An African-centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior
by Marimba Ani
(Dona Richards)
Africa World Press, Inc.
ISBN 0-86543-249X
ISBN 0-86543-248-1 (pbk)- 636 pages including bibliography and index
As one reviewer writes, YURUGU removes the mask from the European facade and
thereby reveals the innerworking of global white supremacy: A system which
functions to guarantee the control of Europe and her descendants (the few)
over the majority of the world's peoples (the many)........Dr. Marimba Ani
exposes the roles of both the academic and Christian establishment in
proselytizing as "universal" that which is indeed culturally specific to
Europe and which therefore functions in the interest of European dominance.,
Sister Dr. Ani's mentor, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, who recently joined the
ancestors, characterizes YURUGU as "a pioneering and ground-breaking work
dealing with a neglected aspect of European culture. He says Professor Ani
"has analyzed the European influence on the world base on what they think of
themselves and how this thought affects most of the world. For during the
15th and 16th century Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they
also colonized information about the world.
Dr. Ani's chosen field is African-centered cultural science and she teaches
Pan-African studies. Professor Ani says, "To be of African descent and to
study anthropology is to be struck by the pervasive anti-Africanism of the
discipline." She has become convinced "that teaching Pan-African studies
well means teaching European studies simultaneously. To be truly liberated,
African people must come to know the nature of European thought and behavior
in order to understand the effect that Europe has had on our ability to
think victoriously." YURUGU is designed to once again activate the
collective conscious of African people in the Diaspora as well as on the
continent. Dr. Ani warns us that this work is "an intentionally aggressive polemic." or
confrontational and describes it as "an assault upon the European
paradigm." And while Professor Ani's approach may make some people
uncomfortable, Aziza Gibson-Hunter reminds us that, "racism/white supremacy
is the fire ignited by the Europeans: our response is only the smoke."
There is no way to extinguish a fire without experiencing the smoke.
YURUGU is by no means "light reading." It is a very thorough study of a
great amount of source material in European and African intellectual thought
and the result of what Dr. Ani refers to as "a 20 year sojourn through the
bowels of European thought." YURUGU definitely requires a careful and
considered approach in order to understand and digest the new information
and revelations therein. It is, however, must reading for all serious
minded Africans.
The study begins with a discussion of European thought and discusses the
uniqueness of European thought in its use of cultural thought in the
assertion of political interest. Dr. Ani says "intellectual decolonization"
is a must and we must create "cultural reconstruction strategies." In
Chapter 2 she differentiates between religion and spirituality. Dr. Ani
states that "spirituality rests on the conception of a sacred cosmos that
transcends physical reality in terms of significance and meaning." It
enables us to apprehend the sacred in our natural, ordinary surroundings.
And religion refers to the formalization of ritual, dogma, and belief, and
may or may not issue from a spiritual conception of the universe. She shows
how religion functions to sacralize a nationalistic ideology and discusses
how institutionalized Christianity and European imperialism are inseparable.
Chapter 3 discusses aesthetics as an expression of value. As Dr. Kariamu
Welsh Asante has said, "all aesthetics have their origin in resemblance" and
Dr. Ani shows how the myth of a "universal aesthetic" is created and used
by Europeans as a tool of imperialism. In chapters 4 & 5 she examines the
images and concepts of self and other and how Europeans justify their
treatment of "the cultural other." Chapters 6,7,and 8 discuss the
relationship between what Europeans want others to believe they are doing and
what actually happens. Dr. Ani calls this breach between word and deed "the
rhetorical ethic." She shows how this built-in hypocrisy catches Africans
and others off guard because this hypocritical component is missing from
other cultures and concludes that Native Americans were correct and
prophetic when they remarked that "paleface speaks with heap forked
tongue." Chapters 9 & 10 closely examine the themes of "progress" and
"universalism" in European ideology. And Professor Ani concludes her study
by "offering an interpretation of European culture that relates its
devaluation of spirit and extreme rationalism to its intensely imperialistic
behavior towards others.
"Secularization and desacralization are by-products of the process of
rational ordering." And since formalized Eurpoean religion has itself been
secularized there is no source of conflict with this process from "religious
" quarters. Dr. Ani says, "The difference between the militarists and the
missionary is only one of modus operandi; the blows of one are more
physically apparent; those of the other leave battered souls and cultures in
their wake."
By creating the concept of the "cultural other" Europeans have declared
most things primitive that they could not understand. Through misuse of the
Bible and racial religious imagery, they taught people to laugh at the gods
of their ancestors and accept the gods of their conqueror. Its a sad
commentary that as African American Babalawo's Baba Fa'lofin and I are
acutely aware of the animosity towards Ifa harbored by many of our Yoruba
sisters and brothers from the Motherland. Many of them have been taught to
reject the religion of their ancestors. They represent the "battered souls"
left in the wake of the European intellectual and cultural imperialism
promoted by the militarists and missionaries. Like many sisters and
brothers in the Diaspora, their minds are "still crowded with the image of
Europeans as superior beings" as they tenaciously cling to the church
commissioned anthropomorphic images of Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael and
others. Sister Dr. Ani has designed YURUGU to be a partial solution to
this condition that Professor Clarke calls "the imprisonment of a people
to image." We should also be aware of what Molefi Asante meant by the term
" indivisibility of freedom." We received our physical freedom in the 19th
century, our legal freedom in the 20th century and yet without our
psychological freedom, sisters and brothers, we are still slaves. As we
approach the new millennium, I submit we should begin the process described
by noted psychologist Dr. Na'im Akbar in his excellent work entitled
Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery (subject of a future book
review).
Professor Ani's work YURUGU is definitely a part of this much needed
process.
Respectfully submitted,
Babalawo Omobowale Langston Adubiifa (Langston Thomas,J.D.)
Baba Adubiifa is a Yoruba Priest (Babalawo) with the Imole Oluwa Institute
of Nigeria and immediate past president
of Alabama's largest NAACP Branch (Huntsville). His email addrsss is
adubifa@airnet.net.
