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The whole culture of the Black man, his religion, his cosmology, his technology, and so on possesses scientific bases. However, the epistemological bases of his science differ from those of modern Western thought. And, this difference prevents those who study Black African culture on the basis of Western epistemology to discover its scientific scope. In this article, the author develops the naturalized epistemology of the African traditional science. This epistemology teaches us that the African starts from the notion of God, to whom all reality is attributed; the Black African science is mainly a deductive science in which knowledge is of a revelatory nature. Contrary to the Western epistemology, the focus of the epistemology of the African science is the moral and spiritual conformity of the initiate to the religious norms and the praxis of the knowledge he produces. Far from being a bunch of superstitious beliefs, the African traditional religion, which is the basis of African lore, is demonstrated today, thanks to the apologetic tools developed by the Institut des Sciences Animiques, to be a scientific knowledge whose cosmology leads to the holistic “theory of everything.” This proves the natural convergence between African traditional lore and Newtonian physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spirituality is defined in cultural terms. The African’s lifelong sojourn for balance and harmony within himself or herself and within society is the essence of the spiritual being. Therefore, spirituality is defined as the African’s search for personal balance and harmony as well as that of society. The concept of Nommo, the power generated from the Spoken Word, is crucial in articulating the spiritual and philosophical nature of language for African people. The fulfillment of Maat is the essence of the spiritual being within the African worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and other critical voices to argue that education in Africa is victim of a resilient colonial and colonizing epistemology, which takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. Postcolonial African elite justify the resilience of this epistemology and the education it inspires with rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally. The outcome is often a devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, and an internalized sense of inadequacy. Education has become a compulsion for Africans to ‘lighten their darkness’ both physically and metaphorically in the interest of and for the gratification of colonizing and hegemonic others. The paper calls for paying more attention to popular systems of knowledge, in which reality is larger than logic. It calls for listening to ordinary men and women who, like p’Bitek’s Lawino, are challenging the prescriptive gaze and grip of emasculated elite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the sources of the discourse on African Mexicans, often referred to as Afromexicans, in an effort to structure a more extensive foundation for cultural work. Taking an Afrocentric approach to the study of Africans who were enslaved by the Spanish in Mexico, the author, who speaks Spanish, traveled to Mexico on many occasions to study the retention of African cultural forms, concepts, practices, and values. As a result of this work, the author wrote her doctoral dissertation at Temple University on African Mexicans. Thus, this article provides the reader with a critical literature brief on the issues surrounding the current discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culture of hip-hop and the legacy of some artists have received much criticism during the past two decades. At the center of that controversy is one artist who is never forgotten, for better or worse, Tupac Amaru Shakur. Although the legacy of Tupac looms large in urban centers around the world among the popular culture of youth, there has been little attention paid to him as a central figure in the professional literature. This article explores his life and lyrics, placing his contributions and struggles on a cycle of the Maat, Maafa, Sankofa paradigm, challenging critics to rethink his legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of colonial rule, Africa has on the whole been inadequately covered by the western media. It is rarely reported except as a backdrop to disaster or as the scene of a celebrity visit. There is an absence of sustained and well-informed reporting about Africa in the mainstream media. And when the media do cover it they often get the story very wrong, partly because there is no ongoing understanding of and engagement with the continent. Using exclusive access to the BBC archive, the article examines how and why media coverage of Africa has been misleading and misinformed in the postcolonial period. It examines the extent to which the close relationship between media coverage and aid agencies has damaged the cause of informing the public. Aid agencies have seen a huge growth since the mid-1980s -- partly precipitated by the power of media imagery. As media organizations have reduced their commitment to investing in reporting on Africa so journalists have in turn become more dependent upon aid agencies, which have filled a vacuum. This symbiotic relationship requires a degree of transparency otherwise there is a danger that it can compromise journalistic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africans in Spain have a large historical presence and influence, but recently a growing official discourse of Europeanization since the incorporation in the European Union puts in a serious danger the Africanity of Spain and leads to a growing racism. This article describes the different generations of Black populations in Spain, the identity conflicts and how one can organize and defy the dominant discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maat is a comprehensive construct that existed throughout ancient Egyptian civilization. Cosmologically, maat is the principle of order that informs the creation of the universe. Religiously, maat is a goddess or neter representing order or balance. Last, philosophically, maat is a moral and ethical principle that all Egyptians were expected to embody in their daily actions toward family, community, nation, environment, and god. This work extends maat beyond the boundaries of ancient Egyptian culture and tests its conceptual elasticity by developing it into an analytical tool for studying classical African cosmological knowledge and how it relates to cultural expression. It focuses on the conceptualization of maat as the foundation of the universe and then uses the manner in which maat appears in ancient Egyptian culture as a basis for distinguishing patterns within classical African knowledge. This pattern contains 10 characteristics or dimensions: sacred, symbolic, visual, functional, moral, oral, communal, rhythmic, multidimensional, and holistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features Emmanuel Mounier and his views on France's role towards Africa's development. Reviews of his writings as published in several journals in France where he focuses on the country's positive roles in aiding Africa's civilization were presented but his works still emphasizes criticisms towards France's colonial practices.

The scope and purpose of this article is to examine the effectiveness of the discipline of Africology as a holistic academic discipline. Often referred to as Africana studies, African American studies, Afro-American studies, Black studies, and Africology, this exercise of nomenclature can be defined as the study of Africana phenomena from an Afrocentric perspective. While reviewing literature and the current debates in higher education, the author theorized, queried, and critically examined the organizational structure concerning the validity and substantial merit of tenure and promotion, graduation and retention of students, and the advancement of this interdisciplinary matrix of knowledge as an academic agency. Indeed, many detractors have attempted to label and subjugate this academic enterprise in comparison to traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. On the other hand, the emphasis of a hegemonic perspective acknowledges the imposition of external and conflicted cultural perspectives that enable the composition of the creation of a subordinate group status. This article tills the idea of an Afrocentric perspective as an optional viewpoint to describe and evaluate the historical and cultural experiences of Africana phenomena within the interdisciplinary matrix of Africology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: In 1901, W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American intellectual and activist, conceived the idea of an encyclopedia Africana. He envisioned a scientific and comprehensive work on Africa and peoples of African descent that would refute the Enlightenment notion of blacks as devoid of civilization and the hallmarks of humanity. Du Bois stood in a tradition of earlier black works seeking to vindicate the race, but World War I and his move from academia to the NAACP postponed his efforts. In 1931, however, Du Bois participated in an encyclopedia project initiated by the Phelps-Stokes Fund. His writing during this period reveals his thinking about the nature and form a pan-African encyclopedia would take. Beset by rivalries and, primarily, lack of support from the established philanthropies, the project died. In 1960, shortly before his death, Du Bois was invited to Ghana to launch an encyclopedia. If any of these attempts had succeeded, the evolution of African and African American studies in the academy would have been significantly different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the European perception of West African civilization. Change in the European perception; Origins of European perception.

Provides an Africalogical examination of the central thesis of Cheikh Anta Diop's `African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality.' Assumptions of the Afrocentric approach top knowledge; References.

Discusses how the talking drum has been a viable cultural voice for various West and Central African cultures in the acquisition of literacy. Background on the study; Talking drum and oral discourse; Cultural perceptions of language and culture; Cross-cultural literacy transformation; Literate voice of the talking drum.

This article presents the views of José Luis González, a well-known author, on the cultural history of Puerto Rico. González examines the stages of Puerto Rican cultural and national formation as a result of ongoing power relations within the colonial society and under the impact of persistent foreign domination. He discusses that Puerto Rican popular culture is essentially and basically African culture in its Caribbean transmutation. He also mentions the restitution of the Afro-Antillean dimension of Puerto Rican culture.