More Thoughts on the Africanists' Agenda

Abstract

Doing Western-type studies of Africa will always be problematic until we are able to wrest control of the paradigm from narrow Western objectives in order to satisfy the fundamental needs of Africa and not of the West. The late Cheikh Anta Diop, the greatest African scholar of the twentieth century, put forth the idea that Western scholars as a whole would find themselves unable to extricate their research from the intellectual interests of the West in order to serve the social and cultural aims of knowledge for Africa. Whether Cheikh Anta Diop was correct or not remains to be seen. However, from what we have already witnessed the most anti-African elements, whether in terms of the research priorities, projects, careers and programmatic orientations, structures, and objectives in the field, continue to have the most awesome hold on studies of Africa. The travesty is that it has lasted for so long.