Eurocentric | An Advanced Analysis

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Until the lion tell the tale of the hunt, the hunt will always profit and glorify the hunter– Modified African proverb

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Eurocentrism has two meanings: Eurocentrism in woke ignorant culture is a word you throw at any established knowledge that you do not like and have no rebuttal for.  So it is highfalutin name-calling to mask ignorance.  People often confuse European for Eurocentrism. A study of Greece or Christian Europe by a European scholar such as Bethany Huges is not Eurocentric until she starts mouthing off about how “better” and “progressive” her European culture is than Islamic or African culture by adding a judgment to cultural differences. Europeans painting Jesus as white does project a Eurocentric worldview but it is not true Eurocentrism until it imposes itself on non-Europeans. It is natural to paint God in your own image if you believe God made man in his own image. I do not expect Europeans to have their children pray to an Arabeque-looking dark skin Jew.

We are entitled to love “our own” but to do so with an ignorant attitude to human diversity is what makes such value judgments backward and Eurocentric. It is not also Eurocentric to compare technology in Europe vs. Africa and come to the obvious conclusion that Europe was superior. So we need to always remember this, we cannot call the obvious advances of Europe, now and then, and avoid these things. The literate European world gave them significant advantages over most of Africa in development terms. It is not Eurocentric to state the obvious. Recognizing that English has more power than Swahili is not Eurocentric. Stating that English is more advanced in the technological space compared to Zulu is blatantly obvious, not because one is inherently genetically “inferior” or “superior” but because English is spoken by 1.5 billion people and is central to global business and technology.  ((While we do not live in an “if” world there is nothing about any language, under similar preferable conditions that would stop it from doing what English has done. Although some might present an argument that due to the radical transformations that have occurred in the history of the English language it is better set up (because of its evolution of borrowing) for global domination vs languages that have never historically had this evolution. In short, anyone thinking of success (what ever viable metric) they want to use will find learning English or a European language very important. Children in South Africa can get to the top without Zulu, the reverse cannot be said for English))

In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature– Alison Baile

There is no pure or singular authentic African narrative, but we must still find an authentic position against a backdrop of 500 years of contamination of our African agency by Eurocentrism. The fact that we are using English already puts us at a serious disadvantage in even knowing what is African and what is Eurocentric. Some of us have appropriated the Eurocentric paradigms and mistakenly painted them as African— they are not, they are rooted in Eurocentric thought which still leaves us on the outside of human advancements. A case in point is discussing organized religions, where Africa has created none, but been a victim of all. Africans are willingly telling the world that nothing we have in Africa is complex enough to be seen as organized alongside Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity. But we must go much deeper than this also. We do not tear apart knowledge for the purpose of aimless deconstruction. We are seeking an authentic understanding of self— nothing else.

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EUROCENTRISM TODAY

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Eurocentrism is just as dominant today as it was during colonialism. While it does not espouse the same level of anti-African hatred its methodologies of studying the world are still orientalist, albeit neo-orientalist. On Wikipedia right now you can read an entire article on Islam and Africa and not find one African source (or very few African sources) A reliable source, while not expressed in racial terms, ultimately means people of European ancestry are the authors of everything central to Africa. African scholars are either Afrocentric, not notable, or unreliable and biased with political agendas. Africans, especially those with colonized mindsets, are included but only those cleared by the great White institutions such as Yale and Harvard. Exceptions do occur more than in bygone years but this for the most part sums up Eurocentrism in scholarship. It also verifies is own authority by claiming work is greater than race, yet for all its pretensions all articles and books on Africa are majority European. It is the same with ownership, while the system claims there is no such thing as White privilege, and Jewish domination, yet reality shows us something different. It is a wonder how so many things could be white without some racist mechanism at work.

Can a European write a book on Eurocentrism? Sure, if they are arrogant enough to think that speaking for the people they are writing about (the victims of Eurocentrism) are incapable of articulating their own experiences. And that is the global problem we still see today. Someone else not only owns our narrative but telling us our narrative. None of us play any role in these definitions of known world, sub-Saharan, black, spirituality vs religion, we were given them we said Thank You and we went about internalizing them. While attitudes have changed, the hunter still dictates the tale of the hunt.

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PERSONALITY OF EUROCENTRISM

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On the theme of Eurocentrism taking and not giving credit is very Eurocentric. It is not that the Greeks STOLE from Egypt, that is nonsense now. The Greeks gave credit and Ancient Egypt also took for everyone that surrounded them. But Greece was not Europe, Europe is something (like Africa) that came about long after Greece had vanished. So Eurocentrism re-writes the history of Europe including Greece and excludes everything it took from. Eurocentrism then plucks Egypt and anything nice out of Africa and creates a sub-Saharan Africa a place of no history and full of illiterate heathen savages that cannot create structured religion or anything advanced like the wheel (their standards not ours).

Europeans knew NOTHING about Greek philosophy, that came from Muslims. It is shocking how something so clear is not known by most. Because we are not trained to understand the 5C of history and one of them is complexity. History does not flow in a straight line. We hear Greece and we think Europe, we hear Axum and see a connection to South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria etc. But this is now, not then. Africa and Europe in a historical sense only frame discussions they are not self-existing permanent entities on their own. (if that makes any sense). As discussed before no one in modern-day Eritrea looked at Yemen and said “that is not Africa” there was no Africa. Uganda was outside of their known world. Just like Norway and Great Britain was outside of the known world of the Greeks. South Africa knew about Zimbabwe but they did not know about The Gambia or Chad, or Niger or even Ghana. Or their ancient counterparts Sokoto, Songhai, Ancient Mali, Wagadou, and Bornu.

So Eurocentrism takes away or mitigates the history of everyone else and footnotes it. We all can read the history of the renaissance it most certainly does not have a European genesis. In the 8th century CE, the Franks were so behind the Muslim Abbasids that what was called science for everyone they called magic. But it is not only the personality of Eurocentrism. Afrocentrism is no different. It protests against Eurocentrism for whitewashing history and then gets on with blackwashing history. And not only blackwashing it but even going into Africa and removing Christian, Jewish, and Islamic African history (doing the work of Eurocentrism).

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NOT ONLY EUROCENTRISM

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The Japanese and Chinese have their own stuff going on as well. And this must be stated as we are often presented with Eurocentrism vs the world of non-white people. Well, that is our Westernized perspective.  Japan took so much from China you have to wonder what they came up with on their own, certainly not Sushi or Karate.  So there is Asiacentrism going on competing with Cinocentrism. In Israel, we see Zionism where Jewish identity spins at the center of the universe just like the Greeks had Hellenocentrism. Muslim fundamentalists have their own Islamocentric stuff going on which plays out just like Afrocentrism to set up an Us vs Them transhistorical story arch. But the world is changing! A lot of progressive historians are rebuilding our understanding of our past and getting rid of this ethnocentric historical narrative. So it is not a case of Eurocentrism vs the non-White world, Western everything is dominant and thus its racism, while not unique, is more dominant. We as Africans are more influenced, destroyed, and subjugated by Eurocentrism, just like all of the world conquered by Europeans. It is their decaying legacy that has the most profound influence on our own agency.

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WOKE EUROCENTRISM

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Eurocentrism is popular as a call out by the woke crowd. Who are dismissive rigid and ideologues who gain power by exposing others, especially established knowledge?  It is the Woke Olympics and showing up your failings is way better than actually producing authentic meaningful knowledge. Someone said that the Bantu expansion used by linguistics is a Eurocentric myth, they went on to boast about the genetic diversity of Africa in the most lay terms. Here the problem is it is not the same “Eurocentric” that discusses the Bantu expansion that also discusses African genetic diversity. So why is one Eurocentric and the other African-conscious truth? Is there a logic to be found in these startling contradictions? This is what scholars identify as the rise of ignorance and rejection of established knowledge.

This is the cherry-picking legacy of Afrocentrism. When Whites say nice things about Africans the whiteness of the author confers authority and truth. When White authors say something negative about Africa those same people who have the exact same color skin as Africans detractors, by virtue of being white and nothing else, are not Eurocentric. It is a funny situation to observe. One self-published Afrocentric said the word African Holocaust is Eurocentric, but then goes on in his book to talk about the need for an African renaissance. The vulgar contradictions of the ideologue are not self-apparent. Naming buildings after dead people is Eurocentric, being punctual is Eurocentric, signing contracts is Eurocentric, look at production in discrete time units is Eurocentric. So what is the African alternative? You do not have to have any! it is just a shaming mechanism for the ignorant. Knowing of self is not a prerequisite for labeling poorly understood things as Eurocentric.

How can you say “Africans have their own history” and label Europeans and Arabs as this and that, and then all your solid references are back to the very same colonialist and marauding Arabs as evidence of the greatness of African civilizations? One person objected to saying the Shona (because it is artificially created) built great Zimbabwe and then proceeds to use Portuguese sources to search for the origins of the word Shona while dismissing European understanding of African history as colonial. But hold up! It does not need to explain itself, it is contrary because its roots are really not rooted in the historiography of Africa.

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BEAUTY

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WASHING OUT CHRISTIAN AND ISLAMIC HISTORY

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Because someone sold “conscious” Africans this image of Islam and Christianity as negatives and this comes out of that issue of taking our modern issues with Christianity in Africa and projecting them back on Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia as if their journey in Christianity is that of Ghana, or America or South Africa. Afrocentric starting with the likes of Chancellor Williams have created a hatred of Arabs and thus a hatred of Islam as an “invader religion.” As such all of that history has been washed out by African hands. But prior to this, between the European orientalist and Muslim racism Africa has been blatantly omitted from early Islamic history. Sometimes one has to ask yourself how did 25% of the Muslim world end up African? When you read these s0-called Muslim books on the History of Islam and Africa does not appear even in the footnotes. Especially the Shia books. Even the first Hijrah to Ethiopia is re-written and only the 2nd hijrah from Mecca to Medina is considered the “real” Hijrah.

If history is documentation of actual events that happened in the past why would anyone studying the past just simply choose to ignore or wash out that history? David Robinson in his book on Islam; New approaches states:

The final part of the answer has to do with Africa. From the perspective spective of the West and the Mediterranean, Africa is “black” and coincides with the part of the continent below the Sahara Desert – Sub-Saharan Africa. Outside of the continent most scholars, students, and otherwise-informed people do not think of Africa and Africans, under these definitions, as being Muslim or, if Muslim, as only recently converted to the faith, not very orthodox, and not very important to the history of Islam.

David Robinson. Muslim Societies in African History (New Approaches to African History) (Kindle Locations 48-51). Kindle Edition.

All of these misconceptions are still widely held, often in very prestigious religious places. Samuel Huntington, the noted social scientist at Harvard, serves as a telling example of the reflexive and unreflected ways in which many well-educated Western-educated people think. In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, published in 1996, he sees Africa as a set of weaker civilizations. At the same time, he sees “the Islamic tradition” as powerful, assertive, and potentially dangerous to the West. In the wake of the Cold War, he writes that “the overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts … have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.” Although he might not ascribe the destruction of the World Trade Center towers to mainstream Muslims, he and many influential writers and officials are predisposed to think of Islam as oppositional and Africa as irrelevant.

David Robinson. Muslim Societies in African History (New Approaches to African History) (Kindle Locations 51-56). Kindle Edition.

I hope to challenge these assumptions. Islam is almost 1,400 years old. It is “ancient” in Sub-Saharan as well as North Africa. It has been expressed in all sorts of forms. Most of its African practitioners have always thought of themselves as pious and correct in their practice. They have fashioned “orthodoxies” of their own. Their stories are critical to an understanding of the variety as well as the aspiration for unity of the Islamic world and serve as an antidote to many of the interpretations of September 11.

David Robinson. Muslim Societies in African History (New Approaches to African History) (Kindle Locations 56-59). Kindle Edition.

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EUROCENTRIC CRITERIA

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We see the word religion ad like the word civilization what we don’t see is how it was defined by us on the outside (some of us or most of us historically). One popular definition of religion is having a religious book. Who set up that criteria? Not us. Today most scholars expand out and away from this criteria but the legacy remains.

When did people speak of organized religions I have to then ask so what are the unorganized religions? Makes no sense whatsoever. When we come to civilization the criteria for that is what? Written language. Now if most of Africa did not have a written language then clearly these definitions put us on the outside of development. This is why Great Zimbabwe is considered pre-history by UNESCO. But it does not end there because how far can any civilization advance without writing? And the lack of writing in the bulk of Africa was something that stymied our development potential.

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IQ TEST THE EUROCENTRIC GOLD STANDARD

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Solve the above and you are special amongst humanity. Read more

IQ tests developed by people from a remote village in Kenya would not be the same as an IQ test developed by remote Ainu people in Japan. It is very arrogant to suggest we can measure something as subjective as intelligence with an IQ test that was developed by Western people. I would really be shocked if that test put Africa at the top of the intelligence test. It is clear there is a cultural bias, but some argue that such bias is not necessarily negative because it reflects the values of the dominant culture. Which means Eurocentrism. And ultimately Jordan Peterson would marry that to what we all should be striving for because success has one metric WEALTH! Eurocentric capitalism. And he states this in his interview with Cathy Newman. So what can we extract from this? The IQ test is Western-biased, but it justifies its bias because it has a direct correlation with Western capitalist values which are the ultimate metric of what we can call success across the cultural divide. In short, Western capitalist metrics are the best and have demonstrated this in the market place. I will not even argue against this, I am the weather man, just here to report the weather.

Most IQ tests focus on upfront small systems analysis and neglect developmental factors of intuition and expertise which underlay what is elemental to creative and pre-analytical products for which reasons. So an IQ test will test if you know the “right word” without dealing with “making sense” as a priority.

From Quora: On the other hand, people in rural areas in Africa in their daily lives have to solve problems that involve shaping various materials, inferring various things from cues in their surroundings, solving problems that involve manipulation of objects in three dimensions etc. So if you constructed a test that would assess IQ by asking a person to solve these types of problems, a typical rural African would easily outperform a typical urban Westerner.

It will not tell you how well you can solve problems such as these…

1. You’ve got 3 skinheads chasing you in a dark street in East London. What do you do?
2. Your demanding manager insists you do something you know you can’t do. How do you handle this?
3. You need to invest in one of these startups – Jibble or Bouncezap. Which one?
4. Someone much stronger than you comes up to you and slaps you. How do you respond?
5. It will not tell you how to create an equitable society with justice for all.