Nothing in our recent history demonstrates an appreciation for Africa’s own contribution to understanding of exchange, return, and bargaining in the context of an African world perspective. It is as if we have abandoned all of Africa’s ancient ideas for the newer forms of capitalist oriented economics. The fact of the matter is that Marxist economics have run their course and the entire field of world economics has been left to the capitalists. Such an exploitative system robs Africa not only of its wealth, but more importantly of its humanity. This is why Afrocentricity International is encouraging its members throughout the world to articulate a new, more authoritative, people-oriented philosophy of economics. This will not be based only on the African Investment Bank, the African Central Bank, or the African Monetary Fund as tools to implement the Sirte Declaration for the Constitutive Act of the African Union. 

We are building a new kind of economic reach based on the principles of African values. There is no secret that the nature of economic predatory activities by the power accumulators of America, Asia, and Europe, namely the United States, China and Japan, and Germany and France, hold the poorer nations in an iron vise. That is why the aim of our economic outlook must have two prongs: (1) assertion of African values, and (2) defense of Africa’s resources from predators.  Without a conscious attempt to introduce African values we will lose the battle to preserve African resources for development. 

Relationship has always been at the base of African economics. A person’s position within the social community and a person’s relationship with another dictate the state of the economic transaction. That is why Afrocentricity International seeks to interrogate how our ancestors were able to live in communities where no one was wealthy at the expense of others and where the exchange of goods was based on the social relationships that people held. This was the opposite of the idea that economic relations dictate social relationships; no, the African philosophy was that social relationships dictated economic relations. Without an adjustment to our understanding of how we produced, exchanged, and survived in the past, we will not be able to complete both prongs of our new orientation to economics. Now is the time for African economists to start from the ground-up to think about relationships as the cornerstone of world economics. 

Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, International Organizer, Afrocentricity International.