Afro-pessimism overlooks the rich history of African thought emphasizing optimism – adoption of pessimistic narratives fails to align with the historical and cultural realities that exist throughout the African diaspora.

Reading what some are today calling “Afro-pessimism” invites no small amount of amnesia, myopia, as well as illiteracy. There is little if any Africa to this discourse at all, its nominal Afro-hyphenation notwithstanding. Armah sits atop the lengthy bibliography on the “AfroPessimism” page at Incognegro.org for alphabetical reasons alone. The selection of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is as symptomatic as this list’s addition of an Achille Mbembe book in due course. There is Frantz Fanon but only his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) is included to the exclusion of A Dying Colonialism (1959), The Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Toward the African Revolution (1964). The rest of the bibliography tends to dovetail with “race” and “critical theory” canons of US-centered academic classrooms, graduate if not undergraduate, across North America—with key duty-free imports from Western Europe. In any case, what is the significance of this term as a term, its rather bizarre adoption by Black academic advocates who have come to promote it today without any apparent sense of the history of its ravaging the African continent and without any reference whatsoever to the history of insistent Black political-intellectual resistance to its application to Africans on the continent and in the diaspora? Crucially, neither pessimism nor optimism is just a word in a dictionary. Fred Moten made a certain call for “optimism” in an earlier, and terribly “friendly,” response to this “Afro-pessimism” which could be deflected by Jared Sexton as if optimism and pessimism were now virtually transposable conceptual terminology or as if pessimism could suddenly be posed as a strange mode of optimism itself—something like a philosophical detour to it, after all, when all is said and done.11 That’s a specious revision to be sure. Yet what goes ignored here is how this lexical couplet makes its meaning in context, politically, in time and space, particularly in European languages and colonial-imperial lexicons, most notably perhaps in English as well as French, just for example. It carries baggage too big to check in current games of academic branding. What’s more, optimism and pessimism do not ever confront each other on equal ground here, any façade of even-handed as opposed to hierarchical dichotomy aside. The pessimist intellectual empire of the West has systematically crowded optimism out of serious contemplation and come to pin pessimist condemnation to all “things” Black-African in the interests of white racist imperialism, for various and sundry periods of this empire. Who would overlook this issue rather than address it frontally—in and beyond books of all kinds? A history or genealogy of optimism and pessimism as “ideologies” is hardly unavailable to us. The old Black radicalism of Cheikh Anta Diop wrote famously and at length about this subject. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa (1959) concluded in the late 1950s, no less: “the Meridional Cradle, confined to the African continent in particular, is characterized by the matriarchal family, the creation of the territorial state, in contrast to the Aryan city-state, the emancipation of woman in domestic life, xenophilia, cosmopolitanism, a sort of social collectivism having as a corollary a tranquility going as far as unconcern for tomorrow, a material solidarity of right for each individual….” “In the moral domain,” he continues, “it shows an ideal of peace, of justice, of goodness and an optimism which eliminates all notion of guilt or original sin in religious and metaphysical institutions.”12 Looking at literature in a long world history, Diop analyzed novels, tales, fables, and comedies to advance this core proposition, along with the material and economic structures of human social development. His Pan-African critique of European imperialism indicted not only its culture of “war, violence, crime, and conquests,” but also its signature “metaphysical systems” of pessimism.13 One could thus combat “anti-Black” racism, “anti-Black” colonialism, and “anti-Black” imperialism, so to speak, by confronting or challenging the pessimism of Occidentalism—or one could reproduce this “anti-Black” empire of slavery and colonialism by adopting, reifying, and endorsing it. The final words of The Cultural Unity of Black Africa would proclaim in the spirit of revolutionary decolonization and bona fide independence: “The universe of tomorrow will in all probability be imbued with African optimism.”14 How then does a current trend in academia proceed to dub itself “Afro-pessimism,” simultaneously deeming itself a school of Black radical thinking, with no awareness of a critique of this stature; no engagement with it at all; and no critical explanation of how “Afropessimism” could not as a consequence signify an elemental contradiction in terms? The late Diop remains the most monumental historian of the Black world. His intellectual biography is as a legendary as his academic and extra-academic scholarship. It is almost cliché now to recall that he was named the most influential thinker of the 20th century—with W.E.B. DuBois—at the First World Festival of Black Arts convened in Dakar of the 1960s. Even if Anglophone political and intellectual circles show little awareness of his radical political practice and related political imprisonment as opposition under Leopold Senghor in neo-colonial Senegal—thinking too exclusively of his counter to Egyptology or his anti-Hellenomania—Diop was and is no less a giant for the historic Black Studies movement of the African diaspora across the Americas.15 Ifi Amadiume would revisit these aspects of Diop’s thought with dazzling ingenuity in her introduction to the Karnak House publication of L’unité culturelle de l’Afrique noir: domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l’antiquité classique in English translation. She endorses without pause his “vision” of an African optimism and identifies him as a Black-African precursor of the white ecology movement, the “Greens.”16 Her own groundbreaking work as in Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture (1997) makes a massive critique of European sexual and gender imperialism, systemically exposing assorted feminisms as Occidentalism as a rule, politically and epistemologically. Both world historiography and global political theory remain sites of intervention for her too. Overall, she highlights a critique of what could be dubbed a racial patriarchy conceived by Diop’s corpus that is comparable to Cedric J. Robinson’s critique of “racial capitalism” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). In opposition to imperialism, it could also oppose the romance language of “feminism” as the exclusive and compulsory language for any systemic “anti-sexism” or opposition to “patriarchy” or male dominance. At any rate, Amadiume’s Black radicalism does not “forget” the anti-pessimism or age-old Afro-optimism embedded in Cheikh Anta Diop’s classic anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism of the Black world. The total ignorance of these traditions manifested by the new incarnation of “Afro-pessimism” might be alarming enough, but what may be more so is its studied ignorance of the racist discourse of “Afro-pessimism” that preceded it and which gives it a name, a sensibility and an orientation. The original Afro-pessimism functioned like a sociological “culture of poverty” or “culture of pathology” discourse not for Black ghettos in the diaspora but for the entire African continent (and, by extension, the diaspora) with a tacit historical and environmental determinism as opposed to the ecological and politically militant African optimism of Diop, Amadiume, and others. This is the Afro-pessimism that has been so diffuse in popular media and all the Western academic disciplines which ever fix upon Africa that it may be impossible to write an exact or exhaustive history of it. What Trinh T. Minh-ha once said about the anthropological version of the “human sciences” can easily be said about this recently recycled Afropessimism; it functions as “the foundation of every single discourse pronounced above the native’s head,” whenever that “native” is an African in Western discourse on Africa and Africans anywhere.17 So, in 2010, Gloria Emeagwali of the History Department at Central Connecticut University offered an online broadside against “Afro-pessimism” grounded in history, realism, and critical hilarity. She cut straight to the point: “There are about six types of Afropessimists.” They might be schematized as follows: Category A: the Nihilists Category B: the Haters and Abominable Racists Category C: the Scholars of Hopelessness Category D: the Self-Loathers Category E: the Opportunist Career-Seekers Category F: the Poverty Pornographers.18 Of the first category, she writes: “Their negative and nihilistic views still permeate a lot of texts on history, geography, sociology, etc. Just pay a visit to the textbooks and read between and above the lines.” The second category’s vocabulary “is limited to words like barbarism, savage, tribesmen, uncivilized and so on. Let us say that you can spot them from a mile away. They are less sophisticated than Group A…. The cult of whiteness permeates their thought process, theological icons and symbols.” The third category of scholars may be “genuinely disappointed with the pace of change in post-colonial Africa,” and can conduct some otherwise correct analysis, but “their discourse is largely counter-inspirational, when unmatched with real political activity and engagement on the ground.” More pointedly, and tragically, they lack all confidence to have hope in anything. The fourth category of Afro-pessimist hates “the skin they’re in” as “victims of white supremacist propaganda, assimilated from the neo-colonial mass media, textbooks, religious texts, Hollywood movies and literature[,] etc.” They are bemoaned as “self-destructive parodies of themselves.” The fifth category doesn’t even believe what they say while they pander for fame and fortune in the white public spheres of the West: “The more they pathologize Africa, the more likely their promotion to the next level in the context of institutionalized racism. They thrive on pity and are beneficiaries of the ‘mercy-industrial complex’ in one way or the other.” The sixth category seems to delight in tales and images of Black misery and suffering. This type especially embodies a blatant “First Worldism” by default: “Celebrities in search of attention, and politicians with little to offer their constituency at home, may fall into this category. Some are humanitarian opportunists—although there are a few well-meaning exceptions, with less questionable motives.” Then, Emeagwali observes, “there are the flip floppers … occasionally trapped between the old paradigm and a newly emerging one.”19 No doubt, other critics might tweak the details of this profile in one way or another. But it’d be inaccurate to dub Emeagwali’s electronic broadside a “parody,” or a “caricature,” since it was so decisively on the mark for so many: “Afro-pessimists” of diverse stripes had been asking for this kind of treatment for how long? Their colonial cultural pathology had been doing its racist colonial work for so long that Diop’s scholarship was a clear response to it and had been hard pressed to dismantle it since the middle of the last millennium.