Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 African philosophy and contemporary African experience
- 2 The Africanisation of languages and communication
- 3 The discontents of Eurocentrism
- 4 African ethical challenges in the contemporary world
- 5 African development and revolutions in science
- 6 Africa and the aesthetic logic of globalisation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
3 - The discontents of Eurocentrism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 African philosophy and contemporary African experience
- 2 The Africanisation of languages and communication
- 3 The discontents of Eurocentrism
- 4 African ethical challenges in the contemporary world
- 5 African development and revolutions in science
- 6 Africa and the aesthetic logic of globalisation
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
The intellectual space covered outlines Africa as a paradigm of difference. For the Greeks, such a peculiarity did not seem to mean more than what the words Africa, Ethiopia, Libya signified.
Valentin MudimbeEurocentrism can be understood as an ideology drawing largely from classical and modern European inheritance that seeks within the order of knowledge, the sciences, economics, politics, technology, and discourse in general to place Europe and its thought systems as the centre of global power and thus create a one-dimensional world rather than a polycentric world as the basis for European domination in general. Let us say from the start that our ensuing critique of Eurocentrism from an African perspective does not mean defending some form of Afrocentricity in thought in the sense of Molefi Kete Asante. Asante characterises the status for Afrocentric knowledges in the following manner: ‘Afrocentricity is a quality of thought, practice and perspective that perceives Africans as subjects and agents acting in their own cultural image and human interests’. Asante further argues that Afrocentricity is about location, precisely because African people have been operating from the fringes of the Eurocentric experience. Many of the studies on African history, culture, politics, literature and economics, Asante contends, have been in pursuit of European interests.
Our view is that the origin of knowledge should not present a criterion for judging its validity and that many discourses, of multiple origin, may shed light on the challenges facing contemporary Africa.
Edward Said also had something to say on this question of European writing on Africa:
European writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia and the Caribbean, these Africanist and Indian discourses, as some of them have been called, I see as part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and people and therefore related to Orientalist descriptions of the Islamic world, as well as do Europe's special ways of representing the Caribbean Islands, Ireland and the Far East. What is striking in these discourses are the rhetorical figures one keeps on encountering in their descriptions of the ‘mysterious East’ as well as the stereotypes about ‘the African’ or Indian or Irish or Jamaican or Chinese mind.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sauti!Moral and Spiritual Challenges Facing 21st Century Africa, pp. 56 - 74Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2012