The Afrocentricity of Marx

By Onwubiko Agozino 

I was delighted to receive this attached clip from my daughter telling me about a mention of my work by the 'social media sensation, @theconsciouslee. It is a moving commentary on my paper about how much Karl Marx admitted that African history was at the center of his own intellectual activism. My paper was first published in the Review of African Political Economy in 2014. I was invited by roape.net editors in 2020 to blog a summary and update of the article after several authors cited it as ground-breaking. Monthly Review republished the blog in 2020. A graduate student at Cornell University interviewed me for the Unequal Exchange YouTube Channel about the article and the interview audio was made available on Spotify in 2022. Now, this awesome commentary by NAACP Image Award Winner, George Lee Jr. on TikTok has convincingly called attention to the same article. It is about time that I completed the promised book follow-up.

Salute To Courage

 By Onwubiko Agozino

Today, January 15, I reflect on 'The World House' which MLK repeatedly said that we inherited from our ancestors. We must share with brothers and sisters in the Jim Crow South, in Vietnam, in apartheid South Africa, in Palestine and everywhere else. We must share all in a 'Beloved Community' or fight in 'chaos' and burn it down. Achebe identified the world house as Mbari, an ancient symbolic architecture still observed among the Igbo. It requires communal ritual selections of representatives to go into the forest and commune with the spirits of the ancestors for days. They return to restructure and reconstruct the miniature Mbari world (mud) house every now and then. When the foundations are shaky or the walls crumbled, a new one was collectively created to replace it. The new Mbari is  repopulated as usual with images of people from all over the world, along with ancestral spirit figures, animals and plants under the same roof. This symbolizes how tolerant of differences Africans are and it demonstrates that chaos is not always a bad alternative to order or the beloved community, since they coexist; as Abdul Bangura, Horace Campbell and Ron Eglash remind us with theories of the science, arts, and cultural politics of African Fractals. Desmond Tutu called the sharing spirit, Ubuntu or a bundle of humanity (and of nature too). Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to You. Onwubiko Agozino