Cultural hybridity is perhaps an inevitable feature of human cultures in this era. The movement of people, goods, and information over the last five centuries accounts for this. This is no different for African people wherever we find ourselves. This is part of why I argue that cultural purity is an unrealistic striving. It is incongruent with the material condition of humanity. This, whether positive or negative, is simply an extant reality.
The manifestations of such hybridity among our people reveals itself in a myriad of ways–language, religion, music, movement-based practices, and so on. This is what I have referred to as a pattern whereby one will encounter Africans in the US whose cultural praxis spans a range of domains from the African Diaspora to Africa (ancient and “modern”) to India to China and so on.
Tomorrow there is a Odwirafo festival on the South Side of Chicago. This is a traditional festival from the Akan people of West Africa. The subject is healing and the keynote speaker is a long-time Tai Chi practitioner. Tai Chi is a traditional Chinese fighting art. This is a case in point of this tendency towards hybridity.
To use the tools available to you is intelligent. Thus, I think that our people’s embrace of various healing, combative, and other modalities has been intelligent, especially given that our access to traditional African knowledge of these kind remains limited. However, it is incumbent upon us to both maximally use those African knowledges available to us, in addition to seeking and constructing additional knowledge. There are many areas where such a process can be applied.
Naming is one such area. There are no discernible barriers preventing us from using and promoting African names.
Languages is another. There are many African languages that are quite accessible to us. The Swahili language is, by far, the most accessible for Africans in the US, but there are abundant resources for those seeking to learn the languages of Kemet (ancient Egypt), the Akan, and the Yorùbá as well. There is also a growing body of resources pertaining to the Igbo, Kikongo, and Wolof languages. What is required is our resolve to learn, use, and transmit these languages. I would argue that these are more of a problem.
Various movement disciplines are another area open to us. Capoeira and African and African Diasporic dance traditions are readily accessible to us. Fu-Kiau stated that dance is a modality of healing. Therefore, these practices have utility beyond the performative, utility that remains untapped amongst us.
Perhaps the areas of greatest importance however, are those which have been the preoccupations of African intellectuals for over a century–history and critical theory. History is, obviously, an area of culture and is indispensable to our regeneration as a people. By critical theory I am simply referring to the efforts of our people to formulate critical analyses of our condition and solutions to this malaise. Martin Delany, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, Kwme Nkrumah, Cheikh Anta Diop, Malcolm X, Marimba Ani, Frances Cress Welsing, Jacob H. Carruthers and others have offered us rich insights to build upon. In fact I would argue that the study of history and critical thought is necessarily a means to effectively inform our discernment of what non-African ideas and practices may be congruent or non-congruent with the broader and necessary process of Sankɔfa or re-Africanization.
Ultimately, I think that what must be remembered is that we bring an African essence to all that we do. That African essence, when we have studied our history and critical thought and have internalized them, enables us to transform whatever we touch, making it serve our interests.