Hegemonic “Modernity”
A problem to consider is that modern writers of African descent have engaged themselves with western theoretical frameworks. Africologists, however, understand that frameworks such as modernity and postmodernity are no good for African people.11Perhaps should more accurately be described as western modernity or “westernity”. In fact, Africologists avoid engaging in such frameworks, only doing so in cases where Afrocentric theory is in need of defense or repair from hegemonic malignity. Modernity is to be understood as a paradigmatically eurocentric framework and a byproduct of the European Imperialist Cultural Project (EICP). Scholars such as Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Blaut, Molefi Asante, and Toyin Falola, have made it clear that “modernism” or “modernity” came about due to the imperialist expansion of European countries such as Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium (Monteiro-Ferreira, 2014, 40).
While modernity may be responsible for the expansion of technological and scientific advancements that have somewhat facilitated human social progress, the very same cultural project was involved in the kidnapping and enslavement of human lives, ruthless and murderous colonization antics, and developing erroneous racial theories that, to this day, have horrifying repercussions for African people. Further, the African people’s involvement with so-called “modern technologies”, such as the automobile, cellular phone, and television, is not a conscious involvement with modernism. To be absolutely clear, the western academy’s application of “modernism”, despite its broad implications, should not be viewed as some universal human endeavor but merely a eurocentric concept of social reality.
Modernism was developed out of Europe’s imperialist quest for power. It was able to be maintained due to the oppression and ontological and cosmological reduction of African people. The simple engagement with the modernist system (e.g., the creation of rockets for a European space program, the development of more efficient traffic signals for American cities, and the creation of music using “modern” technologies), does not make an African person a modernist. To be more clear, such involvement does not automatically make an African person an adherent or inheritor of the western intellectual heritage that is modernity. It is clear from the historical record that African people lived different realities and relied on intentions both unfamiliar and inconsequential to European ethos.
As with most bi-products of the EICP, modernism has had a significant role in psychological terror towards African people. It is through modernism that we have come to adopt such negative ideas as “Third World Countries”, “tribe”, “pygmy”, “bushman”, “native Indian”, and “negro”. These terms represent extant eurocentric ideological negations about oppressed people and cultures. Within modernism, there exists no plurality of ideas unless there is a hierarchy that establishes eurocentric ethos as standard or, more insidiously, universal, while all other cultural ideas are marginalized to the fringes of societal thought.