Finding Our Way Through the Desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview offers a critical examination of the ideas and work of Carruthers, a key architect of the African-centered paradigm and a major contributor to its application to the study of Nile Valley culture and civilization. Herein, Kamau Rashid explicates some of Carruthers' principal contributions, the theoretical and practical implications of his work, and how Carruthers's work is situated in the stream of Black intellectual genealogy. Essential to this book are Carruthers's concerns about the vital importance of Black intellectuals in the illumination of new visions of future possibility for African people. The centrality of African history and culture as resources in the transformation of consciousness and ultimately the revitalization of an African worldview were key elements in Carruthers's conceptualization of two interrelated imperatives--the re-Africanization of Black consciousness and the transformation of reality. Composed of three parts, this book discusses various themes including Black education, disciplinary knowledge and knowledge construction, indigenous African cosmologies, African deep thought, institutional formation, revolutionary struggle, history and historiography to explore the implications of Carruthers's thinking to the ongoing malaise of African people globally.
Kamau Rashid is professor and founding director of the Leadership, Equity, & Inquiry doctoral program at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
A proverb in the Akan tradition states Ap?nkyer?ne wu a, na y?hunu ne tenten 'It is when the frog dies that we see its length.' Jacob H. Carruthers and the Restoration of an African Worldview: Finding Our Way through the Desert by Kamau Rashid serves as the blueprint and template for what an intellectual biography can and should be. This meticulous treatise on the voluminous contributions of Baba Jedi Shemsu Jehuty provides both the reader familiar with his work as well as any who may only be introduced to him by means of this book, with much to contemplate. Rashid has done well in ensuring that Baba Jedi continues to speak to current and future generations in profound ways that contribute to the restoration of our worldview. --O?ba?de?le? Kambon, University of Ghana This book brings critical attention to the broad contours of the intellectual project of Jacob H. Carruthers, Jr. In marshalling a synthesis of the themes embedded in his works, Kamau Rashid has provided us with a guide to understanding how Carruthers understood the relationship between African-centered knowledge production and liberation. The clarity of this divine conversation has never been more urgent. --Joshua Myers, Howard University
