Health is Our Wealth: An Afrocentric Perspective to Health & Wellness
By Art Harris
When I was an early-career mental health professional, my close friend was coming up in his construction career. We came up in the hood together, learning life lessons from living the street life. As we grew in our fields, we wanted to showcase our hard work and income though our appearances and the valuables we owned. I flaunted the flyest sneakers, and he customized his car rims as status symbols. Our understandings of wealth, worthiness, and wellness as young Black professionals reflected Eurocentric materialism, which we have now discovered is unhealthy.
It became imperative for us to re-align our concepts of health, wealth and wellness with African-Centered philosophies. This is what Baba Dr. Wade Nobles refers to as Sakhu (Skh), the illumination of the spirit via African science, study, understanding, and knowledge in his book Seeking the Sakhu: Foundational Writings for an African Psychology. It takes awareness, intentionality, and commitment to raising our consciousness and shifting from Eurocentric paradigms of health, wealth and wellness to Afrocentric ones.
Baba Wade teaches us that racism is the pre-existing condition in America and in The Island of Memes: Haiti’s Unfinished Revolution, he explains that the liberation of the African mind can only happen when we return to an African consciousness. Only a healthy mind can produce a healthy body. Many of the unhealthy urges African Americans experience are a result of imagery planted by the mentally ill White supremacist culture. In enslaving and oppressing Africans in America, the White supremacist culture destroyed our ancestral memories, rituals, and conceptions of health.
African-centered anthropologists and scholars have looked to the Nile Valley civilizations of ancient Kemet (Egypt) and Kush to illustrate the historical greatness that is our legacy. Profound teachers, ministers, researchers, and psychologists like Malcolm X, Tony Browder, Dr. Ivan Van Sertima, Dr. Asa Hilliard III, Chiekh Anta Diop, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston highlight the great contributions of African people to the fields of medicine, science, religion, politics, architecture, and more.
In his books Spirituality Before Religions and the Shabaka’s Stone, Professor Kaba Hiawatha Kamene teaches that the principles of Ma’at (truth, justice, harmony, balance, propriety, order, reciprocity) ensured morality and justice were at the center of maintaining a healthy, righteous Kemetian society.
For myself, it took a growth mindset and reading books like New Visions for Black Men and Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery by Dr. Na’im Akbar. Now, about 20 years later, my friend and I both have advanced in our fields and we now value health and wealth as it pertains to physical, familial, financial, mental, and spiritual wellness.
As we reconnect to natural approaches to healing and attune with what is/is not healthy for people of African ancestry, then we can realize health, wellness, and joy for our families and communities.
About the Author
Art Harris is a Bay Area native, veteran of the U.S. Navy, licensed marriage and family therapist, and school psychologist. He is the Bay Area Chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists (Bay ABPsi) Continuing Education Unit Co-Coordinator. Bay ABPsi Chapter is a healing resource committed to providing the Post Newspaper with monthly discussions about critical Black Mental Health issues. Please join us at our meetings every 3rd Saturday via Zoom or contact us at bayareaabpsi@gmail.com.
