Introduction

This book contends that Afrocentricity and other ideas birthed by major contemporary Black thinkers in the Diaspora are wellsprings for helping to build a new Africa. This book examines these ideas, which have given rise to the Africanist Perspective on the Motherland to place Africa at the center of all intellectual discourses pertaining to African people everywhere while at the same time challenging the pervasive and pernicious Eurocentric myth of African people being inactive agents in history. These contributions from a global range of scholars across disciplines examine the work of contemporary great Black thinkers as sources that can be employed to help in the construction of a new Africa. Each chapter examines how these thinkers conceptualized Africa in their works, with the main objective of delineating their conceptualizations to generate suggestions on how to rebuild the continent.