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.