Black Studies’. In this piece, his arguments focus on the weaknesses of a (supposedly) ‘value-free’ methodology. He therefore proposes a synthesis of the positivist and critical methodologies, which is able to provide historical analysis at the same time as it does not negate or deny power relations and subjective meanings central to the field of Black Studies (Kershaw, 1990).

To summarize the proposed Sociology of Africa approach:

The positivist approach manifests itself through a disconnection from the political and social realities of the Black experience. The objective of this type of approach is to maintain the status quo and it is essentially a-historical at the same time that it is supposedly value-free. The main critique of the positivist approach is that it is not in fact value free, but instead serves to reinforce the dominant paradigms of US academia. Of this approach, in his article, ‘The study of Black people: a survey of empirical and theoretical models’, Ronald Taylor (1990) asserts that there is a need for a Black perspective in social science research and academia, ‘inspired by the belief that the theoretical constructs and methodologies of white social scientists has yielded a distorted view of the Black experience in the U.S.’ (Taylor, 1990: 14). According to Taylor, this is because a false set of ideological and normative assumptions has underpinned much of the previous work on the subject, and also because of the group status, or what I will call the vested interests and normative perspectives of white social scientists that inhibit them from a contextual and realistic understanding of the Black experience. Studies undertaken within the objectivist approach (Taylor, 1990) include studies of deviance and family structure (Kershaw, 1990) within the Black community.

Understanding events in their proper context means examining the political economy and how relationships of power and inequality play out within a people’s historical narrative and experience. This is the approach taken by scholars of the critical sociology perspective. In his article, Ronald Taylor (1990) asserts that the critical approach gained popularity because of the inability of the positivist, or as he refers to it, the ‘order-equilibrium’ approach, to provide an explanation for the confrontations in the civil rights era. Consequently, dynamics of intergroup relations and racial oppression came into focus as the core to the study of Black peoples. The conflict approach took conflict between groups with opposing views and interests as the starting point, and this dynamic is viewed as an ongoing struggle based on the relative power of competing groups in the society (Taylor, 1990).

A Synthesized Approach: Postcolonial Sociology of Africa

I examine the field of African Studies in relationship to the larger context of regional studies and propose a synthesized approach, which I refer to as the sociological postcolonial approach to African Studies. Michael Hanchard (2004) argues that the field of African Studies is the child of an illicit relationship between social struggle and the conventional disciplines. However, this definition would depend on how we approach African Studies. Is African Studies a component of regional studies, or ethnic studies? What conditions played a role in the creation of the field: Orientalism, racism, the civil rights struggle, imperialism and colonialism? If we look at Hanchard’s approach from the lens of Said’s Orientalism, Africana Studies should itself be treated as a colonialist production.

I agree with Hanchard (2004) that Africana or African Studies grew very fast during the 1990s and that the field is relatively autonomous from other disciplines. Knowledge produced in Africana Studies or African Studies does not align with most other forms of western knowledge; Africana Studies is a critical field, and should be treated as a part of postcolonial studies. Therefore, I distinguish between Africana/African/Black Studies scholars and Africanists. In the era of globalization, the field of Africana Studies is searching for its soul and the process of knowledge production in the field conflicts with the western social philosophy and epistemology (Hanchard, 2004). In my perspective, African American Studies is divorcing from Africana, Black or African Studies, because the concept of African-American Studies has been a by-product of western imperialism and Orientalism. Within Africana Studies, knowledge production should be based on African-ness, Afro-centric perspective, and nativity in the context of originality. Conversely, James Conyers’s (2004) article reminds us that the field is still searching for its soul. I agree with Conyers that Africa should be the center of, not peripheral to, Africana Studies; however, I might disagree with him regarding the Afro-centric approach, because we may fall into the same trap of Eurocentric Orientalism.

All regional and ethnic studies have a similar destiny as African Studies, insomuch as they have all experienced colonialism and Orientalism, and this has left a legacy in terms of the scholarship in the field. Middle Eastern studies and Asian Studies for example, also produce a knowledge base born from their colonial past. In order to recognize this and respond appropriately, a critical perspective based on globalized knowledge is needed. A critical approach is more productive than any supposedly value-free approach to regional and ethnic studies, such as Middle Eastern Studies or Latin American Studies. Some of the many related approaches to the study of Black people include the Afro-centric approach, the Black Studies approach, Africana Studies, African American studies, African Studies, to name just a few variations. How do we know which approach has merit? In my view, these approaches have roughly the same objectives, and a successful approach is one that uses a critical lens to look at the production of knowledge. It is also necessary that an approach is Afro-centric to offset the dynamics of White hegemony, within a supporting theoretical framework. We need to develop the field not from a reactionary standpoint, but based on Black subjective experience and African history. And to do this, we must develop a critical approach to the way that the knowledge of regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is produced and reproduced.

The image of Africa has been created in the mind of western academics, by Eurocentric scholars, for western academic interests as expressed through the Orientalist framework. This serves to create and sustain a fabricated identity. It is important to note that some African-American scholars do not approach Africana Studies any differently from the Orientalist framework; therefore, scholarship that is critical to African Studies must be undertaken in the context of a postcolonial studies framework. Without applying postcolonial theories, Africana Studies are also susceptible to following an Orientalist approach, because ‘the Black community has been subjected to a kind of internal Orientalism’(Wilson, 1981: 63). The proposed postcolonial Sociology of Africa approach avoids these pitfalls.

Conclusion

In this study, I have proposed that a sociological post-colonial approach be used within US academia to provide the necessary critical and historically relevant perspective to Black, African, and Africana studies today. This analysis is rooted in the context of Africa’s colonial legacy. I furthermore argue that Orientalism is alive and well, and exists as a legacy of colonial structures in practice in the modern era and within the euro-centric western educational system. The sociological lens is relevant to this study because sociology is a more critical field than political science, international and area studies, history, or anthropology alone, and a critical perspective is needed to understand the realities of the region and therefore the field today. We should use the Afro-centric sociological approach in order to revitalize and unify the field. Asante (2003: 39) argues that, ‘Afro-centricity is a frame of reference wherein phenomena are viewed from the perspective of the African person’. This is obviously a threat to Eurocentric scholarship, which tends to perceive Black Studies as a reactionary, ideologically and politically oriented field. However, according to Anderson, ‘Black Studies is no more ideological or philosophical than European, Slavic, Asian, or American Studies’ (Anderson, 1990: 5).

In fact, every kind of area studies in American academia is as ideologically oriented as Black Studies. The emergence and development of Middle East Studies departments, programs, and centers are the best examples of this. The prototype of Middle East Studies was established at Harvard, Princeton, and Portland State Universities in the late 1950s with direct financial support from the US Departments of Education (DoE) and of Defense (DoD). In the 1990s, Central Asian Studies programs similarly began to emerge as separate disciplines from Russian and Slavic Studies, again with direct support from policy circles and the government. In this context, Africana Studies is no less or more ideological than these programs. However, Africana Studies created the first and one of the few direct challenges to the lens of Eurocentric social science and political values. The main concepts contained within the Afro-centric teaching of a Sociology of Africa originate and are historically rooted in the traditions, questions, methods, and theories imagined and dreamed by Du Bois, Fanon, Karenga, Asenta, Mazrui, Appiah, and Kershaw, and speak most appropriately about the emergent cultural and social connections that arise from postcolonial thinkers and sociologists.