African American Consciousness

Past and Present

Jr. Conyers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412843072
• eBook ISBN: 9781351533676
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: History

African American Consciousness focuses on ideas of culture, race, and class within the interdisciplinary matrix of Africana Studies. Even more important, it uses a methodology that emphasizes interpretation and the necessity of interdisciplinary research and writing in a global society. Worldview, culture, analytic thinking, and historiography can all be used as tools of analysis, and in the process of discovery, use pedagogy, and survey research of Africana history. Advancing the idea of Africana Studies, mixed methodology, and triangulation, the contributors provide alternative approaches toward examining this phenomena, with regard to place, space, and time.

The essays in this volume include Reynaldo Anderson, "Black History dot.com" Greg Carr, "Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism and the African World History Project" Karanja Carroll, "A Genealogical Review of the Worldview Concept and Framework in Africana Studies" Denise Martin, "Reflections on African Celestial Culture" Serie McDougal "Teaching Black Males" Demetrius Pearson, "Cowboys of Color" Pamela Reed, "Heirs to Disparity" and Andrew Smallwood, "Malcolm X's Leadership and Legacy."

The researchers in this volume investigate, explore, and review patterns of functional, normative, and expressive behavior. The past and present of Africana culture is represented, showing how reflexivity can be an adjustable concept to organize, process, and interpret data. Moreover, humanism and social science demonstrate how researchers establish, extract, and identify the limitations and alternative approaches to research of the historic conditions of black Americans.

1

Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism, and the African World History Project: The Case of Africana Studies for African Cultural Development ^*

Greg E. Carr

Preface

In the summer of 2007, a small contingent of faculty and students from Howard University undertook a three-week study tour of Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. Howard University, the flagship of nearly 120 historically African-American colleges and universities, shares a historical significance with Fort Hare, the University of the North, The University of the Western Cape, and other historically African and/or Colored educational institutions in South Africa. The shared emphasis on generating thinker/activists from communities of Africans and others struggling against White Supremacy was foremost on the minds of the Howard group as they engaged in a comparative study of South African and African-American history.

The following ideas emerged from classroom discussions at the University of Cape Town over the course of this visit and hopefully marks the beginning of ongoing dialogue with interested parties toward the strengthening of relationships between students and faculty of African descent at historically Black colleges and universities in the United States and their counterparts across South Africa.

This relationship takes added importance in the wake of the call to the African Renaissance. The 1998 Johannesburg conference on this subject identified historical memory and identity as central to the African Renaissance, framing the conferees’ papers with the following four sets of questions: “(1) Who are the Africans? Where do they come from? What is their history and where are they going? (2) What constitutes the African Renaissance, its objectives and implications, nationally and internationally? (3) What is the history and destiny of national minorities in the African Renaissance? and (4) Why an African Renaissance now?” ¹

The conferees agreed that “the work on the ground in which ordinary people participate will herald this revolution (of the African Renaissance).” ² To this end, a Disciplinary Africana Studies approach to generating Africana historiography requires work product that suffuses the public educational systems of the United States, South Africa, and other African countries in order to train future generations in studying and operationalizing African historical consciousness. At the university level, Sipho Seepe has likewise called for us to leverage the African Renaissance impulse into a discussion on knowledge and identity in higher education aimed at engaging “the nation of what an African identity is at many levels.” ³

Introduction

Thirty years after his death, Bantu Steven Biko continues to occupy the global African imagination, his call to “Black Consciousness,” a political, cultural, and philosophical challenge to embrace definitions of self and community that transcend and at once utilize externally generated constructs of race, wielding them as effective political weaponry that would nevertheless not circumscribe the identity, past, and future of African people.

Biko linked his ideas and those of his colleagues to an awakened African historical consciousness that would build both South African and Pan-African national culture as well as economic and political solidarity. He traced this impulse to the emergence in the 1940s and 1950s of “a group of angry young black men who were beginning to ‘grasp the notion of (their) peculiar uniqueness’ and who were eager to define who they were and what.” ⁴ The leader of this group was Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, whose idea of a free and unified South Africa was inextricable from a free and unified African continent. ⁵

Both Biko’s and Sobukwe’s ideas emerge out of the distinct genealogy of Africana thought as congealed in the South African struggle against White Supremacy. Th eir concepts of African identity likewise eschewed the racial boundaries that too often both circumscribe and define Black cultural and political nationalism.

During the three generations that include and extend beyond the lives and works of these men, ideas of African identity have shifted in response to the ongoing reconfiguration of the Modern World System. As the nation-state continues to deteriorate as an effective conduit for small-group autonomy and governance, ideas of trans-state identities and coalition are more important than ever.

This chapter identifies the academic field and discipline of Africana Studies as a logical and compelling site for generating normative theory capable of critically assessing and integrating thinkers such as Biko and Sobukwe as representative of what Cedric Robinson has called “the Black Radical Tradition.” ⁶ After a brief discussion of the current sociopolitical context out of which both the Africana Studies movement in the United States and the “African Renaissance” movement in South Africa and across the African continent have emerged, including the framing ideas of Sobukwe and Biko, this chapter rehearses the normative assumptions of what the author characterizes as “Disciplinary Africana Studies” and identifies the ongoing “African World History Project” of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization as one model for operationalizing these assumptions. Finally, a word on the relationship between Africana Studies, African-centered historiography, and education (curriculum, instruction, and assessment) concludes the chapter.

Contested Sites for State-Based Identity in South Africa and the United States: The Last Gasp of White Supremacy

As a number of scholars, including George Frederickson, have noted, both the Union of South Africa and the United States of America were founded as settler colonies premised on the cultural and political logic of White Racial and Cultural Supremacy. ⁷ Currently, both states are attempting to preserve and extend ideas of “national” (really state) identity in the face of shifting demographics. In the United States, the ongoing “browning of America” has fueled a deep conservativism bordering on fascism; in South Africa, conflating racial and class-anchored identities ⁸ (e.g., the “rising Black middle class”) has enabled the white minority to reconfigure whiteness as a set of material interests that can be nominally extended to whites. ⁹ While Barack Obama undertakes a potentially successful candidacy for the U.S. presidency, Toxyo Sexwale models an example of “post-racial” politics, appealing to upper class whites and blacks. The attendant models in both the United States and South Africa echo the famous words of Ali Mazrui, asserting that, while Blacks may eventually don a “crown” of political management of the state governance, whites have removed the “jewels” of economic resource control.

In this regard, Immanuel Wallerstein is likely correct in his assertion that “it has been the movements, more than anything else, that have in fact sustained the states politically, especially once they (the movements) came to power.” He argues that movements serve as the “moral guarantors” of state structure, and that “states are needed most of all not by reformers and not by movements but by capitalists” who work in a world system that could not function well without strong states.

Finally, and key, however, Wallerstein observes that the masses of (formerly) oppressed people (Africans in continental African, Diasporan and settler colonial states such as the United States) are becoming profoundly anti-state as they see no hope or certainty in state structures and the movements they supported prove incapable of muting the power of the capitalist—and white supremacist—world system. ¹⁰ In both South Africa and the United States, a resonant chord is struck among Africans when ideas and figures supporting trans-state, culturally grounded African identity are evoked.

During a July 2007 visit to Robben Island, a tour guide, a member of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, lingered a tour bus before the cottage once occupied by Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe. “We love Nelson Mandela,” he said to the large assemblage of African Americans, European Americans, Europeans, and others. “You from the U.S. might compare him to Dr. Martin Luther King.” White and Black heads nodded in agreement and understanding. “But we love this man Sobukwe as well,” he continued. “In fact, many of us believe that, had he lived, he should have been the president of South Africa. If Madiba could be compared to Martin Luther King, we could say that Sobukwe could be compared to Malcolm X.” From the assembled collage of African Americans, a collective “aah” and applause erupted. The whites, Europeans, and Americans alike, remained silent, some even looking bemused. Discussing the event later, the Howard University students present for the exchange agreed that the comparison resonated because it spoke to both Sobukwe and Malcolm X’s perceived willingness and desire to go beyond national and state allegiances. ¹¹

In his recent text Do South Africans Exist? , Ivor Chipkin brings a unique interpretation to the conventional observation that the colonial moment created an African identity that did not previously exist. Chipkin’s contention that nations and national identities are political constructs and not originally cultural ones is compelling. ¹² It is also consistent with Cedric Robinson and Michael Gomez’s contentions that Africans “exchanged their country marks” in the West Atlantic, generating a global African identity for political purposes. The Yoruba, Ki-Kongo, Ibo, Bambara, Fanti, Fon, and scores of other groups congealed identities that gave birth to the first “African multiculturalism,” reduced to an essentialized “Blackness” that ultimately resolved itself as distinct geopolitical identities (e.g., Jamaicans, Brazilians, Haitians, African-Americans, etc.). ¹³

South African historians such as Saul Dubow generally agree that the “idea of South Africa” was largely a fiction until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Boer and British engagement with the Xhosas, Pedi, Zulu, Tswanas, and Sotho forced these groups to momentarily congeal into separate and distinct identities. This phenomenon, however, did not last in its initial form: each group emptied into a general category of “Black” while preserving their cultural distinctiveness.

Barney Pityana, a major figure in the Black Consciousness Movement, has recently observed that “Africans have traditionally resisted such micro identification (on the basis of tribal identity). Th ose who sought to benefit under it during apartheid generally did so less out of commitment than opportunism.” ¹⁴

While brought into existence by circumstance, are the collages of politically pragmatic identities shared by Africans in specific geographical and historical circumstances less authentic or powerful as explanatory narrative and normative analytical frameworks for having been brought into existence as a consequence of enslavement and colonialism?

Biko’s “Black Consciousness” and Sobukwe’s “Pan-Africanism” have Diasporic echoes. They also serve as heuristic devices to delink race from culture while appropriating the political utility of the former. Africana Studies and the African Renaissance serve as potential carriers on of that work. ¹⁵

Africana Studies, the African World History Project and “Ground Rules” for African Intellectual Work

The historical imagination of South Africans and African-Americans emerge out of encounters which require some reconciling of heterodoxical cultural memories, rituals, texts, practices, and icons. The subsequent creation of “African” identities, then, serves not only to bond Africans to resistance but to the potential of global and world identities anchored in a connection to Africa when and wherever it is found.

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. ¹⁶ A parallel and correlative subfield, African historiography, seeks to explore generative normative theory for interrogating the African and world past utilizing the techniques of Disciplinary Africana Studies.

For both South African and African-American thinkers, as much or more perhaps than any other groups of global Africans, this intellectual work is infused with the cultural and political logic of the nation-state. This is a direct consequence of the intimate interaction with racial political logics, essentializing cultural syncretism and the legacy of the United States and R.S.A. in the construction and maintenance of the modern racialized world system.

The interaction between trans-state actors in both South Africa and the United States has been increasingly well-documented. Less well-explored, however, are the theoretical possibilities for imagining a model for trans-state intellectual collaboration in building models of interrogating the African past (historiography) in order to generate some shared sense of historical memory (history) as a prerequisite for building a common historical consciousness capable of informing future efforts to lift Africans globally (historicity). ¹⁷

As the nation-state continues to deteriorate as an organizational concept, models and theories of historical memory anchored in the ideas and efforts of those who have historically been able to see beyond its borders—the Pan-Africanists—are increasingly necessary. In the lo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Black Consciousness, Pan-Africanism, and the African World History Project: The Case of Africana Studies for African Cultural Development
• 2 A Genealogical Review of the Worldview Concept and Framework in Africana Studies-Related Theory and Research
• 3 Teaching Black Males: Cooperative Learning and the Problem of Implementation
• 4 Cowboys of Color: The Perceived Sociocultural Significance of U2 Rodeo
• 5 Heirs to Despair-ity: New Orleans, African Americans, and the Inconvenient Historical and Present-Day Truths Laid Bare by Hurricane Katrina
• 6 Malcolm X’s Leadership and Legacy: From the Grassroots to African Diaspora
• 7 Reflections on African Celestial Culture
• 8 Black History dot Com: The Black Atlantic, the Barack Obama Campaign for “Change,” and Implications for Change and Stability in a Networked World
• 9 “Raising Her Voice”: Writings By, For and About Women in Muhammad Speaks Newspaper, 1961–1975
• List of Contributors
• Index