As someone who frequents message boards oriented around African history, I've run into several individuals who have some very...unorthodox ideas about the role of black people in world history. According to these people, black Africans founded nearly every significant civilization in antiquity, including Greece, Mesopotamia, the Olmec culture of Mesoamerica, and the Chinese Shang Dynasty. I've even met people claiming that the ancient Celts and Vikings were black!
Such individuals would likely be called "radical Afrocentrists", but the more I consider their claims, the more I doubt that this label is really applicable to them. I've noticed that these guys actually seldom pay much attention to cultures inside of Africa itself; they're more concerned with finding blacks in far-flung reaches of the planet. Take as an example Gregory Walker's Shades of Memnon trilogy, which claims a significant black presence in Olmec Mesoamerica and Shang Dynasty China. Walker may proclaim that his books are pro-African, but while the protagonist is indeed Egyptian, as far as I can tell he is in Europe, Asia, and the Americas rather than Africa proper for most of the books' length.
On the other hand, if you study the word "Afrocentrism", you'll see that it implies a focus on Africa. How can people be Afrocentric if they spend more energy declaring non-African cultures to be black than encouraging the study of genuine African cultures? This emphasis on peoples outside of Africa isn't Afrocentric, but is if anything the opposite.
Mind you, I'm not against the notion of black Africans exploring faraway lands by itself. If there's any evidence for it, I can even buy African merchants trading with the Olmecs, Chinese, or what have you. However, I really do not like the idea of black Africans founding every significant non-African culture, for it's implicitly disrespectful to non-Africans. It's tantamount to how Europeans used to claim a non-African origin for every major civilization in Africa, such as Egypt and Great Zimbabwe. The truth of the matter is that the history of world civilization is multichromatic, with its builders ranging in complexion from ebony black Kushites to lily white English. That's a much more colorful picture than the one painted by racial supremacists of any shade.
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