Introduction
The discipline of Africology has long yearned for its own unique historiographical disposition. Molefi Kete Asante (2007) dedicates a whole chapter to the idea of an “Afrocentric Historiography in his text, An Afrocentric Manifesto. Since Africologists utilize the Afrocentric paradigm, which “places African ideas at the center of any analysis that involves African culture and behavior,” (Asante, 1998, p. 2), Africological Historiography is scholarship dedicated to the preservation of African cosmology in the telling of African history. Also, in places where the people and their history remain marginal, such a historiography serves to “tease out the agency” of African people (Asante, 2007, p. 65).
In Victor Okafor’s (1997) article, Toward an Africological Pedagogical Approach to African History, he refers to African history as “a matrix” under which are embedded the various histories of the African world. Both Okafor and Asante acknowledge the utility of Cheikh Anta Diop’s historiography, or Diopian Historiography (Asante, 2007, 118), in presenting a non-chronophobic history of African people. Asante (2007) describes Diopian Historiography as a corrective view of African history that relocates the ancient Nile Valley as an African cultural center.
Africology exists as an errant agent within the western academy. It is not of the western academy; instead, for the sake of combating hegemonic eurocentric paradigms imposed upon African people, it forced its way into a seat at the academic table. As such, if it wishes to maintain any notion of autonomy, it is not possible for it to hold an interdisciplinary disposition. It is a solely disciplinary field with a guiding paradigm that is foundational to no other field. Unlike every other field in the western academy, Africology is primarily predicated upon the assumption of agency for African people. As such, what I primarily deal with in this article is how Africans in America, or “African Americans”, should engage African history. However, the methodologies described within are just as applicable for scholars on the African continent and throughout the African world. In this article, I explore the benefits and dangers of other fields of interests, the dangers of eurocentric theoretical models, afrophobic historiographies, and the inherent praxis of the discipline in its use for producing Africological Historiography. These are primary considerations for Africologists in the writing of African history.