SCHOLAR GIVES LESSON ON AFRICANS' ROLE IN WORLD HISTORY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 5, 1993                   TAG: 9302050291
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: By KEN DAVIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium
SCHOLAR GIVES LESSON ON AFRICANS' ROLE IN WORLD HISTORY
He came to Virginia Tech in hopes of dispelling the myths surrounding the African's role in world history.
In observance of Black History Month, Temple University professor Malefi Kete Asante spoke to a racially mixed audience of about 75 to 100 gathered in Virginia Tech's Colonial Hall this week.
His topic: Afrocentricity, the philosophy he founded that recognizes Africans as central characters in the development of Western culture.
"Afrocentricity is the quality of seeing the African person or African ideas as central to the reality in which they exist," Asante said. "To understand African ideas, you don't impose a European tradition on them."
Asante is credited with starting the first doctoral program in African-American Studies in the world.
His presentation Tuesday night was an hourlong history lesson about the African way of life, something the scholar said had been forgotten during centuries of European domination.
"Most African-Americans who sit in classrooms, even at a university such as Virginia Tech, sit in the classrooms but are outside the information being presented," Asante said.
For example, Asante said when American students take art appreciation classes, they learn about European art and nothing else. When American students study literature, they learn only about European literature.
Asante said Asians, Africans and other contributors to academic study have been ignored, and black students who study in American schools emerge with a distorted view of reality.
"It is precisely the way Clarence Thomases are made," he said.
Asante, who abandoned his "slave name," Arthur Smith, during the early 1970s, said many blacks in America know nothing about their own history. So Asante gave a history lesson of his own Tuesday night, as if Colonial Hall were his classroom and the audience were his students.
Asante said European domination began during the Renaissance when the Greek model of thinking was accepted and all others were ignored.
"I saw in a high school textbook that the Greeks invented reason," Asante said with a laugh. "What happened from the Renaissance on was a reconstruction of ancient history."
Asante said the ancient Greek philosophers and thinkers were students of the Africans, a fact that is not taught to American students today.
Additionally, Asante said Africans developed the greatest civilizations in the world, far superior to European civilizations.
"When Napolean entered the Nile Valley, he noticed there was never a civilization as monumental and majestic as the African civilization," Asante said. "The African civilization was more monumental and majestic than Athens and Rome combined."
Asante said even though European teachers realized the Nile Valley was the mother of all civilizations, they tried to take the credit from the Africans.
"They simply tried to rename the whole area," Asante said. "They took Egypt out of Africa and made it a part of the Orient."
Asante said at almost any university today, Egyptian studies are considered a part of the Oriental curriculum.
"The African civilization is the only civilization in antiquity to have its history contested."
Asante said when Africans were brought to the Americas during the slave trade, the tearing of Africans from their culture and history was complete.
"Slaves were not brought to the Americas, Africans were brought to the Americas and enslaved," Asante said. "The African would say, `I speak five languages.' The white man would say, `You don't speak languages, you speak dialects.' "
Asante said blacks often accept the margins applied to them by the European system, a fact which he hopes to change with Afrocentricity.
"Afrocentricity, as I have constructed it, is not a counterpoint to a Eurocentric world view," Asante said. "It simply says that it is legitimate for Africans to view the world through their own perspective."
Eurocentricity, on the other hand, is a particular view that has been promoted for centuries as if it were universal, Asante said, and he warned that blacks must not accept everything they learn as fact.
"If you accept that dogma, you can never get out of the hierarchical trap of European domination," he said.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB