Wade Nobles: The Intellectual as Healer

Abstract

Healers and priests were archetypes of intellectuals in West Africa that were maintained in the cultural memory of Africans in the diaspora in spite of enslavement. The presence of these intellectuals/healers countered the perpetuation of Eurocentric thought because they were guardians of African culture and possessed the ability to transfer and transmit collective cultural and historical memory. Wade Nobles positions his intellectual work and activism in the tradition of healers that countered European cultural hegemony while affirming the humanity of African people. Nobles defines the Sakhu as the process of illuminating the human spirit and utilizes the various manifestations and functions of the Sakhu to demonstrate the intricate connections between spirituality, science, and culture. Through seeking, defining, unlocking, and applying the Sakhu, Nobles articulates a worldview grounded in African spirituality that attempts to heal the minds and spirits of African people.

Imperial algorithms: Contemporary manifestations of racism and colonialism

“…The African epistemology was scientized through proverbs, herbal medicine, husbandry, dance, rituals, institutions, religious ceremonies, and geometry (Mocombe, 2019). The success of the Haitian Revolution led colonial powers to attempt to stamp out African epistemologies and spiritualities due to the threat they posed to imperialist colonial orders (Jamison, 2017; Robinson, 2000). We see these attempts in French colonial Louisiana where colonial governments outlawed indigenous African practices.…”

“…The centering of BIR/BIPOC perspectives begins the process of the rebuilding of communities that have been previously assaulted with the psychic violence of imperial algorithms. Speaking truth to power often serves as consciousness raising, hence why healers, orators, and intellectuals who enlighten the masses have always been threats to colonial powers (Jamison, 2017) and why colleges have also been sites in which the state surveils people (Rogers, 2012; Taylor, 2016). For example, in the 1960s, the F.B.I.…”

Half-Connecting Theory: Developing African Psychology Theory in a “Radical Beginnings” Direction

“…Finally, with the mention of everyday feelings and body conduct, it is fitting to consider a criticism leveled against the ideas of Nobles that may apply to many African psychology theories—that they “fail to articulate the practical dimensions and implications” of this subfield of Black psychology (Jamison, 2017, p. 546). African psychology theories are being used (e.g., Myers, 1988; Van Dyk & Nefale, 2005; Wynn & West-Olatunji, 2008), but theorists tend to spend more time establishing their abstract and/or philosophical models than they do in advancing the practical applications of those models in the phenomenological world of everyday thoughts, actions, experiences, and built environments.…”

“…However, analysis of the structural level of culture (e.g., Nobles, 1985) enables one to detect how characteristics of the African worldview are still lodged deeply in Black people's philosophical assumptions of the basic nature of human relations, reality, and existence. Thus, while the manifest substance of Black people's ways of living may appear Eurocentric, the deep values that give order and direction to that substance continue to be African (Jamison, 2017), which is why Blacks who have been away from the African continent for so long are still considered an African people in their "communicative style" (Asante, 1990a, p. 236). This theoretical model accounts for the ways in which what is "surface-level" about culture is ultimately shaped by what is unconscious, which, in turn, empowers Nobles (1986) to define culture as a "process which gives a people a general design for living and patterns for interpreting their reality" (p. 126).…”