African Studies for the 21st Century

African Studies as a field of inquiry has had to combat the insidious interpretations of racist theories used to justify the domination and colonisation of the continent for the past five hundred years. While this has not been the complete history of the field, it has yielded numerous historians who have either misunderstood or deliberately distorted the idea of African agency. Now Jacob Gordon has brought together some of the finest minds in the field to establish the parameters for the future. There have been two general movements in the past one hundred years that have reflected the ideas of Africans toward the doctrine of white supremacy in African Studies and other fields: Negritude and Afrocentricity. Both of these movements have attendants, variances, and oppositions. Nevertheless they may be said to speak to the same problem confronting the African people in a global way and African Studies specifically. This book represents an advance in the conceptualisation of African leadership and political direction. There have always been models of leadership, rooted deeply in the culture, responsive to the historical contexts of the people themselves, that have been used by African leaders. However, what the authors in this volume are committed to is the development of ideas and ideals that will lend continuity to the best traditions of the African people.