Molefi Kete Asante facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Molefi Kete Asante
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| Born |
Arthur Lee Smith Jr.
August 14, 1942 |
| Occupation | Professor Author |
| Spouse(s) | Ana Yenenga |
Molefi Kete Asante (born Arthur Lee Smith Jr.; August 14, 1942) is an American thinker. He is a very important person in the study of African-American history and culture, African cultures, and how people communicate. He teaches at Temple University, where he started a special program for advanced students in African-American Studies. He also leads an institute that studies Afrocentricity.
Asante believes in Afrocentricity. This is a way of looking at the world from an African point of view. He has written over 66 books and started the Journal of Black Studies magazine. He is the father of the writer and filmmaker M. K. Asante.
Early Life and Education
Molefi Kete Asante was born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia. He was the fourth of sixteen children. His father worked on the railroad, and his mother worked in homes. In the summers, Asante worked in tobacco and cotton fields to earn money for school. His aunt, Georgia Smith, encouraged him to study. She gave him his first book, which was a collection of stories by Charles Dickens.
Smith went to Nashville Christian Institute, a boarding school for Black students in Nashville, Tennessee. He finished high school there in 1960. While still in high school, he joined the Civil Rights Movement. He took part in a student march in Nashville.
After high school, he went to Southwestern Christian College in Terrell, Texas. There, he met Essien Essien from Nigeria. Essien inspired Smith to learn more about Africa.
Smith earned his first college degree from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964. He then got his master's degree from Pepperdine University in 1965. His master's paper was about Marshall Keeble, a famous Black preacher. Smith earned his highest degree, a PhD, from UCLA in 1968. He studied how people communicate. He later became the director of the Center for Afro-American Studies at UCLA. When he was 30, he became a full professor and head of the Communication Department at the University at Buffalo.
In 1976, Asante legally changed his name. He felt his birth name, Arthur Lee Smith, was a "slave name." This meant it was a name he felt connected to the time of slavery.
Career and Ideas
At the University at Buffalo, Asante developed ideas about how people from different countries and cultures talk to each other. He wrote a very important book called Handbook of Intercultural Communication. This was the first book of its kind. In 1976, Asante was chosen as president of a group that studies intercultural communication. He has guided over one hundred students in getting their PhDs in this field.
Asante published his first book about the Black movement, Rhetoric of Black Revolution, in 1969. Later, he wrote Transracial Communication. This book explained how race makes human interactions more complex in American society. Soon, Asante focused on African-American and African culture in communication. He paid special attention to the unique way African-Americans speak in public.
Asante wrote Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change in 1980. In this book, he said that African-Americans had felt like they were on the edge of European culture. They did not have a strong sense of their own history. Afrocentricity aimed to put Africans at the center of their own stories. It wanted to bring back the teaching of African-American history, which had been pushed aside by European viewpoints.
He wrote about the struggle between powerful white culture and the oppressed African culture. He also wrote about the lack of a "victorious consciousness" among Africans. This means a feeling of strength and success. This idea is found in his main philosophical book, The Afrocentric Idea (1987). Other books on Afrocentric theory include Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge (1990) and An Afrocentric Manifesto (2007).
The Utne Reader magazine named Asante one of the 100 leading thinkers in America. They said he was a "cultural liberationist." This means he helps free cultures. They wrote that his books, like Afrocentricity, offer a strong African-focused way of thinking for Black Americans.
In 1986, Asante suggested starting the first PhD program in African-American studies at Temple University. The program was approved, and the first students began in 1988. Over 500 people wanted to join the program. Temple University became a top leader in African-American Studies. It was ten years before another similar program started at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997. Graduates from Temple's program now work all over the world. Many of them lead African American Studies programs at major universities.
Honors and Titles
- In 1995, he was given the royal name Nana Okru Asante Peasah. He also received the chieftaincy title of Kyidomhene of the House of Tafo, Akyem Abuakwa, Ghana. This is a special leadership title in Ghana.
- In 2012, he was given the chieftaincy title of the Wanadoo of Gao. This was in the court of the Paramount Chief Hassimi Maiga of Songhai.
Understanding Afrocentricity
According to a book called The Oxford History of Historical Writing, Asante has "based his entire career on Afrocentricity." He continues to defend it even with strong criticisms.
In 1980, Asante published Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. This book started a discussion about how Africans can be active in their own history and culture. He said that Africans had been pushed away from the center of most ideas about identity, culture, and history. Afrocentricity wanted to put Africans back at the center of their own stories. It aimed to take back the teaching of African-American history from where Europeans had pushed it aside.
The combination of the European centuries gives us about four to five hundred years of solid European domination of intellectual concepts and philosophical ideas. Africa and Asia were subsumed under various headings of the European hierarchy. If a war between the European powers occurred it was called a World War and the Asians and Africans found their way on the side of one European power or the other. There was this sense of assertiveness about European culture that advanced with Europe's trade, religious, and military forces.
Asante's book The Afrocentric Idea was a more academic book about Afrocentricity. After the second edition came out in 1998, Asante appeared on many TV shows. These included The Today Show, 60 Minutes, and the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour. He discussed his ideas on these shows.
According to Asante's Afrocentric Manifesto, an Afrocentric project needs at least five things:
- 1. An interest in a "psychological location." This means understanding where people's minds are coming from.
- 2. A promise to find the "African subject place." This means seeing things from an African point of view.
- 3. Protecting African cultural parts.
- 4. A promise to make words more exact.
- 5. A promise to fix mistakes in African history.
I chose the term Afrocentricity to emphasize the fact that African people had been moved off of terms for the past five hundred years. In other words, Africans were not simply removed from Africa to the Americas, but Africans were separated from philosophies, languages, religions, myths, and cultures. Separations are violent and are often accompanied with numerous changes in individuals and groups. Finding a way to relocate or to reorient our thinking was essential to the presentation of African cultural reality. In fact, without such a reorientation, Africans have nothing to bring to the table of humanity but the experiences of Europeans, those who initially moved Africans off of social, cultural, and psychological terms.
