The question of African identity requires an awful lot more legitimization than it does consideration. If the political Africa as we see it today—with its landmarks and divisions—was, by and large, the invention of five European countries (France, Belgium, Britain, Portugal and Germany) a little over a century ago, then perhaps the concept of African nationalism is every bit as dubious, a hyperbolic figment of the European imagination. Perhaps the most fundamental concept of identity every African panders to is that of ethnicity, and given that the perfunctory division of Africa gave little heed to ethno-cultural sovereignty, much of that ethnocentric visage today still bears the marks of a colonial past. That the Akan-speaking Asantes of Ghana (where I come from) and the Akan-speaking Baules of the Ivory Coast, for instance, were forced to assume separate nationalities did little to help them define for themselves a shared ethnocentric identity based on language.

As such, the quest to define for Africa a place in the world has very much evolved as a reaction to the place it already has been given in the Western imagination. Not surprisingly, every attempt at defining an African identity over the past century has, more or less, been a struggle in revising misconceived notions of the continent, the sort often conjured up as foils to a fabled Western cultural identity. The Pan-Africanism of Kwame Nkrumah and W.E.B. DuBois, for instance, in seeking to articulate one such counter-identity, had to accept the (questionable) need for any such collective identity in the first place. Perhaps little would have gone wrong with their move had they not taken things too seriously. In his paper, The Conservation of Races, DuBois had argued for a biological conception of race. To him a race was one big family whose shared, in-bred impulses and aptitudes likely influenced their cultures and ways of life. Indeed, DuBois' argument was a variant of what the Beninois philosopher, Paulin Houtondji, would later call an argument for "unanimism," namely the claim to an underlying homogeneity in all African cultures—a claim many today find rather spurious, to say the least.

Lately, the debate on African identity is often heard in two arenas, namely the "Afrocentric" and "cosmopolitan" schools of thought. The Afrocentric perspective is championed by a number of African-American and African commentators, notable among them, Molefi Kete Asante, Professor of Afro-American Studies at Temple University. According to its proponents, the current world-view as we are able to know it via Western education is hopelessly biased and our only chance at an objective appraisal of African culture lies in the adoption a ruthlessly skeptical approach to Western ideals. According to Afrocentrists, growing up in a world dominated by Western culture means being conditioned culturally and intellectually into accepting modes of thought which may not necessarily be appropriate for an objective evaluation of indigenous African culture. To be fair, argues Asante and others, we must adopt a somewhat-Cartesian methodology in completely re-evaluating what we know—Western or otherwise. With their rigorous skepticism, Afrocentrists, therefore, argue for a complete re-articulation of history and literature from an African perspective.