The West is Primitive
Another call for decolonization, reconnection to ancestral knowledge, and study.
I wrote this piece 2-3 years ago and it’s been sitting in my drafts because at the time I would overthink everything. I made slight edits, Enjoy!
While watching the Kanye West interview with Joe Rogan a little over 4 years ago, I became so irritated. Not just by Kanye West continuously calling his favorite architectural designs for sustainable housing, primitive. Or even by his keen interest in building up ‘new’ societies and this idea of the capitalist American dream. What irritated me was the fact that all of this ‘genius’ and innovation he referred to was devoid of education on Africana Indigenous knowledge. Like many ‘Influencers’ of today, there is a lack of acknowledgment and retrieval of the history, ideas, and knowledge of Indigenous peoples. Not always on purpose but mainly because of colonial miseducation. So while many hope to build a new future, I realize that we’re leaving key elements of the past behind. So, as innovative and important as his words may seem by many..when critiquing our current society, his investment in creating a new society (with God at the foundation), seems to still be rooted in Western settler-colonial ideas around what it means to be free, human, and innovative. His free-thinking isn’t free from colonized forms of consciousness.
His critique, like many, falls short of acknowledging how Indigenous people have constantly been resisting and reimagining the very future he’s “conjuring up on his own”. But like many who center the achievements of the west as a reference for how to create anew; a world of ideas, lessons, and knowledge that can contribute to the flourishing of humanity is often ignored/left behind.
Our collective miseducation and lack of knowledge of Africana history were made even more apparent when he said that Black people in America have no heroes. It was saddening and mind-boggling, especially because as an Africana woman in America, I do. Harriet Tubman, Bell Hooks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King Jr, Kwame Ture, Malcolm X, and many others that critiqued the west and organized for the benefit of all peoples. So, while I recognize we aren’t taught the full truth about our histories and societies, I also recognize the need for us to WANT to know.
This idea that people of African descent have no heroes to look up in hindsight is what bothers me the most because we do. We were the first Kings and Queens of human civilization, creating the world’s major religions like Christianity and Islam. In Ancient Kemet, we led socialist and capitalist societies that show the world what works and what doesn’t. I’ve read about them, listened to lectures on them, continued to study world history, and visited the ancient yet futuristic communities that live today. So I know these autonomous realities many seek to build coming out of the west must be mindful to not forget to look to the past and present of Africana people to see what can be done.
For hundreds of years, settler-colonial states have sought to demonize our Africanness, our spirituality, and our technological genius as “primitive”. While at the same time appropriating our histories as their own. There is so much more to us, a long genealogy of societies, kings, queens, warriors, spiritualists, historians, scientists, farmers, and more. We have something ancient, imaginative, futuristic, mystical, beautiful, human, colorful, life-giving, warrior-ish, woman-ish, and empowering.
So despite settler-colonial schools seeking and achieving (to some extent) in dividing, conquering, and erasing the spiritual and resistant history/nature of Africana people, we live to tell the story...we live to resist the story.
There has been an influx of people following the tradition of our ancestors by living purposefully as creatives, spiritualists, workers, historians, teachers, librarians, students, designers, visionaries, theorists, and HUMANS.
We have to live it…
That ancient genius, empowering past, and Africana historical worldview lives in the DNA of Africana people, It lives in our questions, It lives in our minds, it lives in the integrity of our healers, it lives in our resilience, Our love, our teachers, our art, our healing, our curiosity, our memory, and our reconnection.
However, access to formal education, study, and the empowerment of such narratives has long been marginalized, downplayed, discouraged, denied, and deemed unimportant to our success and the benefit of the world. The knowledge of Africana people has been marginalized into a westernized idea of Black history, fragmented and consolidated rhetoric.
A history that has a much larger genealogical connection to the world, and to humanity. Black history especially in the US seems to start in 1619, where hundreds of years of history before colonialism is completely overlooked. Our Ancient existence, long genealogy, culture, and knowledge are said to be non-existent. While European colonists lock artifacts of our genealogy away in vaults and museums. Similar to the Romans burning our archives in Ancient Kemet and calling us liars for remembering.
The result is African-descended creatives being put into western pop-cultural “ideas” of Black culture, Black art, Black movements, and literary genres. This all comes from not knowing the vast historical traditions of African people that existed before colonization. This can be seen in Nnedi Okafor's strong need to categorize her literary work as being African-futurism, a branch off of Sci-fi fiction. And Not “Afrofuturism”, a pop-cultural phenomenon that the West likes to throw at anyone who mixes African aesthetics, science, spirituality, and folklore but only when it’s in connection to western technology.
But we never needed spaceships to be scientific anyway. We don't need to be categorized by the western world, just like we don’t need to have a seat at a settler-colonial table. We need to value and study our Indigenous knowledge.