For Africans in World History: Extended Forms of Democratic Pluralism

Abstract

Few scholars have been successful at articulating with as much clarity as Patrick Manning does, the relevance and centrality of African history to world history. The historical experiences of the peoples of Africa, within, above, and beyond the Anthropocene, had not been synthetized with a view of globalizing certain Forms of the African Past as integral pieces of the mosaic of the Human Adventure. This essay presents the extent of Manning’s contributions to the debates regarding the general concept of Afrocentricity in practice, namely in relation to the construction of functional global institutions where learned citizens congregate to boost humanity’s intellectual capital. Pat Manning stands out for deconstructing in engaging arrangements—that is, in bravura and substance—the marginalization of Africa and Africans in the academic deliberations about the emergence of cosmopolitan Modernity over the past six or seven centuries at a global scale. Manning-Senseï reverberates in global academia the influences of Black peoples on “the Human System in Movement.” On the other hand, Manning arguably evades the moralization of the discourse that participates in the travails for the restoration of historical consciousness in Black Africa, inducing thereby the ubiquitous question of contemporary world historians’ political responsibility.