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Kemet and the African Worldview: Research, Rescue and Restoration

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Maulana Karenga (born 1941) is an African American author, political activist, and college professor, who is perhaps best known as the creator of Kwanzaa. Jacob Hudson Carruthers (1930-2004) was a professor at northeastern Illinois University.

In the Introduction to this 1986 book, Karenga states, "This volume seeks to explore and suggest the outlines of an African worldview in governance, history, spirituality and philosophy, and creative production as evidenced in Kemetic civilization. It is self-consciously a restorative project, an attempt to restore that which lay in ruins for centuries, a legacy unequalled in antiquity, and to explore the lessons it offers us today in conceiving and building our cultural future."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"In ancient Africa, the woman not only had a special place within the context of the family but often ruled nations wielding much power. One only has to look at the ancient nation states of Egypt, Kush, and Ethiopia to see women in positions of leadership and power..." (Pg. 32)

"An overwhelming number of western scholars seek to link the ancient Israelites with the Hyksos who invaded Kemet and ruled for about 200 years during the Second Intermediate Period. Agreement between western scholars on the supposed white or Asian origin of the Hyksos does not mean that the ancient Israelites were so. The presence of the infamous Hyksos in ancient Kemetic history has proven to be a most convenient tool in the hands of Eurocentrics who were and still are bent on white-washing the true history of the African people." (Pg. 61)

"(As Cheikh Anta) Diop has pointed out, the common denominator characterizing the study of ancient Egypt by white egyptologists has been their seemingly desperate pathological necessity and unrelentless attempt to refute Africa's Blackness. Consequently, information regarding ancient Africa has been destroyed, distorted, falsified, suppressed and intentionally made unclear." (Pg. 102)

"We sometimes speak of animal worship which, by the way, occurs nowhere that I know in Africa. There are meditations, rhythmic meditations, as Robert Lawlor recognizes, that were used to clarify essential functions of nature. This was not a worship of animals, but a grasping for essentiality." (Pg. 185-186)