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8 Contemporary Black Thought Leaders Still Debunking Eurocentric Ideology

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Theophile Obenga_2

Theophile Obenga, Ph.D.

Theophilus Mwene Ndzalé Obenga, born in Mbaya (Congo), February 2, 1936, is an Egyptologist, linguist and historian. Obenga is currently a professor at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. His most recent work is African Philosophy: the Pharaonic period 2780-330 B.C. Obenga speaks at least 10 languages and brought to the forefront of the world the significant relationships between the civilizations of Central Africa and East Africa.

Obenga has advocated a number of ideas such as a “Negro-Egyptian” language family (négro-égyptien), which includes all languages of Africa, an approach that he shares with Cheikh Anta Diop. Obenga takes issue with the term “Afro-Asiatic” and states that the term is only a scientific invention and the Egyptian language was never reconstructed following the methods of comparative historical linguistics, the very aim of which is to link genetically the languages concerned.

From January 28 to February 3, 1974 in Cairo, Egypt, Obenga accompanied Cheikh Anta Diop as Africa’s representatives to the UNESCO symposium on “The Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script.” This meeting remains one of the single most important and famous defenses of African intellectual and historical integrity in the modern era.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Obenga

 

MOLEFI KETE ASANTE

Molefi Kete Asante, Ph.D.

Molefi Kete Asante is professor of African-American Studies at Temple University. Considered by his peers to be one of the most distinguished contemporary scholars, Asante has published over 400 articles and 74 books, among the most recent are “As I Run Toward Africa” and “The African American People, Maulana Karenga: An Intellectual Portrait.”

Asante published “Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change” in 1980. He maintained in the book that Africans had been moved off-center in terms of most questions of identity, culture and history. “Afrocentricity” sought to place Africans in the center of their own narratives and to reclaim the teaching of African-American history from the margins of Europe.

Along with advancing the philosophy of afrocentricity, Asante has provided an ideological framework to minimize the threats of regional, religious or ethnic obstacles to continental integration and civic commitment to the nation.

http://www.asante.net/biography/

www.asante.net/articles/50/federalism-african-peoples-the-civil-society-and-the-diaspora/

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