Books: Mauling the myths

Afrocentrism: mythical pasts and imagined homes by Stephen Howe Verso, pounds 20; Ellis Cashmore praises a powerful antidote to racial fantasies

Some years ago, the phrase "It's a black thing - you wouldn't understand" was hard to avoid. Plastered over T-shirts, it became a stock response to any enquiry into aspects of the black experience that required logic and evidence but which elicited neither. There was something so unique about being black that all attempts to grasp it with that old Enlightenment instrument - reason - were doomed.

Howe rails at such insider-ism and the philosophy of which it is a small, and not entirely serious, part. Afrocentrism is really one big idea: that there are "fundamentally distinct and internally homogeneous 'African' ways of knowing and feeling about the world, ways which only members of the group can possibly understand". The conception of a glorious past in which Africa was the "originating point of humanity" has been attractive, especially to African-Americans searching for sources of pride.

But the energy and ambition it commands has brought a damaging imbalance. Too much faith is based on myths of origin and falsehoods about cultural creativity. There is an "ersatz-mystical" quality about such uncritical approval of all things African.

Afrocentrism is advanced in counterpoint to the world views of "Dead White Males" in the Hellenic tradition. Howe retaliates against it with the wrath of a postmodern Achilles, always keeping a watchful eye for historical detail, an attentiveness to evidence and, as he concedes, an "irredeemably Eurocentric conception of coherence". He traces the sources of Afrocentrism to academic writing, political motifs and to sheer illusion. There are influences from esoteric Masonic tracts, French Caribbean negritude, Egyptology and African history. Martin Bernal's Black Athena comes in for a special mauling on account of its dodgy methodology.

Afrocentrism throws up many questions about the dystopian present. Are Jews responsible for spreading Aids in the ghettos? Should black children be educated in Ebonics (the black American English said to be based on African syntax)? Do African Americans deserve reparations for slavery? It answers yes in each case. Howe believes that the prolific Molefi Asante (aka Arthur Smith) of Temple University, Philadelphia, has been influential in spreading these Afrocentric ideas in and beyond the academy. He has a vision of all people of African descent bound by a "natural, psychic and spiritual unity".

In Howe's view, Afrocentrism today is nearer a religious cult than an intellectual position. It slides close to, if not collides with, what it was supposed to replace - racism. Add to this its occasional vilification of women and its condemnation of homosexuals and you have a hemlock-spiced ragout for the melting pot which has been eagerly devoured by rap musicians, among others.

It is fundamentally disempowering to believe in lies and fantasies, says Howe. Afrocentrism contains no potential for improving the material conditions of the poor, for extirpating racism or for kick-starting any kind of meaningful change. Only by disembarrassing ourselves of this large but feeble idea can we engage with such issues.

Lauding a book like this needs prudence. White supremacists might delight in finding the hubris of the Nation of Islam or the revered Marcus Garvey stung by Howe's nemesis. This is far from his intention, which is to expose the haunting myth of an idyllic Africa - in the hope that more sophisticated and practical convictions will replace it.