A Plea to Afro-Centric Writers by Sankofa Student Consultants

To help eliminate the confusion amongst our people on their journey of self-discovery, we need to come up with a  set of literary rules to guide us.  

For one, African peoples are the original HUEmans as we were the first to come into existence.  All other peoples came after and should be identified accordingly.  In our writing, Africans should always be identified plainly as people, men and/or women, and all other races should be identified by their mutated ethnicity (e.g., European American, Asian American, Latin American, German, Chinese, Mexican, etc.)  To differentiate Africans from each other is the only time we should put adjectives in front of ourselves.  

Also, we should always use the African names and/or terms to describe African peoples, places and creations, but we must also agree on what spellings to use.  For example, we should never call the neter Auset, Isis, or the neter Ausar, Osiris.  Using Greek terms to describe African concepts devalues the original and replaces it with a substitution.  In the same line of thinking, we should not be calling a lake in Africa, Lake Victoria, we should call it by the name that the local peoples have given it, which is Nyanza.  This process will make many step out of their Euro-centric comfort zones but it is a necessary step in our evolutionary growth.  

As mentioned briefly above, we must definitely agree to use the same spellings for certain peoples and locations.  For example, the place commonly known as Ancient Egypt is spelled by Afro-centric scholars as KMT, Kemet, Khamit, Kamet, and Khamut. To make the topic even more confusing, we throw in alternate names such as Ta-Meri and leave it up to the student to figure out we are all talking about the same exact civilization.  

I invite you to begin the conversation of creating our literary guidelines in a communal public discussion here on my blog and/or at www.SankofaStudent.com; where our only goal is the unification of our nation through education.  And remember, country borders are drawn in blood; where ever there are people willing to spill their blood for liberation, new borders are drawn.