Repatriation and a Holistic Concept of Africology (Black/African Studies): The Impact of Africa-Centered and Pan African Perspectives on the Lived Experiences of Black/African Scholars
Keywords:
Africology, repatriation, emancipation, Africa-centered, Pan African, academyAbstract
The repatriation of Black/African Africa-centered (Cooper & Morrell, 2014) and Pan Africanist (Adi, 2018) scholars located in the African Diaspora to Africa is indispensable to Afrocentric (Asante, 2021) epistemic agency. Their repatriation to Africa is central to achieving irreversible intellectual authenticity needed for permanently warding off Eurasian forces historically and culturally aligned against the survival of African people. There are two cynical issues accepted as givens. Firstly, there is an inherence of tacit acceptance and consensus that African-rooted knowledge systems guided by Afrocentric universities must concede legitimacy to Eurasian knowledge systems. Secondly, the lack of unified political systems and governance on the African continent also auctions Africa-centered and Pan African knowledge production to conquered and substituted imperial and colonial production of being and knowing in time and space. These dangerous assumptions beg a series of important questions that this endeavor will attempt to tentatively address. 1. How must Africa-centered and Pan Africanist scholars located in contemporary North America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, as well as western Eurasia (i.e., destination sites of forced migration) broach the geography and anthropology, as well as the hermeneutics, of the emancipatory project that seeks to rescue Africa-centered and Pan African knowledge production systems from the tyranny of historical and cultural legacies of the violence of the “coloniality of power” (Quijano, 2007, p. 171; Quijano, 2000, p. 533)? 2. Do such emancipatory thinkers based in Africa proper have a moral, ethical, and epistemic responsibility to re-situate the dynamics of Africa’s quest toward full emancipation given the emerging global system in the 21st century? This emancipatory task is both daunting and needed for a continent whose population is fast exceeding a billion and rolling toward 2 billion in the nearest futures. This essay considers the intricacies of the push-pull factors that may impact some Africa-centered and Pan Africanist scholars’ decisions, regarding domicile, to remain complacent, to live and work outside of Africa, ultimately failing to fully ground their theories in the concrete moral, ethical, and existential realities of the African. The object of this essay is to (1) offer tentative initial reflections to better understand why so many Africa-centered and Pan Africanist scholars do not conduct most of their work in Africa, and (2) explore the benefits of choosing to live and work on the African continent as it relates to moral, ethical, intellectual, and epistemic emancipation of self and the continent at-large.
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