TONIGHT ON THE TERRORDOME: Molefi Kete Asante on African Liberation, Unification and Renaissance.

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Since the 1950s, Afrikan countries have waged wars for national liberation which forced the imperial powers of Europe to abandon their occupations. In the West, those revolutionary wars are called “granting of independence.”

But the political liberty that followed decolonisation has stalled in what Ghana’s founding president Kwame Nkrumah called “neocolonialism,” a system of formal political sovereignty, but economic shackles which enforce political servility.

Nkrumah, like Marcus Garvey before him, proposed formal Pan-Afrikanism as the solution: the unification of all countries on the Afrikan continent into a federal republic in command of the greatest supply of natural resources on the planet.

Of course, any attempt to command such resources and thus rescue Afrika from the continuing exploitation and devastation of foreign powers had to have been met with maximum retaliation.

And so Western destabilisation intensified: assassination of Afrikan leaders, most notably the White House-commissioned murder of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo in 1961, the CIA secret war against Angola in the 1970s and the US backing of apartheid in South Africa.

But the drive for Afrikan political unity has never died. Indeed, as the Organisation of African Unity gave way to the African Union in 2002, the drive for continental unification increased.

To discuss that drive tonight is one of the most widely-regarded and widely-published scholars on Afrikan issues, Professor Molefi Kete Asante, the founder of Afrocentricity.

Afrocentricity is an Afrikan-centered scholarship and world-view that employs research for political liberation through the academic resuscitation of smothered history.

Frequently the subject of attacks by critics who mislabel Afrocentricity as "Afrocentrism" and caricature him as a crank, Asante is undaunted in his role as Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Philadelphia’s Temple University.

Asante has published over 300 articles, and is the author of sixty books, among them Afrocentricity, The Encyclopedia of Black Studies, Erasing Racism: The Survival of the American Nation, and Ancient Egyptian Philosophers.

The Utne Reader called him one of the "100 Leading Thinkers" in the United States, and he has appeared Nightline, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, The Today Show, The Tony Brown Show, and 60 Minutes.

The African Union cited him as one of the top twelve scholars of Afrikan descent when it invited him to give one of the keynote addresses at the Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora in Dakar in 2004.

Tonight we’ll hear Dr. Asante on the prospect for an Afrikan Renaissance fostered by continental unification. He spoke at the California State University at Sonoma on March 8, 2007.