THE AFROCENTRIC WAVE
- ramatiart
- Jan 16, 2017
- 2 min read
Over the past few ages, Africa has lingered in the shadows of Eurocentric reconstructions of her Art and cultural heritage. Although this has dissuaded Africans from understanding the value of African works of art, a certain new Afrocentric wave has began to influence most Africans and the West seems to have hopped on the band wagon with high demand and rising prices for African art. This has resulted in a growing value of African Arts globally. The different historical epochs of our cultural heritage and conditioning, has birth various types of art, from the stone paintings of the San people of Southern Africa used for spiritual purposes to the glistening assemblages of El Anatsui that reflect the sociopolitical issues of our global village from his own post-colonial perspective.
We now often ask ourselves; 'why do we now lay so much emphasise, on the appreciation of African works of art after so much time?' and I must say, it is strange to a majority of our people as they majorly relate African art to the worshipping of idols, traditional religions and cults. The challenge most of us have is that, we have built post-colonial patriarchal pillars in our minds that need to be dissembled and we need to recognise the fact that every culture is unique. Since the beginning of the post-colonial times, most African societies adopted and have since operated with imperialistic modes of production making majority of the masses to place western values at the fore front while they consciously and subconsciously care less for African values, seeing it as obsolete or archaic. This which is the case was a major influencing factor in the sociopolitical development of most African peoples in early post-colonial times, as they now desired Westernization by all means, with little or no regard for our ethnic cultural values any longer. Fortunately, most of us are realising that this should not be the case, as Western values are not always the best and can sometimes be very detrimental to the development of our own African societies. Note that I'm not saying we should now regard Western cultural values less, or view them as negative or detrimental to our societies; but I'm rather trying to buttress the point that every culture no matter how strong has its merits and demerits. This being said Western cultural values, are not better than African values and vice versa so; we as Africans must try to desensitise our minds from the imperialistic mindsets of thinking Western values are better or superior to African values - our various cultural ethnic values, are the very essence of who we are as Africans and we need to preserve this in order not to loose our cultural identities. The global village around us is only getting smaller, so we as Africans should have something to offer the rest of the world in this silent revolution of nationalistim and afrocentrism; we must appreciate, preserve and showcase our African cultures and the beauty in our values in large numbers, like a huge wave; the Afrocentric Wave
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