Reflections on The Pan-Afro-Asiatic Civilizational Complex
The preceding map of the world by fourteenth-century North African scholar ibn Battuta pictures the world as travelers came to know it at the break of the early modern epoch. Reading ibn Battuta’s travelogues, I am reminded afresh of the inter-civilizational unity of Pan Africa and Pan Asia in antiquity and modernity, and the violent severing of these deep ties of civilization and kinship amongst our peoples by European slavery and colonialism. The inquiries of K.M. Panikkar, Martin Bernal, Frank Snowden, and D.D Kosambi have further elucidated the rich history of trade and civilization between Africa and Asia in first millennium of the common era, in antiquity, and indeed, pre-history. We now know that renaissance of civilization in Europe in the fifteenth century would have been impossible without the invasions of Africa, the Americas, and Asia by Europeans much as the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without the labor of the black worker in the Americas.
W.E.B Du Bois was the first to chart these waters in his social scientific investigations, which not only yielded a new method for conducting scientific inquiry, but also set out theses towards a new philosophy of history, one that recognized the full weight of the contribution that African peoples have made to world history and the historical continuities that persist between Asiatic and African civilizations. Du Bois also sets out to develop an aesthetic philosophy and literary practice capable of advancing humanity’s liberation from the twin turpitudes of whiteness and capitalism. But I will save this discussion for another time. As Du Bois confirms in his 1946 monograph, The World and Africa,
“The connection between Asia and Africa has always been close. There was probably actual land connection in prehistoric times and the black race appears in both continents in the earliest records, making it doubtful which continent is the point of origin (176).”
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By R. Divya Nair