This mixed-methods study analyzed the effectiveness of the practices and attitudes of selected African American teachers who use culturally relevant and responsive Afrocentric pedagogies as the instructional foundation for improved academic outcomes with their African American students. The theory of Afrocentricity was used as the philosophical framework to study their pedagogy. Afrocentricity is a mode of thought and practice in which in African people are placed at the center of their own history and culture; engages them as subjects rather than objects; and approaches them with respect for their interests, values, and perspectives (Asante 1980, 2003). Concepts employed from this theoretical framework provided a lens for the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data collected and analyzed. The setting for this study was a private Afrocentric prekindergarten through 8th-grade school. The participants in this study were 3 African American teachers. Data collected and analyzed supported using culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy to produce improved academic outcomes for students of color (Boykin, 1984, 1994; Hale-Benson, 1986; King, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Shujaa, 1995; Villegas, 1991). Findings suggested that in selected academic settings improved academic performance occurred for African American students when teachers used culture relevant and responsive pedagogy. The following themes were embedded in the pedagogy: self-determination, academic empowerment, cultural empowerment, and family/community empowerment. The findings implied a need for teachers and teacher-training institutions to re-examine, recommit, and reinstitute culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy that respects and addresses the culture, education, and social improvement for positive academic outcomes for all children.

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This study provides a foundational framework for Afrocentric translation. Afrocentric translation in which Afrikan languages and their Pan-Afrikan cultural context, transgenerationally and transcontinentally, are central in the interpretation of Afrikan texts (written or oral) and, thus, ensuring that Afrikan people are the subjects in the episteme of the translation process. The two languages of focus in this study are Medew Netcher, the Kemetic language, and the Jamaican language. The basic grammatical features of Medew Netcher will be explained from an Afrocentric perspective through Jamaican translations. More specifically, the analysis shows that the equational juxtaposition system reflects the Afrikan notion of ontological unity, the verbal paradigm is reflective of the Afrikan notion of time, and it also shows how Afrikan existential concepts of existence and knowledge manifest in the grammar of Medew Netcher and Jamaican. In addition, this study includes the first translation of a Kemetic text in an Ebonics language as an exemplar for large-scale Afrocentric translation of a text. Overall, this study provides a foundational framework for the Africological study of Afrikan language. / African American Studies

Thesis (Ph. D. (Psychology)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / Eurocentric literature has contributed towards the understanding of homosexuality for centuries. However, there is very little literature on perceptions of homosexuality from an African perspective. Based on this historical gap, the aim of the current study was to explore Northern Sotho traditional healers’ perceptions of homosexuality in the Capricorn District in Limpopo Province, South Africa. This was with the intention of documenting themes pertinent to Northern Sotho culture regarding homosexuality. Ten (10) participants (7 females and 3 males) were interviewed in the current study and they were selected using snowball sampling. Data was collected using individual face-to-face interviews guided by semi-structured questions and analysed using Thematic content analysis (TCA). The study was underpinned by Afrocentricity. The main themes and sub-themes which emerged from the data analysis were: homosexuality threatens family structure and values; homosexuality is regarded as a taboo and a disgrace; homosexuality and ancestral calling; historical evidence of homosexuality; homosexuality is confusing; homosexuality and western culture; homosexuality and cleansing (mourning process); homosexuality, traditional healing and ancestral calling; homosexuality and initiation schools as well as proposed interventions to curb homosexuality. The results of the study suggest that understanding homosexuality is not consistent with Northern Sotho culture. The study contributes to knowledge and information within Northern Sotho culture and offers suggestions for indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), academic training, policy development and legislation in terms of homosexuality and the indigenous culture. The study also offers guidelines, which health care workers and any other relevant personnel who work closely with homosexuals, should be cognisant of. Furthermore, valuable lessons were also reasoned from the current study in terms of homosexuality and Northern Sotho culture in the area where the research took place. Keywords: Afrocentricity, Culture, Homosexuality, Northern Sotho, Traditional Healer.

The hegemonic Eurocentric culture that dominates the United States accultures African American men into an ideal of Manhood that is antithetical to their being. “Man-Up” an emotional deflective and dominating command, has been a bedrock of African American dislocation to their journey towards Manhood. By returning to an African epistemology and culture rooted in the search for Ma’at, African men throughout the diaspora and within the United States can recover a humane and culturally dislocated definition of Manhood that works in concert with their women, environment, and the cosmological order. This dissertation examines the standard of Manhood in Kemet; whether African American men have sought Ma’at in their description of Manhood; and finally, explores how the Maatian standard of Manhood may reorient African American men into a cultural norm that harmonizes families, communities, and ecologies. There is no overarching question for this work. Still, one central focus is to liberate African men from colonizing cultural models of Manhood and reorient them with an African cultural idea founded on the principle of Ma’at. / Africology and African American Studies

From African rock paintings created 50-70,000 years ago during African migrations to the art of the Nile Valley and the Benin bronzes, much of African art has been claimed and controlled by European institutions governing the capitalization and exploitation of African art and artists. The Western art world has had a vested interest in African art since the European conquest of Africa when much of it was stolen. Incorporating evidence from books, essays, magazines, reports, interviews, and documentaries, this study shows that an operational Afrocentric approach to African art administration dismantles the exploitative agency of the Western art industry to initiate a liberation process from its artistic confines. It enhances how African artists, the community, and cultural representatives on the continent and throughout the diaspora view African artistry from a cultural perspective and free themselves from the control of an industry profiting from their works by defining them from a Eurocentric racist perspective. Cultivating a creative ecosystem that functions as an organizing method by executing Afrocentric infrastructure to demonstrate creative, economic, and social values establishes a culturally sensitive platform to develop the administration, accumulation, and pedagogies of African art. It will have an educational purpose that requires becoming conscious of African cultural history and the function of art. From this perspective, it is possible to develop a cultural identity and grounded analysis of the creativity of the African world and its value from the past to the future. / Africology and African American Studies

This thesis examines of the religious and philosophical origins of racism, arguing that anti-black, anti-African racism has its origins in the biblical account of the ancient Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and the events recounted in the Hebrew scriptures. It begins with an examination of the nature of racism itself, considering how the contemporary experience of and scholarship about racism can illuminate the search for racism’s historical origins. Contemporary experience has taught us that the functioning of racism often operates independently of the explicit racial prejudice coupled with power once thought to comprise it. This understanding has been reflected in scholarship that has examined how racism has functioned through hierarchical discourse, a concept which is defined and analyzed at some length. Following this examination comes a “genealogical” tracing of hierarchical discourse about African phenomena in the Western-dominated academy, leading to the centrality of the religious concept of idolatry in the making of racist accounts of African phenomena. Finally, the thesis concludes with a chapter on the mytho-historical exodus event, which gave birth to this concept of idolatry, analyzing the meaning and significance of the event in the making of racist discourse. This thesis demonstrates that a broader understanding of racism as an outgrowth of a worldview necessarily hostile to alternatives, when applied to the study of the historical development of racism, paints a far more convincing and complete portrait of the origins of racism, its historical development, and its present functioning than studies based on a more narrow understanding of racism. / African American Studies

The purpose of this study is to produce an Africological model that lends attention to epistemological questions in African diaspora research through theoretical and culturally based analysis, ultimately to aid the historical and psychological restoration of Africans in diaspora. This work reflects the theoretical and historic stream of scholarship that centers geographic Africa as the adhesive principle of study in shaping and understanding the cultural and political ally-ship between different African diasporic communities. My aim is to illustrate what Africa represents in diaspora and how it was shaped in the conscious minds and actions of early Africans in diaspora from their own vantage point. Secondly, through a case study of the intra-diasporic relationship between Haiti and free Africans of Philadelphia following the Haitian Revolution, this work lays precedence for the expansion of an African diasporic consciousness. The significance of the intra-diasporic relationship is in the mutual recognition that Haitians and Africans in North America considered themselves a common people. Moreover, they developed an international relationship during the early 19th century to serve their mutual interest in African freedom and autonomous development despite Western expansion. My research locates Africa as the place of origin for dispersed and migrating African diasporic communities, operating as a binding source. In this study Africa is explored as a cognitive and geo-political cultural location for African people in diaspora. I support that African diasporic communities exist as extended African cultural locations of awareness which can and have been negotiated by communities depending on their agency, support, and circumstance to achieve collective goals. / African American Studies

The central problem that this research seeks to engage is the non-implementation of an Afrocentric movement for African American economic advancement. A wealth of research has explored external and internal factors that cause inequalities in wealth among African Americans and their White counterparts, but there has yet to be an adequate program that addresses African American poverty. The lack of an Afrocentric program has contributed to the formation of African American communities plagued by economic challenges. Social factors such as structural racism, poor educational institutions, generational transfer of poverty, urban removal etc. has had devastating effects on African Americans' opportunities of accumulating wealth. While wealth alone will not solve all issues that face African Americans, addressing economics realities from a social, political, and historical perspective will assist with the current movement for African American economic empowerment and contribute to the economic dimension of the struggle for African liberation. In focusing on economics, this research seeks to contribute to African liberation by providing a detailed Afrocentric historiographical perspective, an empirical analysis of current economic realities, and a model for economic liberation. / African American Studies