The term 'Afrocentrism' was invented relatively recently, by Molefi Asante, a professor in Philadelphia, who described it as a way to escape from Eurocentrism by looking at the world from an African viewpoint. Since then, the label 'Afrocentrist' has been attached to a number of intellectual positions, ranging from 'All good things come from Africa' or, as Leonard Jeffries, the outspoken professor of African Studies at City University in New York, put it, 'Africa creates, Europe imitates,' to the many who merely maintain that Africans, or peoples of African descent, have made significant contributions to world progress and that, for the past two centuries, these have been systematically played down by European and North American historians.

LRB 12 December 1996 | PDF Download